WHY ALL THE MESS?

 On this particular evening I was really angry but ‘stupidly’ angry because no one had crossed my path. Many are the times we get annoyed because some people or somebody has just tampered with our temperament. As I alighted a bus and headed to the place of my residence in one of the slums in Nairobi, I could hardly find a place to step! I looked at my purely white dress, my stiletto shoes and imagined how I was going to walk on the muddy road with dirty sewage water flowing all over. This was as a result of the heavy downpour that had occurred that evening. I stood fixed on my tracks not knowing what to do next but the more I stood there the more I got angry. The smell of the sewage water was unbearable to my nose; the mud could not allow me walk on with my stilettos. The dirt of every kind carried by the flowing water made the situation very disgusting and worse of all, my pure white dress was not going to survive all that mess!  Just then a thought flashed through my mind and I found asking myself questions. “How many times have you eaten bananas, mangoes, sweets or even biscuits on the road and threw the litters along the way?” “Do you ever stop to think about your actions before acting them out?” After considering my thoughts, I just gave myself an honest rebuke and told myself, ‘You know what Rinah, you are a contributor to all these, stop getting angry over nothing!’ What seems to be no choice becomes choice when there seems to be no better choice. I took off my stilettos and carried them in my hand, held up my dress with the other hand and headed to the house…

What do you think, is the world upright or upside down? What comes to your mind when you wake up in the morning and the first thing that meets your eyes is a man/woman covered in a pool of blood dumped along the road? How about, an alive baby neatly wrapped and placed alongside the road on a chilly morning, not to mention of the tear-inviting cry that comes from its mouth. I know that you have encountered these or even worse. The most shocking thing is that many are times we choose to act blind to what is evident in our very own eyes. I tell you, that this is the cause of it all! Acting blind to what passes our eyes right into our heart brings death- death of conscience, a significant part of every human being. That part that faithfully informs you and calls upon you to take another route when the one you’re on is bound to culminate into destruction. You walk around and everything that meets your eyes is saddening and you find asking yourself so many questions that have no answers. The outstanding question is: ‘Why all the mess’? 

In my story above, I got angry at what I was seeing but not considering myself as a contributor to that mess but rather having it as “other people’s fault”. At times it becomes easier to point a finger and forget that the remaining four are pointing at you. Have you ever realized that other people’s mistakes are considered ‘BREAKING NEWS’ when exposed to public awareness however our own similar ones are regarded as weaknesses/accidents that were actually unavoidable? I don’t know whether the definition of the word Responsibility changed, however if it’s still the same then it can help us greatly in this matter. If only we owned our mistakes just like we own leadership positions such as C.E.O or M.D, then the many messes we encounter each day could be diminished. Responsibility is an expensive commodity that cannot be afforded by people who take everything around them so cheaply. A gent/lady who want to enjoy the pleasures of sex and has not calculated the cost of raising a child outside wedlock cannot afford responsibility! Qualifications from Institutions of higher learning are slowly loosing meaning because the cost of responsibility is equally becoming extremely high. Purchasing a degree through other means apart from personal involvement in hard work is being tolerated. The result is that we get professionals who would do anything against their expertise resulting to extreme messes in hospitals, schools, courts… Many more other messes are evident in our very own eyes. The question is, are you a counterpart or an antagonist of all these messes?