Tonight I see the reflection of a hypocrite in the mirror.
It's been about 28 days since the earthquakes in Haiti. I was
catching up on some BBC news about this amazing man who was just
rescued from the rubble today. 28 days!!!!
It got me thinking. In the past couple of days, news from Haiti had been at the bottom of the RSS feed that finds its home on my toolbar. Previous to that, Haiti had been at least a top ranking story as aftershock after aftershock shook the Port au Prince. I found myself quickly condemning the western media in how quickly they moved on to the next best story like the Grammys, super bowl and of course Avatar. "What is wrong with you people, people are still hurting?" I thought to myself.
After catching up with all the 'relevant' stories on BBC I found myself on twitter reading posts from the twitter account of Kuweni Serious (@kuweniserious ). They are interviewing John Githongo tomorrow. If you are not familiar with Kuweni Serious I'm doing you a favor by introducing you to them. Quite simply they are Kenyans ready to stand up for Kenya. Anywho I was catching up on all the videos that they had posted, a must watch by the way, and I found myself captured by Boniface Mwangi. This of course resulted in a Google search about the man and then I found a YouTube video. This video captures the post-election violence through a photojournalist's (Boniface Mwangi) eyes.
I found that in my reflection I too had forgotten. I had forgotten how I landed in Kenya on December 27th 2007 and was optimistic about the Kenyan Presidential elections. I forgot that Kenya was never the same on December 30th 2007 when Kibaki decided that just he had to President for another term. I had forgotten that Kenyans had lost their families, lost their homes were losing their hope and so much more. I had forgotten. How then can I condemn? Instead I want to remind you so that you also don’t forget. Here is the video:
[I must warn you that some of the images are extremely graphic so be forewarned.]
Don’t forget like I did, we can’t afford to forget.
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