The Mt Kenya Times 
By Njonjo Mue
When I choose to swim upstream
To question everything given me
When I prefer to hold onto nothing
In order to have all things
When I refuse to fit the mold
That they have created for me
And when they tell you that I’m mad
For not fitting into
Their particular brand of sanity
Will you, too, shun me?
When I choose to go to jail
So as to be truly free
When I prefer life in an asylum
To escape the madness outside
When I choose to give up my dreams
So that others can live theirs
And when I give in to pain
So that the healing can begin
Will you take their side?
Will you, too, shun me?
When I stand up to them
And refuse to follow blindly
And when, by so doing,
I challenge your own values
When I choose alone to start
What all have been too terrified
To imagine
Will you exchange sanity for comfort?
Will you, too, shun me?
Or will you have the presence of mind
To remember our time together
To recall the warmth, the laughter;
Will you pause and reflect
On who I was to you
And who you know me to be;
And will you then pray for courage
To stand with me,
Or will you, too, shun me?
Her response, when it came, landed in my inbox rather unexpectedly one late Friday afternoon just as I was shutting down my computer before leaving the office for the weekend.
It was the title that caught my eye as I glanced at my inbox one last time:
‘I Will Not Shun You,’ it boldly declared. On opening the email, I found that the poem read in part:
I WILL NOT SHUN YOU
By Katindi Sivi
I consider myself your friend,
So I will not shun you
I will stand in the gap
On your behalf
And pray that the sacrifice
You’ll make
Will indeed bring healing
To this nation
That you will find peace and joy
as you watch the seed
Of your labor flourish
That as you let your light shine,
You will unconsciously
Challenge others
To do the same
To realize that
Our playing small
For the sake of our own comfort
Will not serve the nation.
Or liberate others
From their fears and
Make this land
A better place
For us all
As I read and re-read her beautiful words they tugged at the strings of my heart, threatening to awaken feelings I thought I had long securely locked away. But I still thought of her poem as a kind gesture from a thoughtful friend, rather than a suggestion that, from her perspective, our friendship was evolving into anything more.
Still, this did not prevent me from placing a long distance call to her from London one day on my way back from my European tour in late November 2001.
Somehow, I persuaded myself that it was just a way to escape thinking about the cold dreary English weather by speaking to someone who at the time was basking in the warm Kenyan sunshine.
At the end of that trip, I brought a big bar of White Swiss Chocolate, which I handed over to her over a cup of tea that we shared at The Fairview Hotel during my brief stop-over in Nairobi on my way back to Kampala.
She would confess later that white chocolate was her absolute favourite and she could not believe that I had not gotten leakage of that fact from one of her colleagues at IEA.
But actually, I had not; I had just picked it up randomly from Heathrow as I hurriedly made my way to the gate to board my flight.
I did not see or speak to her again for a few months following that meeting in late November at The Fairview.
In fact, I did not even look her up during the two weeks that I returned home from Kampala for the Christmas holidays.
The next time I saw her was in mid-March 2002 when I organised a training workshop on behalf of Panos for journalists from Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The workshop was held at the Methodist Guest House in Nairobi and I sent her an email in advance asking her whether she might be available to record the proceedings and prepare a report for us, which she readily agreed to do.
However, although we spent three days in close proximity to one another during the workshop, we barely spoke since I was busy playing host and she was busy recording the proceedings.
At the end of the workshop I returned to Kampala for two and a half more months before I abruptly ended my tour of duty with Panos and returned home to start the next leg of my life where I would end up seeing much more of her.
But if the friendship between us was metamorphosing into something else, nobody gave me the memo.
I remained as clueless as ever that anything more was destined to come out of our random email exchanges, irregular phone calls, and the odd moments when we joined other young Christians to pray for Kenya, especially ahead of the general election that was scheduled to take place later that year.
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