The One Planet Literature series: Prose

Little Heroes

The One Planet Literature series

1. Flee, Mama Flee – David Mulwa

2. Seven Shades of Dusk – Kwamboka Oyaro

3. Angels of the Wild – Ng’ang’a Mbugua

4. The Daredevil Rider – Henry Munene

5. The High Road – Jennie Marima

6. The Ridges Across River Kaiti – Wambua wa Kawive

7. From the Heart of my Mother – Ken Wasudi

8. Just is Once – Jennie Marima

9. Little Heroes – Ian McKenzie-Vincent

Aziza and Bakari

Little Heroes

Ian McKenzie-Vincent

OnePLANET

Published by

One Planet Publishing & Media Services Limited

PO Box 5649 – 00506, Nairobi, Kenya

Email: info@oneplanetpublishing.com

Website: www.oneplanetpublishing.com

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First published 2019

Reprinted 2019, 2021

transmied in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording or any informaon storage and

retrieval system, without the prior wrien permission of One Planet

Publishing & Media Services Limited.

Enquiries concerning reproducon may be sent to the Publishing

Department, One Planet Publishing & Media Services Limited, at the

address above.

ISBN 978 9966 068 87 3

Cover photo: Ishan-hps://unsplash.com/@seefromthesky

Printed by

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PO Box 32197 – 00600, Nairobi, Kenya

Other novels by Ian McKenzie-Vincent

Come Hell or Dry Water

(With Linda Geraldine Rampling and available in paperback

on Amazon)

This is a story of two teenagers meeting under the most

bizarre circumstances. One is a girl who is kidnapped by two

men employed by a Somali mastermind, and the other a boy

who survives a plane crash in which his parents are killed.

Their situation is already hazardous when they join

forces, but then they are forced to battle against all the odds

stacked against them in order to survive the deadly wastes of

Northern Kenya’s Chalbi Desert.

The Mara Fiasco

(Previously Published as To the Mara with Love)

The Mara Fiasco is a fast-paced thriller set in Kenya’s

fabled Maasai Mara National Reserve where hi-tech,

professional rhino horn and ivory poachers come up against

a gang of rank amateurs who are totally out of their depth.

This intriguing tale explores the connection between

wildlife trophies and black-market narcotics, and weaves a

thread of greed and deceit around some of its murderous

characters while leaving gentle romance to follow its own

destiny.

It is also the story of Popsy Kangela – at first an innocent

bystander – a woman who quickly realizes that Kenya will

only win its war against poachers with state-of-the-art

technology.

Praise for Ian McKenzie-Vincent’s novels

Come Hell or Dry Water

Couldn't put it down! Loved all the detail of the Kenyan rift

area and the wildlife. The characters are well defined and the

plot lines merged quite nicely. This book screams for a sequel.

–Allan Williams

I read this wonderfully descriptive book in one sitting.

Excellent storyline and characters. I am looking forward to

the sequel.

–Jessica Baldwin

The Mara Fiasco

(Previously Published as “To the Mara with Love”)

Having lived in the Maasai Mara in Kenya, I have

waited for this book "The Mara Fiasco" to be published

in the hopes that it would highlight both the problems

and the beauty of this wonderful place. I was not

disappointed. Ian has captured perfectly the battle that

is being fought to protect both the Elephant and Rhino

from poachers hell bent on securing the tusks and horns

from these magnificent animals in the most brutal ways.

Whilst the profits from Ivory are enormous for these

people, thankfully they don't always win. Poachers fights,

helicopter tracking and a love affair all add to the content

and excitement of this story. I can't wait to see what Ian has

in store for us in the next two books in this series.

– Shirley Coleman

vii

I have just finished “The Mara Fiasco” and I must tell you

of the excellence of your words, your knowledge of all

around you. I enjoyed it very much because it was easy

reading, accurate and very exciting. This is a very beautiful

story and I heartily congratulate you. I have few words to

show my appreciation. All I can think of are the late Jan

Hemsing’s words when she once told me that you were an

extremely talented writer.

– Nigel Arensen

This story immediately pulled me in with non-stop

action and intrigue, and is brilliantly written. The Mara

Fiasco explains the elephant, rhino, and hippo poaching

situation by travelling with 2 groups of poachers, 2 Photo

Safari guides, and several other groups as they all cross

each other's paths in the Mara game reserve. The plot is

wonderfully intricate! Ian lives near the Reserve and speaks

with passion and authority about the stark dangers in the

forest and savannah terrain. Reading The Mara Fiasco, is

like watching a terribly exciting, really well done action

miniseries, and I never wanted to put it down, start to

finish! NOW he has a new book coming out, too.

– Robynne McWayne

viii

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of the late Anthony

Lobo, one of the only true gentlemen of the old school with

whom I have had the honour to share time with, and a man

amongst men who taught me more about decency, chivalry,

compassion, integrity, humility, a proper code of ethics and

morals – and a lot more besides – than anybody else ever

managed to do.

And, in so doing, he slowly turned me into who I am

today.

Very sadly, Senior Citizens like Anthony – men who

accepted their responsibilities in life by looking into the

future while fully understanding the true meaning of the

word ‘consequence’ – are of a dying breed of truly honest

men.

It is because of this that today’s corporate greed and

political corruption are driving our world into a truly

uncertain future due to global warming, climate change, and

plastic waste.

Both for us adults but – and far more importantly – for

the readers of this book who might have to suffer as a result

of our mistakes.

This is what this story is all about, and one that will be

continued with its sequel called The Climate of Change.

And it is within this Dedication that I would like to

sincerely thank Anthony’s family who continue to accept

my presence in their fold as though I was one of their own.

Namely his widow, Alina; his son, Frederic; his daughter-

in-law, Sheila; and his grandchildren, Paolo, Julio and

Ariana.

This family has steadfastly stood by my side for the last

thirty years during all my ups and downs, and during all my

trials and tribulations due to getting older in years but not

in mind.

And this is due to their generosity, their patience and

their understanding.

Thank you most sincerely, my friends, and may God

bless you all.

WITH MY SINCERE THANKS TO:

Patrick Marekia, his wife Winnie, their daughter Naana,

and their two sons Marekia and Karuga. Patrick and I have

worked on many projects together, and he has been both my

mentor and a source of inspiration for many years. He has,

in addition, been an incredible pillar of strength throughout

my darkest hours.

Nigel Arensen, an old school friend who I very sadly lost

contact with a long time ago, and a man who has been there

and done that in far more ways than I have. We met again by

chance and, after telling him about this book, he very kindly

offered his help with regards to checking its accuracy.

Onkar, Pushee, Vickram and Kiki Singh Dogra who are

very old friends who have helped and supported me in so

many different ways that were all well beyond the call of

supposed duty.

And last, but by no means least, all the guys and gals at

Google who make the seemingly impossible increasingly

possible; the unknown just a click away; who educate the

uneducated like me and, by doing all of the above, make the

world a far, far easier place in which to both live and work,

and thus to understand.

This manuscript is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

places, organizations, and incidents are either products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

xii

“It is the people who must save the environment.

It is the people who must make their leaders change.

And we cannot be intimidated.

So we must stand up for what we believe in.”

Wangari Maathai

Nobel Laureate

Friday, 11.45 am: The Riverview Academy

The buildings that surrounded the school’s expansive

grounds were seemingly deserted as a result of the school

holidays. However, on closer inspection, there were a few of

its pupils playing football on the pitch, fewer still swimming

in its Olympic-standards swimming pool, and just two of

them in its library whose small annex housed half-a-dozen

laptop computers and a pair of high-speed laser printers.

They were only there because the school had, by tradition,

always allowed its students access to some of its facilities

during their tri-annual holiday breaks, facilities that were

always supervised by a skeleton staff during this hiatus.

While the other members of this scholastic fraternity

were frivolously enjoying their games and their swims, Aziza

and Bakari Qadir were sitting side-by-side as they used their

individual computers that were connected to the internet.

This was because they were researching what every teacher

had asked their students to work on as a holiday project.

It was a subject that was of ever-increasing concern to

every one of the world’s seven and a half billion inhabitants,

Prologue

and one that their respective teachers had loosely called ‘The

Dangers of Climate Change and Plastic Waste’.

After an hour of sifting through Google’s incredible

amount of information on both subjects, and after digesting

and printing out the pertinent information, Bakari turned to

his older sister.

“I’m bored,” he told her in no uncertain terms after

glancing at the huge pile of printouts that proved their

diligence with regards to their work. “We’ve found out

enough for our project, and I want to go and play some

football with my friends.”

Aziza tore her eyes away from the computer screen to

glare at her sibling.

“Forget it,” the fifteen year-old told him. “We have only

just discovered how the big oil companies are destroying our

climate, and how their single-use plastics are destroying our

rivers, lakes and oceans as well. However, we still need to

find out what everybody around the world is doing about it.”

“About what?” her twelve year old brother asked her

expressionlessly.

“You know, about saving us – and every form of wildlife

around us – from almost certain death in the not too-distant

future unless man stops destroying the environment at an

ever increasing pace.”

Bakari stared at her for a moment, and then laughed.

“That is total nonsense,” he challenged her. “And you

know it. With everything we have printed out so far, we

both know that it is all happening so slowly that we have

nothing to worry about. After all, and with everybody telling

us that nothing serious is going to happen to us for the

next hundred years, what do we really have to worry about

because, by then, we will both be dead?”

Aziza stared at her younger brother with sudden distaste.

“You are being stupid,” she told him frankly. “Because,

with all the work we’ve done so far, you haven’t realized that

everything is starting to happen far sooner than expected.”

“What do you mean?” Bakari countered, somewhat

aggressively.

Aziza raised her eyes to the ceiling to express her despair,

and then stared at him.

“Don’t you remember that United Nations report? The

one we were both so shocked about?” she demanded angrily.

“No? Well then, try and remove the cobwebs from what’s

left of your brain, or perhaps I should do that for you,” she

ended sarcastically.

Ignoring the immediate anger in her brother’s eyes as

he squirmed with sudden discomfort in his chair, Aziza

continued with her lecture.

“If you recall, the report stated that all the scientific

projections for the year 2100 are no longer valid, and that

global temperatures are rising far quicker than expected, as

are the sea levels. And that because of corporate greed and

political corruption, the big oil companies are expected to

triple their production of plastic within the next ten years.

That, if allowed, rampant industrial fishing is going to kill

our seas and oceans within twenty years, just as the timber

companies will do with our remaining forests and…”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Bakari suddenly interrupted her.

“What’s your point?”

“We just don’t have the time to sit around and do

nothing. I mean, think about it. When you get married in

about twenty year’s time, will you not care about what kind

of world your children will grow up in? And will you not

care about how your grandchildren will survive in a world

that is so horrifyingly different to the one we are enjoying

today? Come on, bro. Get real and face the facts as we have

both just discovered for ourselves. If we don’t do something

soon, there will be no hope for either of us.”

Bakari stared bleakly at his sister for a moment, and

then quickly returned his attention to his computer while

completely forgetting about the possible game of football

with his friends.

Three hours later, and having shared the cokes and

sandwiches they had carried from home in their satchels,

Aziza sat back and looked at her watch.

“Mum said she’d be late when she called. She told me that

she’d be here at about four, and will then take us shopping

before we go home. But after all this,” she said, pointing at

the piles of printouts that had now tripled in size, “I have a

plan of action. Listen.”

By the time she had finished with her suggestion, Bakari

was staring at her with open admiration, and with an impish

grin on his face.

Friday, 4.20 pm: The Road to Muthaiga

As it was the start of the Easter holiday long weekend, the

traffic had initially been light when Amina Qadir had picked

up her kids from the school. But as soon as she tried to cut

across the city and head towards a Nairobi suburb called

Muthaiga, she had had to start battling against unexpected

traffic jams.

And this, she was quite certain, had been because she had

been delayed by an official, presidential luncheon that she

had had no option but to attend. However, with her children

– who had started their Easter holiday the day before – now

with her in the car, she was able to ease her frustration and

impatience about wasted time in the traffic by chatting with

them.

“So you’re trying to tell me that you think you’ve almost

got everything done for your project?” she asked Aziza who

was sitting next to her, and after a long silence while she had

been forced to concentrate on her driving.

Chapter One

“Yes,” her daughter replied. “And we only managed that

because we had the library to ourselves.

“And you, Bakari? I can’t believe you put as much work

into this as your sister did?”

“I did, Mama. Ask her for yourself,” he replied from

the back seat, and thumped the two bulging, paper-filled

satchels on the seat beside him.

“So after all that work, did you come to any major

conclusions?” she asked neither of them in particular.

“Yes,” Aziza replied. “For me at least, all the research we

did was scary.”

“What do you mean?” Amina asked her.

“Bakari and I have lived with plastic ever since we were

born. It’s a part of our lives we take for granted because it’s

everywhere. You just can’t get away from it so you accept it.

At least I did until today,” she stated matter-of-factly. “It’s

like, when you grew up, there probably wasn’t any plastic

anywhere. But when it did come into your life, you probably

welcomed it with open arms because of its convenience. Just

like everybody else did, and that’s what started our throw-

away culture, something that is about to destroy the world.”

“I agree, mama,” Bakari responded as he leant forward

between the two front seats. “And Aziza and I have decided

that you should immediately ban plastic bags as a start.”

Amina turned to her daughter with a shocked expression,

and Aziza nodded at her with determination.

Friday, 4.45 pm: A Nairobi Supermarket

When they arrived at the supermarket, it was so packed that

Amina had to drive around the shopping mall’s parking lot

twice before she could park her car, a white Volkswagen

Passat with Kenyan government registration plates.

She glanced at her watch and groaned, knowing she

would not be home until late. Not only because of the traffic,

but also due to the fact that she had a lot of shopping to do,

and this was the only time she could do it.

With her and her husband – who also worked for the

Kenyan government – due to start their annual leave on

Monday because of their children’s school holidays, she

had already planned her weekend around a number of

urgent meetings, and also with tidying up her office. And

she knew that she would have to spend at least an hour at

the various shops in the mall, not only with buying her own

requirements, but also to get everything on her mother’s

long list: a variety of things she had asked Amina to bring

down with her when she came to stay for the family holiday.

Wearing a well-tailored beige safari suit with a wide

brown leather belt and matching, calf-high boots, she

grabbed her large leather handbag and got out of the vehicle.

She watched while Aziza walked around the car, a

teenager already tall for her age, and just slightly chubby in

her yellow T-shirt, blue jeans – her favourite colours – and

blue and yellow striped sneakers. She had a pretty face, with

large brown eyes, a fine nose above full lips, and her long,

naturally straight, burnt-ochre coloured hair fell loosely

down to her shoulders.

Bakari was also tall, but thinner than his sister, and he

was wearing a red checked shirt over his brown trousers

that stopped at the top of his safari boots. While he also

had a somewhat angelic face, Amina knew far too well that,

together, her children would get up to mischief as soon as

she was not looking.

“So what was this you were saying about banning plastic?”

She asked Bakari with genuine interest as they started to

walk the seventy metres to the mall’s main entrance.

“It’s because using plastic anything only once is really bad

for the environment,” he told her. “And while everything

else we throw away rots after a while, plastic does not, and it

sticks around for hundreds of years.”

“And because of that, it gets everywhere,” Aziza added.

“It just lies on the ground where it is thrown, and the wind

blows things like bags into the bushes and trees where it

sticks. And in other places like our National Parks, people

throw their trash out of their cars, and animals like elephants

eat it because they think it is food. Then they get sick and die.

That’s why Rwanda has banned plastic bags, some places in

America and Europe have as well, and it’s why we should

too.”

Amina stopped in the car park and smiled at her children.

“My goodness! You two have been busy today. But tell

me, now that you are both such experts on the subject, why

is it suddenly becoming a crisis when we didn’t have any

problems before?” she asked them.

“It’s because the greedy oil companies are not only

making our world hotter because of their fossil fuels, and

therefore causing climate change, but they are also making

more cheap plastic than ever before,” Bakari replied.

“But everybody has to make a profit in order to survive,

and you cannot call that greed,” Amina argued.

“True,” Aziza commented. “But the big oil companies

should not be allowed to destroy our world for profit. The

only reason they’re still doing it is because they have bribed

governments to let them carry on.”

“That’s a very strong statement, young lady,” Amina

glared at her, suddenly angry.

“Perhaps.”

“Meaning?”

Aziza looked up at her mother defiantly.

“The reason why only ten percent of waste plastic is

recycled is because it is cheaper for the oil companies to

make new stuff, and make higher profits at the same time.

This is why eight billion kilos of plastic wind up in our seas

and oceans every year.”

“That is impossible!” Amina declared. “I mean, plastic

weighs nothing.”

“Agreed, mama,” Bakari came to his sister’s support.

“But there are eight billion people around the world who use

plastic everyday. Think about how much plastic we use every

year at home, and I’m sure it will come to lot more than a

kilo, no matter how light you think it is. So, if you do your

sums, our tiny little country with just fifty million people is

destroying our environment and our bit of the Indian Ocean

with fifty million kilos of plastic every year.”

“And it is a problem that no government, not even ours,

is doing anything about,” Aziza added as she stared directly

into her mother’s eyes.

“It is only now,” she continued, “that so many scientists,

conservationists and environmentalists have grouped

themselves together in various increasingly-powerful

organizations to raise the alarm, and call governments

into action. This is because plastic waste can now be

found everywhere in the world, including the North Pole,

Antarctica, and deserted islands in the Pacific. In fact, and in

the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is an island of floating

waste plastic that is bigger than Kenya.”

“And even worse,” Bakari butted in, “is that even though

plastic never rots, it does eventually break down into smaller

and smaller pieces, although these are not as small as the

plastic micro-beads that greedy pharma…pharma…”

“Pharmaceutical,” Aziza helped him.

“Thanks, sis. The micro-beads that the greedy

pharmaceutical companies use to save money in shampoo,

toothpaste, and all the lotions and stuff you women love to

use. And all these – trillions and trillions of them – are so

tiny that they go through all the sewage and water purifying

systems and end up in the sea. And all these different-sized

bits of plastic are eaten by sea birds who think it is food.

They then feed it to their babies who get sick and die. It

is also eaten by the fish that we catch to eat so that we are

starting to eat plastic as well.”

“And it is only now,” Aziza concluded, “that while

everybody is slowly waking up to the fact that we are living

in a totally dangerous plastic world, the scientists are only

just beginning to do research into the effects of plastic inside

the human body. And this is why, from everything we have

learnt today – including the fact that cows are also destroying

our environment and our climate because of greedy farmers

– that I have decided to become a vegetarian. I mean, let’s

face it, mama, all this greed and corruption is eventually

going to destroy everything that is so bright and beautiful

for us today.”

While trying to absorb the barrage of information her

children had so unexpectedly thrown at her, Amina turned

around and started to head towards the mall’s main entrance

once more.

Aziza and Bakari grinned at each other with total

satisfaction, then quickly caught up with her just as a loud

rumble of thunder shattered the silence from somewhere

close behind the supermarket. This snapped Amina out of

her thought process because she suddenly remembered that

she hadn’t brought an umbrella with her.

And that had been her husband’s fault.

Friday, 5.00 pm: The Kenya

Meteorological HQ, Nairobi

Salim Qadir was, like his wife, Amina, a member of the

Wa-Swahili tribe who lived on the Kenya coast, and he was

Kenya’s most senior meteorologist. Having worked at his

enormous computer monitor for over an hour, and having

keyed in all of Kenya’s weather anomalies it had portrayed

due to climate change, he realised he was tired.

It had been a long week, and he was desperately looking

forward to the family holiday with his mother-in-law at the

coast, and one that was due to start on Monday. The problem

was that, right now, and just two days before he could take

his break, he worried about the fact that nothing concerning

the weather seemed to make sense any more.

And this was while his team – all professional

meteorologists – who worked in the operations centre next

to his office, were just as worried about this as he was. While

they all used their state-of-the-art computer equipment

to assimilate the data sent down from the geo-stationary

satellites in orbit above the earth, categorize it, and then

forward any anomalies to Salim, he now struggled to make

any sense of the digital information.

The problem was that, during the course of the last

five years, these unpredictable changes to what had once

been normal weather patterns and climatic behaviour for

millennia were rapidly increasing. And every change his

team picked up was sent to Salim for him to analyze the data,

translate it into what it meant for Kenya’s weather for the

next twenty four hours, and then prepare a weather forecast

for the country’s media to announce to the public.

But this was becoming more and more difficult, and Salim

knew that the reason for this was the ever increasing amount

of carbon dioxide pollution – a gas caused by burning

anything, especially fossil fuels – in all the air around the

world. Pollution created by the big oil companies who had

known – for the last forty years – the negative effects this

would have on the world’s climate.

However, with their desire for vast profit with which they

had bribed governments – despite the proof their scientists

had proved to them – they had kept all the evidence secret,

and had just buried it away.

As a result of this denial, the world’s man-made

atmospheric pollution was getting exponentially worse. This

was causing the world to get hotter, the weather to become

totally unpredictable, the sea levels to rise, and the storms to

become far stronger than they ever had been before.

And it was the reason why Salim, just like every other

senior meteorologist around the world, no longer had any

idea about what was going to happen to the weather next.

With a frustrated sigh, he pushed his executive chair

away from his desk and stood up. Like a cat, he stretched

his tall, lean and muscular body as far as it would go, and

briefly shivered with delight at this sudden release of stress

from his system as a result. He then picked up the empty

mug from his desktop, and wandered into the operations

centre to refill it from the beverage-dispensing machine

located near its entrance. He briefly scanned his four staff in

their cubicles as they studied their computer monitors, and

fingered their keyboards to save any relevant information.

While one of them concentrated on global weather

patterns, another studied those affecting the African

continent as a whole. The third member of his team worked

on Central Africa and the Great Lakes region while the fourth

was duty-bound to concentrate on what was happening over

Kenya, and the Indian Ocean area for a thousand kilometres

to its east.

Salim finished filling his mug, and returned to his office.

He sat down, took a sip of his steaming brew and then

keyed in a number of instructions on his keyboard. One by

one, images of the climatic conditions over Kenya sent by

various orbiting weather satellites began to fill his screen,

but he could no longer concentrate on the information he

was collecting.

He took another sip of his coffee and sat back in his

chair. He rubbed his tired eyes with his fingertips and, in an

effort to relax, he cast his mind back to his family’s history,

wondering yet again just how they had managed to survive

over a century ago.

Both his and Amina’s descendants had come from

different villages along the coast near Malindi where – as

young adults – they had been captured by slave traders in

1876. They had been force-marched south to Shimoni – a

small Indian Ocean fishing town on Kenya’s southernmost

coastline – where they had been chained to the walls of an

enormous cave that half-filled with sea water at every high

tide. And there they had waited – with very little food and

drinking water – to be shipped to Zanzibar where they would

be auctioned off as slaves to the highest American bidders,

and then transported like cattle to that country.

Even though they were Muslims, they – like all the other

prisoners chained to the walls – had been captured by

Muslims, and now other Muslims guarded them. However,

in the very early hours of one morning, a group of men led

by an Anglican priest had attacked the cave and freed them.

After days of hard marching which had left them very

weak, all the men and women from the cave had eventually

arrived at Freretown, a freed-slave centre on the Kisauni

Creek just north of Mombasa. This had been established

by Sir Bartle Frere, a man who later played a major role in

ending the slave trade, and it had a church called Kengeleni

because of its enormous bell that was rung every time the

Arab slave-trading dhows appeared over the horizon.

The centre, ran by the Christian Missionary Society, was

filled with African captives from not only Kenya, but also

from places that are today known as Malawi, Tanzania,

Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. And it was in this peaceful

mix of hundreds of different people that, being from the

same Kenyan tribe, Salim’s great grandfather had first

encountered his great grandmother, and Amina’s great

grandparents had also met each other.

While they had slowly become close friends, the four of

them had discussed the question of religion, especially the

fact that their fellow Muslims had – because of simplistic

greed – wanted to sell them off as slaves destined to live

horrifying lives on American plantations.

But then, when they saw how badly some of the European

Christians were treating a few of their fellow Africans, they

had decided that there was no place in their lives for any sort

of religion. Instead, and from then on, they would simply

live loving and giving lives according to what they had been

taught as children, and what they had learnt ever since.

They had slowly gathered their strength and, three weeks

after their arrival, they thanked the priests and had left to

travel north along the coast, and back to their own villages.

However, on the way, they decided that, with everything

they had gone through that had pushed them together, they

should get married in the traditional way.

For obvious reasons, the two families had remained

close friends but, as always happens when time changes,

their children had gone their different ways until, almost

a hundred years later, what went around came around

when Salim had met Amina at a United Nations-sponsored

Climate Change Conference in Mombasa.

They had been total strangers amongst hundreds of

delegates until – as a budding meteorologist and a guest

speaker – he had put forward his theory that the world’s

weather controls its environment. Amina – by then well

into her university course specializing in forestry – had

immediately stood up to argue against his supposition

by proposing that instead, the environment controls the

weather.

This had started a serious debate and, at the end of the

session, and during a tea-and-biscuit break in the conference

hall’s break-away area in a tent pitched in an adjacent garden,

Salim had looked for Amina and they had been married two

years later.

Moments later, Salim suddenly snapped out of his reverie

and felt a little guilty about dreaming while on duty. This was

because he had always been systematic and conscientious

about his job. As if to prove that, he suddenly stood up to

flex his muscles in order to re-vitalize the blood flow to his

brain.

He went to his small washroom and splashed cold water

over his face to wake him up even more, and then looked

at himself in the mirror. Like his two children’s, his was an

open and very friendly face. However, his hair was starting

to grow a little grey not only because he was now forty two

years old, but also because he was worried about what was

happening to the weather.

Ten years earlier, every single one of his forecasts had

been totally accurate. But now, and because of the rapidly

changing climate, he was right only half the time.

When he told Kenyans that it would rain the following

day, it sometimes would not. And when he told them there

would be a dry spell, there would occasionally be floods.

Today, he had predicted clear blue skies. But when he

looked out of his office windows, he saw a large thunder

storm shooting out lightning about ten kilometres away,

and then he heard the thunder. With an angry frown, he

glanced at his watch.

His face suddenly lit up when he saw it was time for him

to go home, and then he wondered if his wife and children

had finished their shopping.

Friday, 5.15 pm: A Nairobi Supermarket

Aziza admired her thirty eight year old mother yet again

as she pushed the trolley behind her along the long lines of

shelves in the supermarket. She was tall, like her husband

and children, and just as attractive. And because she had

graduated with honours in forestry – the study of trees –

from the university, and had later become a well known and

highly respected environmentalist around the world, she

was now Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for the Environment.

But it was not just this that Aziza admired. It was the fact

that her mother, just like her father, had never shouted at

her or Bakari, and had never lifted a hand in anger to beat

them. Instead, her parents had always patiently explained

why their frequent mischief was wrong, even though their

two children never seemed to learn from their mistakes.

Moments later, Aziza’s mobile phone rang and she pulled

the old blue Motorola C113 from the pouch strapped to her

belt. Her parents had given it to her as one of her Christmas

presents two years earlier, and she now looked down at its

tiny screen. The call was from her father. With a smile she

pressed the call-accept button.

“Hi, papa. How are you?”

“Fine, thanks. Where are you?”

“We’re still shopping, but we’ll be home soon,” Aziza

promised.

“Okay. Have fun, and I’ll see you later. Bye.”

Some of the shoppers turned to stare at the attractive

teenager with such a simple mobile phone, and then they

recognised her mother. They looked at her with shock

before hesitantly rushing forward to greet her with total

respect. After all, it was very rare for any senior member of

Kenya’s government to be seen out in such a public place as

a supermarket while shopping without any form of security.

