On 12th March 2020, the first COVID case was reported in Kenya. Two weeks later on March 26, the country’s first COVID-19-related death was reported. The message was all over in the media. The first COVID death in Kenya was none other Engineer Maurice Namiida, a friend and colleague. A man I had known and had worked with in GIBB (International) for 25 years. A man who was the only contemporary in years in the office. A man who we often had lunch together. As a diabetic, his favorite was millet ugali. He was dead. Dead from COVID which he contracted in South Africa or Botswana, where he had gone on an engineering assignment. The news of our colleague’s death was like a bolt from the blues. It hit and struck hard. Who was going to be next? The office had to close down and everyone would work from home. Schools and Universities were closed. Our daughter Elizabeth Njeri, an Engineering Student at Cardiff University, came back home on 26th April 2020, to study from home. She came back in the nick of time; that same afternoon all overseas arrivals were shuttled to COVID quarantine centers.
In hindsight, having to work from home with my daughter and my spouse, Professor Ruth Nduati was truly the start of this amazing writing journey and this is how ‘GӧӧKA: From the Village to the City’ a Coloring Book and Discussion Guide’ was born, designed for children aged 6-12 years. It is written by a grandfather (gooka) to his grandchildren. The book attempts to convey gooka’s age old wisdom by narrating short stories from past to the present. The stories start with stories the author heard as a boy in the village days. It moves on to contemporary stories in the city. It ends with futuristic stories for a child or adult to ponder. The stories are based on the author’s real-life experiences.
Each story is followed by a coloring activity. After coloring, the child is supposed to engage with parents, grandparents or even teachers to discuss questions based on the story. Each story has a lesson, a ‘gooka lesson’. The gooka lessons are intended to impart values of education, honesty, good neighborliness, love, diet, sport environment and other social issues to children at their most impressionable age. Locally, the coloring book comes complete with 12 coloring pencils. Print copies are available from the author contact +254722723329 or BOOKSTOP at Yaya center. The book is intended to be used as gift. A gift for birthdays. A gift to our rural schools, which i have personally donated to my rural primary school and secondary school.
Print copies of both books are available on Amazon. Soft copies of second book are available on Kindle, Vivlio, Barnes &Noble and Kobo.
Living with a spouse and daughter from morning to evening was a new experience. Breakfast, ten o’clock tea, lunch, four o’clock tea and dinner 24/7 required mental strength. And the strength came in form of new activities. There was no going to the gym, no going to the golf course. A morning and evening walk became the alternative to the gym and golf course. In the morning, it was a 1.9 km walk to the road, to pick daily newspapers and the same distance back. All along we lived in earthly paradise: trees, birds, flowers that we had never noticed. The evening was a walk the opposite direction to other neighborhoods that we rarely visited. Then it occurred to us that visiting elderly neighbors was within our ability.
By the end of June, our daughter was done with her exams and had more time. I too was stressed after examining road drawings all day, morning through evening. So we visited a past Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, the Very Rev George Wanjau, a servant of God who served us in the University days in the 1970s. in tattered pieces of paper were a selection of his 100 sermons dating back to the 1970s. They had been roughly typed, but not checked. Now 88, Rev Wanjau did not have the capacity to look at the typed work and they had been saved in a flash disk for more than ten years. My daughter and her mother offered to look at all the sermons and see what could be done to compile them into a book. They would work into the night cross checking Bible references to the sermons. I was still checking drawings and writing tender documents for a major project (the Eastern Bypass) whose dualling is currently underway. I was not doing any work on the sermons, but would occasionally peep at their work. I did not know I was a writer and editor in the making.
