Even though I was delighted to be reunited with that precious photo, I was a bit crestfallen that some mischievous termites had scratched the part of the photo showing my face. I wish the termites had left my face alone and scratched another part of the photo. All the same, I am glad that my immediate elder brother Paddy, the lad partly hidden on the right side of the photo, is visible.
Paddy was respected in my hometown Catholic church for his musical talent. Later on when he was at Starehe Boys' Centre, a high school I was also fortunate to join, I noted that an austere Canadian priest called Fr. Joseph Carreire also recognized his musical talent which compelled him to gift Paddy with an autographed copy of the Starehe Boys' hymnal.
Back in the late '90s when the photo above was captured, Paddy had grown into a fashion-conscious teenager. There was a time he scribbled the price of every piece of clothing, from the hat to belt to shoes, on the picture of a handsome hunk holding a matchbox in an advert promoting a certain brand of matchsticks that someone had glued on the wall of the room I shared with him.
So as I look at the Paddy of that time the photo above was being taken, I am of the opinion that he must have been thinking, "This younger brother of mine called Thuita is boasting of holding someone else's piano keyboard not knowing his audience is pitying his poverty revealed by the unpolished shoes he is clad on. A little fool he is!"
And all that reminds me of our childhood days. Well, our family wasn't wealthy by modern standards, for we didn't own cars, phones and computers. But we were rich in all the important aspects of life such as health and human companionship.
When I say human companionship, I am talking of our parents, our other brothers (Joe, Bob & Symo), our relatives who visited us on a regular basis as well as the wonderful neighbours and their kids that we mingled with. Boy, didn't those human companionships enliven our childhood years!
My eldest brother Joe for instance, once asked my kid brother Symo and I whether we liked God or Satan. Symo and I were then too young to understand who God and Satan are, more so in English. I don't even think Symo had began his nursery school education. One of us replied that he liked Satan.
And then I recall me claiming that I had never seen a thief. Apparently, I must have had the idea that thieves have a particular look like the way police clad in recognizable uniform.
What I didn't know back then was that a thief is anyone who takes someone else's property, however trivial, without permission. So if your son, nephew or some other small boy ever claims that he has never seen a thief, tell him he is one of them if he has ever eaten your apple or chocolate bar without your permission.
But perhaps the strangest remark I ever heard in my childhood years was on money by some schoolmates at Naru-Moru where my brothers and I had much of our primary school education. It was of a theory conceived by some curious pupils and propagated with interest that the people employed to print paper currencies do the printing while naked so that they cannot carry some of the money away.
That theory has set me imagining a group of nude employees locked in a room with sophisticated money printing machines. And then I am wondering what else the employees might be tempted to do as they shuffle past one another in the locked room. But let me stop such kind of imaginations because St. Paul implores us in Phillipians 4:8 to think only that which is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy.
Let me instead tell you of another person who was part of the human companionships we had in the '90s. That was Uncle Stephen Ndonga.
Uncle Ndonga used to live with us after he offered to work at home with regular pay by our parents. He was sometimes funny, which makes me think he was the one who glued a certain sticker in our living room. The sticker had this quote printed on it:
God made man.Perhaps we can conclude from that pithy quote that the people we should be wary of stealing money are not the ones who do the actual printing but the thieves out there who engage in all sorts of larceny: the timid ones who pickpocket passengers in public service vehicles; the brave ones who break into shops; the intelligent ones who defraud banks; and the powerful ones who embezzle public funds for personal use.
Man made money.
Money made man mad.
Recently, I heard in the news of a new breed of thieves who dug a 150-metre tunnel into a bank in Thika Town here in Kenya and made away with 50,000,000.00/-. I have displayed that amount in digits to emphasize the huge sum of money stolen.
Now tell me, under which category would you classify that gang of thieves who dug the tunnel to commit that eye-popping theft? Was it timid, brave, intelligent or powerful? Me, I think it was all of the above.
