Kikuyumoja – Page 134

Wewe ni Ujerumani!

Yes, Du bist Deutschland (=you are Germany). Me? A country?

This 30 million EURO campaign, initiated by 25 big media companies in Germany, tries to reach 1,6 billion contacts which equals around 98% of all Germans (~16 contacts per person) – everything over a period of 4 months.

The message they are trying to convey is simple: You are Germany. Whatever that means.

The aim behind all this is to combat any dull or bad mood – something, Germans are good at. At least since 1945, my fellow Germans have followed the golden rule of panem et circenses and consequently left most important decisions to the government. People learned how to shut-up and focus on their work. The fruits of living that way were a working infrastructure, jobs, a booming economy, your Mercedes @home, etc. etc…
As the world is constantly turning around, there’s nothing as constant as CHANGE. We have seen the Wall falling down, a symbolic German Unification, a merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler, global terror portrayed with the help of the media, the introduction of the EURO currency in most european countries and reckless global markets coming up. No panem et circenses any more, people are waking up from their Matrix-styled laying batteries. Más vale tarde que nunca.

In summer 2005, Germany’s chancellor Gerhard Schröder asked for a vote of (non-)confidence in order to have reelections a year earlier than expected. The premilinary election results from September 18th are hilarious – 35,2% for CDU/CSU (right-wing) and 34,3% for SPD (somewhere-in-the-middle-wing). Time will tell what kind of coalition we’ll get (or was it Newsweek? :-).

Is it because of the elections that the media started this Du bist Deutschland campaign? I don’t know.

What I DO know, though, is that this stupid You are Germany phrase perfectly makes up for some great satire. Remember, this campaign started two days ago, and we already find visual material on Flickr (like the pic above), tons of media coverage and jokes that follow the “you are….” pattern. Hehe…

Three questions:
1. Instead of spending 30 million EUROs on this useless campaign and knowing that the Internet is a resourceful way of promoting ideas, wouldn’t it have been easier to just spend a few EUROs on a smaller start and see what happens? Or is it just another tax-saving model for the media?
2. WE ARE EUROPE. Why didn’t they use this one?
3. Faith. Hope…Religion? In times of fading interest for community work and a tv programme which is SO out of any morality (and produced by the media!), it apparently takes an expensive campaign to generate some awareness for standards like self-assurance? “Yeah, you know, we can’t offer you any decent jobs at the moment, but hey, look, there are ass and titties, soccer and lame shows on the screen to keep you busy. And to prevent you from slowly drifting away into chaos, here’s this cool campaign which shows you that you can do it too.” No words lost on the church or any other religious institution out there. How come?

Actually, it’s still panem et circenses. The only difference being that in these modern times, we see the media et al sitting on the tribune.

BodaBoda + Taiwan

“We look out upon the sea, The coast is always changing,
I’ll bring my camera out to sea, The coast is always changing”
(Maximo Park)

Hmmm….so you think the streets of East Africa are slowly rapidly filling up with motorized Boda Boda?

My dear bro KPT moved to Taiwan the other day and now look what he’s just send me via Skype:

Motorcycles in Panciao, TAIWAN

Dude, where’s my scooter?

Googleardhi

I was really wondering about blogging this, but here ya go:
A good friend of mine, Lady Kikuyumbuzi, had this crazy idea of climbing Mt.Kenya. Having a great ability to assert herself, she quickly persuaded some other volunteers (read: unaware interns) to accompany her on this quest of climbing the highest mountain in Kenya.

I never had any doubts that she’d do that one day when she told me, but, to be honest, I never really expected her to do it this early. She dropped me a few lines from Nairobi on saturday and wrote: “yeah, and btw, I’ll be climbing Mt.Kenya on Monday…..and there’s this other appointment I’m having like at the end of the week”. Yeah….
CAN YOU IMAGINE why I adore her that much?!

Anyways.

So I am sitting here in my warm and comfy room in Germany and thinking to myself: Well, I can’t be in Kenya right now due to other obligations, but my thoughts (and prayers!) are with her anyways so maybe….maybe I’ll just start another Google Earth session and have a closer look at the slopes of Mount Kenya. Maybe somewhere between Bwana Whispers shambas I’ll find a little Mzungugoat holding up a sign that says: “Hello Bw Kikuyumoja, me I am here. Sound and safe”.

