When did it start? How long has Lewa been running? Who runs it? Name a.few famous runners. Why is it held? What county is it in? Who is governor/mp/senator? What flora/fauna is found in Lewa? Special guests? How long is the railway! How often is it used? Where is the station? Fairly smooth road What has changed in the 10yrs? Have stars been made/discovered? Do the animals ever come into the camps. Has there ever been a casualty of wildlife? Have you really been camping here for two months planning the meals? It took how many lorries of food to feed the entire village for one meal? Are the tents always there? Do people camp out here throughout the year? Is hunting of game/deer/zebra for meat allowed here?
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
ALL BLACK, ALL RED CHAPTER INFINITY
He sat there, thinking. He thought about his father. He'd been a nice enough man, but he'd never had enough spine in him to hold straight a sole blade of grass in the lightest of winds. He thought about his mother. Momma. She'd been strong enough for the three of them. Even now, ensconsed in earth, her flesh munched away by its critters, her strength seemes to push him on whenever he felt to weak to do anything. Like the last of the mummies, she remained steadfast as the one true thing in his life. The girls, the booze, the money, the guys - they were all passing air. But momma, she stayed and she stayed forever. He stood up from his solitary couch, noticing as it creaked under him. He walked over to his small dirty window and thought some more. Looking down into the street he saw a girl that reminded him of Terry. Was it her walk? Was it the way she dressed. Or the way the kink on her head stood, immovable in the wind? He sighed and took a drag from his ciggarette. He sighed again and put his tobacco stained hand on his chest. God he missed her. His Terry. His one night stand. His lover for one night. Useless thoughts, his mother's voice came to him. He walked back to his chair. Again, it creaked. And he noticed it. He took another drag, sighed and closed his eyes. "What am I going to do now?" With his left hand he reached for the papers on the small table next to his chair. It was his payslip. Nothing but debt. Two thousand shillings to his name, rent unpaid for three months, the eviction notice still stuck to his door, hunger that he couldn't satisfy and a job he used to have.
Terry.
How was he going to find her. Useless thoughts, his mother's voice said again.
"But I need her."
What you need is a good punch in the gut. That will teach you to feel sorry for yourself. No son of mine will behave like a spoilt, lost, little lamb.
"You're dead. What can you do?"
The answer never came.
*****
Moha woke the next morning with a stiff neck and a mouth full of acid.
"Jesus!" he jumped at the blackened table top and the ashes that had once been his payslip. Even that he had lost. The damn cigarettes would be the death of him. Stretching delicately his now weakened body, he dragged himself to his bedroom, now bedless. He'd had to sell a few things just to buy a bus ticket and a few cigarettes to keep reality at bay. A few things being everything but the little table, the chair he'd blacked out on and the jacket draped over it. And his books? Those remained. He'd rather starve to death and have the landord bang at his door every minute of every day, than live without the escape those pages offered.
"To hell with truth..." he mumbled as he walked over to the sink in his bathroom, hoping to rinse the acid out of his mouth, and give his face a cold splash. The taps were dry.
Cursing, he reminded himself that he would do the same thing if his tenants did what he was doing now.
I need your strength momma, he thought. Then...
"I NEED YOUR STRENGTH MOMMA!" he yelled at his reflection. His head began to pound more from the effort than from anything else. Cradling it in both hands, he sank to the floor and wept. He wept like a man defeated. He wept like a man whose only next move, was a gun to his own head.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
Thanks to @rimbui...I came across this and just had to make sure I could always access it.
“OBITUARY: Atticus Finch…”
Atticus Finch, lawyer and lawmaker, conscience of a community and soul of a South, died last week after an extended illness.
He was…ageless. “His heart just couldn’t take any more,” Maycomb Mayor Beauregard Radley said today. “It’s funny. He was the man everybody used to want to be.”
Finch, a man of conservative family values but liberal views of mankind, practiced law in Maycomb and served in the Alabama Legislature for many years. He was known in the Statehouse for his attention to detail, valued for his reason, diplomacy and unwavering decency.
His abiding principle in government and life–”the best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.” –served to bring even the most radical political foes to common ground, said Rep. Dutch Persons, a longtime colleague.
“Put a Finch in a room with a chicken and a chicken hawk, and they’d come to see they all had feathers,” Persons said. Out side of Maycomb and Montgomery, though, Finch is perhaps best remembered for his greatest legal failure. Finch, with the good looks of Gregory Peck and the courtroom presence of a Clarence Darrow, argued passionately in the case of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. Finch produced compelling evidence that Robinson could not have committed the crime. But an all-white Maycomb County jury convicted him anyway.
Robinson went to prison, and was later shot dead while trying to escape.
Finch’s daughter Jean Louise, a retired school teacher, who still answers to the childhood nickname of Scout, once asked her dad why he agreed to defend Robinson in the first place. Finch knew he could not win, she said. And he knew that merely taking Robinson’s case would cause him and his family grief. Finch responded this way.
“For a number of reasons,” he told her. “The main one is, if I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town.” I couldn’t represent this county in that legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or (your brother) not to do something again.”
Because to Finch, honor always trumped outcome. Duty forever out-dueled security, comfort, clout or convenience.
And the ends never justified the means.
The means, to Finch made the man.
Finch taught Scout and her late brother Jem that courage does not come from the barrel of a gun or the mouthpiece of a mob. It comes from standing with dignity for what you believe in, even when it would be easier to simply sit down.
“It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what,” he once said. “You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
Sometimes you do.
Even if it means standing against friends and family.
Scout Finch recalls hearing many of her father’s words as a child. At the time she wondered what they all meant. But one piece of advice stays with her always.
“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” he told her.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view …until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.”
Finch will be buried behind Maycomb Methodist Church. He is survived by daughter Jean Louise, grandchildren Nelle and Lee Finch, and many great-grandchildren and admirers.
In lieu of flowers, he said before his death, just look around.
“If you see someone in need of a kindness,” he said, “just give it to them.”
I’m among his many admirers. Taken from the Mobile, AL ”Press Register,” compelling words from Atticus Finch, by John Archibald, jarchibald@al.com.
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