So rare, in fact, that one of the shoppers slipped around

a corner to excitedly call a friend who called another friend

who worked for one of Kenya’s foremost news companies.

Aziza was so proud with the way her mother handled

all her well-wishers with such dignity, especially when she

smiled so genuinely at each and every one of them. As soon

as they were alone again, and while Bakari watched her,

Amina stopped to pull a bottle of Sweet Chili sauce from

one of the shelves.

“That’s exactly what we were telling you about, mama,”

he told her. “Look at all the bottles and jars, the wrappings

for the spaghetti and the sugar and everything else as well.

It’s just a shop full of plastic! And when we’ve finished with

it, most of it’s just going to wind up in the sea, and then in

our stomachs.”

“I think that is a bit of an exaggeration, Bakari,” she

stared at him.

“It’s not, mama,” Aziza commented. “I promise you. We

saw film clips and read the reports, and we learnt exactly

what happens to all the plastic we throw away.”

“Go on,” her mother prompted her patiently, despite the

fact that she was tired after an already long day.

“It’s all taken to a huge rubbish dump outside the city,”

Aziza began to explain. “There, poor people and street

children with no jobs and no money go through all the

trash. They look for any food they can eat, and also for

anything they can sell for a shilling or two, something like

this bottle when we throw it away. The people who buy this

for a shilling or two will also be poor, and nobody will come

to collect their rubbish. So when they have finished with it,

they will just throw it into the bushes near their houses.”

“And?” Amina urged her to continue.

“Can you imagine how many thousands of bottles like

this are thrown away by people everyday?” Bakari asked on

Aziza’s behalf. “I mean, think of how many plastic bottles of

mineral water are just dropped to the ground when they are

empty because we Kenyans are too lazy to drop them into

rubbish bins? Now think of how many millions of Kenyans

are living in all our cities, towns and villages, and multiply

that number by five for every piece of plastic we each throw

away everyday. What do you get?”

“About two hundred million pieces of plastic,” Amina

replied almost immediately, her eyes suddenly wide with

shock.

“Right,” Aziza confirmed. “Then, when it rains, it washes

all that plastic rubbish into the rivers that take it not only

to the sea, but also to all our lakes as well. Now you might

understand why we were not telling you stories about that

floating island in the Pacific.”

Amina was about to continue with her shopping but,

she cautioned herself, it was her job – not only as a parent

but also as a Cabinet Secretary – to listen to exactly what

they had to say. This was because she was quickly coming to

the realization that plastic was indeed rapidly becoming an

alarming threat, not only to Kenya, but also to the rest of the

world. And if Rwanda could ban it, then…?

But first she needed to seriously think about everything

her children had told her so far, and prepare herself for more

of the same later.

“Why don’t you both go and get a trolley and buy

whatever goodies you think you will need for our holiday?”

she suggested in order to get rid of them for a few minutes.

Expecting them to want to continue expounding on their

new-found knowledge, she was somewhat surprised and

extremely suspicious when they suddenly grinned at each

other excitedly and disappeared.

Friday, 5.45 pm: A Nairobi Supermarket

“Where is your trolley?” Amina asked Bakari when he and

Aziza rejoined her twenty minutes later.

“We got what we wanted, thanks, so we left it near the

cashier’s counter,” he replied with a contented grin.

“That’s sensible, I suppose,” she smiled at him.

With her trolley nearly full, Amina made her last stop at

one of the freezers with a wide selection of ice creams.

“What flavours would you like? Chocolate and vanilla as

usual?”

“Nothing, thank you,” Bakari smiled at his mother.

She stared at him with a suddenly worried frown.

“Are you not feeling well? You always have ice cream!”

“That was before we realized how bad plastic is,” Aziza

replied.

“But nearly everything we have bought is covered with

plastic!” Amina told her, suddenly exasperated.

“I know, mama. But we can do something with all the

other stuff, but not with the ice cream because it will melt.”

The shopper’s earlier telephone call about Amina’s

presence in the shop had attracted a small television crew,

and a photographer and a reporter, who all arrived together

just as Amina and her children stopped at the cashier to pay

their bill. The crews filmed and photographed her, waiting

patiently as Aziza removed all the items from her small

trolley.

However, her patient smile turned to a surprised frown

when she saw her daughter unload canvas carrier bags,

different sizes of glass jars and bottles, some rolls of plain

white paper, two pairs of scissors, some sellotape, and two

marker pens. Amina was about to say something, but then

she remembered the media crews. She would ask her kids

about them later.

After the cashier had swept these items past her bar-code

detector, Aziza and Bakari placed their small, empty trolley

between them, then arranged the goods methodically on the

packing counter in front of them.

The camera men filmed Amina staring at her children,

and as she started taking everything out of her trolley and

putting it – piece by piece – in front of the cashier. By now,

some of the other shoppers had stopped, and were also

wondering what Aziza and Bakari were doing.

The cashier passed the first item in front of her bar-code

detector. The computer screen beside her lit up with the

details: a packet of sausages costing four hundred shillings.

She passed it to Aziza who used the scissors to remove the

plastic wrapping, drop it into the small trolley, wrap the meat

with some white paper, and then seal it with some sellotape

and mark it. Then she put it into one of the new carrier bags.

Everybody stared at her with shock, including Amina

and the cashier and, seconds later, the camera men quickly

adjusted their cameras and re-focused the lenses. Then

Amina suddenly realized exactly what her children were

doing, and she felt proud of them.

A second later, the cashier registered the bottle of Sweet

Chili sauce and passed it to Aziza who gave it to Bakari. He

emptied its contents into a glass bottle, closed it, marked it,

and dropped the empty plastic one into the trolley.

They worked well and quickly together as a team and, in

just a few minutes, they had repacked everything into glass

or paper containers, and had filled all their carrier bags. And

this was while the crowd of curious shoppers around them

had got bigger and bigger, and while the camera men took

their film and their photographs.

Then the news people moved closer to the two youngsters

and held out their microphones.

“Can you tell our viewers what you were doing?” One of

them asked Bakari.

“Trying to teach Kenyans to stop using plastic for

everything,” he told the woman while staring at the cameras

with a defiant expression. “It is destroying our environment.”

The crowd of shoppers around the counter stared at him

for a few moments, and then began to clap and cheer.

The news crew switched their attention to Amina.

“Do you have any comments, Honourable Minister?”

“Only that I am proud of my children,” she said while

holding her large, new umbrella like a walking stick. “They

have made a statement today that the whole world should

listen to. If we continue to use throw-away plastics the

way we are presently doing, we are going to destroy this

beautiful world of ours. And it is because of this that I am

now seriously thinking about imposing a ban on single-use

plastics in this country.”

Friday, 6.45 pm: The Qadir Residence,

Nairobi

The Qadirs’ home was not overly large and pretentious

as would be expected of a woman in Amina’s position. It

had four bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, and the lobby

between them had a drop-down ladder to access a large play

area to include a table-tennis table and a pool table inside the

roof. Its ground floor area contained generously furnished

and carpeted lounge and dining areas, a small office with

an adjacent washroom, a well-equipped, spacious kitchen, a

laundry area and a store.

In front of the building was a wide expanse of grassy lawn

lined by areas of flowering plants, a small greenhouse in one

far corner, and the whole property was surrounded with tall,

indigenous trees. To one side of the house were two garages

for the Qadirs’ cars and, at the end of the driveway behind

the house, there was a gate house manned by armed police

guards, something the government insisted on for all its

most senior members.

In the kitchen, Aziza and her mother had packed away

everything they had bought at the supermarket, and were

now starting to prepare dinner. While Amina could have

easily afforded to employ a cook she had not, and instead

had a professional housekeeper and a maid to keep her

home in order.

This was because with her incredibly busy, often stressful

days at her office and out in the field, she always looked

forward to getting back home and relaxing in her kitchen.

This was because there was nothing she enjoyed more in her

personal life than cooking.

To her initial disappointment, Aziza and Bakari had

never taken any interest in the health benefits of fresh fruits

and vegetables with only an occasional serving of chicken

or fish. They had, instead, preferred junk food like pizzas,

French fries, burgers and hot dogs while they chilled out with

her friends. That was until they had both started developing

acne on their faces, and had put on so much weight that

they had started to fail their school exams due to a lack of

concentration. And, for obvious reasons, they had had to

visit their family doctor at least once a week due to various

health problems.

But it was only when one of her closest friends had died

of a heart attack due to her obesity that Aziza – unlike all

her other friends – had suddenly decided that enough was

enough, and had started to spend more and more time

learning about healthy food from Amina in their kitchen.

This was something that, most unexpectedly, Bakari had

also started to do.

While Amina and Aziza were arguing about whether to

cook a mixed vegetable soup followed by some grilled fish

with rice and vegetables for the family dinner, Salim was

sitting in his favourite armchair in the lounge with a cup of

tea on the table beside him as he read the day’s newspapers,

and Bakari was watching the widescreen television whose

volume control was set to low.

Because there was nothing particularly interesting on the

TV, Bakari turned to his father.

“Papa, when we were doing our research today, we

learnt that all the smoke that comes out of cars and lorries

is poisoning the air, causing global warming, and changing

the weather. And that all the smoke that comes out of the

factories, including those that make plastic, is doing the

same. Is this why it rained this afternoon even after you had

said that it would be a dry day?”

“Yes, it is,” Salim replied after lowering the paper. “You

see, that smoke as you call it, is a gas called Carbon dioxide

– or CO

for short. It is made when anything is burnt, like

petrol in a car engine, charcoal in a factory, and even all the

dead leaves and grass that our gardener burns every week.”

Bakari frowned at him.

“So how can something like that change our weather?”

He wanted to know.

“It’s because for the last ten thousand years, there were

never any machines or factories on the earth, and the only

came from burning forests and erupting volcanoes.

And during all that time, the world’s climate never changed

because the heat from the sun’s rays could warm the earth,

and then bounce back into space. Then, about a hundred

and seventy years ago, somebody invented a machine,

and the fuel with which to make it work. This was called

the Industrial Revolution because these machines together

with the fuel they burned changed the world. Since then,

hundreds of millions of machines, factories and vehicles

have been pouring billions and billions of kilos of CO

into

our atmosphere.”

“So?” Bakari asked, by now fascinated. “How is that

changing the weather?”

“Because all the CO

is forming a layer at the top of our

atmosphere that lets all the heat from the sun’s rays in,

but it won’t let the heat out. As an example of this, do you

ever notice how hot it is when you go into your mother’s

greenhouse in the garden?” Salim asked him, glad that his

son was so interested in this subject.

“Yes, of course. I start sweating as soon as I go in to collect

some vegetables for her. It’s like all the heat from the sun is

trapped inside it.”

“And that is why we call CO

a greenhouse gas. It’s heating

up the earth, and that is what is changing our climate. A lot

of people are very worried about this, and they are trying to

slow down – and even stop - the use of all these fossil fuels

like petrol and charcoal. This is why so many places have

solar panels to give them electricity, and why electric cars are

becoming more and more popular around the world.”

“But papa,” Bakari commented, “Kenya does not have

so many cars and factories like other places in the world. So

why is our weather changing here?”

“Because when the CO

from all the big industrial

countries goes up into their atmosphere, the winds blow it

all around the world. This means that everybody is forced to

suffer from climate change. Even small islands that have no

cars and no factories,” Salim explained.

“That is so unfair!” Bakari shouted angrily. “But hopefully,

if they stop using oil and stuff, the weather will get back to

normal.”

As soon as he said this, the television program ended

and some advertisements appeared on the screen. Moments

later, the newscaster smiled at them, and gave them a brief

summary of what to expect on her news show for the next

thirty minutes.

Bakari immediately ran into the kitchen.

“Come quickly!” he yelled excitedly at his mother and

sister. “We’re about to be on the TV,” he announced before

dashing back to the lounge.

“What’s going on?” Salim asked his wife as soon as she

sat down in the armchair next to his while Aziza joined her

brother on the sofa.

“Sorry,” she explained with a smile that lit up her

beautiful, large eyes and lifted the corners of her full lips into

a gentle curve.

“It’s just that we got back home so late and, with so much

to do in the kitchen, I didn’t have time to tell you about it.”

“About what?” Salim asked her with a sudden frown.

“Just some fun and games we had at the supermarket,” she

told him as Bakari used the remote to increase the volume.

“At a busy supermarket this afternoon,” the news

lady began her next item of interest for her viewers, “the

Honourable Cabinet Secretary for the Environment, Mrs.

Amina Qadir, was out shopping with her two children who

unexpectedly staged a protest about our continued use of so

much plastic. Here is the full story.”

Her face faded from the screen and was immediately

replaced by an image of Amina unloading her full trolley, and

of Aziza and Bakari repacking everything she had bought. A

few minutes later the news changed to a different subject

and, after Bakari had reduced the volume, Salim turned to

him and his daughter with sincere respect in his eyes.

“Now I know why you were asking me so much about

plastic and oil and climate change, Bakari,” he suddenly

grinned at him. “I am so proud of you and your sister. I just

don’t know what to say.”

Aziza glanced at her mother, and worked up all the

feminine guile she had within her before licking her

suddenly dry lips and looking directly into her father’s eyes

with a seductive smile.

“Are you proud enough of me to get me a smart-phone,

papa?” she asked him softly.

Her unexpected question caught him totally off-guard,

and he turned to Amina for help, just as he always did at

times like this.

“You are never going to give up, are you?” Amina asked

her daughter with a frown on her exquisitely pretty face.

“No, I am not!” Aziza responded defiantly. “All my

friends and a lot of the younger kids at school have one, and

I always feel embarrassed whenever I have to use this trash

in front of them. Especially because I am the daughter of one

of Kenya’s most respected government ministers,” she said

as she pulled her Motorola C113 out of its pouch and tossed

it onto the carpet at her feet.

Salim glanced at his daughter with a worried frown, and

then at his wife. Knowing fully well that the world was about

to end, he took a sip of his now-cold tea and hid himself

behind his newspaper.

Amina stared at her daughter angrily, but did not raise

her voice.

“Getting dramatic is not going to help you one little bit,”

she said to Aziza. “If you do not like your phone, then give

it to me so I can throw it into the rubbish bin. Your choice

and, once you have made up your mind, please join me in

my office. That invitation goes for you too, Bakari, because I

do not want to suffer from this kind of nonsense again when

you get to your sister’s age. ”

With that she stood up, and turned to look at her

husband’s newspaper before she left the room.

“Excuse me, my love, but our dinner might be a little later

than usual.”

Friday, 8.00 pm: Amina’s Home Office,

Nairobi

Amina’s office was small but functional, and had a large

window that overlooked her garden that was now lit by the

flood lights that, yet again, the government had insisted on

to ensure her personal safety.

While its one wall was covered with bookshelves that

held all sorts of literary references that related to her work,

the other was filled with a long working top that supported a

computer with a keyboard, a large wide-screen monitor, and

three telephones: a black one that she used to communicate

with her friends: a green one that gave her direct access to

her official, government office, and a red one that was a

direct line to Kenya’s president wherever he was.

And because the desk was so large, she had made it more

visually appealing by stacking a few paperback books and

old diaries on its spare space, a vase filled with fresh flowers

from her garden on a daily basis, and even a wig on its

stand in case she was not prepared for suddenly unexpected

visitors.

By the time Aziza and Bakari entered her office, Amina

had already fired up her computer. She turned her executive

chair so that she could face them, and then gestured at the

two small stools beside her as an invitation for them to sit

down.

“For your information,” she told Aziza with a gentle

smile, “I have been expecting something like this ever since

we discussed the same issue just less than a year ago. If you

remember, I warned you then just how bad smart-phones

were for any form of verbal, physical and social interactions

with your friends. But, and because you ignored my warnings,

I have spent a lot of time to gather some proof to support my

arguments. And I can only pray that you, Bakari,” Amina

said when she turned to look at her son, “will also learn

something from my presentation as well, especially when

papa and I give you a phone like Aziza’s on your thirteenth

birthday next month, just as we have always promised you.”

With that said, she turned her monitor around so both

her children could see it clearly, and then moved her mouse

across its leather pad until the computer’s cursor stopped on

an icon called ‘Smart-Phones’.

When she double-clicked it, the monitor’s screen

immediately came alive. Aziza stared transfixed as one

of her mother’s friends, the Cabinet Secretary for Health,

made a speech about how dangerous these types of mobile

telephones were for children because of the cancer-causing

radiation they emitted. The film stopped, and Aziza was

about to start arguing again when another film started. This

showed different groups of people – and couples on their

own – sitting in restaurants, cars and on park benches, and

standing at bus stops as they all operated their smart phones

in total silence.

Then the film had gone on to show people in funny

situations like falling into ponds, tripping over low fences,

and walking into trees while concentrating on their phones.

Then it showed a badly damaged car in a ditch with the police

removing a dead body and carrying it up to an ambulance

on a stretcher. At the end of the film, the computer screen

had gone black and a text message appeared.

‘Last year, in the United States alone, 3,247 people were

killed in car accidents while driving on their own. No other

vehicles were involved. Later investigations proved without

any doubt that every driver had been using his or her smart

phone at the time of the accident, and had lost control of their

vehicles.’

The last part of the show had shown actual city security

cameras filming people heading along streets while

concentrating on their smart phones, and walking into busy,

fast moving traffic where one or two had been killed.

Without a word, Amina had turned off the computer and

left the room.

Aziza stared at the blank computer monitor for a long

time, deep in thought. Then she heard laughter coming from

the lounge. She turned round but, because there was no sign

of Bakari, she stood up and left the office.

As soon as she entered the lounge, she saw her brother

strutting around the room with his mother’s wig askew on

his head, and holding out a small diary to simulate a smart-

phone. Even worse for Aziza was the fact that he had a silly

grin on his face, his eyes were stretched wide, and his tongue

stuck out from between his lips.

He had managed to imitate a total moron.

Aziza felt the anger rising in her as she realized that Bakari

was mocking her. She was about to scream at him, but then

he tripped over his father’s legs and crashed onto the carpet.

When he stood up with the diary held out again, he bumped

into a wall, bounced off that, and then fell over the sofa.

When he landed on the cushions, he couldn’t control

himself any more and he burst out laughing. Salim and

Amina suddenly stared at their daughter with worried

frowns but they need not have worried.

Aziza had seen the funny side of it as well, even though

the joke was on her. With a huge grin on her face, she rushed

to the sofa where she picked up a small cushion and started

hitting Bakari with it. He grabbed another cushion and

jumped up and, within seconds, the two kids were laughing

with the fun of having a full-scale pillow fight.

Saturday, 7.30 am: The Qadir Residence,

Nairobi

Salim, dressed in a suit and tie, was finishing his breakfast

when Aziza wandered into the dining room barefoot and

wearing a pair of blue and yellow striped pajamas.

“Good morning, papa,” she smiled at him as she sat down

in the chair next to his, and put her mobile on the table in

front of her.

“Hello, my little hero,” he smiled back.

She stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

With a laugh, he picked up one of the newspapers and

handed it to her.

“See for yourself,” he told her.

She turned it around, and stared at the heading on the

first page of the ‘Life Style’ section in the middle of the paper

with shock.

Chapter Two

It read ‘LITTLE HEROES’ and, below this, was a picture

of her and Bakari at the supermarket’s cashier-counter the

evening before, followed by the text which covered the story.

Aziza looked up at her father, her eyes wide, and he

grinned at her.

“Now you’ll know what it’s like to be a star. People will

recognize you everywhere you go.”

As soon as the words left his lips, her mobile announced

an incoming call.

“Excuse me,” she said to Salim as she picked it up, checked

the screen, and accepted the call.

“Hi Mary,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m good, thanks. And I’m even better for being your

friend. I mean, wow! You certainly know how to make an

impact! Can we meet later?”

Aziza watched as her mother sat down opposite her and

picked up the papers.

“I’ll call you, okay?”

She disconnected the call and looked up at Amina who

was wearing a pale blue blouse, cream slacks and a rust-

coloured jacket.

“Good morning, mama,” she smiled.

“Good morning, my dear,” her mother grinned at her. “I

see I have competition today. Talk about keeping it in the

family.”

“What do you mean?” Aziza asked her with an immediate

frown.

Then her mobile started ringing again. She ignored it as

she waited for an answer to her question.

“Did you read the article, or did you just bask in the glory

of having your pretty little face in the newspaper?” Amina

asked her playfully as Bakari walked in and sat down next

to her.

As soon as he was settled, Amina began to read the story

out loud.

“Yesterday, the Honourable Cabinet Secretary for the

Environment, Mrs. Amina Qadir, told us that she was

thinking of banning single-use plastics in this country. As

if to support her, her two children, Aziza and Bakari, were

apparently determined to prove her point.”

Amina smiled at them.

“You can read the rest for yourselves later as it covers

everything you told the reporter, which was almost the same

as what you had told me.”

Amina handed the paper to Bakari who was staring at

Aziza, his eyes wide with excitement.

“Wow. Wait till I get back to school next term,” he said to

nobody in particular.

“Forget it,” Aziza told him bluntly. “They will have

forgotten all about it by then.”

Amina looked at her daughter with a slight frown and

was about to say something when her mobile announced an

incoming call. She glanced at the screen, then immediately

stood up to carry the instrument to her office where she

closed the door behind her.

She returned to the table five minutes later and sat down.

“That was the president,” she announced. “He has invited

us all for lunch on Sunday so we can talk about plastic.”

Saturday, 8.30 am: A Plastic Factory,

Nairobi

Hermann Bernstein was a sixty-year old, heavyset, obese

European who, together with his wife Mathilde, not only

owned this plastic manufacturing factory, but also identical

ones in South America and Australia. He had been in the

plastics industry for years and, while he knew he should

either retire or diversify because of the rising swell of global

protests against both plastic and atmospheric pollution,

he knew he would do neither because of the profits he was

making.

Without any warning, he suddenly slammed one of the

newspapers down on to the top of the enormous desk in

front of him, and used his hands against its edge to angrily

push his wheeled, executive chair away from it. He nervously

ran his fingertips back through his long, grey hair – ignoring

the fact that this would leave a dusting of dandruff on the

shoulders of his navy-blue suit jacket – and then stood up.

Bernstein grabbed the empty coffee mug off the desk and

carried it to the bubbling percolator where he filled it with

the black coffee that he always drank without milk or sugar.

He took a sip of it and walked across the thick carpet, past

the boardroom table with its eight chairs, and stopped at the

large, soundproof, double-glazed window behind it.

From the top, executive floor of the office block

that housed offices for the forty two members of his

management, quality-control and clerical staff, he stared

down at his enormous factory floor that produced every

type of disposable plastic possible. His list of products was

endless, and included all forms of carrier bags and nets: bin

liners and sacks; rolls of plastic sheeting; injection-moulded

Styrofoam food containers and the cling-film needed to

seal them; plastic plates, mugs, knives, forks and spoons;

plastic bottles and jars of every shape and size, plastic food

packaging of different thicknesses; and even plastic drinking

straws.

All the CO

that was produced by their manufacturing

processes was ducted out of the factory floor by massive

extractor fans into two tall chimneys that towered over their

roofs as they poured out massive streams of thick black

smoke: something that Bernstein quite simply did not care

about because all that atmospheric pollution was making

him money.

As the largest manufacturer of plastic in East and Central

Africa, and a pillar of Kenyan society, Bernstein knew that

if Qadir carried out her threat to ban plastic bags, it would

set the ball rolling with bans on every other type of single-

use plastic as well. And if he allowed that to happen, then he

would indeed have to shut down this factory and concentrate

on the other two.

But he loved the easy life-style, the society, and the climate

here in Nairobi, he thought to himself. If he invested just a

little of his vast profits, he could squeeze even more profit

out of his machines. He could fly in two experts from their

manufacturing company, triple the thickness of the bags,

and then fit moulding plates into the machines to give them

a woven texture. That way he could sell them for higher

prices, and make even more profit until someone started

making cheaper, heavy-duty paper bags with handles.

Alternatively, he reasoned, he could possibly spend less

money by fighting the ban before it came into effect. He

would only decide on which course of action to take after he

had gauged the reaction to the newspaper article.

Thus decided, he walked back to his desk and sat down.

He reached for his multi-purpose telephone and pressed two

of its controls. His secretary answered almost immediately.

‘Yes, Sir?’

“Kindly ask my wife to join me at her earliest possible

convenience,” he told her.

She walked into his office barely five minutes later.

On first impressions, Mathilde Bernstein was a beautiful

European woman. She was tall, lithe, and thirty years

younger than her husband, a man who she despised, and

one she had only married because of his money.

Despite this, she had always acted as though theirs was

a perfect marriage, but only because he had one daughter

from a previous marriage. Beatrice was a twenty-three year

old woman who was the only other beneficiary in his last

will and testament.

This meant that, when her husband died, Mathilde

would have to share his millions with his daughter, and that

was something that she refused to do because she was just as

greedy as he was.

When she closed the door behind her, she used her

fingers to clear her long, blonde hair away from her face.

She was wearing a seemingly casual outfit that included a

Gucci pink silk shirt over a pair of white Diesel slacks whose

bell-bottoms spread wide over the tops of exquisitely-tooled,

custom-made calfskin boots. As for her jewelry, and despite

the fact that she was working in a factory, her neck and wrists

were adorned with thick gold chains. All in all, everything

she was wearing had cost her husband in excess of a half a

million Kenyan shillings!

Mathilde quickly walked around his desk without a

word, and stopped behind him to brush the dandruff off

his shoulders with disgust, a sentiment that – for obvious

reasons – she kept to herself. She then walked across her

husband’s office to help herself to some coffee from the

percolator, added fresh cream and a lot of sugar to it, and

only then returned to his desk to sit down opposite him.

“You called,” she reminded him without any form of

respect whatsoever.

Bernstein looked into her small, narrowly-spaced green

eyes to either side of her hooked nose above her thin lips

and, once again, despised himself for ever having married

her. After all, she was a woman who, despite her incredibly

curvaceous body, had facial features that freely advertised

possible evil intent. It was, as he remembered, something he

had done as an ageing man in the winter of his life to keep

himself young.

“We have a problem,” he told her. “It is a serious one that

might force us to shut down this factory in the near future.

“I know,” she agreed. “In case you haven’t noticed, I read

the same newspapers as you do.”

“As such, do you have any suggestions about how we

might turn this around?” he asked her.

“Yes, I do,” Mathilde replied after taking another sip of

her steaming coffee.

“Go on,” Bernstein prompted her.

“I do not believe that Qadir came up with this suggestion

entirely on her own. For your information, I was chatting

to a friend last night whose kids are at the same school as

Qadir’s, and she asked me if she could bring her son to our

factory to learn more about plastic. This is because every kid

at the school has been told to complete a holiday project that

lays down the facts covering the dangers about plastic waste

and climate change.”

Bernstein stared at her, his mind whirling.

“If we get someone to do some diligent research,” she

continued, “we will probably find that the Qadirs will soon

be going on holiday somewhere, like some other families

usually do at this time of year.”

“What has that go to do with our problem?” he asked her.

“Simple,” she told him as she calmly took another sip of

her coffee. “If they are going on holiday, her kids will not be

able to do their research so they will have already done as

much of it as possible. And, after she picked them up to go

shopping, they would have told her everything that they had

discovered. And that is precisely why – as the newspaper

article reported – she is still only thinking about banning

single-use plastics. After all, she can’t do this on her own.

She has to get somebody like the president to authorize it.”

“So that gives us time to fight the ban before it is enacted,”

her husband suggested.

