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The struggle with many a rigid Logooli cultural practices

  The Logooli community is one of the deeply cultured societies – with near everything supposed to have been done as per custom – to allow another custom to follow. One example is that for a mature man (with a child or more) to be buried, there must be a house structure at home. Another is that a boy must be circumcised and nursed in father land. If maternal family decides to, the boy will have a hard time reconnecting with father people - a dent on his masculinity. There were two children who got burnt to death in a house in Nairobi. The single mother had left for night work. Elders were told that one of the children was Logooli. The other, the woman had sired with someone else. The Logooli family wanted to burry their little one and long discussed the do’s and don’ts. Of a man who died childless and the grave was placed as if he had died as a man with children. It should have been dug on the sides, the grave. A real thorn should have been thrust in his buttocks, his name go...

Must we trade both on the dying and the dead, Dr?

We do not have enough money to help us get our sleeping boy from Kenyatta Hospital Morgue. They are debting us Ksh 400,000 and more. It increased today. If we pay about 75%, they say that they will allow us take him out- but some of us will part with identification cards.

I am not writing this so that we contribute some money. That is indirect thievery.

My father works for a company in Industrial Area. His NHIF medical card can not be accepted in hospitals away from that which his company is registered with. He has no enough to knock the offices of leading insurance firms. He got sick and we had it tough. Can't there be systems to make sure that the average man lives  a better life? If he gets sick in the rural sides and the hospital has no branch there we have to ferry him.

Back to our boy. His father is one of my friends;guard whose salary is a matter of the arrow roots and vegetables he grows on the small land in the primary school.To him the cash is but a dream and wonders how. But he cannot throw away his child- his tradition does not allow. He must see to a way that he will have the money if it means slicing a piece of his rural small share.

Something is wrong here. Can't the society itself see to such? Must the doctors be paid, must he lose a share, must the morgue attendants refill their perfume bottles? Must we pay to get the body of our own? Must a human pinch another? Oh, wait. We are still evolving.

Picture Source: Gado.

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