With ‘Gotta,’ it is always  well with me!! 

With ‘Gotta,’ it is always  well with me!! 

The Covid-19 pandemic emergence and related happenings taught us various things and facts and now more informed, we must sustain the progression from the learnings for better health and good public health practices.

So my friends and relatives, kindly do not be so keen on handshaking and especially shaking my right hand.
If I do not offer my open hand/palm in greetings when we meet and rather present my folded knuckles in the ‘Gotta’ style, please do not take offense.
Don not insist that I shake your hands… I may have just visited the toilets and afterwards did not get soap and water to wash…
So why should I ‘soil’ your hands and thus contribute to perhaps making you sick and worsening the already poor public health status in the country..?

My friend, my relative, do not take offense and frown when we meet and you offer me your open hand/palm in greetings and I instead offer my folded knuckles in the ‘Gotta’ style in response.

I may be feeling terribly dirty for several reasons.. I may even have been ‘picking’ my nose as our people are often wont to do or tend tend to do as a way of passing time.

I may have been working in apparently clean yet unhygienic places and lacked water and soap or even an alcoholic based sanitiser to disinfect my hands.

I may be quite alert that my hands despite appearing clean are quite dirty for various reasons and i could be looking forward earnestly to getting to a place where I can clean my hands or if I can’t access such a place, I may be Keenly looking forward to reaching home in order to clean my hands as the very first activity.

Do not take often with my preference for the ‘Gotta’ style. Though this may not apply to you and with all due respect, many times i have visited the wash rooms and toilets in many locations and Keenly observed people leaving the toilets small rooms, evidently from ‘long’ calls and after returning the water containers they have ‘flushed’ the squat toilets with, they just walked away without cleaning their hands at all!

It makes me frown too when I imagine that such persons will hardly walk a few meters away before generously offering their hands in greetings once they meet friends and acquaintances even without ‘brinking’ their eyes and without even an iota of self shame knowing where they have just come from.
So, in essence, the ‘Gotta’ style is relatively safe for all of us….

If we must shake hands as our culture has taught us for a long, long time, let us do this after we have all congregated at a central location and cleaned our hands.
After shaking hands, let us all later cleans the hands again to take meals or just to spend time together in socialization and other activities…

In serious reflection, ‘Gotta’ is not such a bad practice after all.. It may be the practice of the future after all! 

The dirt and mess in our PSVs…

We discard chewing gun cover & ‘rolli pop’ sticks then later stick the used gum to bus windows….

We’re very much modern folks and more so civilized and forward to thinking. We espouse sustainabilityin our lives 

IGNORANCE PR SHEER FOLLY, CARELESSNESS EVEN? 

Ignorance mostly, perhaps excessive greed for gain or even sheer carelessness is our own undoing?

Awareness on the need to conserve and preserve our environment is rising daily in the country. Yet some of our own activities and actions are bad, faulty and reversing some of the gains in these efforts.

At an area in Dagoretti South, many Boda Boda garage operators and spare parts dealers daily burn waste including used motor bikes tyres, the faulty replaced parts, hard & soft plastic packets/packages and even helmets, wires and replaced lights.

There’s a dogmatic belief in the country that waste must be burned this leading to production of lots of obnoxious smelling and pungent fumes and gases.

The ground on which the garages sit and even the area around the garages where the repairs happen have turned black with motor engine oil poured carelessly.

All these activities leading to unnecessary pollution.

Moreover, plastic waste collectors are now adding insult to injury, indeed ‘putting salt to the wounds’…

Some have now turned to burning the plastic waste they can’t sell as a means of disposal….

They are also burning hard electronic plastic waste in effort to retrieve metals, mostly copper, imbedded in the plastics.

The result has been pungent smells blown by the wind many meters away from the waste collection points leading to terrible discomfort in terrible smell and risk of airborne disease especially for people predisposed to allergic smells and other chest problems….

Air quality in such areas is now greatly compromised.

Whom should area residents cry to for help? Whose duty is it to sensitize against such retrogressive ignorance and carelessness?