“No, it does not,” Mathilde responded angrily. “Don’t

you realize that there is a global movement against

disposable plastics? Have you not read that countries all

over the world are now starting to ban them. Do you not

know that supermarkets are now setting aside large areas for

goods that have no plastic packaging whatsoever, not even

Styrofoam or Clingfilm? And do you not realise that Qadir,

in her position, and having made her suggestion, will now

have no option but to immediately follow through on in

order to maintain her reputation as one of the world’s most

respected environmentalists?”

“Agreed.” Bernstein concurred in order to avoid yet

another one of their fiery arguments, “But where do we go

from here?”

“If, as I strongly believe, her kids gave her the idea, then

we have to get rid of them in order to stop her train of

thought in its tracks,” Mathilde stated flatly with suddenly

narrowed eyes.

“Carry on,” her husband prompted her even though he

was beginning to increasingly dislike the direction their

discussion was taking them.

“We have three options,” Mathilde told him. “The first is

that we get together with all the other plastic manufacturers

in this country and legally fight this possible ban.”

“The second?”

“That we use Onyango to kidnap these kids and hold the

Kenya government to ransom. This way we can stop Qadir

from banning all the plastics that we manufacture – for

the time being at least – but then we will ultimately have a

problem with this strategy.”

“Why?” he asked her.

“It is because Kenyans have short memories when it

comes to matters of little importance. Today they worry

more about the threats of climate change, and where their

next meal will come from as a result, and just exactly how

much it will cost them. This issue of plastic bags or wrappings

is therefore neither here nor there for them when it comes

to holding Qadir’s kids for ransom. And, in any event due to

her popularity, the Kenyan government will quickly pay the

ransom on her behalf, and then we will be back where we

started with these two brats – now even more popular as a

result – making even more noise about disposable plastics.”

“And your third option?” Bernstein asked her.

“We must use Onyango to kill those kids instead, just

like he got rid of that environmental guy who also wanted

to shut us down. If he does the job quickly while the Kenyan

population still associates the kids with banning plastic, they

will treat their deaths as a kind of evil spell against this, and

not allow it to happen.”

Bernstein stared at his wife.

‘How naïve, arrogant and stupid you are when it comes to

assessing just how intelligent Kenyans really are,’ he thought

to himself with total disgust.

Saturday, 9.00 am: The Qadir

Residence, Nairobi

As soon as their parents had left for their respective offices,

Bakari read the full article in the newspaper about him and

his sister. While he was doing this, Aziza’s phone began to

ring almost continuously with calls from her friends and, as

these slowly began to slow down, Bakari shoved the paper

away from him and across the dining table.

“I don’t like the way they called us both heroes,” he told

Aziza somewhat aggressively. “I mean, it was me who set up

everything on the counter, and it was me who talked to that

reporter.”

“I totally agree,” Aziza smiled at him sweetly.

Bakari stared at her, shocked by her totally unexpected

response until, moments later, she glanced at the paper and

then stared into his eyes.

“But, if you can conveniently remember, that whole idea

was mine in the first place.”

He looked at her, suddenly embarrassed, and dropped

his eyes to the table.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“That’s okay,” she accepted his apology while still smiling.

“Mum and dad said they wouldn’t be back until late because

it’s their last day of work before our holiday, so what do you

feel like doing?”

Bakari grinned at her, grateful for her patience, and began

to consider her question. Moments later, he had an idea.

“Why don’t we call some of our friends to go plogging?

That adaptation of jogging that we found out about

yesterday? I mean, yesterday we started a war against plastic,

so let’s keep it going for as long as we can.”

Aziza’s face lit up with sudden excitement, and she

grabbed her mobile to start calling back those friends of

hers who had congratulated her earlier, especially ones with

younger siblings that were of Bakari’s age as well.

As soon as she had finished, Bakari shoved a business

card in front of her. It was that of the reporter who had

interviewed him at the supermarket the day before. Without

any hesitation, Aziza called the number and told the lady

about their plans for the rest of the morning. Then she used

the radio-telephone to warn the armed policemen about the

impending invasion.

Saturday, 9.15 am: The Utalii Hotel,

Thika Road, Nairobi

Joseph Onyango was a tall and muscular, extremely fit,

ex-military man who had been court-martialed by the army

for theft, and had served a one year jail sentence for this.

After his release, he had used the stolen money to set

himself up in a line of extremely profitable, commissioned

and organized crime.

He had started by buying a National ID card on the

black-market: one that had once belonged to a man now

dead; a man who had been murdered, and his corpse buried

somewhere deep in the Kakamega Forest where it had never

been found, and whose death had never been reported; a

man of his age and with the same first and last names as his,

but with a different middle name, and a man whose fuzzy

photograph on the card bore an uncanny resemblance to his.

With this single master-stroke, he was a new man without

a criminal record!

He had then paid an instructor to teach him more about

martial arts and self-defence than he had learned in the army,

had taken some driving lessons in order to get a license, and

had finally made friends with a chemist who had taught

him everything he had needed to know about natural, fast-

acting and untraceable poisons. His final investment had

been the legal purchase of a second-hand Mitsubishi Pajero

– a rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle – and a black-market

automatic pistol with a box of ammunition.

Thus established, Onyango had built up a contact list

of criminals who were specialists in their own fields, and

men and women he employed depending on what he had

been commissioned to do. These jobs included the violent

collection of long-overdue debts after all the avenues of

due legal process had been exhausted; entering offices and

cracking safes to steal documents of extreme interest to his

paymasters, and doing this without leaving any trace of his

forced entry behind him; and the assassination of anybody,

provided he was paid enough money.

It was these killings that he had always carried out alone.

This was because he had yet to find anybody professional

enough to back him up during a life-threatening, unplanned-

for disaster.

This was one of the reasons why Onyango had always

spent weeks doing diligent research on his targets. He would

learn all about their daily habits, their favourite restaurants,

their hobbies, their families and their interests until he

almost knew them as well as his own brother.

And it was only after all this background work that

he would plan the execution so that it would be as clean,

unobtrusive, and as natural as possible.

Now, three years later, he was an extremely wealthy

man as, habitually, he had stopped at the hotel on the way

to Nairobi’s city centre from his home that lay below the

impressive ramparts of the Ndakaini Dam wall. He slowly

sipped his coffee while sitting at a table on the walkway that

surrounded the hotel’s swimming pool, and thought about

the telephone conversation with Mathilde Bernstein that he

had just terminated.

He had once done another job for her, and therefore

respected her reliability with regard to payment. Even

though his fees for hit-jobs had substantially increased

since then, she had accepted his demands, just as she had

his request that she provide him with a fifty percent deposit

before he began his work.

Saturday, 10.00 am: The Qadir

Residence, Nairobi

During the course of the last half-an-hour, Aziza and Bakari

had showered and changed into sports clothes. And, as soon

as he was ready, Bakari had rushed to the garden store to

find as many lightweight sacks and bags as he could find.

By the time he returned to the house, its car park was

already half-full and Aziza was chatting to their friends who

had all again congratulated her on their brilliant protest

at the supermarket. Silence fell as an armed policeman

approached her.

“Excuse me, Miss Qadir. There are some television people

outside who would like to see you and your brother. They

say they want to interview you. Can I let them in?”

Aziza thought quickly, and turned to her friends.

“Hey, guys. Do you want to be on television?” she yelled

at them to make herself heard.

There was immediate silence as the youths turned to stare

at her before roaring their approval.

Aziza grinned at the policeman who was smiling at all the

youngsters of different ages and nationalities, and all dressed

in bright, colourful sports clothes and shoes.

“I think you just got your answer,” she confirmed.

Bakari draped all his bags on somebody’s bicycle saddle,

and then started to circulate and greet everybody. Moments

later, followed by a last group of kids on bicycles, a Toyota

Land-Cruiser drove in and parked beside the garage. Aziza

quickly approached the woman who was stepping out of it,

and who stared briefly at all the youths and their bicycles

before smiling at Aziza with her hand outstretched.

“Good morning, Miss Qadir. My name is Margaret

Kinuthia, and I am a news reporter for the Kenya Independent

Television Network.”

Aziza smiled back at her as she shook the woman’s hand.

“Welcome,” she said. “But please call me Aziza. I was told

you wanted to interview me and my brother. But I recognize

you from yesterday. Is this about what happened?”

“Yes it is. I didn’t have a chance to talk to you directly,

and I wanted to get more on your thoughts about plastic

waste, especially because your mother is now considering a

ban on plastic bags. But before we go any further, do you

mind telling me what’s going on here? Are you guys having

a bicycle race or what?”

Aziza laughed.

“No. We’re all going plogging.”

Margaret stared at her.

“I beg your pardon. What on earth is that?”

“Why don’t you set yourselves up first?” Aziza suggested

as she gestured at the crew still inside the vehicle. “It will

mean that, when I answer your question, all our friends and

your viewers can learn about plogging as well.”

When everything was ready with the driver’s help, and

with all the kids forming the background, Margaret looked

into the camera with a microphone in her hands.

“We are at the home of our Honourable Cabinet Secretary

for the Environment, Mrs. Amina Qadir, and we are here

to interview her two children, Aziza and Bakari, who we

featured on our news program last night. But first, let’s get

an idea of what is going on here first.”

She turned to Aziza and Bakari who were standing beside

her.

“Good morning, Aziza, and Bakari. After your action in

the supermarket yesterday, we have had a lot of calls in the

studio about whether your mother will be banning plastic or

not. But, before we go into that, would you very kindly tell

what is going on here? It looks as though you are all about to

have a bicycle race.”

Aziza smiled at Bakari as a prompt for him to answer the

question. After all, she thought to herself, this had been his

idea.

Bakari laughed, and looked at Margaret.

“No, we’re not having a race. We’re going plogging.”

Margaret stared at him.

“Plogging? What on earth is that?”

Bakari waited until all the kids had moved closer to hear

what he said about what they were going to do.

“It’s a new sport that has started in Sweden,” he replied.

“It’s the same as jogging but, as you run, you pick up all the

plastic waste on the ground at the same time. So it’s like a

plastic jog, and that’s why it’s called a plog,” Bakari beamed

at her as some of the kids behind him groaned at the thought

of having to do so much.

“And fitness experts around the world are saying it’s a

perfect training activity because of all the bending down

and straightening-up involved,” Aziza added. “This not

only works most of the body’s rarely-used muscles, but also

stretches the tendons in the arms, legs and back when people

bend down to pick up the litter, and then continue with their

run. So, and because plastic waste is such an environmental

issue these days, this is a way to get fit and clean up at the

same time.”

“Do you have a name for your team?” Margaret asked

her.

Aziza immediately turned to the kids.

“We need a name for our team!” she shouted.

“Qadir’s Ploggers!” somebody immediately shouted back.

A second later, everybody shouted the name.

Aziza turned back to Margaret with a satisfied grin on

her face, and the reporter sensed that it was the perfect time

to stop this part of the recording. When she dropped the

microphone to her waist, her crew immediately switched off

their equipment.

“Why don’t you film us plogging? This will not only teach

people about the new sport, but it will also make them aware

of just how much trash there is everywhere around us.”

“What about our interview?” Margaret asked with a

suddenly worried expression o her face.

“Let’s do it when we have finished our run. I am sure that

will give our chat a lot more impact for your viewers.”

After quickly discussing the route the ploggers would

take, Margaret and her crew headed to their car.

Saturday, 10.30 am: Naivasha Avenue,

Nairobi

With the sun shining down from a clear blue sky, Margaret’s

driver turned left onto Tchui Lane as soon as it left the

Qadirs’ property. While she was standing through the Land

Cruiser’s front roof hatch, the camera and sound men had

positioned themselves through the rear one.

With the camera pointing at her, she raised the

microphone to her lips.

“We are now leaving the Honourable Qadir’s property to

film plogging for the first time in Kenya’s history,” Margaret

began her commentary. “We will follow the road that leads

down to the Karura Forest, and show you what happens on

the way there.”

With that said, her crew swiveled their equipment around

while she ducked down into the car and re-emerged beside

the camera man. Behind them, Aziza and Bakari led their

twenty three, colourfully dressed ploggers out of the gate.

As planned, they split up into two teams to run along

both sides of the road, and pay special attention to the storm-

water drains along both sides of it. Within seconds, Aziza

saw an empty mineral water bottle on her side of the road

and stopped to pick it up. As she stuffed it into her sack, the

front runners of her team overtook her until their new leader

stopped to pick up an empty plastic yoghurt container.

Exactly the same thing happened when Bakari, leading

the team on his side of the road, stopped for an empty Coca-

Cola bottle. And when the youngster in front of him stopped

for a plastic bag that had once originated from a hamburger

joint, all the other brightly-clothed youths overtook her as

well.

And so this sort-of-relay race continued even after the

ploggers had turned left onto the extreme length of Naivasha

Avenue that finally ended at the junction of Serengeti

Avenue and Mutundu road.

However, it did have its occasional interruptions when

all the youngsters stopped and gathered together to look at

a bit of plastic or rubber that was totally out of the ordinary

– often with screams of laughter from the boys or blushes

of embarrassment from the girls – before they continued

with their race that was gradually becoming more and more

competitive as each of the participants wanted to be the first

to fill their bags.

The television crew that was leading the way in their

vehicle gradually felt a rising sense of excitement as they

realized they were recording an exclusive news story, and

hopefully one that their editors could patch together in time

for KITN’s lunchtime news broadcast.

So much so that, while Margaret continued to voice her

running commentary into her microphone, she was wracking

her brains to unravel everything she could remember about

the Karura Forest, facts that she knew she would need to end

her story.

But while Muthaiga is one of the most up-market – and

therefore one of the quietest of Nairobi’s suburbs – a steady

stream of traffic was gradually and respectfully building up

behind the ploggers and the vehicle that was leading their

way.

Even the few vehicles that were heading in the opposite

direction slowed down when they recognised Aziza and

Bakari. Their drivers took time to study all the brightly-

coloured youngsters on both sides of the road who ran for

a couple of metres, and then stopped to pick up something

that they put into their bags before continuing with their

run.

One of these vehicles was a nondescript, Mitsubishi Pajero

driven by Joseph Onyango. He immediately identified Aziza

and Bakari but, like every other driver was doing, he briefly

watched what the kids were doing, and then drove on.

Saturday, 11.00 am: The Karura Forest,

Nairobi

Having collected all the plastic trash they could find along

the length of Naivasha Avenue, and after plogging down its

curve that followed the line of Muthaiga’s golf course while

filling their bags with even more plastic waste, the ploggers

eventually stopped for breath when the road met the junction

of Serengeti Avenue and Mua Park Road.

Margaret, while standing through the roof of the Land

Cruiser, used her smart-phone to very quickly do some

research about her story’s final destination.

And it was here that Aziza and Bakari, quickly realizing

that their ploggers were exhausted due to this unaccustomed

exercise, rallied them together by using a tactic they had seen

while watching a rugby match involving the New Zealand

All Black’s team of players.

“Qadirs’! Qadirs’!” They chanted as they widened their

eyes, spreading their feet, thrusting out their arms and

sticking their tongues out at their friends.

And then they burst out laughing!

All the youngsters stared at them as though they were mad

but, with this kind of visual and physical encouragement,

and with a certain amount of embarrassment due to their

physical shortcomings – especially when Aziza and Bakari

were so fit - they gathered themselves together.

Minutes later, they dutifully followed their two leaders

when they led the way down the old Kiambu Road. After

turning down one of the family trails that the forest was

renowned for, they soon arrived at a rest stop with a small

cafeteria.

The café was located near the headquarters of Kenya’s

Forestry Service, a Kenya government organization that was

controlled by Amina Qadir.

Now on foot, Margaret and her crew quickly caught

up with them and, while she immediately bought all the

ploggers a much-needed drink, her cameraman filmed all

the full-to-overflowing bags that the ploggers had dumped

against the café’s walls: bags that were stuffed with all the

waste collected along just three short roads.

Margaret turned to look into the camera and raised her

microphone while all the ploggers gathered behind her

and, with Aziza and Bakari close beside her, she raised the

microphone to her lips.

“We are now at the end of the plog and inside the Karura

Forest. This is one of the largest forests inside a city’s limits

anywhere in the world. It covers an area of one thousand

hectares, and is full of indigenous trees, nature walks, rivers,

lakes and marshlands. It is also where the late Professor

Wangari Maathai campaigned to save all the forests in

Kenya, and also to stop land-grabbing within their borders.

And if this famous environmentalist were alive today, I am

quite certain she would have been proud of all these ploggers

that you have been watching. In fact, I now find it quite

amazing just how much plastic they have picked up because,

as you can see for yourselves, every one of these twenty three

bags is completely full. This is a lesson for all of us, and one

that will hopefully teach us not to be so casual about plastic

waste. It is also a lesson about plogging that I hope some of

you will start doing not only for your own health, but also

for that of our beautiful city.”

She then turned to Aziza and Bakari.

“Would you please tell my viewers a little more about

your thoughts about plastic?” she asked, and held the

microphone close to Aziza’s face.

“It seems to me that that the entire world is being taken

over by plastic,” Aziza began. “It has become so much a

part of our lives that we just don’t notice it any more. We

produce over three hundred billion kilos of it every year, and

eight billion kilos of that winds up in our seas and oceans.

And even though every aspect of our environment is being

destroyed by all this, the oil companies are planning to

manufacture three times more plastic within the next ten

years. And it is only if the whole world stops buying single-

use plastic that its producers will stop making it.”

“And what do you think, Bakari?” Margaret asked as she

moved the microphone towards him.

“I agree with Aziza,” Bakari replied while staring directly

at the camera. “If we carry on like this, all the plastic will kill

us one day. I mean, my grandmother in Mombasa is always

complaining about plastic. Every time we go to see her, she

tells us about how she used to go shopping long ago. That’s

why we did what we did yesterday in that shop. It was to

show everybody that plastic is not vital to our lives. It is just

cheap and convenient, and we are now paying the price for

our laziness, and other people’s greed for profit, especially

the oil companies.”

Margaret was taken aback by Bakari’s unexpectedly

profound statement, and it took her a moment before she

turned back to Aziza.

“Do you have any other comments?”

“Yes. I believe that people need to know that plastic

containers are made of chemicals, and that food and drinks

kept in them start absorbing these after a while. While

nobody today – not even scientists - really knows what

happens to our bodies when we eat or drink these things,

I am sure they are just as poisonous for our systems as

cigarettes and alcohol, if not more so,” Aziza said into the

microphone while looking into the camera that was aimed at

her. “Even more importantly,” she added, “pregnant women

should be made more aware of the dangers of plastic. They

should be told exactly how all these poisons might affect

both their unborn babies and their newly born ones. After

all, I am quite certain that adults have far more resistance to

these kinds of toxins than tiny kids do.”

Margaret sat back, suddenly overwhelmed by the

information these two youngsters had at their disposal, most

of which she had previously known nothing about.

She dropped her microphone and stared at Aziza briefly

before changing the subject.

“Just out of interest, how are all you guys going to get

back to your house?”

Aziza stared at her with an immediate frown, and then

looked at Bakari as though he might have the answer. A

second later, they both turned their attention to the ground

at their feet.

With all their excitement, they hadn’t even thought about

it!

Margaret laughed as she fished her phone out of her

pocket.

“Don’t worry. I will get our staff bus to come and collect

you and your garbage, and buy you all another drink for you

to enjoy as you wait for its arrival.”

Saturday, 1.00 pm: A Japanese

Restaurant, Nairobi

The restaurant had once been a large house before it had

been extended to create the necessary space for an indoor

bar and restaurant, and also a large kitchen. Its verandah

had also been enlarged to create an outdoor dining area

for patrons to use on sunny days and warm evenings and,

beyond this, there was a garden full of mature trees, thick

lawns and a children’s playground.

The Qadirs had only been there twice before, but had

enjoyed the food so much on both occasions they had

decided to meet there for lunch. It was also convenient for

this particular afternoon because it was not far from Salim’s

office, and because Amina’s next meeting was at a nearby

sports club.

Salim stood up when his wife arrived and, minutes later,

a waiter arrived with a tray holding a pot of tea, milk, sugar

and two cups. Amina did the necessary, and they began to

chat while they waited for one of her ministry drivers to

arrive with Aziza and Bakari.

“They caused quite a sensation yesterday,” Salim

commented.

“Yes, they did,” Amina responded. “And because they

were in today’s newspapers as a result, I am surprised

nobody has called me to say anything, either good or bad.”

“I am so proud of them,” Salim remarked. “Not only

because of the statement they made about plastic, but also

because Bakari appears to be genuinely interested in climate

change as well.”

Amina smiled at her husband.

“I agree. Whenever I bring up that topic with anybody,

they immediately try to change the subject.”

“It’s because they are scared of it, and they wish this

whole climate thing would just go away,” he commented.

“What do you mean?” Amina asked.

“For hundreds of thousands of years, we humans always

lived at peace with nature. We respected her and she looked

after us. More recently we have started to destroy this Mother

Earth of ours, and she has started to fight back with stronger

storms, worse floods and longer droughts. While man has

fought hundreds of wars against other men, he has never

had to fight a war against nature. And we all instinctively

know this is a war we can never win.”

Amina stared at him with a frown that quickly turned

to a smile when she saw Aziza and Bakari walking across

the verandah to join them. And while they wove their way

between the tables, all the other diners noticed them, and a

hubbub of excited conversation erupted. An attentive waiter

had also noticed their arrival, and he followed them to their

table. After greeting their parents and sitting down, Bakari

turned to the waiter.

“Can I have a Coca-Cola in a glass bottle, please?” he

asked.

The waiter stared at him with a frown.

“I am sorry, Sir, but all our soft drinks are in plastic

bottles.”

“What do you do with them when they are empty?” Aziza

asked.

“We put them in a big bin, and a council lorry comes and

takes them away with all the restaurant’s other rubbish,” the

waiter explained. “After that, I do not know what happens

to them.”

“The fish eat them,” Bakari said bitterly.

“Excuse me?” the waiter stared at him, thinking he was

joking, while Salim and Amina smiled at their son.

“Do you have any fresh fruit juices?” Aziza asked him.

“Yes. We have orange, passion, mango and a tropical

mix.”

“Are they freshly squeezed, or do they come out of those

boxes with plastic lining?” Bakari asked him.

“I am sorry, but we only have freshly squeezed orange

juice. But I could use a blender to make you a delicious mix

of papaya and banana with a little lemon juice and a lot

of ice,” he suggested, doing his best to be helpful not only

because of the children’s mother, but also because they had

been in the news today.

“Perfect,” Aziza and Bakari said in unison.

“And could we please have some more tea while you’re at

it?” Amina asked him with a smile.

The waiter nodded at her with respect, and then rushed

off, totally relieved.

“You certainly have a thing about plastic now,” Salim

told his son.

“Yes,” Bakari looked at him with determination written

all over his face. “And I am going to start a war against it.”

His parents had to stop themselves from laughing at his

sudden decision.

“What I do not understand,” Aziza commented, “is why

somebody does not collect all the plastic and burn it. That

would stop it from going into our lakes and oceans.”

“It is because all the resultant smoke would contain a lot

of CO

and some other chemicals that are all bad for both

our climate and our health, especially because we all have to

breathe it. Did you know that about ten million people die

every year because of all the poisonous pollution in the air?”

Salim asked her.

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “And that is probably why India

has banned single-use plastics in all their major cities, and

has recently passed a law that all road-builders must shred

the remaining plastic waste, and mix it into their bitumen

because it makes their roads far stronger and, therefore,

longer lasting. And it might be why China is converting

all their plastic waste into building blocks for houses, and

multi-storey office and apartment blocks.”

Aziza’s flow of thought was interrupted when the waiter

delivered her and Bakari’s drinks but, as soon as he had left

their table, another waiter almost immediately arrived with

the food menus.

Totally frustrated about being interrupted, she quickly

ordered three vegetarian dishes so she could continue with

her lecture. But then she quickly realized that she would

have to wait while the rest of her family decided on what

they wanted to eat.

As soon as the waiter had taken all their orders – during

which time Aziza had swallowed down half of her incredibly

delicious fruit juice – Salim turned to his daughter with a

smile of encouragement.

“You were saying?” he prompted her.

“Yes, I was,” she declared after finally getting the attention

that she felt she so richly deserved from at least one of her

parents. This was because her mother and her brother were

suddenly too busy discussing other matters that were closer

to their own hearts.

“Go on,” her father invited her.

“What I was trying to say before I was so rudely

interrupted,” she informed him with a louder voice than

was necessary. “Was that, even in West Africa, enterprising

people are building houses with empty mineral-water bottles

for their walls.”

Aziza paused until she was sure that she had everybody’s

attention.

“They pack them full of sand or soil, lay them down on

top of each other, and then use a little bit of cement to secure

them. Because these walls are stronger, better insulated and

far cheaper than normal concrete or stone block walls, there

are even a few people in Europe who have built their own

houses in the same way.”

“So what is the point you are trying to make, my dear?”

Amina asked her with seeming disinterest.

“Why are we not doing the same with our plastic waste

here in Kenya?”

Amina immediately stared at her daughter for a few

seconds, and then slowly poured herself another cup of

tea, obviously deep in thought. And then, in order to

intentionally distract herself from everything Aziza was

saying that, within her soul she knew was right, she turned

back to Bakari.

“So what have you two been up to this morning?”

He turned to Aziza for support and, when none was

forthcoming, he looked back at his mother with a smile on

his face.

“We went jogging to get some exercise after sitting on

our backsides while doing our research all day yesterday.”

Amina stared at him with total disbelief, and was about

to say something when her smart-phone announced an

incoming call.

Suddenly annoyed by this unwelcome intrusion into her

family’s private time together – especially during a weekend

– she was about to deny the call but, out of her natural

curiosity, she glanced at the instrument’s screen to identify

the caller.

Without any hesitation whatsoever, she immediately

stood up and quickly walked to the far end of the restaurant’s

garden before accepting the call.

Because she had become habituated to her mother’s

frequent absences as a result of some of the calls she received,

Aziza turned from her rapidly departing back to look at her

father.

“I know we’ve talked about corporate greed and political

corruption many times before, but that was all about the oil

companies, and just how this is driving global warming and

climate change.”

Salim stared at her for a second, knowing full-well that

after all the research she had done the day before, she was

finally in a position to ask him some very difficult questions.

And questions that his wife was probably far better

trained to answer.

“Go on?” He asked her while trying to maintain a

somewhat authoritative tone of voice.

“What else is being destroyed by greed?” Aziza demanded

to know.

Somewhat relieved by the simplicity of her question, her

father launched into its reply, and worded this as simply as

he could even though, he suddenly realised, his daughter

was no longer a child, and neither was his son.

“Big timber companies are destroying all our forests

that absorb our carbon dioxide and convert it into half

of the oxygen we all need to survive. And big agricultural

companies are doing the same to make more land for their

crops and their cattle. The other half of the air we breathe

is provided for us by various plants and tiny creatures that

live in our seas and oceans. If all our indigenous trees, and

our seas and oceans are killed by greed, we will also be killed

as well. And, at the same time, big fishing companies are

destroying our seas and oceans by harvesting as many fish

as they can in their nets while disregarding the fact that they

throw away over thirty percent of their catch – this to include

fish and mammals like sharks and dolphins – because they

cannot sell them. And the big chemical companies continue

to sell pesticides and weed killers even though they know

fully well that their products are killing pollinators like bees.

And this is even though they know that if all the bees die, we

as a species might well die as well.”

Both Aziza and Bakari stared at their father with total

shock.

This was something that, with the limited time they had

had for their research into their holiday project, they had

been totally unaware of.

