Images from Mwingi

These kids were minding there own business walking from school and yakking on about school stuff. No they weren’t running away from me, they were running because I showed them the cover of Nation which had the picture of Onyancha, the psychopath.

We visited this Christian school which touched me. The headmaster, a pastor, told me that three quarters of the children were experiencing “unworldly problems”. This is the euphemism for “they are possessed by dark forces.” Just that morning there was a 10yr old girl who was foaming at the mouth, eyes rolled over, and screaming that she wanted to hang herself. Deeply saddening. They had to hold her down and pray for her, exorcism of sort. The pastor also told me of a disturbed kid who walks in the school compound and black crows follow her…and she talks to these birds and they follow her commands! I didn’t believe it. So he brought the girl out and one look at her and I felt my blood curdle. Her eyes…they looked dead, they looked like something lived in her soul, something that you didn’t want to meet in a dark alley, hell even in a well lit alley. I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture of her. The guy I was with walked away and sat in the car, he later said he felt he was in the presence of something extraordinary. But these are kids who need help, and the pastor (bless him) Rev John Muli and his dedicated staff takes care of these kids and they pray for them. Such brave and selfless act. Apart from the Crow Leader I saw, most

of these kids look like normal kids. They laugh and they play and they love the camera.

This goat (a Toggenburg breed) lives like a king. He gets wakes up in the morning to a hearty breakfast. When he’s tired of eating, he takes a short nap, then when he wakes up he eats some more. In the afternoon women line up with their local she-goats for him to impregnate, this is the hardest part of his day apparently. Agriculturalists call it cross-breeding, I call it whoring.

We had stopped over a small village in Kitui. This cucu walked up to where our driver and I were standing and started addressing me in rapid Kikamba. There is something sheepish when someone assumes you understand what they are banging on about when actually you can’t get a word. In such circumstance i let the person talk and talk until they realize they are talking to a goat (pun intended), but this was a grandma and grandmas deserve respect so I looked at our driver for

help and said, “Please tell me she’s asking for my phone number, please?” The driver smirked and said she was asking how tall I am. I told him and he translated to her. She asked something again. “She wants to know where you come from.” the driver said. I told her my shags because I was confident she wouldn’t know where on earth that was. She nodded and asked something else. “She wants to know where that is.” I told him. She stared at me for a few seconds then started walking away without a word. I asked the driver to ask her if i could take a picture of her. She smiled and giggled and smoothened her dress and adjusted her headgear and asked one of her buddies if she looked okay. Then she looked into the camera with such intensity i felt like an opportunity to take pictures hardly ever presented itself to her. Then i showed her the picture I had just taken. She laughed perhaps satisfied that yeah, she still had it. That was the highlight of my trip.

There is something disrespectful, to the animal world, with stooping so low as to take a picture of a goat’s udder.

I like this picture because it’s a happy and innocent picture. Kids have the most honest smiles, not forced or staged. Ask a grown up to pose for the picture and they will try and project a persona. The evidence is all over Facebook. But kids? They don’t care for frills. They smile genuinely and that normally is enough.