well, here i am in kenya.

subtitle: 2 American women were car-jacked and shot and killed today just outside of city centre, and i watched Blood Diamonds and Howl’s Moving Castle.

for life to be like what many of us are accustomed - with manufactured products and food from somewhere other than where you are right at that moment and materials that need to be dry-cleaned and even a democratic system, ie a Western lifestyle such as what is lived in most parts of the US and what is being aspired to and replicated throughout the world including Nairobi - all of that requires a certain amount of machinery. Machinery with lots of gears and squeaky parts, machinery that requires a lot of labor and just as much blood.
So in many parts of the US, it is possible to live with the manufactured products and imported foods and dry cleaned materials and voting rights, and not see the machinery. There is sufficient padding between (many) folks and the machinery, and we can ride along on top and enjoy the scenery, and the grinding gears fade into white noise, and if we want a thrill we can peak under some of the layers of padding and see in and either use economic theory to justify the people sweating down there among the gears or we can say tut and talk about reforming the machinery.
In a place like Kenya, the machinery we’re riding along is a lot smaller than in US cities/societies, and patched together even more haphazardly. Fewer of us are on it, too. And there surely isn’t as much padding. It’s not southern Sudan, where there is almost no padding at all (unless you count the UN’s air conditioned stations), and it’s not even Uganda, with less padding. But there’s less padding in Nairobi than there is in Washington DC or New York or Scottdale PA. Bumpier ride, and it’s a lot harder to forget that you’re on this machine, and that there are people being ground into the gears and reaching to grab onto you to pull themselves out or pull you in.
and i guess to stretch this already painfully stretched image, our machinery here in Kenya is connected to that in the US, and the EU, and all those other countries, and we’re getting some of the waste products of all those imperfect machines.
so that’s it. I don’t know what the answer is - do we pull the whole machinery down and start over again (i guess the anarchic types at the World Social forum would prefer this), do we try to tinker at the machinery and over time change it, but without messing with the gears so much that it stops moving forward (i guess the oxfam-ish types at the World Social Forum would prefer this)

hmm.

ps: wrote this several weeks ago. The police are now blaming the notorious thug that they recently gunned down (see previous post) for ALL of the unsolved car-jackings and killings. Seems a bit Convenient.