They were both about to throw even more complicated

questions at him when, much to his relief, Amina returned

to their table.

After settling herself into her cushioned chair, she glared

at Bakari.

“You told me that you and your sister went jogging this

morning?”

“Yes,” he replied before immediately looking elsewhere.

Knowing fully well that her son had lied to her, she turned

her wrath on Aziza.

“Do you have anything to say about this?”

“No, mama, nothing at all. I promise you,” Aziza declared

in full support of her younger brother.

Amina stared at her, half in jest and half in anger.

“Then why is it that our country’s president, after

watching the lunchtime news, found it necessary to call me

and say that he was so impressed by your plogging?”

Sunday, 8.30 am: The Bernstein’s House,

Nairobi

The Bernsteins had woken up unusually late – even for a

Sunday – due to a dinner party the night before, one that had

been followed by their host’s private screening of a feature

film he had produced.

It was a movie that Hermann Bernstein had invested

heavily in, and it was a rags-to-riches story about a young

Kenyan man who had been doing odd jobs for a film

production unit until he had started playing bit parts in films,

and who had quickly become a major international film star.

He had then lost all his money to high-living, alcohol, drugs

and women, and it was only a devoted girlfriend who had

put him back together, and had thus given him another

chance at life.

Bernstein had really enjoyed the film, and had sincerely

congratulated the producer for a job well done because he

now knew – without any doubt whatsoever – he was going

Chapter Three

to get a major return on his investment. However, Mathilde

had made no comment about it whatsoever.

Probably, he had thought to himself, because she had

violently argued against putting so much money into what

she had classified as a stupid story. If there was one thing his

wife hated more than anything else was to be proven wrong.

About anything!

And now, wearing robes and slippers, the Bernsteins

walked out of their lounge and into the sunshine that warmed

their verandah. Without saying a word to each other, they

separated to settle themselves onto the cushions that padded

the wrought-iron garden chairs that were set at the ends of a

long garden table.

As was usual, their servants had laid down a thermos

flask of black coffee, a personalized mug, and a stack of the

day’s newspapers for him. And in front of her were identical

tabloids, a glossy magazine, a glass coffee pot with a matching

cup and saucer, and bowls of sugar and chilled cream.

Mathilde immediately made herself a cup of coffee while

her husband first enjoyed the warmth of the sun, the songs

from all the birds living in the trees and bushes on his

property, and the perfect tranquility of his garden.

And it was while he was filling his mug from the

thermos of coffee that his wife quickly scanned through the

uppermost newspaper on the pile. After spending more time

on the international news pages, she quickly paged through

the rest of the news until she reached the sports section.

Her evil, narrow-set green eyes widened when she saw

a large picture of Aziza and Bakari standing in front of a

group of other kids, and besides different size bags stuffed

with plastic waste.

‘PLOGGING: A NEW SPORT FOR KENYA’ read the

headline.

Without bothering to read the story, she tossed the

newspaper onto the table in front of her, and picked up

her smart-phone. She angrily swiped its screen with her

fingertips until she found the name she was looking for, and

then carefully jabbed at the call button with the tip of her

forefinger so as not to damage its exquisitely manicured and

expensively decorated nail.

“Yes, Madam?” Onyango finally responded to her call

after he had extricated himself from the church service that

he was attending

“What is taking you so long to eliminate those kids?”

Mathilde shouted at him without any of the expected social

graces about his well-being. As far as she was concerned,

he was just a paid employee, rather like the servants in her

house.

“My apologies, Madam,” Onyango answered her question

while wishing he could kill her instead of the two youngsters

he had grudgingly come to admire. “But this job is not as

easy as the last one you gave us.”

“In what way?” She demanded to know.

“These two children are protected by the police. Wherever

they go in government cars, they sit behind bullet-proof

windows. When I was driving to their house yesterday, I

had a chance, but I could not do anything because of the

television people.”

“So what are you suggesting? Mathilde asked him after

accepting his reasoning, and with a slightly softer voice.

“After spending a lot of time and money calling all my

friends, I have finally located a woman who is very close to

the Minister’s secretary, and a lady who I have arranged to

meet this evening. While we were chatting, she mentioned

that she thought they were going to the coast next week for a

holiday, but I will confirm that when I see her, and try to find

out exactly where they will be staying. If this is the case, and

to save time, you might start arranging for a small calibre

rifle like a .222 Hornet with a telescopic sight, a silencer, and

some spare ammunition so I can sight it in before the kills.

And, with the advance payment you sent me, I should be

able to bribe her to get me the more precise information I

need to successfully carry out your orders.”

“Excellent,” Mathilde complimented him without any

sentiment whatsoever in her voice. “I will call you later to

advise you on where you can collect the facility you have

requested.”

With that said, and without waiting for a reply, Mathilde

arrogantly terminated the call. She then casually took

another sip of her coffee, and turned to one of the two

newspapers she had left on the table to read some of their

more interesting contents.

This was while her husband, who had been listening to

her conversation with Onyango, very quickly decided that it

was time that he very quickly took his life back into his own

hands, as well as that of his beloved daughter, Beatrice.

Ten minutes later, when his wife went into the kitchen

to supervise their breakfast, Bernstein grabbed her phone.

He swiped the screen, hit the recent-calls icon, and quickly

memorized Onyango’s mobile number before replacing the

phone exactly where he had found it.

Sunday, 9.15 am: The Kenya

Meteorological HQ, Nairobi

Salim Qadir entered the operations centre and greeted the

four meteorologists who were on duty that morning. They

all turned to acknowledge his presence, and then three of

them turned back to their computer monitors.

The fourth looked at him with a worried frown.

“You look as though you have a problem?” he smiled at

her.

“Yes, Sir, I do. Take a look at this,” she invited him as she

rolled her chair to one side to make space for him beside her.

Her large monitor portrayed a satellite map of Kenya that

was overlaid by a fine-line grid of squares, each representing

ten kilometres a side. She had shunted the map to the left and

zoomed in on it so all Salim could see was Kenya’s coastline

around Mombasa, and a section of the Indian Ocean to the

east of it.

But it wasn’t the image of lines of palm trees along the

white sandy beaches being washed by the blue water of the

ocean that caught his attention.

It was, instead, an enormous ring of cloud that lay twelve

kilometres to the east of the port city, a cloud-formation well

outside his experience.

He whipped his smart-phone out of his pocket, found a

number, and dialed it.

Amina’s mother answered his call almost immediately.

“Good morning, Salim. How are you today?” she asked

him.

“Good, thank you, and looking forward to seeing you on

Tuesday for lunch. And how are you?” he asked her.

“I’m fine, thanks, and enjoying an unusually cool and

windy day for this time of year,” she commented.

“Well, now the monsoon has changed to the Kusi coming

in from the south east, it should be getting a little cooler

with a good chance of rain soon. And that’s why I’m calling,

Farida. There should be some clouds over the sea in front of

you. Could you please tell me what they look like?”

“Just a second,” she said. “Let me go out onto the veranda.”

He heard her walking though the lounge and opening a

door, and she started to answer his question a few seconds

later.

“They are very strange, Salim, and something I have never

seen before. It’s almost as though four huge thunderstorms

have met up together. But each of the ones I’ve always seen

before have a sort of enormous mushroom formation on top

of them. These do not. While I can see the four individual

clouds, there is just one big sort of mushroom covering all of

them. Almost like a halo. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s why I called you. I can see the top of it on the

satellite image, but I wanted to know what it looked like

from the ground. And now I need to find out what it is.

Thank you so much, Farida, and I’ll call you later.”

Salim stared at the cloud formation for a few more

seconds, his mind whirling with questions. Then he turned

to the meteorologist.

“Give me a minute to fire up my computer and grab some

coffee, and then send this to me on live feed. Okay?”

“Yes, Sir,” she confirmed as he dashed out of the centre.

Minutes later, he was studying the almost perfectly

circular top of the storm on his larger monitor while sipping

at his cappuccino. To his total astonishment, the entire three-

hundred kilometre wide cloud mass was very slowly rotating

in a counter-clockwise direction, almost like a hurricane.

With a suddenly worried frown, he pulled the electronic

marker-pen out of its slot at the side of his keyboard, and

drew a dark-blue circle around the storm before keying in

a number of commands. A series of charts immediately

appeared on the left of his screen, and then his smart-phone

rang.

“Qadir,” he responded when he picked it up without

looking at its screen.

“Mr. Salim Qadir?” a woman’s voice asked with an

American accent.

“That is correct,” he told her. “How can I help you?”

“I’m calling from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration headquarters in Silver Springs, Maryland, in

the United States. Please hold for Mr. McFie.”

Salim immediately glanced at his watch, and quickly

realised that it was only two thirty in the morning at the

NOAA offices in that part of the world.

“Salim. Hi. Jerry McFie here. How are things with you?”

“Good, thanks. You’re up late, or should I say early?”

“Nah. Just doing the night shift for a change, and I’m

glad I did. It looks as though you guys have got a gremlin

building up near Mombasa,” he told Salim. “And she’s one

that we’ve called “Charlotte” for our records.”

Because Salim knew NOAA compiled a list of names in

alphabetical order so as to give every large tropical storm,

cyclone, typhoon and hurricane a title in the order of their

occurrence, he realised that this was the third major storm to

have occurred anywhere around the world so far that year.

“I’m looking at her right now, Jerry,” Salim told him.

“And I have never seen anything like it before.”

“That’s why I’m calling you, old friend. Because neither

have I after watching her build up for the last six hours, and

she’s still growing. However, what baffles me is that, while

all the meteorological conditions are perfect for a really

powerful cyclone, you guys have never had one of those in

recorded history. Do you have any ideas?” McFie asked him

“Not yet. To be honest with you, I only arrived at the

office about twenty minutes ago, and I was just pulling up

the charts when you called. Just give me a second while I

check them.”

Salim quickly scanned the information on the charts on

his monitor and, as Jerry had said, none of it made any sense.

“No,” Salim told McFie. “But from the figures, and a lack

of any reasonable humidity, it doesn’t look as though she’s

going to dump any rain in the foreseeable future. And at

twenty kilometres an hour, she’s moving unusually fast. Tell

me, has there been any thunder and lightning?”

“None whatsoever,” McFie replied. “And that’s another

factor that makes this anomaly so incredibly weird. Why do

you ask?”

“A few minutes ago I called my mother-in-law who lives

on a beach just north of Mombasa. She told me that, from

what she could see, it was like there were four big clouds

like thunderstorms clustered together, and with a single big

halo-type of cloud covering all of them.”

McFie suddenly fell silent for a few seconds while he

digested this extraordinary information.

“All I can say is that you’re lucky you have a lot of

relatively unpopulated territory just inland of your coast.

With luck, ‘Charlotte’ will either dump or burn herself out

before she goes too much further.”

“Agreed,” Salim told him. “But what worries me is that

if she doesn’t, and she survives for longer than we expect,

when she finally decides to dump all her rain it’s going to be

a total disaster with major floods wherever that might be.”

Thirty minutes later the storm called ‘Charlotte’ sailed

over Mombasa and started heading straight towards Nairobi.

Sunday, 12.30 pm: State House, Nairobi

Because Amina – who was dressed in a turquoise trouser suit

and black leather boots – was a regular visitor to Nairobi’s

State House, she drove through all the security checks without

a problem, and then down the long driveway between the

beautiful gardens that led to the Kenyan president’s official

house, and his most private offices.

It was a large, white building with two floors that were

topped by a red-tiled roof, one that had been built by the

British colonialists in 1907, or just over a hundred and ten

years earlier. Like America’s White House in Washington

that had been built in 1792 to a very similar design, the

ground floor was only used for matters of presidential

importance, and the upper floor contained the president’s

private accommodation.

The president, wearing a blue silk shirt over cream-

coloured, cotton trousers and a pair of leather sandals,

embraced Amina as soon as she walked around the car to

greet him, and then shook hands with Salim – who was

already uncomfortable in his dark blue suit and tie – and

who he had met a few times before.

“When are you ever going to start getting your weather

forecasts right again?” he asked, almost jokingly.

“As soon as governments like yours start respecting the

environment,” Salim replied with a sad smile.

The president was about to respond angrily when Amina

smiled at him.

“Please allow me to introduce our two children who you

have never met before. This is my first born, Aziza, who is

fifteen, and Bakari who arrived three years after her.”

The president smiled down at the two youngsters.

“My two little heroes,” he said. “I cannot thank you

enough for bringing the attention of all Kenyans to the deadly

menace of plastic like you did on Friday, and yesterday as

well. You’re now spending more time on TV and in the

newspapers than I am.”

Dressed in a peach-coloured trouser-suit with matching

shoes, and having been trained by her mother that very

morning, Aziza curtsied when the president shook her hand.

And when he turned to Bakari, who was wearing a light blue

suit over a white shirt and a black and white-striped tie, the

boy bowed respectfully, just as Amina had told him to.

The president was about to lead them into his residence

when Amina stopped him with a question.

“Would you like me to park my car where I usually do?”

“No, thank you,” he replied. “I am not expecting anybody

else today, so just leave it where it is. And with my apologies,

Roselynne, my wife, is presently representing me at an official

function in South Africa because I have urgent matters to

attend to tomorrow.”

He led the way through the building until they arrived at

a verandah where a table had been set for five, and smiled at

Salim, his earlier anger forgotten.

“I am taking a chance on us sitting outside because your

forecast said it would be a sunny day. And it has been so far.

But on a serious note, what is happening to our weather?”

“While many people believe that the weather controls

our environment, Sir,” Salim began after a quick glance

at Amina, “our environment controls our weather. The

Sahara Desert in North Africa is a prime example of this.

Just a few thousand years ago, it was a land of forests, grassy

plains, and rivers and lakes. When its population grew,

they destroyed more and more of the natural vegetation to

provide themselves with food and building materials. This

changed the climate and stopped the rain. In the end, the

rivers and lakes dried up, and it became what it is today.”

The president stared at him with shock.

“That is what you meant by respecting the environment,”

he said with a worried look on his face as he sat down at the

head of the table with Aziza to his right and Bakari to his left,

and with Amina and Salim beside them. A uniformed waiter

arrived to take their orders for drinks, and Bakari frowned at

his mother on the other side of the table.

The president laughed.

“Please do not worry, young man. Because of you and

your sister, I had everything covered in plastic wrapped up

in paper. I also returned all our plastic bottles of water and

soft drinks to the shop. My staff then bought sodas in glass

bottles, and a special filter for the tap water.”

“What did you do with all the plastic that was left?” Aziza

asked him shyly.

“I was shocked at how much there was. I called my

housekeeper, and she decided to put it in sacks until she

finds somewhere to have it recycled.”

“Will you please tell your story to the newspapers?”

Bakari asked him.

“Why?” the president asked him.

“Everybody will soon forget what happened because we

are just kids. But if YOU tell people what you did, and the

reasons why, every Kenyan will listen.”

The president looked at the boy thoughtfully as the waiter

arrived with their drinks, and then he turned to Aziza.

“Now that your father has told me what he thinks is

causing our weather to change, please tell me what you think

about the environment.”

Because she was now feeling a little more comfortable in

his presence, she looked at him directly with a slight frown.

“We are destroying it, just like they did in the Sahara. We

are cutting down all the trees for building materials, and to

make space for growing food. We are emptying all the lakes

and oceans of fish, and we are killing all our pollinators like

bees with unnecessary chemicals. “I mean…” she paused for

a second to gather her thoughts.

“I mean, today’s human beings are so greedy that they

have forgotten the meaning of the word ‘consequence’.

They just don’t seem to care about the natural environment

any more. They don’t care about pollution, global warming

and climate change, the stronger storms, bigger floods and

longer droughts we are starting to get, and they don’t care

that the world is running out of fresh water. All they want

is profit, and they don’t care where they get it from. I mean,

in some countries they spend more money on sick chickens

than on sick or starving children because they cannot make

any money out of them. This is why some kids in America –

and others in Europe – are suing their governments because

of how they are destroying their chances of a happy and

healthy future.”

The president was staring at her when a waiter placed

bowls of fresh, hot tomato soup in front of each of them.

As soon as he left, Amina was about to apologise for her

daughter’s outburst but the president waved her to silence.

Then Bakari decided it was his turn to speak.

“And that is also because global warming is melting all

the ice around the world and the seas are rising. Soon all

the beaches will be gone, the sea ports will be useless, and

seaside cities like Mombasa will be underwater.”

Bakari was about to continue when the president smiled

at Amina.

“I think it might be a good idea if you gave Aziza and

Bakari jobs to advise you with your ministry,” he suggested

before turning back to Bakari.

“So, young man. If you were the president of Kenya, what

would you do about all these problems?”

Bakari looked up at the president with a serious look on

his face.

“I would bring together all the countries and islands in

the world that have done little or nothing to destroy their

environments, but which are suffering from the consequences

of climate change and rising sea levels. I would then form

a coalition or something like that so we could, together,

take everybody responsible for all our problems - including

big companies and governments in America and Asia and

Europe – to court, just like all those kids are doing.”

“It is just like people forgetting what we did on Friday

and yesterday because we are kids,” Aziza explained, “So

when a few kids try to sue a government, people will laugh.

But if a few countries like ours do the same thing, the whole

world will sit up and listen.”

Sunday, 5.00 pm: The Kenya

Meteorological HQ, Nairobi

As soon as the Qadirs had returned home after their lunch,

and a wonderful afternoon with the president thereafter,

Salim had taken his own car – a white Toyota Fielder – to

head back to his office.

He greeted the four duty meteorologists, grabbed a coffee,

and sat down to study his computer monitor that he had left

switched on due to the live feed that had been networked

into his database.

Eight hours after his troubling conversation with McFie

earlier that day, the exact centre of the storm formation lay

slightly north east of the town called Voi on the Mombasa to

Nairobi Highway.

And it had still not dumped any rain.

Salim did a quick mental calculation and realized that

if ‘Charlotte’ continued in the same direction at the same

speed she would – unless she burnt herself out by dumping

all her rain and then dissolved into the atmosphere – hit the

Nairobi area at about five thirty the following morning.

And almost exactly at the time when most people were

enjoying their deepest sleep, and would therefore be at their

most vulnerable.

Deeply troubled by the implications, Salim drained his

coffee and, deep in thought, he headed to the coffee machine

to refill his mug. Instead, and on a sudden impulse, he left it

on the table next to the machine, and headed to the computer

station that was dedicated to Kenya’s weather.

The duty meteorologist sensed his presence, and turned

away from the storm on his monitor to look up at Salim.

“Yes, Sir?”

“What do you make of this storm?” Salim asked, by now

desperate for another opinion.

“Between you and me, Sir, and according to the charts, I

think we in Nairobi are going to be in serious trouble early

tomorrow morning.”

With a sinking heart, Salim rushed off to fill his mug

before sitting down behind his desk and studying the storm

called ‘Charlotte’ once again.

Seconds later, he picked up his phone and sent a text

message to McFie.

‘Can you talk?’

Moments later, the American called him.

“Hi, buddy. And yes, I am still in my office because

‘Charlotte’ is really starting to freak me out. Unlike any storm

I have watched for the last thirty years, she is slowly starting

to intensify her incredible power by reducing her diameter

and increasing her height. But there is still no thunder and

lightning in any of the four storms, and still no signs of any

rain despite the heat in the area between Mombasa and Voi.

I just don’t understand it,” McFie complained.

Salim’s heart sank.

“Do you have any idea about what we might expect?” he

eventually asked.

“No way with everything that is going so badly wrong

with our weather today. But at a wild guess, ‘Charlotte’ is

going to keep building up her strength while she sails over

the increasingly higher ground that leads up to Nairobi and

the southern aspects of your Aberdare Mountains just to the

north west of you, and then she is going to dump very, very

badly.”

For the first time in his life, Salim was lost for words as he

tried to digest the information.

“Bless you for your advice, Jerry,” he thanked the man he

had first met at a climate change conference in Paris three

years earlier, and then disconnected the call so he could

consider whether he should put out a general warning or

not.

If he did, and if the storm blew itself out before it hit

Nairobi and its surrounding areas, he would probably lose

his job. But if he didn’t…

Seconds later he made his decision and called Amina.

“Yes, my love,” she answered his call almost immediately.

“Where are you?”

“Still at the office because that storm I told you about on

our way to lunch is just getting worse and worse. Having

received second and third opinions about the possible

outcomes, I am now more or less convinced that it will hit

either Nairobi and or its surrounding areas with devastating

consequences.”

“Do you really think it’s going to be that bad?” she asked,

suddenly worried.

“So bad that I think we should delay our trip to Mombasa

until it blows over. In view of this, I strongly feel that you

should call the president with this information so that he

can authorize a nation-wide warning for Nairobi, and also

for all the towns within a hundred kilometres of the city,”

he told her.

“That’s going to create panic, Salim,” she warned him.

“Agreed, but it might save lives. And even if the storm

misses Nairobi and hits the Aberdares instead, we are still

going to get a lot of rain,” he commented.

Amina fell silent for a few seconds.

“Where in your heart of hearts do you really think it will

hit?” she finally asked him, her voice suddenly intense.

“The Aberdares because the high ground between

Machakos and Kitui will swing her round slightly. This is

why the president needs to prepare an evacuation order for

everybody living below the Sasamua and Ndakaini Dams,

and every town, village and tourist destination that is located

anywhere near the banks of the Athi River until it ultimately

flows out into the Indian Ocean just north of Malindi.”

Amina knew her husband well enough to know that he

was not a man to be alarmed by vague possibilities.

“Oh. And with my apologies,” Salim added, “I think in

view of the gravity of the situation I need to stay here for the

night to keep an eye on things.”

As soon as he had disconnected his call, she called the

president’s personal number.

“Yes, Amina?” he answered her call moments later.

“My husband is getting increasingly concerned about

a strange storm that is heading towards Nairobi,” she told

him.

“Is that the same one he mentioned after our lunch?” he

asked her.

“One and the same,” she answered his question, and

then went on to tell him exactly why he needed to act on the

information.

Sunday, 6.00 pm: The Blue Posts Hotel,

Thika

Onyango had slept late, and had taken the morning off before

having lunch at the Utalii Hotel on his way into Nairobi. He

had then gone to visit a man in Parklands who had given

him a large briefcase full of cash to settle a long-overdue

debt owing to one of his clients. From there he had driven to

the other side of the city to meet Mathilde’s messenger, and

to collect the rifle in its case which he had concealed under

the Pajero’s rear seat beside the briefcase.

From there he had headed back towards Thika for

his appointment, and parked his car in the lot beside the

hotel that had been built in 1908. He strolled down to the

restaurant and bar complex where, as arranged, his contact

was sitting at a table under the blue umbrella on the section

of the lawn closest to the river.

They introduced themselves and started to chat, and

Onyango ordered a round of drinks from a passing waiter.

“You said you wanted some information?” she reminded

him a few minutes later, and after a sip of her Tusker Cider.

“Yes,” he said as he lowered his glass of Coca-Cola. “A

friend of mine has paid me to deliver a very special surprise

to the Qadir family while they are on holiday with their

children. The problem is that I do not know where they are

going for this. You mentioned the coast, but I need to know

exactly where they will be staying for my delivery. Can you

help me get this information?”

“Why doesn’t your friend call them directly?” she asked.

“Like I said, he wants it to be a surprise,” Onyango replied

with a smile.

She stared through her large, very dark sunglasses at his

friendly face and honest-looking eyes, and decided to trust

him.

“How much will you pay me for this?” she asked him

avariciously, licking her thin lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Five thousand now, and another five thousand when

you call me tomorrow with the details,” he told her.

“Make it ten and ten,” she smiled. “And we will have a

deal.”

Five minutes later, Onyango was driving home in his

old-looking Pajero. But it was only the body that was a little

battered so it would not attract any attention. What could

not be seen was a brand-new, extremely powerful engine, a

new gearbox and new axles to make sure he could drive away

from any trouble with the utmost of speed and reliability.

He turned off the highway to Nairobi, drove over the

flyover leading to Thika town, and then turned onto the road

that led to his house at Gituru just thirty eight kilometres

away.

There was still some light in the sky when he drove

through the small township, and he was surprised to see that

there were no pedestrians around, and that all the shops were

shut. He immediately had an instinctive sense of foreboding,

but then he remembered that two of England’s top football

teams were playing the final game of the Premier League

that night, so most of the town’s residents would already be

in the sports bars to await the kick-off.

However, he should have trusted his instincts because,

by sheer coincidence, he had missed every single broadcast

about the dangers of the storm.

Oblivious to the warnings, Onyango turned off the road,

and drove slowly down his rough and bumpy driveway –

something he knew he could afford to pave but hadn’t so as

to avoid unnecessary attention. He parked his car in the lean-

to garage on the one side of his medium sized but modest

house where he lived alone, and removed the briefcase and

the gun. As was his habit whenever he returned home, he

stopped to nervously stare up at the menacing, sixty-three

metre high, earth-filled wall of the Ndakaini Dam that was

just over a kilometre away to the west.

It was a massive wall that had been designed to hold

back seventy billion litres of water, and one that had been

supposedly built to withstand any kind of floods.

Onyango then looked a little higher to enjoy the sight

of the peaks on the southern reaches of the Aberdares

Mountain Range – some reaching over four thousand

metres into the sky – and now silhouetted against the last of

the blood-red evening light as the sun disappeared over the

western horizon behind them.

He knew that the eastern sides of this mountain range –

one that ran in a north-south direction for over two hundred

kilometres – was made up of scores of valleys whose rivers

followed the law of gravity as they sped downhill, most of

them into the Ndakaini Dam.

Onyango stared at the dam wall again, and made a

decision.

As soon as he had killed Qadir’s kids, and as soon as he

had been paid in full for the job by Mathilde, he would sell

this place and buy another somewhere that, whenever he

went to bed at night, he didn’t have to worry about waking

up alive the following morning.

Sunday, 11.30 pm: Makindu Town,

Mombasa Highway

The massive storm called ‘Charlotte’ sailed silently over this

small town famous for its Sikh Temple and the delicious

meals it served free to the poor, and for donations only

from passing motorists. Due to the fact that she was still

not emitting any thunder or lightning, the town’s residents

were unaware of her as she passed overhead on her way to

Nairobi.

They had, however, heard and seen all the warnings

about her on radio and television.

Monday, 5.30 am: The Kenya

Meteorological HQ, Nairobi

Salim tore his tired eyes away from his computer screen to

answer a call. He stood up to stretch, glanced at the pouring

rain outside his office, and then stared at the smart-phone’s

screen.

The call was from Jerry McFie.

“With the kind of hours you work,” Salim commented

when he answered the call, “I think it’s high time you came

back to Kenya for another holiday.”

McFie laughed.

“Mildred and I are actually putting our minds together to

do exactly that in July, and we’ll call you for advice closer to

the time. But for now, we have more worrisome matters to

discuss. Has it started raining yet?”

“Yes, but not that heavily. The storm suddenly lost

its halo when it hit the high land around Athi River and

Machakos, then veered slightly as you suggested she might,

and went on to hit the Aberdares instead.”

Chapter Four

“And that is the strangest thing,” McFie commented.

“What is?” Salim asked.

“‘Charlotte’ is doing something I’ve never seen any

storm do before,” the American replied. “She has stalled

over your Aberdare Mountains. She is just sitting on top of

them without any thunder or lightning, and has just started

dumping the heaviest rain I have ever seen along their

eastern slopes,” McFie told him.

