Don't Worry Be Happy

"Yet he cannot simply quit and walk away from Iraq without at least some fleeting semblance of success: too many Americans have died for him to admit that it was all a mistake and say he's sorry... They will have to stay so that he does not have to admit that the whole Iraq adventure was a blunder and a waste."
The Mess They Made, Gwynne Dyer.


Like cockroaches scuttling away from the light after lifting an old portable fridge on a building site, the left are scattering away from the light after the national apology. They turned their back while Brendan Nelson gave his speach, although it was meant to be a moment of national unity. He said things they didn't want to hear; and will never want to hear. Perhaps he went too far, or could have chosen his timing better; a four year old drowned while being raped by a petrol sniffer; perhaps that went too far; although of course it was entirely true. Perhaps it is all healthy; stripping away the romanticism and hysteria of it all, moving beyond a blockage point. They were visionary moments; they showed great leadership; they showed a country shifting on its axis. Slowly we get used to the term: Prime Minister Rudd.

And I see the police harassing people; everywhere; make some flippant comment, we're little better than a police state, the great communist republic of Australia. Although sadly its true. Groaning under multiple layers of inept government and grotesque levels of taxation, we are trapped in a terrible, secretive, declining society feeding on itself. We rank 28th in the world for press freedom. The police are wearing gloves as they search through the belongings of a group of drunks that had gathered at the bus stop near the Newtown train station. I stare in concern, bewilderment, curiosity, trying to determine exactly what it is they are doing. There's been an announcement that police are cracking down on anti-social behaviour and I want to watch. Coming so close on the apology, it is redolent with irony. For of course it is our indigenous brothers who will suffer the most from any street crackdown. The ones that we see are little more than street alcoholics, dealing right under the nose of the police, thumbing their nose at, or oblivious to, the ever omniscient cameras.

You're going to spend the night in a cell, I hear a young policeman say to a drunk elderly, well older, man they are forcefully escorting across the road towards the police station. The traffic moves on and I can't catch the rest of the drama, but one thing I do know, it could easily have been me. He arches back, resisting, weak, futile, very drunk. What did I do? he asks plaintifully, I didn't do anything. Then he calls them a bunch of effing c...s and the traffic rolls me away into a life of chores and duty.

My youngest brother, who has been in America, in silicon valley, since he was poached by an American computer company as a young man, arrived in Australia last night. It's been 17 years since he was last in Australia and I haven't seen much of him his entire adult life. He had degrees in pure maths, computer science and electrical engineering by the time he was 23 and made his fortune developing the computer chips or whatever they are for the central processing unit in computers. After building a super computer that could fit in a box, used for instance by giant finance companies on the hedge market to beat the competition by seconds, he tells me things I don't really understand about how there will be 1600 engineers working on the next project, the next stage in computer design, the place he has spent his entire professional life at.

Where will it end? I ask at the City Extra 24 hour cafe at Circular Quay; and he says it will never end. He's spent his entire life working on the "what next" area of computers; and there will always be something more. Thuey're just now shipping millions of computers he helped design, using technology he developed ten years ago. It's all amazing stuff. Offers he can't refuse. Millions of dollars I will never see, millions he would never have seen if he had stayed here. Australia is at the end of the known universe, we are far far away from the heart of things. He would never have succeeded if he had stayed here, there simply aren't the opportunities.

And I, the eldest brother, I stayed here. I've been kidnapped by an old man, he joked to our mother on the phone. For I've got grey hair and grown old, now a man in his 50s, since we last saw each other. His 14-yar-old boy Brian was trailing after him; skinny with long hair, playing constantly with his phone, ear phones in his head even walking through the airport in a new country; and my own kids welcome their cousin they had never seen, although it's well past their bedtime. And we say one thing now, after all that has happened: Don't Worry Be Happy. You're not that man being dragged across the street to he police cells. Some days you really are happy. Some days couldn't be better than they already are.

THE BIGGER STORY:

n a mother's loss, Kenya's agony
By Jeffrey Gettleman The New York Times
Friday, February 15, 2008

It did not take many people to carry the coffins of Wycliffe and Cynthia Awino.

