Milimani To Bondeni

Have you ever taken a walk?
From Milimani to Bondeni?
You will be surprised my friend.

Up there in Milimani, people are fewer than the houses
Did I mention houses, I mean mansions
Well built in well watered ever green electric fenced compounds
As if the perimeter wall and electric fence are not enough
There are security guards as well as uncountable cctvs.
Police vehicles keep on patrolling the region every five minutes
If you are shabbily dressed and walking in the ever maintained avenues,
You risk being locked up.

Early in the mornings well-dressed obese kids
Are chauffeured in sleek Mercedes to academies
Where like future leaders they are treated
For they must be the leaders
In schools teachers are more than the pupils
Sitting in ever comfortable furniture’s
Every day a well balance meal is served
When they are sick with cough
They are taken to well-equipped private hospitals
Where nurses don’t know what mgomo is
In fact the patients are fewer than workers.

But as we drop a few kilometers!
The population increases and the vehicles are rusty
Welcome to Majengo the land of hustlers.
Houses here are closely squeezed together
Police surveillance is after a crime has been long committed
Each and every day houses are broken into
Early in the morning casually dressed people rush to bus station
Where they fight for seats
Children in dirty torn uniforms
Are crammed into overloaded unroadworthy shapeless buses
No wonder many die every year in transit to and from schools
Where they are treated like future laborers.

The schools are literary full to the brims
Others are forced to study under the trees
Teachers are fewer than classes
And most of the time they are being teargassed by the police
Here you just pray not to fall ill
Or else you will have to line up for days
Before being attended to
And when attended to
You pray not to be admitted
Or else you will sleep on the floor
Awaiting for another patient who is worse than you
To be discharged
And if you die without money my friend
Your body will be rotting on the morgue’s dirty floor.

A few steps down and we reach Bondeni
Nice welcoming smell invites you
Malnourished dirty naked barefooted children run up and down
School is a vocabulary to them
Did you ask hospitals?
My friend here it is the strong one who survives
Polythene houses are scattered all over
You wonder where residents goes for short and long calls
Death is a common occurrence here
A week without food is not a calamity
Police officers never walk in this region
For fear of harden criminals.