“Tell me about it. Amina briefed the president yesterday

about what to expect and, when ‘Charlotte’ started changing

direction about an hour ago, I issued a Presidential

Evacuation Order to the police, the military and every other

government authority to order everybody out of every

human settlement along the length of the Athi River,” Salim

informed him.

“Smart cookie,” McFie complimented him. “And that, I

can only assume, means that emergency rescue teams are

already on their way?”

“You bet,” Salim confirmed. “At least to all the larger

settlements down there.”

Monday, 6.30 am: Gaturi Village,

Aberdare Mountains

Even the oldest inhabitants – two of whom were over a

hundred years old – of this village that was nestled in the

forests that covered the eastern slopes of the Aberdares had

never seen so much rain before.

And it poured down in sheets of water that rapidly filled

the upper reaches of all the rivers that flowed downhill into

the Ndakaini Dam.

However, during the dry season that had lasted from

the November of the year before, all these rivers had been

partially jammed by the falling branches of trees that lined

their banks. And these blockages had all been finally sealed

shut by their falling leaves and wind-blown grass.

As a result of this, the effects of the torrential amounts of

rain that ‘Charlotte’ was dumping on the eastern slopes of

the mountain took a while to be felt.

Monday, 7.30 am: Onyango’s House,

Gituru

Onyango had slept on deeply despite the rain that had been

pounding against the roof above him for the last two hours.

It was still a little dark so he flipped the switch for his bedside

light but there was no electricity. He then stared at his alarm

clock and was shocked to see how late it was.

He cursed, sat up, and swung his legs out of the bed.

He yelled out with alarm when his bare feet sank into five

centimetres of water, and he leant forward to see what had

happened. In the dim light coming in through his bedroom

window he saw that the entire floor was covered with water.

Onyango immediately thought of the dam barely a

kilometre away, but then relaxed when he remembered that,

according to the newspaper reports from the day before, it

was less than half full. With relief, he realized it must have

been raining heavily for a while, and that all the water had

poured in under the house’s entrance door to flood it like

this.

With a groan of sheer frustration, he threw on a dressing

gown for warmth, grabbed his smart-phone and, when he

pulled the curtains aside to take a quick look outside, he

realised why it was still dark. The sky was covered with

thick, black clouds that were pouring rain in amounts he

had never seen before. He shook his head with resignation,

and splashed his way around the house to see that all the

floors were covered with water. Now worried about the legs

of all his wooden furniture, he decided he needed some tea

to clear his brain, and headed to the kitchen.

After throwing the empty bottle of whisky into the trash

can, he put some tea, milk and sugar into a saucepan, and

struck a match against one of his cooker’s gas burners. He

then realized he had nothing to do until his contact called

him, and that could happen any time during the course of

the day.

While he waited for the tea to brew, Onyango knew he

had to get rid of the water in his house. It was something

his maid could do, but she was already late for work. With

a growl of annoyance, he splashed back to his bedroom to

collect the rectangular black box with the rifle, and the cash

for his client.

By the time he had finished counting the money on

the kitchen table, his tea was boiling, and he emptied the

saucepan’s contents into a mug decorated with a large red

heart, and the words ‘I LOVE YOU’ on its sides.

Then his mobile rang. He checked the screen and saw

that it was his contact. He frowned briefly about the fact that

she was calling so early, and then accepted the call.

“Good morning, my dear,” he greeted her. ”You’re up

bright and early this morning,” he commented without

feeling particularly bright himself.

“Yes,” she responded. “By chance my friend called me

late last night and, during our chat, I asked her about the

Qadirs’ holiday destination. After asking me a few questions,

she gave them to me as follows. Are you ready?”

“Go ahead,” he responded with rising excitement despite

his headache.

“They are due to drive there tomorrow, and will be

staying with the minister’s mother in Shanzu. Her house is

on Coral Lane, and it is number twelve,” she told him.

“Bless you, my dear,” he commented. “At least I can now

make the delivery, and I will send you your balance a little

later this morning. Have a beautiful day.”

As soon as he disconnected the call, he scrolled down his

list of mobile numbers until he found the one he was looking

for. He gave Mathilde Bernstein the information about the

Qadir’s movements and, without even thanking him, she

terminated the call.

100

He stared at his smart-phone with total disgust and,

almost as soon as he had placed it on the table in front of

him to take a sip of his tea, it announced another incoming

call.

And this time it was with just a number on the screen

without a name. He hesitated for a second, and then accepted

the call.

“Onyango?”

“Mister Onyango, good morning. This is Hermann

Bernstein, Mathilde’s husband.”

“Good morning, Sir,” Onyango responded with a sudden

smile on his face. “I must admit that I was very surprised that

you managed to find me what I wanted so quickly, especially

on a Sunday.”

“Thank you, but whatever Mathilde does, achieves or

arranges is her own business, and this is why I want to talk

to you. When can we meet, and where?”

“How about lunch at the Muthaiga Club?” Onyango

suggested, knowing that the Bernsteins were members there.

“That is not a good idea because my wife is scheduled to

meet some clients at that time. Can you suggest somewhere

else that is a little less conspicuous?”

“Wherever you like, Mr Bernstein, and I will leave that to

you but, if you don’t mind my asking you, just why do you

want us to meet?” Onyango asked.

“Because I want you to forget about assassinating those

two innocent children, and kill my wife instead! It must

101

look like an accident and, as a deposit, I will pay you the full

amount that she has promised you to kill the kids, and then

the same again on your successful completion of the job.”

Monday, 7.45 am: The Ndakaini Dam,

Murang’a County

The incessant, indescribably heavy rain was filling the dam

faster than ever before, and was substantially weakening the

massive earthen embankment that reinforced the concrete

section of the dam wall.

At the same time, the only active volcano in Kenya, The

Barrier Volcano that had last erupted in 1921, and one

that was was located at the southern tip of Lake Turkana

four hundred and fifty kilometres to the north, suddenly

shuddered violently and let out a huge cloud of white smoke.

This initiated a cataclysmic movement of the earth’s crust

somewhere deep beneath the volcano, and the shockwaves –

called earth tremors – shook the whole of Kenya.

The most powerful tremors ran down the length of the

Rift Valley and hit Mount Suswa, a dormant volcano, and

a huge crack appeared down its western slopes as a cloud

of smoke rose above the nearby Mount Longonot, another

dormant volcano. Slightly weaker tremors hit the Ndakaini

Dam at the same time, but they were still strong enough the

shake the foundations of the dam wall. A series of cracks shot

across its concrete section, and its now-muddy, enormous,

supportive embankment slipped fractionally.

102

The sheer volume of Charlotte’s rainwater falling into

all the rivers that flowed down the eastern slopes of the

Aberdare Mountains gave them a power they had never

enjoyed before.

They ripped through every single one of nature’s dams

and, with the subsequent flash floods, two of them burst

their banks and totally destroyed the village called Gaturi,

and killed every single one of its inhabitants.

Then, because of the combination of the earth tremors

and the vast amounts of rain, all the earth for two kilometres

up the steep slopes of the Aberdares above the dam suddenly

slipped to create a massive landslide.

It started slowly at first, but quickly gathered speed. The

mountain of mud picked up everything in its path and,

within minutes, enormous boulders were also rolling down

the slope and destroying everything in their path.

Just below them, carrying all the debris and the bodies

they had collected from the natural dams and the village,

each and every single one of the flooding rivers finally – and

simultaneously – cascaded into the western and northern

sectors of the dam that was still rapidly being filled by the

rain. These sudden, massive waves of water poured into

the Ndakaini Dam and filled it to the top of its wall within

minutes.

And, right behind them, the millions of tons of mud,

together with the boulders and hundreds of enormous trees,

103

cascaded into the western end of the dam with massive

fountains of water and large waves exploding out in all

directions.

However, because of its altitude, combined with a long

chilly night, the water in the dam was cold and therefore

very dense. When it parted in displacement to make space

for the landslide, it did so with a terrifying, devastating force

in the form of an almost-solid, underwater shock-wave.

This raced out from the epicentre of the landslide’s

impact and, with deadly intent, it headed towards the dam

wall at a speed of thirty metres a second.

Monday, 8.00 am: Onyango’s House,

Gituru

When the earth tremor hit the house, Onyango almost

lost his balance. He grabbed the kitchen door for support

while his whole world shook violently. With eyes as wide

as saucers, he watched the hanging lights swaying around in

ever widening circles. Then the saucepan fell off the cooker

which fortunately remained upright, as did his small fridge.

And before he could grab it, the kitchen table overturned,

together with the two chairs. He heard a loud crash from the

living room, and then the sounds of other furniture falling

into the water, but he ignored them. Instead, he looked down

with horror at the gun case and all the cash floating on the

water at his feet. He stared at his broken coffee mug, and the

104

remaining tea as it slowly disappeared into the water. And

then his heart lurched.

There was no sign of his phone!

Without thinking, he let go of the door in order to find

it, and a final tremor knocked him off his feet and onto his

back with a huge splash of water that, by then, was seven

centimeters deep

Then the tremor suddenly stopped. Onyango got to his

knees slowly, and then stood up as the hanging lights slowed

their wild oscillations. He splashed towards the kitchen

table, and groped around the broken mug until his fingertips

touched his submerged phone. He lifted it to his face but it

was dead.

He shook it to get rid of the water inside the device, and

then lit the oven with the hope that its heat would dry it out.

He then removed his dripping dressing gown and headed to

his bedroom to get something dry to wear.

It was not to be when he stared at his wardrobe that had

fallen onto his bed, and had deposited all its contents into

the water below.

‘It can’t get any worse,’ he thought to himself as he turned

to go back into the living room.

It was only then he saw that the dining table and its chairs

had all overturned, all the other furniture had been thrown

around all over the place, and that his book cases with all his

precious books had fallen into the water.

105

With a groan of despair, Onyango opened the curtains

and stared outside, but there was nothing to be seen through

what seemed to be a solid wall of rain water.

He went back to the kitchen, picked up the saucepan and

began to brew some more tea. He then righted the table and

chairs, picked up all the floating money, and started laying

it down on all the flat surfaces so it could dry out. He picked

up the gun case and put it back on the table, and then groped

around in the water until he found all the bits of the broken

mug so they would not cut into his bare feet.

And it was after he had dropped all the shards into a

small, empty cardboard box on the kitchen counter that he

glanced through the kitchen window.

His heart sank.

The heavy, lean-to garage had collapsed on top of his

beloved Pajero.

Onyango stared blindly down into the saucepan as if

willing it to boil. He picked up another mug from the drying

rack beside the basin, and absently dried it with a dish cloth.

When the tea boiled, he filled the mug and despondently sat

down at the kitchen table.

He sipped at his tea with his mind in a daze until his eyes

slowly focused on the gun case, something the same shape

and size as one designed to carry a pair of pool cues. He

opened the catches and lifted the lid and, to his relief, the

inside of the case was totally dry.

106

As he stared at the component pieces of the .222 Hornet,

he slowly came back to life.

After another sip of his tea, he removed the box of

ammunition and counted the twenty four bullets. He

then attached the gun’s barrel onto its stock, and snapped

on the telescopic sight. He hefted the gun in his hands to

check its balance, and began to familiarize himself with all

its mechanisms with regards to just exactly where its safety

catch was, how much pull would be needed to fire the gun,

and how stiff and noisy the bolt-action would be when he

needed to reload

Still sitting, he lifted the gun to his shoulder, and

supported it by resting his elbows on the table. He aimed

the rifle through the kitchen doorway, and centred the

sight’s cross-hairs on a picture that was now hanging askew

on the far wall of his living room. After a few seconds, he

felt comfortable with the gun, and looked forward to test-

firing it on the way to Mombasa where the Qadirs would be

enjoying their holiday.

And then Onyango began to dream.

He was at the coast, with the ocean waves breaking on the

beach barely thirty metres to his right, and he was lying in the

nest he had built for himself at dawn. It was on a slight rise

covered with bushes, and there was a palm tree swaying in the

sea breeze above him. The part of the beach where he expected

the kids to come down and play was just seventy-five metres

away, and he had a clear view of it through the undergrowth.

107

When they appeared, he lifted the rifle, loaded it, flipped

off the safety catch, and pulled the weapon’s butt hard into his

shoulder. He traversed the gun’s powerful telescopic sight until

its cross-hairs centred on Bakari’s profile as the boy stared out

to the sea with a smile on his face. Onyango’s finger started to

squeeze the trigger, but then he swung the gun slightly until

the sight centred on Aziza’ beautiful face while she laughed

at her brother. An easy one-two, Onyango thought to himself,

but again he hesitated.

But then Mathilde Bernstein’s ugly face suddenly replaced

Aziza’s in the sight. He centred the cross-hairs on her right ear

and pulled the trigger.

Because of the silencer, the rifle only made a light popping

sound. He watched Mathilde fall to the sand at her feet, and

then crept through the bushes to where he had hidden his

Pajero. He quickly concealed the rifle and slowly drove away,

and the woman’s murder would be a mystery forever more.

Onyango was smiling to himself when he snapped out of

his reverie and came back to the real world. He lowered the

gun and broke it down to pack its parts back into the case.

He stood up and waded through the water that was now ten

centimeters deep, and opened the oven to check if his smart-

phone had dried out. The warm air hit him in the face as he

bent down to retrieve the instrument, but when he stood up

and touched the screen, it was still dead.

Because he was expecting a call from Bernstein about

their meeting, Onyango suddenly realized he would have to

108

move fast. He would have to go out into the torrential rain,

pull whatever was left of the garage away from the Pajero,

and then come back inside to change into some dry clothes

so he could drive into Thika to buy a new phone, and have

his SIM card fitted into it.

Working in the pouring rain, and using his powerful body

to his best ability, he slipped and slithered in the mud as he

cleared the wreckage away from his car. While the damage

was not as bad as he had expected, the windscreen was now

cracked and it was something the police would stop him for

if they spotted it. Quickly realizing that there would be no

policemen around because of the rain, he got into the car

and started it to warm up the engine before he drove away.

When Onyango went back into his house, he suddenly

remembered that his maid occasionally left the clothes she

had washed on the shelves above the hot water boiler in a

cupboard in the kitchen. He waded across the floor and,

to his total relief, he found a stack of neatly folded plastic

bags beside an untidy bundle of his laundered but un-ironed

clothes.

The least of his problems, he grinned to himself.

He quickly selected a shirt, trousers and underwear

together with two of the bags, and carried them and his dead

smart-phone to his bedroom, dumped them on the bed,

and stripped naked in order to have a very quick, very cold

shower. He toweled himself dry and, after drying one foot,

he put it into one of the plastic bags, and quickly did the

same with the other.

109

He rolled up the ends of his trousers before he dressed,

and put his mobile, wallet and credit card holder into

his pockets before he found a pair of surprisingly dry,

lightweight shoes that were floating on top of the flooded

room. He carried these and a pair of socks with him as he

rushed out of the house, locked the door behind him, and

dived into his Pajero.

Now drenched with rain water but still feeling warm for

the first time in an hour, Onyango turned on the car’s heater

before peeling the plastic bags away from his dry feet and

pulling on his socks and shoes. He then used the gear lever

to select reverse in the automatic gearbox, and released the

hand brake.

The vehicle’s spinning rear wheels finally gained traction

in the mud and, after slowly reversing away from the rubble

of his ruined garage, he slid to a halt.

It was only when he pushed the gear selector forward into

drive that he suddenly remembered the rifle and the cash

still lying in the kitchen. He quickly pulled the gear lever

into neutral and paused to consider his options.

‘Getting a new phone is more important than anything

else,’ he tried to convince himself. ‘In any event, nobody is

going to go anywhere in this kind of weather.’

But then Onyango remembered that his maid was a

little absent-minded, and would occasionally do some

crazy things like burning holes in his clothes while ironing

because she had started to dream about other things, and

110

like making his bed the wrong way round so the sheets and

blankets pulled loose as soon as he got into it.

‘What if she finally decides to brave the storm and come to

work for fear of losing her job? What will she do when she sees

hundreds of thousands of Kenya Shilling bank notes covering

every available dry surface in the kitchen?’ He asked himself.

Moments later, the sound of the rain drumming against

the now-dented roof of his Pajero unexpectedly eased off,

and he stared at the distant, forbidding wall of the Ndakaini

Dam with indecision.

And then a combination of caution and greed got the

better of him.

Without thinking to replace his dry shoes and socks with

the plastic bags, he leapt out of his car and ran to the house

where he splashed into the kitchen. And it was while he

was grabbing handfuls of still-wet cash and stuffing it back

into the briefcase when, with total shock, he felt a strangely

violent but short vibration through the soles of his shoes.

And this had been caused by the underwater shockwave

when it finally smashed into the concrete section of the dam

wall.

While most of its force was dissipated by the wall’s sloping

concrete, inner surface, the wave’s residual power was

enough to undermine its already-weakened foundations.

With the billions of litres of water that the dam had been

designed to hold back, none of its architects and builders

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had ever imagined that there would ever be an earth tremor

while the dam was so full.

As a result of this lack of foresight with regards to the

environment and climate change, the Ndakaini Dam wall

and its supporting embankment finally capitulated to

nature’s fury.

At exactly the same time, Onyango was in his living

room, staring at the dam through what was suddenly a light

drizzle beyond the windows.

He watched as the dam wall collapsed with massive

fountains of muddy water reaching high into the sky and, a

bare millisecond later, he felt the floor of his house shaking

beneath his feet. And then he heard the massive explosion

of sound.

Immediately grabbing the money and the rifle, he ran out

of the house, hurled the two containers onto the passenger

seat, and dived behind the steering wheel. By now totally

panic-stricken because all his nightmares about the dam

wall collapsing had finally come true, he rammed the gear

selector into drive and pressed the accelerator all the way to

the floor.

It was the last mistake he would ever make.

The car’s wheels span uselessly in the mud and it didn’t

move. Suddenly realizing that he was going nowhere fast,

Onyango immediately abandoned the vehicle and began to

run wildly down his uneven driveway as fast as his legs could

carry him.

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However, the wall of mud and water that exploded out

of the ruptured dam wall travelled five times faster than he

could ever run.

It totally destroyed his house, rolled over his Pajero

several times before the mud quickly settled to bury the car

in its embrace, and then reached out towards Onyango’s

desperately running body

And while he ran, Onyango kept turning his head back

to keep pace with the fifty metre high wall of water, silt and

mud that, he quickly realized, he had no hope of outrunning.

While his heart pounded painfully against his ribs as

he put every effort into outrunning the flood, it suddenly

knocked him flat on his face as if to punish him for all his

previous sins, and he very quickly died by suffocation with

thousands of kilos of mud on top of him.

Monday, 9.30 am: A Kenya Air Force

Helicopter

With her family on board, the Kenya Air Force Sikorsky

helicopter that Amina had commandeered flew due north

through the rain to the Ndakaini Dam.

Despite his total exhaustion from a sleepless night, she

had asked her husband to join her so he could assess – and

later compile a full report about – just exactly how climate

change had caused this disaster.

Because she had left the house at dawn, she had asked

him to collect Aziza and Bakari en route because, despite

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their recent notoriety, they had nothing else to do since their

holiday at the coast had been delayed.

Twenty minutes after taking off from the air force

base at Eastleigh, they were flying around the dam and its

surrounding areas – together with numerous other aircraft

carrying press photographers, video-cameramen and

reporters – and staring down at a scene of total devastation.

The Ndakaini Dam was now totally empty except for a

massive, storm-fed river that was racing across the deepest,

silt-filled section of the reservoir. This cascaded through the

breach where the enormous dam wall had once held back

billions of litres of water, and then sped over what could

only be described as a sea of mud.

Of the town known as Gituru, there was no sign

whatsoever. The helicopter circled around the road that had

once run through it, but it had been blocked by the mud

and slime that was still pulsating due to the rain and the

storm-driven river. To either side of this, they saw hundreds

of stationary vehicles whose occupants were standing on

the road, staring at the still-moving, one metre-deep wall

of still-oozing mud in front of them, mud that had savagely

destroyed everything it had encountered, as witnessed by

the rich pickings that stuck out of its surface. There were

the back ends of cars that were seemingly floating; timber

supports from buildings; crumpled sheets of corrugated

iron; all sorts of trash and other debris; and even a couple

of bicycles.

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Amina ordered the pilot to fly to the furthest reaches of

the flood and, two kilometres east of where Gituru had once

been, they saw the end of the thick wall of mud, and the new

river cascading over it as gravity dictated its course.

When she felt she had seen enough of the devastation to

report back to the president, Amina – who was sitting in the

co-pilot’s seat – turned around to look at Salim.

“Have you seen enough for your report, or do you want

to go round one more time before we take a look at the

damage along the banks of the Athi River?” She asked him

while noticing that, behind him, Aziza and Bakari had their

faces pressed to the aircraft’s windows as they stared down

at the result of nature’s fury.

“More than enough, thank you,” Salim tiredly answered

her question with a humbled voice as he suddenly worried

about the future integrity of Kenya’s other major dams like

Masinga, Seven Forks, Sasamua and the Turkwel Gorge due

to the effects of climate change.

Amina turned to the pilot.

“Let’s go down to Kiboko, and follow the Athi River from

there.”

Just when the pilot was working his controls to gain both

speed and altitude, Bakari suddenly shouted at him.

“Stop!” he yelled. “Go down!”

Amina whipped round to see what her son was so excited

about, and saw him pointing down at something while he

explained what it was to his sister.

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“Please do as he says,” Amina told the pilot. “He may be

young, but he’s not stupid.”

While the aircraft was descending, Aziza and Bakari

figured out how to open its access door and, just as soon as

the helicopter’s skids hit the ground, they leapt out of it.

After getting their bearings, they began to fight their way

through the mud but, after ten minutes, they gave up.

Now covered with slime, and stinking accordingly, they

ran back into the helicopter without closing the door behind

them.

“Please go back slowly towards where we came from,”

Bakari begged the pilot with a loud yell.

His mother nodded at him to confirm her son’s request.

The helicopter took off and, while flying very slowly just

two metres above the mud, it headed back towards where

Gituru had once been established.

Monday, 9.45 am: The Ndakaini Dam

Disaster, Gituru

As soon as they noticed this peculiar behaviour by a

government aircraft, and with little more to report about the

dam’s collapse, all the media crews ordered their pilots to

zero in on it.

Like a flock of vultures looking for food, the helicopters

and light aircraft converged above Amina’s helicopter as

though they were a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

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Then they began to jostle for position to get the best

angles and the best light, and the scene in the sky above the

disaster quickly began to resemble a war-time, aerial combat

zone.

How none of the aircraft collided was anybody’s guess!

Monday, 9.50 am: A Kenya Air Force

Helicopter

“There it is!” Aziza suddenly yelled with excitement above

the roar of the helicopter’s engine and the throbbing

downdraught of its spinning rotors.

Bakari followed the line of his sister’s fingers and

immediately grinned at her.

“DOWN!” they yelled in unison at the top of their voices.

By now totally confused about what her children were

doing, Amina nodded at the pilot. The helicopter slowly

dropped centimetres at a time until its pilot turned to Amina

with a wide-eyed, worried frown.

“If the skids sink into that mud, I don’t know whether

we will be able to get airborne again,” he told her as he

worked his flight controls so the helicopter began to hover.

“Especially,” he added, “as the downdraught from the rotors

is going to dry the mud very, very quickly, and it will start

setting like cement.”

Amina fully understood what the pilot had told her,

and both she and Salim turned to look back at their filthy

children with expressions of regret.

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“I’m sorry,” Amina shouted at them. “But this is now

getting too dangerous for all of us. And, just out of curiosity,

do you mind telling us just exactly what you’re doing?”

“There’s a child down there who is fighting to survive,”

Aziza yelled at her mother. “We can’t just leave it to die.”

“I’m sorry,” Amina shouted back. “But we can’t put all

our lives in danger just because of one survivor.”

For the first time in her life, and much to Amina and

Salim’s total shock, Aziza glared at her parents with hate.

She then turned round to focus on the mud below her, and

jumped out of the helicopter.

“NO!” Amina screamed with immediate despair and

foreboding.

But it was too late, because Bakari followed her into the

void moments later.

Monday, 10.00 am: The Ndakaini Dam

Disaster, Gituru

It was with total relish that the media crews recorded two

people jumping out of the helicopter when it was barely a

metre above the oozing slime, especially when they somehow

recognised Aziza and Bakari despite their grime-covered

faces!

This story, as a result, was going to make yet more

headline news.

They filmed and photographed the exact moment when

the two youngsters landed in the mud, and when they pulled

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a five year-old girl out of the morass. Bakari had only spotted

her because of the brightly coloured Maasai bracelet on her

wrist as she thrust it above the black, heaving morass. And it

was only this that had led his eyes to her blackened face with

only the whites of her eyes still clearly visible while she had

valiantly fought against all odds to survive.

They filmed Aziza clearing the muck away from the girl’s

face while the downdraught from the helicopter’s rotors

rippled the surface of the still-wet mud around her. And

they filmed her as she gave the girl the kiss of life, and then

when she and Bakari battled to get this one survivor of the

devastation into the aircraft with the help of their parents

because it could not land on the wet mud.

Just as soon as her children and the child they had rescued

were safely on board, Amina, now also plastered with mud,

turned to the pilot.

“Take us to the Karen Hospital as quickly as you can. It’s

the nearest place with somewhere we can land, and one with

all the necessary facilities to save this child’s life.”

Having issued her instructions, she called her secretary so

she could prepare the hospital for their impending arrival.

Monday, 12.30 pm: The Aftershock of

Onyango’s Death

Onyango’s contact sat under an umbrella on the verandah

of her house as she stared at her Nokia smart-phone with

confusion.

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‘Why wasn’t Onyango accepting her call?’ She asked

herself. ‘Or was it because he now had the information she

had given him, he was not going to pay her?’

Suddenly hungry for the remainder of the cash he had

promised her, she stared at her phone as the willing it to

come alive with either a call from him, or a message from

M-Pesa to announce the arrival of her money.

Hermann Bernstein was suffering from the same problem

when he tried to call Onyango so they could meet at a venue

he had decided on. It was a little known Indian vegetarian

restaurant in the back streets of Nairobi.

He slowly removed his mobile from his ear for the third

time in order to stare at its screen, and saw the same message:

‘Sorry. The mobile subscriber cannot be reached.’

‘Perhaps the man had closer ties to my wife than I thought,’

he began to worry. ‘Perhaps I told him too much on the phone

instead of saving it for our meeting, despite all the money I

offered him to kill her.’

In the office next to his, Mathilde Bernstein stared at

the same message on her smart-phone screen with sudden

anger.

Without any hesitation, she found another number on

her smart-phone – that of a man who could only be described

as a thug, and a man who had successfully done two hit-jobs

for her in the past. She quickly gave him his instructions

before abruptly hanging up

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Because of her distrustful mind, she suddenly realised

that she had given Onyango too much by way of the cash

and the weapon he had asked for in advance. And she knew

that he had run away with both in order to make a fool of

her.

With sudden fury, she jumped out of her chair and

stormed across her office to its rear door, one that opened

out onto a steeply descending, winding steel stairway that

led down to the factory’s workshop floor.

As soon as she appeared, all the Kenyan workers stared up

at her. Within a second she recognised her mistake because

she was wearing an extremely short skirt and excessively

high heels.

If she had had any sense with regards to her well-being,

she would have realized that her shoes were not designed to

negotiate a steel stairway, and that she should have retreated

back into her office, and closed the door behind her.

However, with her simplistic greed that had so far driven

her anger because of Onyango’s infidelity, she stepped out

across the metal landing and began to make her way down

the steps.

And it was because of her anger, and the fact that she was

certain that all her employees were staring up her skirt, that

she rushed her descent.

