Dear Baba Crismasi, you who come down from the slopes of Mount Kenya with a sledge made from two boxes of fruit, pulled by as many Grant's Antelopes, and when you arrive on the coast you take off your jacket for the heat and you have under a Hawaiian shirt and a kikoy, this year I don't have much to ask you.
I know you can do very little about the weather, since it's well known that you love snow, but someone has been melting your glaciers for years, you've never shirked requests for plastic gifts, and now all the Christmases of the last fifty years are floating in our oceans, and human beings are always on your ass, as they should be.
And yet you have remained one of the few symbols that bring together and represent everyone: pagans (because let's not forget that you are not a believer and if anything your god is called Odin) and Christians, because there are still many who, as Enzo Jannacci sang, believe that the Baby Jesus is Santa Claus as a child.
Personally and as the director of Malindikenya.net, I would like you to give us a few more volunteers here on the coast to continue our battles to make this place as wonderful as it has always been until a few decades ago, at least until you too were hired by multinationals and opened a branch in Beijing.
So save us gifts that are not recyclable, please, and that can fuel corruption. By the way, I've never understood where you get them, whether the North Pole is a free zone and how you clear them through customs at the port of Mombasa, which has become a mess. Mysteries of the diplomatic passport from Antarctica...
This year, we're going to need recycling garbage cans. There are some decent ones and not very expensive and if you want I can attach the photograph, I'll even add it below. Besides, the more you buy, the cheaper they are. Some activities in Malindi, and hopefully also banks and companies, are already booking them and when we will have many, the town will certainly be cleaner and we can start an educational campaign not to throw anything on the street. You will say "little thing with all the problems in the world", yes but have you ever done something for the problems of the world? Then give us a hand for these little things for which we are demonstrating unity of purpose and good will.
If you want to do something useful and immediate for the local population, you know that in the hinterland of Malindi girls need tampons, but make sure that they don't disperse them in the environment. You can give them washable and reusable ones, for example.
To boys, without worrying about doing something rude or illegal, give them biodegradable condoms. Statistics say there's still a lot of underage pregnancies around here.
Yes, I know...gifts for boys and especially children should not only be useful, but inspire play, fun...and then we have already taken away most of the fantasies, dreams, beauty of Creation...if we also take away the gifts under the tree what remains for them?
The other day a little girl in a village in the Rift Valley hanged herself because she had lost her mobile phone. I wonder if it was a present from the previous Christmas. Well, you can safely avoid those kind of surprises for the kids.
To us residents, tourists and all adult Kenyans, if you can, just prepare a card and write on it that it's time to stop with the alibi that it's the Government that has to do something, because the Government is like you: it doesn't exist and it gives out presents, which are called promises, only before its Christmas, which is called "Elections". So let's give presents to ourselves, to our children and to our Planet, every day. Because the Earth is us, we are responsible for it and only we can stop its destruction, and because every day is the birthday of millions of human beings, and therefore it is a Christmas.
Merry Christmas, Chrysmasi Njema!