Br. Mwaura

        Today Br. Mwaura will be buried. A lot of stories are going to be said about him, and probably you and I will not hear even a half of them. I am going to tell his story as well, from my perspective. It is easy to tell stories of dead men; owing to the obvious fact that they are never there to object. Only in comics do they rise to defend their character when it is not well represented. For instance there is that fellow who had pretended to have been dead only to hear his neighbor telling his wife that “he has died with my cassava, arrowroots, sweet potatoes, and other debts, he should have paid his debts before going.” The fellow rose to tell his wife the truth! Br Mwaura is GONE, gone too soon although he had hit the fifty years necessary for seeing Abraham (Jn 8:57).

         

The period between when I met Br. Mwaura, forgot him, then met him again and renewed our acquaintance, was a decade that flew like a snowball falls off the sky. When I met him last, he reminded me that indeed there are people who live their life saying yes to almost everything, fully conscious that an emphatic No hurts and an inappropriate yes can always be explained later. He was one of them. Everything to him was “ah, ndio”. One day, and as his responsibility to dispense certain services like giving me 40 shillings for shaving, he always did it with a vibrant, “ah, ndio, unahitaji kunyoa ukae smart, ndio.” He would give and then later tell me, “lakini sasa ukinyoa hivyo watanzania, watakuona kama umetoka kwa mazishi!” I stopped shaving like “that” jordan. I stopped shaving all together - but today I have to shave because indeed it is a burial day for him. May his soul rest in peace.