Seconds later, her high heels slipped on the steel steps

and she fell.

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The weight of her body bounced her down the steps and,

at their next corner, she shot out from beneath the steel

safety railings and, when she hit the workshop floor below

her, the force of the impact was enough to break her neck.

She died without fully realizing that her evil life had

finally caught up with her.

Monday, 6.45 pm: The Qadir Residence,

Nairobi

Having spent most of her day with filing her official reports

about the Ndakaini Dam disaster – just as Salim had –

Amina had spent the rest of the time in her office trying to

locate the little girl’s parents, or at least her extended family.

She had finally given up with the sad realization that they

had probably all been killed as a result of the Ndakaini Dam

collapse.

But because – and for obvious reasons – the girl had no

identification documents, this would be almost impossible

to verify until she came out of the hospital’s intensive care

unit, and could talk coherently.

By the time she had driven herself home at the end of

what should have been the first day of her official holiday,

she had given the problem considerable thought. Especially

because she knew full-well that the girl would have little

chance of survival without any family to support her once

she was released from the hospital.

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Amina locked the front door behind her, kicked off her

shoes, and dropped her handbag onto the top of a side-

table in the entrance hall before entering the lounge. With

a quick glance, she noted with satisfaction that her husband

and children were all wearing clean clothes as they stared

expectantly at the television. Still standing in the doorway

to the sitting room, and suddenly feeling grubby in her

muddy clothes, she was about to announce her arrival and

then immediately excuse herself while she went upstairs to

shower.

But then the evening news started.

Monday, 7.00 pm: The IKTN Televised

News Broadcast

“This morning, after the tragic collapse of the Ndakaini Dam

wall, and the resultant deaths of hundreds, if not thousands,

of Kenyans, there was still one little candle burning in the

wind,” Margaret Kinuthia reported as her sad face was

replaced by a film of the Air Force helicopter hovering low

over the mud, and Aziza and Bakari saving the little girl’s

life.

“When Mrs. Amina Qadir, the Cabinet Secretary for the

Environment, visited the devastated area, her husband, who

is the senior meteorologist at Kenya’s Met. Department,

and her two children, Aziza and Bakari, were with her,” she

continued with her narration of the story. “And it was they,

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now well-known for their fight against plastic, who spotted

the sole survivor of this catastrophe, and risked their lives in

order to save hers.”

The film cut to the helicopter landing very close to the

Karen Hospital where a team of medics was standing by

with their equipment and a stretcher. With the aircraft’s

rotors still spinning, its rear door opened, and the camera

zoomed in on Aziza, totally covered in mud, holding the

rescued – but now unconscious – girl in her arms and slowly

walking down the steps followed by an equally filthy Bakari.

As the helicopter door closed and the aircraft took off, Aziza

gently laid the little girl onto the stretcher, and started to

follow the medics into the hospital when Margaret pushed

her microphone towards her.

“Excuse me, Aziza, but what exactly happened out there?”

she asked her.

With her face blackened by now-dry mud and slime that

was starting to peel off her skin, she stopped and turned to

face the camera.

“The tragic effects of climate change that we can no

longer control due to the corporate greed around the world.

But we were lucky to be in exactly the right place at exactly

the right time, and we only did what anybody would have

done under the circumstances.”

With that said, she smiled, and a large piece of mud fell

off her cheek before she turned to follow Bakari into the

hospital.

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The film cut to Amina’s office where, despite having a

laptop computer and piles of files on the desk in front of her,

the filth on her beige safari suit was clearly visible.

“Honourable Minister,” Margaret spoke into her

microphone. “Today we have witnessed one of the most

daring acts of courage and bravery ever carried out by such

young children during Kenya’s long history. Do you have

anything to say about this?”

“No, except to say that I am extremely proud of them,”

Amina replied. “That is especially now, and after the

event. At the time, I had told my youngsters that it was too

dangerous to try and save the little girl but, before I could do

anything, they had jumped out of the helicopter. The rest is

history, and I can only pray that the child survives.”

“I think the whole of Kenya does,” Margaret commented.

“And after you left the hospital, you followed the line of the

Athi River with the helicopter. What did you find there?”

“Scenes of complete and utter devastation,” Amina

replied. “Bridges, villages, and tourist camps and lodges

completely washed away. When we got to Lugard’s Falls in

Tsavo East National Park, we saw the flood waters rushing

towards us, and the wall of water was at least three metres

high. Our last stop was at a tourist camp near the Sala Gate

exit from the park, but thankfully it was deserted. The

authorities had done their job extremely well and, up to

now, we have not had one reported fatality.”

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The film then cut to a private room in the Karen Hospital’s

High Dependency Unit where the little girl had sensors

attached to every part of her body, pulsating monitors on

shelves and tables around her bed, and drips attached to her

wrists.

“How is this only little survivor of the Ndakaini tragedy

doing?” Margaret asked the attendant nurse.

“After pumping a lot of mud and other rubbish out of her

stomach, and feeding her intravenously with vital nutrients

and antibiotics, she is finally starting to stabilize to our

satisfaction. However, I worry about what will happen to her

when she is released from the hospital.”

“What do you mean?” Margaret asked the nurse.

“I have been sitting with her for the last five hours. During

that time she has survived a fever during which I truly

thought she would die. And during that time, with sweat

pouring from her little face, she tried to tear off everything

we had placed on or in her body so that she would survive.

After I had calmed her down with a song and iced water, and

after I had replaced everything she had removed, she started

talking in her sleep. What shocked me is that she did this

in very good English instead of Ki-Swahili or Gikuyu. She

described everything that happened when the dam collapsed

at a time when her entire family had gathered in her house

to celebrate the wedding of one of its daughters on Saturday,

and that all of them had spent the night in nearby lodgings.

In her fever, she said things that made me cry like I have

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never cried before. And it is because of this that, unless a

guardian angel arrives from heaven, without a home and

a family this little girl will ultimately suffer from far worse

than what happened to her today.”

Monday, 7.15 pm: The Qadir Residence,

Nairobi

With all thoughts of showering and changing forgotten,

Amina wiped the tears from her cheeks as she heard Aziza

and Bakari crying, and she watched her husband – who had

fortunately managed to sleep all afternoon – clench his jaws

and brush away his tears with his fingertips.

As soon as she had brought herself under control after

hearing the news report about the little girl’s family, she

announced her presence by walking into the lounge and

sitting down next to Salim. Being too ashamed to face her

because of the tears in his eyes, he only acknowledged her

presence by groping for her hand.

“Hello my love,” she whispered. “A man’s ability to cry is

one of his greatest strengths, and by no means a weakness. It

is a testament to his emotional stability because, if you men

bottle-up all your feelings and emotions, you will ultimately

destroy yourselves because of unnecessary stress.”

Amina felt his hand grip hers by way of acknowledging

her advice and, as soon as Salim turned to her with a weak

smile, she turned to her children who were comforting each

other on the sofa.

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“Hey guys,” she called to them. “Just in case you haven’t

noticed, I’m home, and I’m waiting to hear what one or

both of you have made for my dinner before I go upstairs to

shower and change.”

Aziza and Bakari turned to face her, and stared at her as

though she was mad.

“You missed the news, mama,” Bakari immediately

complained. “That lady who told Kenya about our plogging

has just said that the girl we rescued might not survive.”

“I watched the news from behind you,” his mother

contradicted him. “And as a result of this, I feel that we all

need to discuss this issue during what I can only hope will

be a delicious meal.”

Both Aziza and Bakari got the hint and immediately

vacated the warmth of their sofa, rushed to the kitchen, and

started cooking.

An hour later, with Amina having showered and changed,

and after having had an intense discussion with Salim, the

youngsters served up a delicious starter of thick mushroom

soup with little squares of fried bread in a small, separate

bowl.

After tasting it, and indicating her approval to the chefs,

she turned back to her husband.

“As I was saying, all we can do now after all the media

coverage is to pray that a relative eventually claims her.”

“And what is she going to do until then, and after she’s

released from the hospital?” Salim asked her with a worried

frown.

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“We will delay our holiday until she is well-enough to

leave the hospital. My mother will understand. And then

she can stay here and, if nobody turns up, we will take her

to the coast with us,” Amina suggested, to her husband’s

approval, and to an excited sharing of looks between their

two youngsters.

They made their plans to accommodate the little girl, and

Aziza and Bakari cleared away the soup bowls and replaced

them with plates filled with spaghetti covered by a thick,

creamy cheese and bacon sauce for their parents, and an

equally thick tomato sauce for themselves.

Amina stared at their food with confusion, and then at

Aziza.

“Why have you two got a different sauce to ours?” she

demanded to know.

“Because,” Aziza told her with a satisfied grin, “and if you

remember, I told you that I was becoming a vegetarian.”

“Me too,” Bakari informed his mother who shook her

head with immediate but feigned despair.

After a few seconds of silence while the family enjoyed

their food, Aziza looked up at her mother.

“On the TV, that nurse said that all the little girl’s family

had been killed. Or do you think there might be others who

didn’t go to the wedding?” Aziza asked with a frown.

“We will just have to wait and see. You know how most

Kenyans have large, extended families. I mean, somebody

might have been sick, or couldn’t get to the wedding for

other reasons,” Amina suggested.

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“But what if it’s true that all her family did pass on? What

then?” Aziza persisted while Bakari stared at his mother,

waiting for her reaction. “I mean…” Aziza added before

Amina could reply. “I mean, we can’t just dump her in an

orphanage, can we?”

Amina stared into Aziza’s eyes for a moment, looked

at Bakari’s expectant expression, and then turned to her

husband.

“That was quite simply delicious,” Salim commented

with a contented smile. “The best spaghetti I’ve had all day.

Is there any more?”

“Of course there is!” Bakari almost shouted at him. “But

first, please tell us about the little girl.”

“Then please give me some more of your food, and I will

give you my answer,” his father told him in order to buy

himself just a little more time.

Bakari scowled at Salim and then leapt out of his chair –

almost toppling it in the process – and grabbed his father’s

plate so fast that the spoon and fork were left spinning on

the table mat.

“Would you like some more as well, mama?” Aziza asked.

“No. I’m fine, thank you,” Amina replied with a smile

as Bakari grabbed his father’s utensils, put them on top of

the steaming food, and then positioned the plate in front of

Salim before racing back to his chair.

“Thank you, young man,” Salim said before taking

a mouthful of food, and chewing it contentedly while

everybody stared at him.

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He then wiped his lips with a napkin before turning to

his son.

“The question you asked me is not an easy one to answer.

There are responsibilities to consider, financial obligations,

and all sorts of other things as well. So, and to answer your

question, I will ask Aziza a question because she is your

elder,” Salim looked at Bakari with a sad smile.

“What?” his daughter asked him with a suddenly worried

frown.

“If you were in my shoes, and no member of the girl’s

family steps forward to claim her, what would you do?”

Salim asked her.

Aziza stared at her father with a mixture of frustration

and confusion for a few seconds, and then turned to Amina

for help. She, however, was smiling at her husband and,

when she looked at Bakari, he was suddenly staring down

at his lap.

Knowing she was well and truly on her own, Aziza briefly

fiddled with the spoon and fork on her empty plate, and

then looked directly into her father’s eyes.

“If I was in your shoes,” she began slowly as everybody

turned to listen to her. “I would think about a little girl

who, on one day was loving life because she had a family,

because she had a home, and because she had nothing to

worry about and, on the very next day, she was a little girl

who was fighting for survival because she had suddenly lost

everything that she held most dear to her heart.”

Aziza paused as she continued to stare at her father, and

while her mother used her napkins to dry her eyes.

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“And if I was in your shoes after I had rescued that girl

from almost certain death,” Aziza continued with tears

rolling down her cheeks. “I would feel totally responsible for

her future well-being. And this would be because, if I later

turned my back on her, I would have condemned her to a

fate worse than death. This would be something that I would

never be able to live with thereafter. So, and from my point

of view in my shoes, and knowing that I had the money to

give this girl a new and possibly better life, I would discuss

the issue with my family and, if they agreed, I would adopt

her.”

Salim stared at his daughter, his mind racing with

wonderment at her eloquence, and then turned to look at

Bakari.

“And you, my son? What are your thoughts about this

serious family matter?”

“I totally agree with Aziza,” Bakari immediately replied

without any further thought.

“Then that is exactly what we will do if nobody claims the

little girl you rescued,” Salim declared.

“But what about mama?” Aziza immediately protested.

“You haven’t asked her!”

“We had already agreed to adopt the girl while you

two were in the kitchen,” Salim told her. “I just wanted to

make sure that we were all on the same page for all the right

reasons.”

132

Tuesday, 7.30 am: The Qadir Residence,

Nairobi

Aziza and Bakari were the first to arrive downstairs and

went straight to the kitchen. The housekeeper stared at them

in wonderment and, by way of an explanation for this, she

handed Aziza the newspapers before turning to make them

some tea.

They carried the papers to the dining room where they

sat down and unfolded the tabloids and, while Aziza took

one, Bakari took the other.

To their total astonishment, a picture of them with their

grimy faces and wearing their filthy clothes while Aziza held

the little girl in her arms at the hospital filled both front

pages.

And even the bold, banner headlines above the images

were almost identical.

‘LITTLE HEROES’, read one, and ‘TRUE HEROES’ the

other.

Chapter Five

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Tuesday, 9.00 am: A Private Room, The

Karen Hospital, Nairobi

Aziza and Bakari sat in their chairs to either side of the

little girl’s bed, and stared at her as though willing her to

wake up.

An hour later she did.

Her eyes slowly opened and gradually focused on Aziza

and, when she turned away from her, she saw Bakari.

Even though she had more-or-less recovered from the

effects of all the medications that had been forced into her

young, unsuspecting body the day before, she was still a little

dazed.

However, while her system gradually stabilized to allow

her to regain a little of her strength, she slowly began to

recognise them.

“You are the people who saved my life,” she whispered

with unexpectedly good English as she suddenly remembered

what had happened to her in the early hours of the previous

morning.

And with that she started crying as the attendant nurse

looked on, a lady who knew full-well from experience that

tears were often a better cure than any medicine.

With her feminine intuition dictating how best she could

resolve this crisis, Aziza instinctively took one of the little

girl’s hands in both of hers.

The child stared at her through her tears and, suddenly

uncaring about all the sensors and needles attached to her

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body, she suddenly threw herself into Aziza’s arms while

Bakari looked on with total confusion.

Aziza caressed the little girl’s head, neck and back until

she had stopped crying, and then gently pulled away to smile

into the girl’s eyes.

“Hey, little girl, you are going to be okay. While I know

you lost everything yesterday, we, together with our parents,

are going to make you our new little sister.”

When the girl stared at her as though she was mad, and

started crying again, Aziza took her into her arms once

more, caressed her gently, and then whispered into her ear.

“Just so you know, my name is Aziza, my little brother’s

name is Bakari, my mother is called Amina, and my father’s

name is Salim. What is your name?”

The little girl suddenly pulled back from Aziza’s

comforting embrace, and used her fingertips to wipe the

tears from her cheeks.

She briefly squeezed her eyes shut to clear away the last

of the tears in her eyes, and then her face unexpectedly lit up

with a beautiful smile.

“My name is Charity!”

Tuesday, 2.30 pm: Various Children’s

Clothes Shops

After a delicious vegetable lasagna followed by a fruit salad

that Amina had prepared for lunch, she, Aziza and Bakari

went out shopping.

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They went to all the major shopping malls in the

Westland’s suburb of Nairobi and, while guessing Charity’s

size with surprising accuracy, they bought her a wardrobe

of new clothes that included dresses, skirts, blouses, jeans

and slacks, underwear, socks and shoes. They also decided

to buy her a pair of fluffy teddy-bears in case she needed

some comfort at night.

And, at their last stop, they found her two swimming

costumes and, by sheer chance, a beautiful pink suitcase.

As soon as they returned home, they unpacked everything

and asked their housekeeper to wash and iron all the clothes.

This was so they would be a little softer when they packed

them into Charity’s bag in readiness for their holiday at the

coast.

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Wednesday, 3.00 pm: The Nairobi-

Mombasa Highway

Because their holiday had already been delayed by two days,

and after an earlier call from the hospital, Salim and Amina

had packed the car with their luggage and Farida’s gifts

before they left their house with Aziza and Bakari.

When they had walked into the Karen Hospital’s reception

area, Charity had rushed towards Aziza and Bakari with an

excited, happy smile on her face before shyly looking up at

Amina and Salim who she vaguely remembered from the

helicopter.

However, she had been wearing the same clothes that she

had been when she had been rescued, and which the hospital

had laundered for her.

Just a dull grey smock and a pair of faded blue panties

that were well past their throwaway-date.

Without a word to her parents, Aziza angrily grabbed

Charity’s new suitcase out of the car, and had then dragged

the little girl into the Lady’s restroom and stripped her.

Chapter Six

137

While Aziza was stuffing her old clothes into a trash can,

Charity admired herself in a full length mirror with total

shock before smiling at Aziza who was kneeling beside her.

“Thank you,” she said, and then burst into tears because

she had never expected anything like this to ever happen to

her.

From the hospital, Salim had used a bypass road to

access the Mombasa highway and, with Charity sitting

between Aziza and Bakari on the back seat while she stared

at everything around her with total fascination, they had

driven south east through the small towns of Athi River,

Sultan Hamud, Emali, Kiboko, Makindu and Kibwezi before

finally stopping at Mtito Andei – the WaKamba name for a

forest of eagles – a small township almost half-way between

Nairobi and Mombasa.

It was by then that Aziza suddenly realised that Charity

had never once left her village called Gituru, and knew

absolutely nothing whatsoever about the outside world

beyond it.

After filling his Toyota Fielder with fuel, Salim turned

right to enter Tsavo West National Park. This is – combined

with the Tsavo East National Park that lies on the left of the

Nairobi to Mombasa highway – one of the largest wildlife

protection areas in the world.

As soon as they started driving along the park’s murram

roads, Salim kept his speed down to the fifty kilometre-an-

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hour speed limit demanded by all of Kenya’s National Parks

and Reserves. This was so that drivers would not accidentally

kill any animals, birds or reptiles that were crossing the road

in front of them.

However, after they had only driven a kilometre from the

park’s entrance gate, Bakari spotted an empty mineral-water

bottle on the side of the road.

“Stop!” he yelled at nobody in particular.

Even though Salim did not realize what the problem was,

he immediately stopped the car and Bakari jumped out to

collect the bottle.

As soon as he returned to his seat next to Charity, and

had dumped the bottle on the floor at his feet, Amina turned

around to look at him.

“One of the rules of all our parks is that you are not allowed

to leave your car except in places where it is permitted.”

Bakari glared at her.

“I do not care. I mean, would you rather see wild plastic

or wild animals in a place like this?”

Amina looked at her husband but, because he had nothing

to say, he drove on towards their destination.

After another five hundred metres, Aziza spotted a plastic

Coca-Cola bottle and told her father to stop, which he did.

And then, after every hundred metres, either Aziza or

Bakari would spot yet another offending piece of plastic,

and get out of the car to retrieve it. By this time, Charity

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had decided for herself that this was a wonderful game, and

started to join in.

However, she had never seen a wild animal before. When

a Thompson’s gazelle had stuck its head up above the long

grass beside the road and stared at her, she ran back to the

car with screams of terror

After an hour, during which they explained everything

they knew about every animal they saw to Charity, they had

to start throwing all their trash over their suitcases and their

grand-mother’s presents.

They finally drove into the lodge car park as the sun was

setting over the western horizon, and Salim went into the

reception to sign them in. However, after the porters had

immediately recognised the minister and Kenya’s two little

heroes, when they went to the back of the car to collect their

luggage, they were shocked to find it covered with plastic

trash.

“Could you please find me a sack?” Bakari asked them.

“We are NOT taking all that rubbish to Mombasa!”

Amina decided it was finally time to put her foot down.

“We are too!” Bakari argued. “If we leave it here, it will

just get thrown onto a dump and wind up in the sea. We

might just as well throw it onto the beach ourselves when we

get there tomorrow!” Bakari glared at his mother.

Amina smiled at the porters despite her embarrassment

at having a family argument in front of them, and then

shrugged her shoulders casually with a kind of kids-will-

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be-kids attitude. The three men grinned at her nervously,

and she turned to glare at Bakari while Aziza looked on with

a smile on her lips, and Charity with a suddenly worried

frown.

“So, and because you seem to have an answer for

everything these days, what are you going to do with it when

we get there?” She asked him.

“When Aziza and I were on the internet, we found two

different places in Mombasa that recycle plastic. So, when

we get there, I am going to take all this to them. Is there

anything else?” he asked her with a sudden grin.

Amina knew she had lost, but she was still determined to

have the last word.

“Yes,” she replied with a smile. “After these fine young

men have put all your trash into a sack, would you like them

to take it to your room together with your suitcase?”

Bakari ignored her sarcasm.

“Now that is a good idea,” Bakari commented. “I should

have thought of it myself because with you and papa sharing

a room, and with Aziza sharing hers with Charity, I won’t

feel so lonely because I will be sharing mine with my sack!”

Amina initially glared at him, but then her lips curved

into a smile as Aziza burst out laughing, and even Charity

managed a grin.

After the family had wiped their faces and hands with hot

towels, and enjoyed their welcome drinks, the porters picked

up their luggage and guided them to their rooms.

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When Aziza and Charity arrived in theirs, the teenager

immediately showed the little girl around their room, and

explained how everything worked. Charity’s eyes were wide

with wonder because, other than her hospital room, she had

never seen anything like this before.

“And this, and everything inside it, is all yours,” Aziza

told her as she picked up the pink suitcase, put it on the bed,

and opened it.

She pulled out the two teddy-bears and gave them to

Charity who, eyes wide with delight, took them gently from

Aziza’s hands and immediately began to cuddle them.

Her delight quickly gave way to wonderment when Aziza

began to unpack all her clothes, and showed them to her

– one garment after another – before placing them on the

shelves in the cupboard.

When she turned back to Charity, the little girl was frozen

in place with her teddy-bears in her arms, with tears rolling

down her cheeks, but with a glowing smile on her face.

Then she put her two new friends carefully down on the

bed, and turned to rush into Aziza’s waiting arms.

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Thursday, 6.30 am: The Tsavo River Lodge

After an extremely tasty dinner and a blissful night’s sleep at

the safari lodge they had chosen, Salim, Amina and Bakari

– all wearing extremely casual, colourful and light clothing

because they were soon due to arrive in the heat and

humidity of the Kenya coast – sat down at their breakfast

table on the verandah in front of the dining room, one which

overlooked a waterhole where a small herd of elephants was

drinking in the early morning sunlight, together with a large

herd of impala, one of Africa’s most graceful and beautiful

antelopes.

Aziza and Charity – similarly dressed – joined them a

few minutes later and, as soon as they had sat down, Charity

could not take her eyes off the wild animals, not even when

she ordered her meal – with Aziza’s help – from the waiter,

and not even when all their food arrived because, and to the

little girl’s total fascination, a herd of buffalo had arrived,

together with a few zebra.

Chapter Seven

143

“They are so beautiful,” she said to nobody in particular

as Aziza tapped her on her shoulder and pointed down at

her plate.

“I agree, Charity,” Amina commented as soon as the little

girl had started to eat. “But it is such a pity that we will soon

no longer see these magnificent animals in the wild ever

again,”

“What do you mean?” Aziza demanded to know as she

stared at her mother.

“Man’s greed, just as we discussed last week,” Amina told

her. “You see, my dear, every elephant carries some ivory,

even the small ones. And these extra-long teeth of theirs are

today valued at about a hundred thousand shillings per kilo

in Far-Eastern countries like China, Japan and Thailand.

And it’s because of this that everybody wants to kill them

because of all the money they can make from their tusks,

and from all the meat they can sell in butcher’s shops after

calling it cow’s meat.”

“But… but what about all the beautiful little animals that

are sharing the water with the elephants?” Bakari asked his

mother with a worried look in his eyes.

“Have you ever heard about bush meat?” She asked him.

“No,” he admitted.

“Well, normal meat from cows, goats and sheep is now

getting too expensive for a lot of people. So more and more

men are trapping these beautiful little animals, killing them,

and then selling their meat in the markets for a lot of profit

because it costs them nothing.”

144

Aziza stared at her mother and, suddenly sad, she looked

out at all the animals around the waterhole. Moments later,

she slowly put her spoon down on the saucer holding her

bowl filled with yoghurt and muesli.

“Come on, Aziza,” her father told her. “Please finish your

breakfast. We told your Nana we would be there in time for

lunch.”

Aziza glanced at him.

“I’m not hungry any more.”

Thursday, 12.15 pm: Farida’s House,

Mombasa

Amina could almost have been her mother’s twin sister. The

middle-aged, tall and gracious lady called Farida looked –

except for a few grey hairs – a lot younger than her sixty one

years of age.

Dressed in a colourful and traditional blue, red, black and

white khanga, and with a pair of beaded leather sandals on

her feet, she was wearing no make-up or jewelry when she

met them at the door of her simple but large, single storey

house beside the sea.

She screamed with delight when she saw them, and

embraced Amina and Salim with long hugs, and then turned

her attention to Aziza and Bakari.

“My goodness,” she said to them with her eyes wide, “You

have both grown so much since I last saw you.”

145

“If you came to Nairobi to see us sometimes,” Aziza

smiled up at her, “then you would not get such a shock every

time we meet.”

Farida laughed with delight, and bent down to kiss each

of her grand children in turn.

“I do not care if I never see Nairobi again,” she told them.

“I have everything I want here, and a perfect climate. And

now I have my little heroes to keep me company as well. And

that’s after one whole year.”

“What do you mean?” Bakari asked her.

“Hah!” she grinned at him. “We do get newspapers down

here, you know? I read all about your fun and games in the

supermarket, what the president had to say about it a few

days later, your plogging, and then when you saved this

beautiful little girl who, your mama has told me, might soon

become a member of our family.”

With that she swept Charity into her arms, effortlessly

picked her up, and then angled her hip to make Charity

comfortable. Somewhat startled by this unexpected welcome

from a woman she had never seen before, and terrified that

this lady would start treating her like a baby just like all the

elderly women in her family had once done, Charity stared

at her with a frown, and with sudden tears in her eyes.

However, when Farida paid her no further attention while

she caught up on all the Nairobi gossip with Amina and

Salim, she began to relax.

146

Aziza and Bakari glanced at one another just as Farida’s

housekeeper, dressed in a white uniform, her cook also in

white, and her gardener, who was wearing green overalls,

all came to greet the family, and welcome them back to

Mombasa. While the housekeeper and the cook returned

to their duties inside the house shortly afterwards, the

gardener went to unpack the car. When he removed one of

the suitcases, a cascade of plastic bottles of every shape and

colour fell to the sandy driveway.

“My goodness,” she exclaimed as she turned her attention

back to Charity. “You must have been very thirsty while you

drove down here!”

Charity giggled at her new-found friend as Salim laughed

at Farida’s comment.

“No, Farida. The kids have become so angry about plastic

that they collected every bottle they saw when we drove

through the park yesterday, and even more this morning.”

“I am proud of you, my little darlings. But I warn you,

you are going to be very busy here,” Farida told them with

a frown.

“What do you mean, nana?” they asked her together.

“My whole beach is covered with the cursed stuff! Come,

let us go inside so you can settle in and freshen up before we

have a drink and some lunch.”

147

Thursday, 1.00 pm: Farida’s House,

Mombasa

The family settled themselves around a table on the veranda

that overlooked a grassy lawn, a number of coconut palms

and, beyond a slight rise, the blue waters of the Indian Ocean.