I think it started way back in 1982 (?) after the AirForce coup when the Moi-regime banned all detailed maps of Kenya. Before, I was told, you could get the most detailed maps of Kenya (YES, those ones with contour lines!) and after that ….well, we apparently all know what those city maps of Nairobi looked like during the 1990s. They were just cut down to a minimum and rendered useless for real Safari needs…

Now, imagine this lack of proper maps and try to think of it in GoogleEarth. And it doesn’t even matter if you’re in Kenya or Germany – small Kijijis like Naro Moru or Suderburg (which is where I study – boys, this place is SO lost!) are not indicated on the map. In fact, those ignorants over at GoogleEarth HQ (a.k.a. Keyhole.com) apparently lost the key to the room that contains all those juicy, detailed maps that would show us our beloved Nairobi in its full beauty.

The Internet community though, being as resourceful as a kenyan fundi, quickly came up with a working solution. Why wait for more zoomable maps at higher resolutions if you can have real pictures taken at ground level and overlayered into GoogleEarth’s maps?! This useful Flickr plug-in for instance, which shows the closests 50 images posted on Flickr (based on your current viewing area). Of course it’s just a few pictures now, but as communities grow, more and more images on Flickr & other web resources will hopefully become connected to placemarks on GoogleEarth. This GoogleEarth Bubudiu isn’t just a great toy – it’s a new way of marketing locations. And Kenya being a preferred tourist location, why not promoting it through Google Earth? (Which of course reminds me of EduVision’s eSlates project at this point and adding a tourist functionality to the programme where they give out PDAs to tourists (with some futuristic “GoogleEarth for PDA” installed) and clickable maps…”Oh, yes, we’ve already marked our route on the PDA”. Or somethin’…)

Yani, this all goes to show that I might not be able to actually put my feet on the slopes at this very moment, but at least I can have a closer look upon the route Lady Kikuyumbuzi is taking and….I guess upon reading this blog entry once she returns, she’ll probably never talk to me again. Why? Well…remember Whisper’s wife Thatcher? Haia….go figure…

Ghar Ka Khana

Today I read an interesting story on the efficiency of the so-called Dabbawallas in Mumbai (Bombay), India: >> The “Dabbawalla” system that operates in Mumbai is unique and incredible in the complexity of its task, simplicity of its operation, and surprisingly low error rates for a system of its size. It is a daily service in which thousands of men carry and deliver over 200,000 lunches every day, within a three hour block of time, across the city’s 70-kilometre stretch, with each lunch box (dabba) changing hands at least four times. <<

an indian mkokoteni (handcart)

>>In fact, the American business magazine Forbes gave a Six Sigma performance rating for the precision of dabbawalas. This rating indicates a 99.999999 accuracy percentage of correctness, meaning one error in every six million transactions — an astonishing (and perhaps unbelievable) degree of exactness.<< Some Dabbawallas have already been invited to lecture on their daily trade. And, to round it up, celebs like Prince Charles or even Sir Richard Branson went to Mumbai and spent some time with these diligent workers.

And there’s the Hawala system we all heard about – most notably since 9/11. This informal value transfer system that goes by the name of Al-Barakat in Somalia and which has been declared illegal by the Bush administration and other countries. Even Interpol has been lured into the debate and officially believes the Hawala system to play a role in money laundering (well, obviously there’s a point in that one).

Basi, what I do LIKE about both systems is the basis of their functionality: SIMPLICITY & TRUST.
As for the simplicty, I strongly believe that we should always strive to keep things as simple as possible. And what about the TRUST?

Why do we need a rating system on Ebay? Why do I need to pay for banking fees if I want to send money from here to XYZ – do I pay for the service or for the trust? Why do most religions in this world tell us something about loving each other, we’re fans of fictional worlds like Star Trek with its one-world idea, we go out eating and thereby trust some unknown wapishi (cooks) etc. etc… and yet we’re told that you can not trust the whole world. Why? Because the world, we’re told, is evil. Woiii?!

I think it’s about time for this world to sit back, relax for a moment and reflect what’s really important. I don’t want to think about things like trust when I do business or talk to a stranger. Those values should be taken for granted. I would like to see this basic idea of trusting someone implemented in our western world with such a normality we find on those described systems like the Dabbawalla or Hawala. Yeah, that would be nice.

p.s.: I titled this entry Ghar Ka Khana (~ good food, home-cooked Indian cuisine) because, instead of simply going to a restaurant for lunch, those downtown employees prefer (trust?) the food their families cook for them. The German part in me of course suggest that they should take their food with them once they leave home in the morning, but uhhm, well, if there’s a market for such services…

tool time!

