I did not choose the Christmas holidays because at Christmas 'we are all better' or because I wanted to make a 'nice gesture'.
I do not think of myself as 'good' and I would like to be even less so in this age where those who know they are not right can still be right.
It's just that sometimes I feel like a geometer of narration, I feel the need, and also the duty, to calculate the distance between the story that arises from what I observe, with its protagonists, and their reality.
I was pleased to meet Dennis, that's all.

It was curiosity that drove me to him, as well as symbolism.
But above all, the fact that at Christmas time there is hardly anyone around in Nairobi.
Dennis lives amidst the dust, noise and smog of one of the most messy roundabouts in one of the most messy metropolises in the world. 
Dennis doesn't pay rent, but his house can be taken away every minute by the municipality, by young vandals, by a private garbage company, by neighbourhood thugs who demand protection money, by diggers for water, light and fibre optics.
I wonder if it changes much from where it originated. 
Many Kenyans still live in places where their home can be taken away any minute by a flood, expropriation by an environmental company, a fire set by a rival tribe or fatality, a mega construction project, banditry, an elephant.
Dennis has built his own hut in the centre of it all.

He stands still, placid, impassive, and the others spin like mad around him.
They snort like their vehicles, they swear, they make noise, they hate each other.
Dennis does not. 
He is at the centre, impassive, and at one with himself. 
His palace is made up more or less of what he wears and he does not have to fit in it. 
He just has to be there. 
He doesn't flaunt the ethics of recycling, eco-sustainability, he doesn't fill his mouth with beautiful, empty concepts: he lives with it.
Objects are not like humans, they are all useful.
Rags, clothes, cables, pieces of metal, stones, planks, an umbrella.
There is a natural empathy with them.

The objects come to him easily, they are the refuse of society, discarded and abandoned by everyone, deemed unserviceable. Just like Dennis. 
When he comes out of the hut, Dennis wears a workman's helmet and under his jacket, always buttoned up, in the blazing sun or in the cool that follows the night downpour, he keeps like a treasure everything that must not be taken away. 
Like a fanny pack, like a placid pregnancy.
On the fingers of both hands he has priceless rings, around his neck a luminescent necklace and a silk scarf, flown off a late-model off-road vehicle. 
I don't know what he will do with my money; he doesn't eat conventional food, only scraps, of course.
I think he will barter it for something useful.

I have met many other human waste like Dennis, almost all of them in dumps or sewer districts. 
In the presence of Dennis I tell myself that it would also be natural to find him there, where for the righteous it is wrong, therefore right or at least justified, to be.
But no, Dennis wants to live where everything is created, not where it rots.
He stands there, showing you the end you deserve.

He lives a stone's throw from a skyscraper where, on the 20th floor, there is one of the city's most exclusive restaurants, behind two shopping malls where you can find everything you've always dreamed of owning, but don't really need, and right under the Chinese highway that takes you straight to the sky, connecting Kenya's capital to the world.
The world, the real world, is where and how Dennis stages it.
It inhabits our precariousness, dresses up with our few securities, retrieves here and there forgotten values and shows off the rare fortunes found on the street.
But, unlike us, he will never tell you that he is right.