While the adults sipped at various types of fruit juice, Aziza

and Bakari were totally happy with their fresh, cold coconut

water, as was Charity who had never tasted anything like it

before.

Farida asked her grandchildren how they were doing

at school, and Amina proudly told her how well they had

both done during their most recent exams. And, while the

two women were discussing Amina’s plans for Charity’s

education, the cook and the housekeeper started placing

trays and bowls of food on a large side table against the

veranda’s back wall.

Farida stood up to make sure everything was in order,

and then called her family to start helping themselves.

Amina and Salim filled their plates with grilled fish, stir-

fried vegetables, rice and some fresh salad, and then added a

little of each of the different sauces to their food.

And then, under their grandmother’s watchful eye, Aziza,

Bakari and Charity started to help themselves.

When they turned to carry their plates to the table, Farida

stopped them.

“You have not taken any fish!” she complained.

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“We are vegetarians, Nana. We don’t eat meat any more,”

Aziza responded with a defiant look.

“Since when?” their grandmother demanded to know.

“Aziza on Friday and me on Monday,” Bakari told her.

Farida glanced at Amina but she merely shook her head,

her way of saying ‘please don’t discuss it’.

After their lunch that they had finished with large bowls of

fresh fruit salad, Aziza, Bakari and Charity rushed excitedly

to their rooms to change into their swimming costumes.

“I do not know what is getting into today’s children,”

Farida said to Amina as soon as they had gone. It is one thing

to start a war against plastic, but quite another to become a

vegetarian.”

She paused for a moment.

“I mean, your father would have had a fit if he had still

been with us.”

Amina smiled sadly at her mother as she remembered her

late father who had been Kenya’s Ambassador to the United

States with his offices in New York. It was there that he had

been killed when terrorists had flown two airliners into the

Twin Towers complex in the November of 2001.

“You are right, mama,” she said quietly. “But Salim and

I were talking about becoming vegetarians ourselves on our

way here this morning, or at least cutting down on our meat

in a big way.”

“Why?” Farida demanded to know with a worried

expression on her face.

149

“For the same reason as the kids, really,” Amina told

her mother. “And we actually think it is a much healthier

option. I mean, a lot of famous presidents, actors and singers

are vegetarians today, and they always look a lot better than

any of us.”

“What a lot of rubbish!” her mother told her. “Name one

of them?”

“One is your favourite singer, Paul McCartney. Then

there are my favourite singers, Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce.

Would you like me to continue?” Amina asked her with a

smile.

“No, thank you,” her mother told her. “Why are you

always so right about everything?” she asked with a slight

smile on her lips.

“Because it is my job to be right as much as I can,” Amina

replied.

“Then why is your husband so wrong most of the time?”

Salim burst out laughing.

Thursday, 2.15 pm: Farida’s Beach,

Mombasa

Bakari arrived on the verandah wearing a baggy, almost knee-

length white swimming costume with ‘Hawaii’ stamped all

over it and, moments later, Aziza appeared in a blue and

yellow striped single-piece outfit while Charity was wearing

a similar costume but in pink and white.

150

They grinned excitedly at their elders, grabbed the towels

that the housekeeper had put out for them, and ran down

the sandy path towards the beach.

“Such beautiful children,” Farida commented as she

watched them go.

“All thanks to you, Mama,” Amina said, leaning forwards

to pat her mother’s hand.

Aziza, Bakari and Charity dashed up a slight rise but,

when they reached the top from where they could look down

onto the beach, they stopped exactly where they were. What

had once been a beautiful, white sandy beach that stretched

as far as the eye could see was now all covered in plastic.

With a mixture of sadness and anger, they dropped their

towels and slowly walked down the gentle slope.

They found empty plastic bottles and jars; broken pieces

of plastic mugs and plates; bits of plastic fishing nets and

plastic ropes; plastic bags; plastic shoes ; plastic computer

key boards; Styrofoam food containers; plastic drinking

straws; plastic knives and forks; plastic toothbrushes; and

plastic everything else.

Bakari used his foot to kick away some of the rubbish so

he could see the sand and, there, he and Aziza saw hundreds

of tiny pieces of plastic that had broken up because of the

sun and the waves.

Very slowly and carefully, the three youngsters picked

their way through all the trash to get to where the waves

151

were breaking against the beach, and which Charity stared

at with wonderment.

Here the sand was clean but, when they looked up, they

saw more plastic bags in the waves, and bottles floating on

top of the water.

Aziza turned and stared at her brother while tears filled

her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as Charity took her

hand in hers to comfort her.

“Stop being so silly, ‘Ziza,” Bakari told her, using his pet

name for her. “Crying is not going to help. It’s time to get

angry and do something about this, just like we did in the

shop.”

Aziza dried her eyes and looked down at Charity.

“Sorry, but I am just so sad because this was once such a

beautiful beach.”

“That’s okay,” Charity smiled up at her. “What are those

things called?” she asked while pointing at the waves.

“They’re called waves. Can you swim?”

“No. The only place I have seen with so much water was

the Ndakaini Dam near our house. And I was not allowed to

swim in it. Is this a dam as well?” she asked.

“No,” Aziza replied patiently. “This is the Indian Ocean

which stretches for thousands of kilometres before it reaches

another place called India. Do you want to feel the water

with your feet?”

Charity stared at her with a suddenly worried expression

on her little face.

152

Aziza and Bakari took her hands in theirs and slowly

led her to the water’s edge. She didn’t flinch when her feet

entered the shallow water but, when a wave rushed towards

her, she screamed with terror and fled.

While Aziza coaxed her back, Bakari stared at all the

rubbish on the beach before turning back to her.

“Just wait for me. I will be back soon.”

When he returned a few minutes later, Aziza and Charity

were laughing with delight as they frolicked in the waves.

When they saw him waiting for them on the beach, they

reluctantly got out of the water and went to join him.

“Juma, the gardener, had these in his shed,” he told them

with a grin as he handed each of the girls one of three hessian

sacks. “Then I asked papa to go and buy as many more as he

can. We are going to need thousands. Come on. Let’s collect

as much of this as we can to start with.”

When they started stuffing the sacks with all the plastic

that was on the beach in front of them, it attracted the

attention of a few fishermen who were cleaning their small,

traditional, wooden fishing boats that had been carved out

of the trunks of dead trees, and that were anchored about

fifty metres from the beach.

“What are you doing?” one of them asked when they

stopped beside the three youngsters.

They stood up and smiled at the men.

“Clearing away all this plastic,” Aziza told them.

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“Why?” another man asked.

“Because it is bad,” Bakari explained. “It never rots, and

when the seabirds eat the very small pieces that are floating

on the sea, they die. And the fish eat the tiny pieces as well so

that, when we eat the fish, we eat plastic as well.”

The men stared at them.

“Wait,” one of them said. “I saw your picture in the

newspaper two times last week. And then the president talked

about you as well, and then I saw you again on Monday.”

Aziza smiled at him proudly.

“But I know you,” he told her as he turned to look in

the direction of Farida’s house. “You look just like Mama

Mohammed.”

“She is our Nana, our grandmother,” she explained.

The men sighed as a sign of respect for Farida, and looked

at Aziza and Bakari with renewed attention.

“She is a good woman,” one of them said. “Whenever we

have a problem she helps us. If we do not have money for

school fees, she pays them for us and we repay her later. It is

the same if we cannot buy food or repair our boats, or if one

of us gets sick. In fact, if it was not for her, many of us would

not be here today.”

Aziza and Bakari thanked them for their kind words, but

they hadn’t finished.

One of them smiled down at Charity who smiled back

somewhat shyly.

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“And this is the girl you saved at that dam. I saw you and

her on the television when you were at the hospital,” he told

Aziza before turning back to Charity.

“What is your name, little angel?” he asked her.

“Charity,” she said with the beginnings of another smile.

“Welcome,” he told her, and then turned to Aziza.

“So, because we are still blessed with the presence of

Charity, and because your Nana has helped us so much, how

can we help you?” he asked.

“By getting as many people here tomorrow morning to

help us clean this beach,” Aziza replied.

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Friday, 7.00 am: Farida’s Beach,

Mombasa

After an early breakfast, Aziza and Bakari pushed

wheelbarrows piled high with the new sacks towards the

beach while Charity followed them to pick up the ones that

had fallen off. When they arrived, they were shocked to see

over a hundred people sitting on the beach waiting for them.

Their new fishermen friends stood up to greet them.

“We have told them what they need to do. Now that you

have come with the sacks, we can start,” one of them said.

Aziza and Bakari started to hand out the bags with a

smile and a word of thanks for everybody who took one.

The beach was soon covered with men, women and children

wearing their colourful kikois and khangas as they picked

up every piece of plastic they could see. And the three

youngsters were there working with them, clearly visible in

their brightly coloured swimming costumes, together with

Juma in his green overalls.

Chapter Eight

156

An hour later, Farida walked to the top of the low rise

above the beach with her daughter and son-in-law. She was

wearing a long, flowing, sky-blue robe that closely matched

Amina’s cotton blouse that she was wearing over some

baggy, cream-coloured slacks. Even Salim was wearing blue

today, with a dark shirt and light shorts. When they stopped,

Farida stared down at the scene below her with shock.

“It’s so sad,” she said softly. “I used to love coming down

here every evening to walk along this beach. But when all the

plastic started piling up, I stopped. But now look at it, thanks

to our two little heroes, or should I say three? I truly believe

that, because of them, I might just be able to start enjoying

my evening strolls once more.”

The three of them stared down at a section of the beach

about ten metres wide and thirty metres long from the

bottom of the rise to the sea that had already been completely

restored, and was glistening brightly in the early morning

sunlight.

Then one of the people cleaning the beach noticed Farida

watching them and shouted. Everybody turned to stare at

her. With cries of excitement, they dropped their sacks and

rushed across the beach to greet her. They formed a long line

and, one by one, they shook her hand and bowed over it as

a sign of total respect. Farida introduced them to Salim, and

then Amina who they stared at with awe before going back

to work with a song in their hearts.

As soon as the last person had returned to the beach,

Bakari, Aziza and Charity – who had been waiting patiently

157

to talk to their parents – rushed towards them with worried

expressions on their faces.

“We are going to need more sacks. Thousands of them,”

they told Salim. “There are more and more people arriving

all the time, and most of the bags you bought yesterday are

already full,”

Salim stared at them, his mind working overtime about

where he could buy so many more bags.

“And we are going to need water for all these people to

drink,” Aziza told him. “And toilets like those ones we use

when we go camping.”

“And food as well because they are going to be working

all day,” Charity added to the list.

Salim was completely out of his depth at all these demands

from his children.

“This is much bigger than we ever thought it would be,”

he said to Amina. “It’s turning into something like a military

operation, and getting too big for just you and I.”

Amina had already been thinking along the same lines

and, after a few moments, she quickly turned to Farida.

“Is there a public access road to the beach?” she asked her

mother.

“Yes, it runs right down the side of this plot,” Farida

replied.

Amina pulled her smart phone from the pocket of her

slacks, and swiped the screen until she found the name she

was looking for.

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“Good morning, Colonel Mwangi. How are you?” she

greeted the commander of the Nyali Military Barracks in

one of Mombasa’s northern suburbs.

“I am well, thank you, Honourable Minister. How can I

help you?”

“I am down here on holiday with my family, and I need

your help, a lot of it and urgently. Do you still have all those

hessian sacks we purchased last year? The ones we were

going to use as sandbags after unexpectedly heavy rain

threatened to flood downtown Mombasa?”

“Yes, Minister. They are in one of my stores. Where do

you need them?”

“I am on a beach north of you. I will text you the exact

GPS co-ordinates in a minute. In addition, I also need…”

her voice trailed away as she turned around and started

walking across the grass in her bare feet, deep in thought.

Realizing that their parents were – as usual – taking care

of their problems, Aziza and Bakari ran back down to the

beach while their grandmother watched them go with her

heart full of love and adoration, and with a rapidly increasing

liking for Charity as she scampered after them.

Unknown to everybody, the European owner of the

house next to Farida’s noticed the unusual activity on the

beach. He picked up a pair of extremely powerful binoculars

to survey the scene, and immediately recognised Aziza and

Bakari from their photographs in the newspapers and on

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the television news. He called a friend who in turn called

a friend who knew the Mombasa-based editor of a major

newspaper.

It was only minutes after those three mobile telephone

calls that a number of events began to happen in rapid

succession.

Friday, 9.00 am: Farida’s Beach,

Mombasa

Without any warning, the heavy throbbing sound of an

approaching helicopter made everybody look up. They

watched as the military aircraft flew low over all the palm

trees that lined the beach and then headed out to sea. But

then it stopped and turned and, when it began to descend

for a landing, everybody ran for cover – including the three

youngsters – and even Farida, Amina and Salim who were

doing what they could to help clear away all the plastic.

When the helicopter landed, its crew threw open the

door and tossed out huge bundles of tightly tied sacks onto

the beach. As soon as the aircraft had taken off to return

to its base, all the people involved with the beach clean-up

converged on the bundles, cut away their strapping-tapes,

and Aziza, Bakari and Charity began to distribute the new

sacks.

And while they were busy doing this, a gang of seven,

heavily-muscled Swahili thugs dressed in cut-off jeans

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and sleeveless ‘T’-shirts, and with one of them armed with

a shotgun while the others wielded machetes and clubs,

suddenly burst out of the bushes beside the public-access

road to the beach.

After watching the helicopter take off and fly away from

their hiding place, they knew that they could now do exactly

what they had been paid to do without any threat from the

military, or even the police for that matter.

It was because of this, and also because of their basic

ignorance of the meaning of the word ‘consequence’, that

they charged down the beach towards the crowd of workers

without posting guards to keep an eye out for what might be

happening around or behind them.

And it was due to their negligence that they were totally

oblivious to the fact that a news reporter with a photographer

and a television crew had arrived at the European’s house just

ten minutes earlier. Having quickly obtained his permission,

they had rapidly set up their telephoto lenses, and their ultra-

sensitive directional microphones on the beach just below

his house, and had begun to record the attack.

Almost simultaneously, a Kenyan Army Armoured

Personnel Carrier – filled with the personnel and the

equipment required to quickly establish two temporary

latrines – had parked silently on the sand beside the bushes

where the thugs had so recently been hiding.

Their commanding officer, a middle-aged, armed

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Sergeant, had stared at the scene on the beach below him for

a few seconds, and had immediately realised that something

was not quite right. However, and because his eyesight was

a little weak due to his age, he had fished out a pair of small

but extremely powerful binoculars from the top pocket of

his uniform pocket in order to get a better idea of what was

going on below him.

Friday, 9.15 am: Farida’s Beach,

Mombasa

The thugs used their clubs and the flat sides of their machetes

to clear their way through the suddenly terrified crowd until

they came face-to-face with Aziza, Bakari and Charity who

were still standing beside the bundles of sacks.

Their leader – obvious because he was a giant of a man

standing over two metres tall with a huge, thickly-muscled

body – pointed his old, sawn-off shotgun at them.

“What are you doing here?” he asked them with an

extremely deep voice.

Being the eldest, Aziza took up the challenge and stared

at him, his gun and his thugs without any fear.

“Cleaning up this beach, or do you think we are all

hunting for crabs in the sand?”

“Shut up, bitch!” the man snarled at her as he viciously

whipped his gun up until its twin barrels were aiming

directly at her face.

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“You and your brother have recently been making news

with your fight against plastics. And this is making some very

wealthy people extremely unhappy, despite the president’s

support for what you are doing.”

Aziza stared at him, and then pushed her angrily bunched

fists against the sides of her waist before she stared straight

into the man’s eyes.

“Do you really think you scare me?” she asked him with

a loud voice. “Do you really think that, because you are so

much bigger than me, you can tell what I can and cannot do?

I do not think so, especially when you are such a coward that

you can’t face me on your own! That you can only do this

with the support of all your thugs! And, in any case, what are

you going to do if I disobey your orders? Shoot me?”

A low murmur of shock rippled through the crowd and,

as the tension in the air rose to almost fever pitch, she heard

her mother scream.

“No Aziza! Stop it. Do as the man says for the love of

God!”

Aziza ignored her.

The giant used his right thumb to pull back the shotgun’s

hammers to arm it.

“Yes,” the man answered her question. “Either you stop

your protests against plastics, or I will be forced to do exactly

that!”

Aziza laughed despite the fact that her lips were suddenly

dry and, with the sudden terror in her mind, her heart began

to beat painfully against her chest at an incredibly rapid rate.

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She licked her lips with an almost dry tongue, and quickly

glanced at Bakari and Charity who were both staring at her

with expressions of sheer terror on their faces. She swung

her gaze around the crowd, and looked into everybody’s eyes

until she locked hers into her mother’s. She saw the tears

streaming down her cheeks while she held both clenched

and trembling hands over her mouth.

Aziza managed a weak smile for her, and then turned

back to the man with both her courage and her steely resolve

quickly slipping away. It was then that, with her incredibly

sharp eyes, and in the periphery of her vision, she suddenly

saw movement at the top of the rise above the beach behind

the thugs.

It was a group of uniformed men jumping out of what

looked like a small, dark green, open-ended truck, men who

– armed only with spades and machetes – stealthily began to

approach her as they followed a man carrying an automatic

rifle.

Suddenly more confident, and with a sudden frown on

her usually beautiful face, Aziza quickly realised that she had

no option – under the circumstances – but to play for time.

She finally managed to moisten her lips and, with her

mind whirling to find the necessary words to talk-down

this terrifying situation, she turned her attention back to the

enormous thug who was so confidently standing in front of

her with his shotgun pointing unwaveringly at her face.

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“So you are going to kill me,” she told him with a soft

but clearly audible voice, “unless I obey your orders which I

refuse to do. You are just going to shoot me where I stand,

totally defenseless, but in front of hundreds of witnesses

who will testify in court so that you will ultimately hang for

your crime. And this will be just because some greedy people

have paid you to help them destroy the world. Do you really

believe that their money is worth more than your life?”

Her mind-wrenching question caught the man totally

off-guard while Aziza watched the uniformed men rapidly

get within striking distance of the enormous thug and his

men who were now supportively spread out around him.

The giant stared at her and, with total defeat, he slowly

lowered his gun.

Seconds later, the uniformed men had isolated the thugs,

snatched away their crude weapons, and had forced them to

lie face-down on the beach.

“Show me the license for your gun!” the sergeant barked

as he pressed the muzzle of his automatic rifle against the

gang leader’s neck, and slammed the thick, heavily-ribbed

sole of his military boot down onto the man’s back.

The enormous man could not do this because his shotgun

was one that he had bought on the black market.

“So be it,” the sergeant commented. “And because there

is nothing here to steal, you are not robbers. And because of

that, the only reason you and your men are here is to disrupt

legal environmental rehabilitation on somebody’s orders.”

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Without any qualms, or any change in the expression on

his face, the grey-haired sergeant pushed the end of his gun

even harder against the man’s neck. He then snatched back

its receiver and released it to load a bullet into the weapon’s

firing chamber, and then used his forefinger to release the

rifle’s safety catch.

“Who is that somebody?” the sergeant asked the

enormous thug with an unexpectedly soft voice.

Having once been a police officer himself, the gang-leader

recognised the sounds of a gun being loaded and primed for

action. And knowing fully well that all of Kenya’s armed

forces were trigger-happy by way of shooting first and

asking questions later, he had no option but to answer the

sergeant’s question, especially because of the intense pain in

his neck.

“Mathilde Bernstein, the owner of BPMC,” he finally

gasped, “the Bernstein Plastics Manufacturing Corporation.”

The sergeant laughed.

“That is a lie. Now tell me the truth!” The sergeant ordered

while pushing the gun even harder into the giant’s neck.

“It is true. She called me to give me her orders on Monday

morning. I swear it on my mother’s grave!” the man managed

to shout.

“Try again, you scum,” the sergeant laughed, “Because,

according to the newspapers, that woman died four days

ago!”

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Friday, 9.45 am: Farida’s Beach,

Mombasa

When Aziza watched the sergeant and his men escort

their prisoners up the beach towards their vehicle, both

her courage and her bravado quickly abandoned her. And

despite the fact that everybody in the crowd turned to

her with expressions of awe and admiration, and almost

immediately began to sing and dance to a Wa-Swahili song

in her honour, she suddenly felt dizzy, and her legs started

to buckle under her.

However, having recognized the signs of her daughter’s

immense stress, Amina forced her way through the hip-

swaying dancers and managed to grab Aziza just before she

collapsed onto the sand at her feet.

Feeling safe and secure in her mother’s arms, Aziza

started crying into Amina’s shoulder as she exorcised the

tension and the terror of the last half an hour. Salim, Farida,

Bakari and Charity gathered around them in solidarity while,

behind them, an army lorry parked behind the Personnel

Carrier at the top of the beach. Moments after its armed

troops had taken over the prisoners from their captors, the

lorry drove away and the men began doing what they had

originally come to do.

They immediately started hacking their way through the

thick undergrowth until they had created a small clearing.

As soon as they had removed the debris, the men with

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spades started to dig deep holes into the sand. And when

they had finished their work, they installed the necessary

wooden floor boards with holes in them, and then erected

some small tents around the improvised latrines.

Moments later, Aziza pulled away from Amina and

wiped her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly while she stared at her family

standing around her.

“Sorry for what?” Farida demanded to know.

“I don’t know what got into me,” she replied with a weak

smile. “It’s just that…just that I refused to be bullied by that

horrible man.”

“Well, whatever it was,” Salim commented. “It certainly

made you the bravest person I have ever seen. Now come.

Let’s go up to the house so you can rest for a while before

lunch.”

Aziza stared at him, knowing fully well it was what she

should really do. But then a stubborn streak in her psyche

rebelled, and she grinned at her father.

“Thank you, but no thanks, papa. If we leave now, all

these people will stop working, and I don’t know if they will

come back tomorrow.”

With that said, she grabbed Bakari and Charity’s hands

and led them back to the piles of new sacks. With her heart

full of pride and a lot more besides, Amina watched her go

just as the singing and dancing stopped. The crowd stared

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at her for a moment and, with a loud shout of sheer joy,

everybody rushed forwards to grab their bags and get back

to work.

Behind them, the army Personnel Carrier left and

another lorry arrived, but this time on Farida’s grassy lawn

above the beach. And then two more trucks drove in and

parked beside it while an army pick-up and a military water

bowser stopped at the end of the access road, and beside the

temporary toilets.

The army personnel carried two very strong steel tables

down to the top of the beach and, after they had made sure

their legs were firmly set into the sand, they set two large metal

drums on top of them, huge two-hundred litre containers

with taps near their bases. And when they returned to their

pick-up to collect boxes of waxed cardboard drinking cups,

yet more men unrolled a thick rubber hose pipe from the

bowser to fill the drums with drinking water.

Almost as soon as these vehicles had left, a large, military

mechanical shovel arrived, one that was painted with the

camouflage colours of different greens and browns, just like

the helicopter and all the trucks were. With its tank-like

tracks instead of wheels, it easily trundled down the slope

onto the beach with half-a-dozen uniformed men sitting on

its mudguards.

They started work by filling the enormous shovel with

the hundreds of sacks that were already full of plastic, and

used the machine to dump them at the end of the access

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road. As soon as they had done this, they drove south down

the beach, turned around, and began to shove all the plastic

rubbish towards where everybody was working to fill all the

new bags with it.

They went back again and again and again until they

had cleared the whole southern part of the beach to leave

an enormous mountain of plastic right in front of Farida’s

house. Without any hesitation, all the voluntary workers –

by now about two hundred of them – began filling their bags

with all the trash.

While they were doing this, Farida, Amina and Salim

returned to the house and began to direct the army troops

from the trucks parked on Farida’s lawn. As soon as they

had told the commanding sergeant what they wanted and

where to put everything, his men leapt into action.

Moments later, an army Land Rover parked to one side

of the driveway near the house, and a tall, uniformed officer

stepped out of the vehicle. He walked straight up to Amina

and stretched out his hand.

“Welcome back to Mombasa, Honourable Minister. Your

arrival has certainly started with a bang,” Colonel Mwangi

smiled at her.

Amina laughed and shook his hand.

“Well, yes,” she commented. “And I cannot thank you

enough for all your help. I mean, look what your men and

our beach-cleaners have already achieved,” she said while

pointing down at the beach.

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Colonel Mwangi stared at all the activity with total

astonishment and, after being introduced to Farida and

Salim, he turned away to help supervise his men who were

starting to erect the tents.

Then Amina’s smart phone rang. She removed it from

her pocket and answered the call without even glancing at

the screen.

“Yes?” she answered absently while watching the men

removing their equipment from the trucks.

“Good morning, Honourable Minister. My name is

Collette Deacon, and I run a non-profit plastic recycling

industry here in the Mombasa slums.”

“Yes, Collette,” Amina replied as she turned to stare at

the huge pile of plastic on the beach. “How I can I help you?”

“I have heard that you are organizing a massive beach

clean up, and I was wondering if I could come and collect

all the plastic?”

“No, you cannot,” Amina responded.

“I’m sorry.” the lady replied with a shocked voice.

“I mean, there is just too much of it. Do you have a large

compound?”

‘Yes, we do. But…’

“Never mind,” Amina suddenly smiled. “Please text me

your physical address, and I will have all the sacks delivered

to you.”

Minutes later, the army personnel finished erecting an

enormous, white, circular tent with the top of its roof almost

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as high as the palm trees, and had furnished it with long

tables and bench-seats, and a series of strong buffet tables.

With that done, they erected a second tent and filled it with

large gas-cooking ranges, tables, and huge saucepans. The

army chefs filled eight of the pots with rice and water, and

the other twelve with oil, tomatoes, onions and garlic, and

lumps of chicken to which they added coconut milk, and

various herbs and spices. As soon as the saucepans were

heating up, they started to prepare chapatis; hundreds of

them.

Friday, 11.00 am: The Indian Ocean, Off

Farida’s Beach

Aziza and Bakari slowly came to the conclusion that there

was very little more for them to do. The beach to the south

was now completely clean, and the crew of the mechanical

shovel was taking a short break before heading north to do

the same job.

With all the plastic having been delivered to them, all the

workers were able to fill their sacks at a far greater speed,

and the mountain of plastic was shrinking rapidly.

With Charity beside them, they slowly walked up the

beach and sat down in the shade of a palm tree. Aziza looked

out over the beach and the sea beyond, deep in thought.

After a couple of minutes, she turned to Bakari.

“I think we should go goggling,” she suddenly suggested.

“We have those goggles and flippers and things that nana

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sent us for Christmas to replace the ones we grew out of, and

we’ve never used them.”

“Aren’t you tired after everything that’s happened this

morning?” He looked at her with a suddenly worried frown.

“No, and thanks for asking,” she replied with a smile.

“But with all this plastic on the beach, I want to see what’s

on the ocean floor beneath the waves.”

“What is goggling?” Charity immediately wanted to

know.

Bakari laughed, relieved that his sister was feeling better.

She had hardly said a word since the attack.

“It’s looking at everything that lives under the water,” he

explained to Charity. “You wear a mask with a big piece of

glass in front of your face, a piece of pipe in your mouth

so you can breathe, and some special, very long, flat rubber

shoes called flippers that push you through the water when

you kick your feet.”

“Can I come too?” she asked.

“I wish,” Aziza told her. “But first we have to teach you

how to swim, something we’ll start doing after lunch, and

then we have to buy you some equipment which we’ll try

and do tomorrow.”

