There are many sorrows that this long, interminable period of physical captivity, which has also become for many a mental slavery, has handed over to us.
Among the deprivations, for many compatriots who used to have their window on well-being, on serenity, their escape from the stress of daily habits and constraints, there was also Kenya.
A landing place experienced on several levels: from the simple holiday that then became a habit, to the sweet escape every time you can in the second home or in the occasional buen retiro. From the safari in the boundless savannah where you dream of the wild life that takes you back to the origins of the world, to relaxing on an equatorial beach where your neurons are busy at best choosing between a passion fruit juice and an ice-cold beer. Then there are the countless variations on the theme, ranging from the noblest (helping others who have not had our "good fortune", that of growing up with a silver spoon in our mouths, as the English say, and of being able to live in an evolved society without considering too much that one meal a day is already a great achievement) to the less celebrated (exchanging physiological needs for the need for love and vice versa, often turning them into material bargaining chips) and so on.
Kenya for each of us has meant the possibility of a second life, of doubling the lack of eternity, adding however a semblance of meaning and reviving the predisposition to live this adventure called existence in a surprising way or at least outside the canons that for many are anchors of security but in the end are only alibis.
Too much philosophy? So let's say that in these days of Easter there are many of you who are nostalgic for Kenya, for the inner peace that here, more than in many other accessible places on the planet, becomes a reality and, despite all the difficulties, injustices, paradoxes and inconsistencies of Africa, it is possible to find it if you only know how to look beyond your fears, your selfishness and the mental blocks given also by high feelings.
No fear, Kenya is still here waiting for those who have understood it and understood its people, who do not have all the reasons to be as they are but not all the faults either.
This is a wonderful place where human instinct is free and pure, and as pure it is more likely to be continually corrupted by every evil imported by western society.
It is useless to engage in the exercise of being a crusader, but equally sterile is the a priori condemnation of inequalities without understanding their roots.
Kenya is Kenya and it is part of that great, indefinable reality called Africa, so immense, fragmented, diverse and unfathomable that it captivates those who come across it, because it has the same characteristics of the great love that everyone has the right to encounter in life.