Es ist Freitag, ich öffne meine Post und finde in der aktuellen BrandEins einen Haufen Werbung für kommende Weihnachtsgeschenke. Chocolade, exklusiv, aus erlesenen Rohstoffen. Exklusiv selbstverständlich auch der Preis – z.B. Hochfeine Champagnertrüffel für € 32,90 (für Firmenkunden mit eigenem Logo möglich). Angesprochen fühle ich mich vor allem von einem Präsentkorb mit 6kg frischen exotischen Früchten bester Qualität, einzigartig dekoriert für € 87,00 (netto € 81,31) oder wahlweise auch mit Champagner 0,7l Veuve Clicquot und 250g Ballotin Trüffel und Pralinen für € 124,00.
Als nächstes folgt eine 2-Tageskarte mit einem Wert über € 80,- für eine Premiummesse Inverstmentfonds “funds & finance 2005” und ein nett gemeinter Brief der Firma Reemtsma, in dem höflich angefragt wird, ob ich noch weiterhin an Informationen zu ihren Produkten interessiert sei.
Um die Illusion der umschwärmten Mitte passend abzurunden, entdecke ich im Inneren der BrandEins Ole’s Kumpel Giovanni di Lorenzo in einem DieZeit – Fragebogen für potentielle Abonnenten. Lieber Herr di Lorenzo, neben dem Abo der BrandEins, der taz, der cqdl und der Abwasser&Abfall sowie diverser Inet-Zines bevorzuge ich die kostenlose Internet-Ausgabe und irgendwo ist dann auch mal Schluss mit den Informationen, nicht wahr? Man kann sich doch nicht jeden Tag mit Infos zuballern! Für Ihre Anfrage jedoch vielen Dank, ich weiß, es ist sicherlich nett gemeint..
Ja, wenn man möchte, kann man in diesem Land schon Mitte September an Weihnachten denken und in aller Öffentlichkeit an seiner materiellen Wunschliste basteln. Man kann für seine Geschäftspartner exklusive Dinge bestellen oder als armer Student krampfhaft überlegen, wie man mit der gleichen Summe im nächsten Monat über die Runden kommt. Würde ich jedoch irgendwann mal zur richtig viel Geld kommen – ich weiß nicht ob ich damit wirklich nur verreisen, Notebook kaufen oder die Amazon Wunschliste abarbeiten würde.

Nein.

Stattdessen würde ich nach Metten ins Mekka der Holzhandwerker fahren und mir einen geilen Hobel eine geniale japanische Säge zulegen. Gerne auch einige Werkzeuge für den Gitarrenbau, bei den ausgesuchten Rohmaterialien bedienen und vielleicht auch passend dazu noch den richtigen Umgang mit dem Werkzeug + Verständnis für die verwendeten Materialien in einem der fast immer ausgebuchten Kurse erlenen.

Oh…ich frohlocke…..Weihnachten kann kommen! :-)

The Modern Laibon?

Esuj erashe ng’ejuk emusana

I don’t know what’s the deal between the Maasai and the Swiss, but here’s an interesting ~~shoe~~ training tool from Switzerland called Masai Barfuss Technologie (MBT) by a company that goes by the name of Swiss Masai (as seen on polylux and other channels):

"Using a multi layered sole, MBT® transforms flat, hard, artificial surfaces into natural, uneven ground. Much like walking in sand, the unique uplifting lever spring action of the MBT® sole challenges the core strengthening muscles to be more active. This reactive, more supportive muscle action creates good posture and increases shock absorption for all the joints, significantly reducing muscular-skeletal compression."

Yaani, this modern flip-flop costs 179,- EURs (~ 215 US$)…

Aliyetota, hajui kutota.

>> I was chatting with a street kid in the Eastlands area of Nairobi when he asked me for money. He had asked me the day before, and I had bought him lunch. But on this day, I told him that I had no money. He took away the bottle of glue he was holding in his mouth and looked at me for a moment. Then he gave me 40 shillings, shouted "Jah Rastafari," and walked off. <<
National Geographic‘s author Binyavanga Wainaina on his best Nairobi experience.
And he continues: >> In order to negotiate our complex lives, Nairobi people have learned to have dual personalities. We move from one language to another, from one identity to another, navigating different worlds, some of which never meet. << Ich finde dieser Satz hat etwas.

Now, where’s tearoom? :-)

ati?! part 3

Remember my inquiry about this huge nini east of Nairobi way back in July?

Well, Google has come up with an update for Google Earth, this time apparently focusing on "The Illuminated Continent: African imagery and articles from National Geographic". Haia!
Of course I immediately had to start this addictive GoogleEarth-nini and check about my favourite and still unknown spot east of Nairobi.

OMG!

I should have known better. Being a student of water & soil management and having spent half a year in 2004 on Bremen’s sewage treatment plant (cleaning all machines of used condoms, tons of hair, q-tips and other hygenical stuff I won’t mention in detail now), this huge nini eventually turns out to be the "Dandora Waste Stabilisation Pond System which treats the industrial and domestic sewage from the City of Nairobi, Kenya and is the largest pond system in Africa".

Kûrita nî kûru. (= Is is bad to be a fool.)