After leaving Charity with their parents and collecting

their gear, Aziza and Bakari returned to the beach. They

strapped their new diving knives to the calves of their right

legs, and then waded out into the sea until the water beyond

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the waves was up to their waists. After fitting the goggles

over their heads, and pushing the snorkels under the straps,

they pulled on their flippers and pushed the long breathing-

tubes’ rubber mouthpieces between their teeth.

As soon as they began to use the flippers to power them

towards deeper water with their heads down, the saw what

looked like a scene of total devastation.

The flat, slightly sloping, sea floor was just the dull light-

grey colour of dead coral broken up only by lighter patches

of white sand, and darker patches of sea weed whose leaves

flowed gently with the movement of water around them.

And there were no fish to be seen anywhere, only

thousands of plastic bottles and other pieces of trash that had

lost their ability to float and had sunk into the sand below.

It was only when Aziza and Bakari began to get into

deeper water near the reef that the sea floor suddenly

dropped away slightly to form a long, wide canyon about

three metres deep. Its base was filled with living corals of

different types and sizes with their reds, blues, yellows and

greens brightening up the bottom of the sea. And it was here

that, for the first time since they had started their swim,

they began to sea shoals of brightly coloured tropical fish

swimming around and between the coral heads.

After enjoying the beautiful spectacle below them for a

few minutes, they continued towards the reef. But as the sea

bed began to gradually climb up to meet it, the colours of the

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living coral began to fade, and be replaced by the dull grey of

the dead that had been killed as a result of global warming.

When Aziza reached a depth of water she could stand up

in, she lowered her flippers onto the dead coral and stood

up. She removed the snorkel’s mouthpiece from between

her teeth, and pushed the goggles up to the top of her head.

She stared at the large waves rolling in from the open

ocean on the other side of the reef barely fifty metres away,

and breaking against the protective coral barrier with a

steady-but-muted rumble of sound, and with glistening

white sprays of sun-kissed foam cascading into the air above

them.

Seconds later, Bakari stood up beside her, lifted his

goggles clear and stared at her.

“It’s a disaster,” he muttered after spitting out some sea-

water. I think there’s more plastic down there than there was

on the beach.”

“You’re right,” she told him sadly. “And there’s nothing

we can do about it unless we teach all our beach-cleaners

how to swim, buy them costumes, and get them all goggles

and flippers, and some light nets to put all the rubbish into.”

Friday, 11.30 am: Farida’s House,

Mombasa

While Farida stayed outside to continue with her supervision

of the lunch preparations for all the workers on the beach,

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Amina, Salim and Charity took a short break on the verandah

for a much-needed drink. While the adults had mixed fruit

juices, Charity stuck to her coconut water.

“How are you enjoying the beach, my dear?” Amina

asked her casually after she had cooled down a little from

the hot tropical sun outside.

Charity beamed at her.

“It is beautiful. I never knew there was a place like this.

Not even my parents or my school teacher told me about it,”

she commented, her expression suddenly sad.

Amina’s interest immediately picked up.

“Then what did you learn at school, or was it a

kindergarten?” she asked.

“Yes. Mathematics, English and Ki-Swahili, but my

parents had already taught me that and I was bored. I think

they only put me in school to keep me busy because my

daddy was sick with cancer, and my mummy had to work.”

“Would you like to talk about that now, or some other

time?” Amina asked her gently while Salim, knowing this

was women’s business, finished his drink and went outside

to join Farida who was chatting to Colonel Mwangi.

Charity didn’t notice him go as she stared down at her

drink that she held on her lap. And then she eventually

looked up at Amina with a hint of tears in her eyes.

“Aziza and Bakari saved my life. And you and Sal…

papa are doing so much for me I can never thank you. So I

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think you should know these things now,” she replied while

staring directly into Amina’s eyes.

“There is nothing to thank us for,” Amina smiled at her.

“Because we would like you to become a part of our family

if none of your relatives come forward to say you are theirs.”

“Nobody will,” Charity told her flatly with a sad whisper.

“Our family was small, and everybody was at the wedding,

even all the old people and the small children, and even my

big sister and my little brother.”

“Go on,” Amina prompted her with a soft and gentle

voice.

“My father used to be a doctor,” Charity began after

drying her eyes with her fingertips. One day he told me that

he had done very well at school, and he had got a schol…

schol…”

“Scholarship,” Amina helped her.

“Yes, a scholarship to go to a school in England, and

after that he had stayed there to learn how to become a

doctor. After he came back to Kenya, he had to work for the

government for two years before he could work on his own,

and he was sent to manage a clinic at Gituru. He met my

mother who is…was…”

Charity immediately started crying in earnest and, with

sudden tears in her own eyes, Amina stood up, grabbed the

two little teddy-bears off the buffet table, wrapped them in

Charity’s arms, and then knelt beside the little girl, and put

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her arms around her. She sobbed into Amina’s shoulders

for a few minutes and, with her little chest still heaving, she

slowly pulled herself together.

Amina gave her all the time she needed to recover from

her grief and, staying on her knees, she only pulled away

slightly in order to gently wipe Charity’s cheeks dry with her

fingertips.

“I am sorry,” Charity sniffled as she stared down at her

two little toys with surprise.

“There is nothing to be sorry about,” Amina assured

her. “You have been so strong ever since that tragedy that I

cannot tell you how proud we all are of you.”

Charity stared into Amina’s eyes for a second, and then

leant forward to kiss her cheek.

“Thank you,” she smiled unexpectedly, and Amina hoped

that, with that outpouring of grief, Charity had managed to

exorcise most of her bereavement.

“What was I telling you?” the little girl asked her, suddenly

a little embarrassed.

“Are you sure you want to carry on? Or would you rather

we went back outside to see what the cooks are making for

our lunch?” Amina asked her with an encouraging smile

that belied her immediate concern.

“Not yet,” Charity told her with a slightly stronger voice

after quickly kissing both her teddy-bears’ noses, “because I

like talking to you.”

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“You were telling me about your mother,” Amina

reminded her with as gentle and soft a voice as she could

manage.

“She was a teacher of English at the secondary school

in our town,” Charity told her in a voice which indicated

that she had seemingly accepted her loss. “And because my

father was so proud of his perfect English that he had learnt

in England, all we spoke at our house was English. It was

only later when I started playing with friends and going to

school that I learnt some Ki-Swahili. And my grandparents

were always very angry because I could not speak any Gi-

Kikuyu.”

“That explains it,” Amina commented.

“What?” Charity asked her.

“We were all wondering just exactly why your English

was so good,” Amina grinned at her before leaning forward

to kiss her warmly on both cheeks.

Friday, 12.15 pm: The Indian Ocean, off

Farida’s Beach

After glancing at the beach to see all their helpers still

stuffing their sacks with trash, Aziza and Bakari stared at the

enormous tents in Farida’s garden with amazement. And

after briefly watching the mechanical shovel removing all the

plastic from the shore to the north of their grandmother’s

house, they decided it was time for them to swim back to

shore so as not to be late for lunch.

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However, Aziza – who was leading the way – decided to

follow the line of the reef for a little while before turning

around and heading home. And she did this while looking

through the crystal-clear water ahead of her instead of

staring down at the devastation below her. This was because

she suddenly wanted to enjoy the freedom of the open water

to clear her mind of the tragedy of how mankind’s greed was

destroying her beloved ocean.

Aziza used her flippers to power her way ever faster

through the ocean so she could fully enjoy the sensuous

feeling of the water streaming over her body. Then, and

with Bakari now far behind her, she saw something moving

ahead of her. It was almost like a ghost-like apparition that

was slowly rising up through the water.

She swam even faster and, when she got to within ten

metres of what she had seen, she suddenly stopped with

horror written all over her face behind the glass-frontage of

her goggles.

It was an enormous Green turtle with a small head, light

green skin, and a speckled brown shell that Aziza recognised

from her research into the dangers of plastic in the ocean.

The tortoise-like creature was trapped in a very long, light-

gauge, discarded plastic fishing net that was snarled up

against a piece of dead coral. Aziza watched it as it struggled

against the weight of the mesh to swim up to the surface

of the sea in order to breathe in some air, and then sink

slowly back down to the sea floor three metres below it with

obviously increasing exhaustion and desperation.

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Despite this, the three hundred kilo marine reptile turned

to stare at Aziza as she slowly approached it in order to help,

and then desperately tried to swim away to escape this new

threat.

But it could not because of the net that tied it to the coral,

a meshed fabric that it could never escape from without help.

Immediately recognizing her mistake, Aziza swam away

to what she thought was a more comfortable distance for the

turtle. She then turned and floated motionlessly on top of

the water while keeping an eye on the creature and waiting

for Bakari to arrive. While she did so, she went back to her

research, and remembered the films showing divers freeing

turtles from fishing nets, something she had never realized

she would have to do herself one day!

When Bakari arrived, Aziza quickly pointed out the

trapped turtle to him and then surfaced. When their heads

popped out of the water, they both pushed their goggles back

and removed the snorkels while they worked their flippers

so they could stay upright for a hurried discussion.

After a brief but fiery argument that resulted in a reluctant

agreement on Bakari’s part, they replaced their snorkels and

goggles and, while Bakari swam slowly to a position behind

the reptile, Aziza waited on one side of it with her diving

knife in her hand.

The turtle was obviously aware of their presence and,

although it was getting more and more desperate to swim

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to the surface of the sea and breathe in some more air, it

was reluctant to do so because of what it thought were two

predators swimming above it.

But then nature’s forces took over and, with its lungs

aching painfully, the turtle had no option but to use the

last of its strength to fight its way up to the surface while

dragging the net up behind it.

As soon as it had made it, Aziza knew they had to move

fast before the turtle sank to bottom again. Bakari quickly

approached it from behind but, the closer he got to the reptile

the more scared he became because he had not realised how

large it was. The turtle was as long as he was, and twice as

wide. He was about to stop and give up but, when he saw

Aziza approaching from the front, he bit into his snorkel’s

mouthpiece, gathered his resolve, and swam on.

As soon as the turtle started to desperately gulp in some

air, Bakari swam onto the reptiles back and stretched both

his arms wide so his fingers could get a grip on the outer

edges of its shell.

The turtle panicked. It swung its head around, and

frantically used its huge, front paddle-like flippers to get

away. Under normal circumstances, it could have easily

done so even with Bakari clinging to its back. But the net

held it back, and its strength was also ebbing due to a lack of

air and food.

When Aziza approached it from the front, the reptile

desperately tried to get away again. But then it gave up and

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started to sink until the buoyancy of Bakari’s air-filled lungs

held it up near the surface.

Suddenly extremely nervous, and after a glance at her

brother hanging on to its shell, Aziza swam up close to the

turtle. With her knife at the ready to cut the net clear from

around its body, she was appalled to see two centimetres of a

clear plastic drinking straw sticking out of the reptile’s right

nostril. She froze, knowing that she somehow had to remove

it before cutting the reptile free.

She quickly transferred her knife to her left hand, and

tried to grab the straw with her right, but the turtle closed

its eyes with fright and whipped its head away. She tried

again but failed, and it was only on her third attempt that

she managed to grab the straw.

The straw was slimy and slipped uselessly out of her

fingers. She stared at the offending piece of plastic, suddenly

angry. And then she had an idea.

Bakari watched her pull-back from the turtle’s head, and

wished she would do something quickly because, after their

long swim, he was getting tired. And then, out of the corner

of his eye, he spotted movement. He looked up and saw one

of the wooden fishing boats slowly approaching them with

two men staring in their direction.

There was no way Bakari could tell his sister that help

was on the way. With total disbelief, he watched Aziza stick

her knife back into its sheath on her leg, and then remove

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her goggles. With his eyes now wide with confusion, he saw

her stick her arm through their strap and, after taking a

deep breath, remove the snorkel from her mouth and stuff it

down the front of her costume.

For Aziza, her eyesight was now suddenly a bit blurred.

But she was close enough to the turtle’s head to clearly see

the straw. With the anger still coursing through her blood,

and knowing that the turtle could not retract its head into

its shell because of its somewhat-flattened aqua-dynamic

shape, she made her move.

She used both hands to grab the turtle by it thick neck,

and then slide them upwards so they were gripping the back

of its head.

This was too much for the reptile. It frantically worked its

flippers, and Aziza ignored the pain as they battered at her

shoulders, and managed to maintain her grip. With the last

of its strength the turtle was able to reach the surface, rear

its head back and suck in some fresh air. The sheer power

in its neck pulled Aziza up with it, and she too quickly filled

her lungs with oxygen as soon as her head cleared the water.

The two fishermen – who had helped clean up the beach

– were now barely ten metres away in their boat, and they

stared at the scene with total disbelief. They saw Bakari

riding a massive turtle’s back while Aziza clung onto its

head. It was almost as they were fighting it, or trying to kill

it. And then they watched as the girl suddenly thrust her

head forward as if to kiss the reptile.

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Totally ignoring the nearby fishing boat, Aziza suddenly

saw her chance. With the turtle gulping in air, she tightened

her grip on its head and focused her eyes on the offending

piece of plastic. Moving like lightning, she opened her mouth

and whipped her head forward. As soon as she felt the end of

the straw touch her tongue, she clamped her teeth around it

as hard as she could and pulled her head back.

The straw slid out of the turtle’s nostril with a gush of

blood that sprayed over Aziza’s face. The enormous reptile

suddenly shuddered so violently with sheer agony that Bakari

was almost thrown off its back. Bakari reflexively tightened

his grip and held on even though he was mortified at the

sight of his sister’s bloodied face. He thought the reptile had

bitten her.

Then she glanced up to grin at him before removing the

straw from her mouth, and dipped her head into the water

to wash away the blood.

The turtle, despite the pain and the shock it had suffered,

suddenly seemed to realize that the two creatures it had

thought were predators were in fact trying to help it. With

its head still above the surface of the sea, it ducked its head in

and out of the water, breathed in deeply, and then powerfully

emptied its lungs though its nostrils with another spray of

blood, and then another until its previously afflicted nasal

passage had cleared.

While it was doing this, and with Bakari still riding its

back while the fishermen – by now totally stupefied – looked

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on, Aziza quickly put the goggles on top of her head, fixed

the snorkel beneath their strap, and pulled her wickedly-

sharp diving knife out of its sheath.

The turtle lay calm and didn’t flinch as she grabbed the

part of the fishing net that had looped around its neck and,

almost with a surgeon’s precision she cut through it until it

fell free.

Aziza then lowered her goggles to cover her face and

wrapped her teeth around the snorkel’s mouthpiece. She

ducked her head down, and carefully studied the sections

of the net that were still locked around parts of the reptile’s

body which were underwater.

Because of the enormous turtle’s incredible strength, and

its titanic struggles to get free since it had been trapped in

the net, the plastic mesh had tightened around its shoulders

to such an extent that it resembled a thick rope. Undaunted,

Aziza carefully cut through it to free one of its shoulders,

and then the other.

When the net didn’t fall away as she had expected, she

swallowed her disappointment, took a deep breath, and

dived beneath the reptile to find out where the problem was.

After realizing that the last parts of the net were wrapped

tightly around the turtle’s much smaller rear flippers, ones

which it used for steering instead of swimming, she quickly

rose to the surface to suck in some much needed air.

Then she started to hyper-ventilate, a technique used

by deep-water divers without any artificial breathing

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equipment, and one she had read about while browsing the

internet but had never tried. She began to rapidly breathe

in and out as deeply as she could so as to fill her blood with

as much oxygen as it could absorb and, thus prepared, and

with her knife at the ready, she quickly dived beneath the

turtle again.

After Aziza had managed to cut away the net around

one of the flippers three minutes later, she ran out of air

and quickly returned to the surface. After hyper-ventilating

again, she dived down and freed the other flipper but, instead

of letting the heavy net drop to the ocean floor, she kept hold

of it as she used her flippers to power her way back to the

surface while she replaced her knife in its sheath.

As soon as she got there, she raised her free hand to give

Bakari a thumbs-up signal and, with total relief, he released

his grip on the reptile’s shell, slid off its back, and quickly

swam to the fishing boat where the two fishermen pulled

him on board.

Using her flippers to keep her afloat against the weight of

the net she was holding, Aziza waited to see what the turtle

would do next now that it was free.

To her total surprise it initially did nothing. But then, and

as it gradually realised that it was now once again free to

go wherever it wanted, its front flippers finally – and very

slowly – started working. Much to Aziza’s disappointment,

the reptile began to swim away from her but, seconds later,

it slowly turned to stare at her by way of thanks, and then

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turned again to slip below the waves and swim out of her life

forever more.

With a sudden song in heart, Aziza fueled her blood with

oxygen for the last time. She quickly used her hands to pull

herself all the way down the net to the piece of coral it was

wrapped around, and quickly freed it. Using the last of her

strength, she powered her way to the surface, and very slowly

swam to the fishing boat.

Bakari and the two fishermen immediately reached down

to pull her on board, but she gave them the ends of the plastic

fishing net instead.

After they had dumped this into the bowels of their boat,

they reached down for her again.

Despite her exhaustion, she refused their offer.

“That net was yours,” she shouted up at them. “You

dumped it because it was beyond repair just like so many

lazy fishermen do all around the world. And, because of your

laziness, you very nearly killed one of the most endangered

reptiles in the world, just as you are killing the dolphins,

the whales, and countless other animals and fish. Don’t

you realize that, if you keep doing this, you will destroy this

ocean and you will no longer be able make any money from

your fishing?”

The two fishermen stared down at her.

“We are sorry, Aziza,” one of them apologised. “After

seeing what you did today to save that creature, I promise

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you that we will change our ways. Now, please, allow us to

take you back to the beach.”

As she was about to reply to his invitation, a wave smashed

into her open mouth. She immediately spat out the sea water

and glared up at him.

“Get lost!”

Friday, 1.00 pm: Farida’s Beach,

Mombasa

Despite her almost total exhaustion, Aziza’s renewed anger

about the discarded fishing net fuelled the energy she

required to swim to the beach while the fishing boat dutifully

followed her all the way there.

As soon as she could stand up and wade through the waves

towards the shore, all the people cleaning the beach stared

at her. Moments later, the remaining television cameraman

and the reporter rushed down the beach to record her slow

removal of her goggling equipment before she sat down

in order to regain her strength. When Margaret Kinuthia

stepped in front of her to ask some questions, Aziza shook

her head and stared down at the sand.

Fortunately for her, the fishing boat beached at almost

the same time. Bakari immediately jumped off the boat, ran

to his sister, sat down beside her and put his arm around her

shoulders. Behind him, the two fishermen rushed towards

Margaret and the cameraman to excitedly tell them what

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they had witnessed. They then called all the beach cleaners

to gather around them so they could share the story with

them as well.

After a few minutes, and with gradually increasing

interest in what was going on around her, Aziza managed to

turn round and look up at the northern parts of the beach.

The realization that they were now clean gave her a new

lease on life, and she slowly stood up while Bakari picked up

her equipment.

Friday, 1.30 pm: Farida’s Garden,

Mombasa

All the beach cleaners slowly walked up the slope to Farida’s

garden before lining up to thoroughly wash their hands

with soap and water in the stands that had been provided

by the Kenyan army. They then gratefully settled themselves

around the tables under the shade of the tent, and helped

themselves to the soft-drinks that had been set out for them

and, minutes later, they were joined by the men from the

mechanical shovel.

After having taken a long shower, and changing into a

yellow blouse and blue shorts, Aziza walked out onto the

verandah where her family was waiting for her, together

with Margaret and the cameraman.

“Hello, Margaret,” she greeted the reporter with a tired

smile. “What are you doing down here?”

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“We’re waiting for the president when he arrives in

Mombasa later this afternoon. And, after a tip-off, we

were able to cover your beach clean-up and the attack this

morning, a horrifying incident which was broadcast on the

lunch-time news. We had just finished filming the lunch

preparations before heading back to Mombasa when you

came back from your swim. And that was a stroke of luck

because we recorded the fishermen telling us about your

incredible rescue of the turtle. Why don’t you sit down and

tell us a little about that?”

Aziza looked at her parents, and when they smiled at her

supportively, she sat down beside Bakari as the cameraman

set up his equipment.

Minutes later, the group headed out across the garden to

join the beach-cleaners for lunch. Farida led them to a table

she had reserved for them against one side of the enormous

marquee and, as they sat down, the chefs began to lay out all

the food on long, very strong buffet tables positioned at four

points around the tent. The hungry cleaners immediately

stood up to fill their plates while Farida wandered around to

keep an eye on the proceedings.

As soon as they were all enjoying their meal with flowing

conversation and some ribald laughter, Farida’s family and

the news crew stood up to help themselves. However, when

Aziza headed back to the table with her plate heaped with

chapattis, and rice with some chicken sauce, not even the

excellent food could keep everybody’s admiring eyes off

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her. It was only when she sat down for her meal that she

suddenly noticed the two empty chairs at the opposite end

of their table to her and Bakari’s.

Aziza turned to her grandmother with a puzzled look.

“Sorry, nana, but are we expecting some other people for

lunch?” She asked.

Farida glanced at Amina, and then turned to Aziza with

a smile.

“Perhaps,” she replied mysteriously.

When a few of the cleaners returned to the buffet to

get a second-helping of the food, the sound of a rapidly

approaching helicopter quickly overwhelmed that of the

excited conversation. Surprisingly, everybody ignored it,

even when the small aircraft landed on the beach below

them with a cloud of flying sand.

That was until Kenya’s president, together with his wife,

Roselynne – who was wearing a brightly-striped trouser

suit made entirely of kikoi material – walked over the rise

above the beach, and casually approached them, much to

everybody’s – especially Margaret’s – total shock and delight.

Dressed in a floral-patterned shirt above his habitual

cream-coloured trousers, he stopped in his tracks when

Colonel Mwangi lined up all his military personnel, ordered

them to attention, and then saluted him, and while everybody

in the tents stood up to greet their beloved president. And

with that, they all cheered his arrival, especially when he

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and Kenya’s First Lady weaved their way between all the

tables to embrace Amina, hug Farida, shake Salim and

Bakari’s hands, and then bend down to hug Aziza and

Charity. They then sat down to share the lunch that, as per

Amina’s instructions with due respect to her children, had

been served on cardboard plates, and with Chinese-made

bamboo spoons and forks.

During a chat with Amina who was sitting next to him,

he finished his lunch, washed it down with some water, and

then looked down the table at Aziza.

“I see you’ve been rather busy since we last met, young

lady,” he smiled at her.

“I’m sorry,” she stared at him.

“Most importantly, you have blessed us with the

continued presence of Charity, sitting next to you,” he told

her as Roselynne and Farida paused in their conversation to

turn and smile at her, just as everybody else in the tent did

at the sound of the president’s voice, some even standing up

to do so.

Aziza squirmed at suddenly being the centre of attention,

and briefly stared down at her lap before shyly looking back

at the man seated opposite her.

“Thank you, Sir. And hopefully she will soon be our little

sister,” she told him as Charity happily grinned at her, and as

the president turned to Amina who nodded her confirmation

before he turned back to Aziza.

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“In addition, and in just one single day, you and your

brother have cleaned up two kilometres of beach, stood down

a bunch of armed desperados, and rescued a turtle that was

far bigger than both of you put together,” he complimented

her.

As soon as his last word left his lips, all the beach-cleaners

jumped to their feet to start singing another Wa-Swahili

song to celebrate Aziza’s inestimable courage for one so

young and, at the same time, they began to sway their hips

and dance their way around all the tables.

Due to all the noise, the president immediately stood

up, walked down the length of the table, and leant down to

whisper into Aziza’s ear.

“I am so proud of you, just like every Kenyan is, that I

have some ideas I want to discuss with you. And to do this, I

have told your mother that my wife and I are expecting you

for lunch at my Mombasa State House on Sunday.”

With that said, he straightened up, nodded at Margaret

who immediately alerted her cameraman who, in turn,

filmed the president as he and his wife joined the dancers

and began to dance and sway to the rhythm of their song.

When Kenya’s Head of State and his wife headed back to

their seats at the end of the table, the cameraman swung his

camera around to focus on Margaret. This was in order to

record an establishing shot while she used her microphone

to explain, as always for the beginning of any news report,

just exactly what was going on.

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Minutes later, and after everybody had sat down and the

ripple of animated conversation had begun to flow around

the tent once more, the president walked around the crowd

to chat with some of the beach cleaners who, he insisted,

remained seated.

After asking them about their fishing, their children and

their health, and then getting their views on plastic waste and

climate change, the president headed back to the table. Once

there, he turned to face the crowd, and waited for Margaret

and the cameraman to line up their equipment.

“On behalf of Mrs. Mohammed, I would like to sincerely

thank you all for your incredible efforts with what you have

done so far to clean up her beach, and I would also like to

sincerely thank our army personnel for putting on such a

delicious lunch for all of us.”

He paused for a moment to take a sip of water from his

glass and, when the clapping and cheering subsided, he

faced the expectant audience once more, his face now a lot

more serious.

“But while we are enjoying the good times right now,

there are dark days ahead of us. The whole world is now

starting to feel the effects of global warming, climate change,

and rising sea levels. This is the fault of the industrialized

nations, and small countries like ours will suffer from these,

even though we are not responsible for their causes. Because

of this, our farmers will now not know when to plant their

crops because the rainy seasons will change. And the dry

seasons might get longer, the days hotter and our winters

colder. But nobody knows exactly what we can expect.

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Not even the climate scientists who say there is now more

pollution in our sky than there ever has been before, and they

can therefore no longer predict what is going to happen.”

The president stared around the crowd for a moment,

and then continued.

“For your information, there are a number of youngsters,

the same ages as Aziza and Bakari, who are suing their

governments in America and Europe. This is because they

say that these lawmakers are responsible for all the problems

we are facing in the future. That these men and women are

not doing enough to stop the pollution, and thus ensure a

healthy, happy and sustainable future for them.”

He took another sip of his water.

“It is because of this that I am ordering my government

to fight pollution with all the means at our disposal. And the

first thing I will do is to follow Mrs. Quadir’s advice that she

gave me earlier today. That is to place a total ban on the sale

and manufacture of all single-use plastics. This will include

shopping bags and drinking straws, and all the rest of the

rubbish that you good people have so far collected off the

beach, and it will come into effect in ninety days҆ time.”

He paused to allow a murmur of excited conversation to

rise and fall, and waited until everybody turned to stare at

him expectantly once more.

“I call on Aziza and Bakari, two youngsters you all now

know so well, to come and stand before you at my side.”

A loud round of applause exploded around the tent, and

then everybody stood up with excited yells and wolf-whistles

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as Aziza and Bakari stopped on either side of the president,

and when he draped his arms over their shoulders.

“Without such brave children like these, and such as

those I mentioned earlier who are overseas,” he continued

after the clamour had died down, “we adults will all soon be

lost in the Biblical wilderness. And without their anger, and

without their determination to right our adult misdeeds, we

will all soon be fighting to survive the consequences. This

is because we grown-ups have all had it so good for so long

without any interference from our children. But it is now

time for a reckoning, because our children are our future.”

The president paused to briefly gaze over his audience,

and then to look directly into the camera that was focused

on him.

“We must all immediately start working as hard as we

can to protect what is left of our world from all the man-

made threats to our long and sustainable future. We must

use Aziza and Bakari as shining examples of how to fight

back against man’s greed with total determination. This

has been despite all the odds stacked up against them, just

as every one of us has witnessed today. If we do not, future

generations will read their history books, ask themselves

why we did not do anything to stop the devastation, and

curse us as we lie in our graves. Thank you.”

The president’s audience took some time to digest and

discuss his parting words and, when they had all agreed that

everything he had said actually made perfect sense, they all

stood up to respectfully applaud him.