The pandemic in Kenya seems to gather in itself many of the contradictions of this country where the tao of good and evil is not black and white but full of colours and nuances.
There is no tourism: the number of animals increases and the vegetation grows back.
There is no tourism: poaching increases and poor people return to hunt gazelles and zebras to feed themselves and if they have to eat monkeys too.
There is no work: entire families leave the suburbs and the slums of the cities and return to the rural dimension, putting their hands in the fertile land and finding at least something to live on.
There is no work: the young people who stay in the city, in order not to give up their mobile phones and motorcycles, buy a firearm and go on robberies.
On the coast, in the markets, the abundance of fruit and vegetables is clearly visible. At the end of the day you can buy tons of pineapples, watermelons, spinach and the like, avocados, onions and vegetables at derisory prices.
If you want to organize for preserves, sauces, jams and soups, buying a good freezer you can prepare for the saddest winter of the last thirty years (yes, because that of the elections at the end of 2007 at least until early January was excellent ...). If you then have the money to pay the electricity bill, which has increased like everything else, starting with petrol.
And yet, and here's another great contradiction, in Kenya it's a charming situation.
If the future weren't in the way, the ghost that is becoming the real sword of Damocles for everyone and makes you forget that life is the sum of a past full of happy memories and a living and kicking present, you would say that everything is a wonder: Nature is flourishing again, the little traffic on the streets of Nairobi and Mombasa, the empty beaches (and now that there are the right tricks to walk, it's just a wonder), the Savannah for a few intimate and passionate, other than matatu...
And then there are the meetings among the few who are around, the friendships found again, the solidarity of helping each other.
And then there's the maddening of the social networks and the embroilment of many fellow countrymen in the country.
If only they would give us a glass of wine at the restaurant, a dance and a chat in a night bar and a concrete help to those who are in trouble, we could go back to thinking that Kenya is the most beautiful place in the world where to live the present and it would be worth preserving the positive things and report, fight, isolate the negative ones.
Because it really is, but today everyone is busy thinking about too many other things, often useless.