They were 7 and 9 years old.

The brother and sister were burned to death by a mob last month in Kenya in the explosion of post-election violence. And if there ever was a woman alone, it was their mother, Millicent Awino, who stood by herself at the foot of two freshly dug graves on Thursday, blotting out reality with her hands over her face, as her only children disappeared into the ground.

"I only wish to have kids again," she said, staring at the caskets.

Awino is a 23-year-old single mother who was at work packing roses for the equivalent of $2 a day when her children were killed. A mob surrounded the house where they were hiding with 17 other people, barricaded the doors and soaked the walls with gasoline. No one inside had a chance.

Everyone died, including 11 children. It was one of the most disturbing episodes in the bloodletting that convulsed Kenya since a disputed election in December. The incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging.

Since then, more than 1,000 people have been killed in vicious fighting between supporters of the two politicians, fighting that followed mostly ethnic lines but broke all rules. Old men were chopped in the head with axes. Mothers were stabbed to death in front of screaming babies.

The killings seem to have subsided for now as Kenya's rival politicians continue to negotiate. On Thursday, officials said that government and opposition leaders had agreed to the idea of joining together in a coalition government but remained bitterly divided over how much power the opposition would have. Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, is headed to Kenya next week to coax along the politicians. While they haggle, there are open wounds almost everywhere.

Katito, where Awino now lives, is a small town about an hour's drive from Kisumu, an industrial city on Lake Victoria. About all that is left of Kisumu's once vibrant Kikuyu community, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, are a string of scorched shops picked clean by looters. Kibaki is a Kikuyu and opposition supporters have vented their outrage about the election toward members of his ethnic group, who have been methodically hunted down across the country.

The Kikuyus have taken revenge, massacring Luos, Odinga's community. The Awinos are Luos. They lived in Naivasha, an ethnically mixed town in the Rift Valley that used to be known for its nature walks, fancy hotels and flower farms.

Around 7 a.m., Sunday, Jan. 27, Awino left for work. She was one of the many migrant workers who had flocked to Naivasha for jobs in the flower farms, neatly packing beautiful roses by day and returning to their iron-roofed shanties at night. Two dollars a day is considered a decent wage here, especially for a woman who dropped out of 8th grade to have her first baby at age 14.

Wycliffe and Cynthia were sent to a neighbor's house. Wycliffe seemed especially caring for a 7-year-old.

"Whenever I came home from work, he'd take one look at me and say, 'Mommy, you're tired,"' Awino said.

Cynthia helped raise him, boiling tea in the morning and cooking rice. The only picture the family has of them shows the children sitting on the grass, Wycliffe with a freshly shaved head, Cynthia wearing a lemon-colored dress.

Awino rushed back to her neighborhood that Sunday afternoon when her boss told her that Kikuyu gangs were killings Luos. She found her house in ashes. When she reached her neighbors, she collapsed. The bodies of Wycliffe and Cynthia were found huddled with the others in a back room, burned almost beyond recognition.

On Thursday morning, Awino brought the bodies home, two wooden coffins trimmed with lace strapped atop a minibus.

Home is now a shack with plastic sheeting for walls, built on the edge of a farm belonging to her ex-husband's father. The people here are strangers to Awino. Even though she split up with her husband seven years ago, custom has it that she still should live on his family's land.

About 20 people came to the funeral. The refreshments were simple, warm Coca-Colas and slices of white bread.

Members of the local church tapped metal rings that rang like bells. The smell of fresh manure wafted up from the fields.

The speeches were short. Awino told the story of how her children were killed. Their father, Morris Okoth, then shared a few words.

"There is no need for payback," he said.

Wycliffe went first. Before his three-foot coffin was lowered into its hole, one woman threw herself on it.

"Wycliffe! Wycliffe!" she wailed. "Where are you?"

Cynthia's coffin was then covered by shovelfuls of earth.

There was no comforting message at the end. There seemed to be nothing to say. Most people walked away with their heads down. The only sounds were soft sobbing and birds chirping.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/15/africa/15funeral.php




Stephen and Danny.