zackomoroblogs

At the heart of the COVID-19 crisis is quarantine and its attendant colleague Lockdown. From my lockdown experience, Quarantine is adding up to be an adversity many multiples more severe and challenging that most adversities that I may have encountered in my sixty plus years earthly sojourn. It is an unprecedented disruption of my life. I am a consultant and my pre lockdown routine has been leaving the house for office daily at seven in the morning and back at about 8 o’clock in the evening, a warm shower follows before I   settle down on my favourite armchair for a spot of news on television while taking supper. I normally go to bed at exactly 11 o’clock in the evening. I need to add that I have only one wife- a corporate employee- tottering towards retirement and a father of four two young male adults and two teenagers, boy and girl. Pre- COVID-19, I can’t really recall when we last had a meaningful family conversation with the four products of my loins.   What I experi

Given my view that the COVID-19 crisis is an extreme form of adversity, but it is our attitude toward and response to the COVID-19 crisis that can either make or break our experience of it. I am a consultant therefore within limits capable of working from home. My better half is a corporate employee retiring within the year. She had been home in the lake region following up on her retirement project she was setting up at home. Her argument was valid.   “We need to start preparing to relocate back home when retirement happens” Talk is easy. Re-entry back home after decades of sojourning in the city not so easy. As if on cue, the president granted her the wish and announced the sudden lockdown of Nairobi for at least three weeks. Following the presidential directive, suddenly my missus, found that the would-be retiring home is not so interesting especially when the hubby remained in Nairobi. This is a paraphrase of the conversation we have had in the last four days: Missu

My name is Abu Kuloba, a private security guard in a gated estate on the outskirts of the city. The residents refer to us private security guards as Solja- a corruption of Soldier. It doesn’t matter; after all, it puts bread on the table. As a daytime solja, I am an expert on sitting down and waiting. Solja always sits and waits; it is my lot. The security guard job has been my calling for the last seven years and I am now resigned to be a professional gateman with all the stereotypes attributed to it. It might be humble and in a way risky calling but then I find it also in a way strangely satisfying. Maybe because it seems so undemanding, so unfettered,   so natural…maybe also... so lazy.  My junior colleague is one named Jamin Shihemi, A tall, gangly, rake thin man with a withered moustache. I don’t know the origin of the name Jamin, but I personally don’t like him. Never liked him. Partly because he doesn’t listen keenly to my instructions before acting on them and partly bec