GMOs: You Pay Me to Shit in Your Garden

Supposing I were to re-engineer my domestic sewage system so that it dumps sewage from my house into my neighbour's garden, my neighbour would be quite upset, right? But supposing I were to take it a little further and sue my neighbour in court for refusing to pay me for manuring his garden, that would really add insult to injury, wouldn't it? It sounds ridiculous for me to be claiming that I am the injured party, when I have, without permission or discussion, used my neighbour's land as if it belonged to me.

Well, that's how GMOs (genetically modified organisms) work. If I grow GMOs on my land and they contaminate my neighbour's land, my neighbour will have to pay royalties to the seed manufacturer, even though my neighbour may grow non-GMOs or organic crops. My neighbour's crops have been contaminated, not in some way blessed with the bountiful gift of genetically modified crops. I should be compensating my neighbour because the crops now grown on my neighbour's land will no longer be non-GMO and will no longer be organic.

My choice to grow GMOs in the first place is questionable enough, because it is inevitable that they will eventually contaminate my neighbour's crops. But I have effectively also taken the decision that my neighbour should no longer have the right to grow non-GMOs or organic crops. Where did I get this right and why does my neighbour not have the same level of autonomy over their land that I have over mine?

Farmers in Brazil and Argentina are facing this very absurdity, that the serial rapist is taking their victims to court for compensation for the use of their genetic input. Those contaminating the land, the land belonging to those who wish to have nothing to do with GMOs, are set to be paid for their contamination. Australia is busily trying to patch up their laws so that unwitting non-GMO farmers can be protected. But the multinationals that produce GMOs are rich and they are not going to give up easily.

Absurd though this is, it is exactly what awaits any country that is tricked into allowing GMOs to be grown on their land. Individual farmers will not have the right to choose whether to fall for GMOs or not; if their neighbours accept the thirty pieces of silver, their land will also quickly become contaminated and they will also have to pay royalties, they will also be stuck with weeds that are resistant to certain pesticides, their soil will become degraded and they will be forced to buy expensive fertilizers. Their yields and crop quality will also suffer.

Consumers, also, will have to pay for the greed of the few farmers who are willing buy into the plot. Eventually, consumers will not have the choice of GMO or non-GMO crops, they will all become contaminated. It is simply not possible for both GMO and non-GMO crops to be grown in the same areas. While non-GMOs may attract a premium for a while, the price will quickly rise before they become unavailable.

The only solution is to hold out against GMOs, regardless of what carrots the GMO manufacturers hold up, whatever threats they make or whatever lies they propagate about 'food security' and the rest. They are interested in deciding what people grow and eat and that's the way things are in countries like Brazil and Argentina. The costs to the farmers are higher and growing, therefore the costs to consumers are also higher and growing. The only ones that benefit from GMOs are the multinationals.

If anyone has seen the wonderful Italian film, The Bicycle Thieves (or the more recent Bejing Bicycle), they may notice a similar irony, where the person who has been wronged is made to pay for their victimization. How has this cruel and dangerous absurdity been allowed to arise in the first place? Why do faceless multinationals have so much power and influence that they can pay for a policy of appeasement, while they treat the defenceless as guinea pigs in their deadly experiments? And will we simply say 'never again' after conventional farming has been destroyed? There may be time to prevent this disaster in some countries, but it has to be now. The consequences cannot be reversed.

World Domination Trumps Science in the GMO Industry

One of the most scary things about genetically modified organisms (GMO) is that they are not being pushed because there is scientific evidence that they are a potentially useful tool in improving global food security. Firstly, global food security is not primarily a problem of a lack of food, it is a problem of unequal access to food. Secondly, GMOs have been shown to lead to decreased food security, for several reasons. Yields are not higher, they are the same or lower. GMOs do not show any signs of being resistant to drought or pests. And overuse of pesticides has given rise to pesticide resistant weeds, just as critics predicted it would.

Scientific evidence for or against GMOs is irrelevant because the GMOs are all about world domination. The issue is one of geopolitics rather than science. It is an attempt by some of the most powerful multinationals in the world to gain control of all the arable land in the world. When you grow GMOs, you use GMO seeds and GMO products. You can't save the seed for the next growing season and the amount of fertilizer you need every year will increase because of soil degradation. The amount of pesticides you will need also increases because of ever growing resistance. If you try to return to growing conventional crops, they will become contaminated and there is a risk that the GMO manufacturer will either claim royalties or prevent you from growing the crop. And you will find your markets rather limited too, as Canada has found.

India may have successfully rejected the genetically modified brinjal (aubergine or egg plant) by putting a moratorium on its production. But India rejected the crop because of the flawed scientific arguments that were used to try to force it on the country. If the science is irrelevant, the moratorium is merely a political matter. Already the powerful and well paid pro GMO lobby there is busying itself with laws and regulations that will prevent people from criticizing GMOs with threats of fines and prison sentences. Ironically, they say that you are not permitted to criticize GMOs without scientific evidence.

There is no scientific evidence to show that farmers should not become indentured slaves to these multinationals. It is a human rights issue, not a scientific issue. The scientific arguments against GMOs have been available for years but they are dismissed, out of hand, dismissed by a lot of sales pitch and political bluster. Those opposed to GMOs are branded Luddites and said to be anti development and denying people in developing countries access to this life saving technology. US soya farmers, Canadian cotton farmers and Indian cotton farmers know just how life threatening this technology really is.

There was a facetiously titled programme on the BBC recently called 'Food Fights'. It wasn't about GMOs, specifically, it was about large scale land grabbing by rich countries, multinationals and investment portfolio administrators to grow food, biofuels and anything else they need in developing countries. It is clear that this land grabbing is not even intended to benefit those in developing countries, yet the programme gives the impression that it is a viable answer to global food insecurity. The programme is not completely biased, but it allows some palpable falsehoods to remain unscrutinized.

For a start, this sort of land grabbing is said to be the only alternative to the present situation, where developing countries depend to a large extent on food and other kinds of aid. The only real alternative for developing countries is for them to become self sufficient and self reliant, which is the opposite to what this neo-colonialism offers. Rich foreigners are not looking for an alternative, they are looking out for their own interests, regardless of the costs to those in the countries where they propose to extract everything they can get.

Although it is not a GM crop, the example of sugar cane fields is examined because sugar cane is one of the favoured biofuel crops planned for Kenya. Even before biofuels and stories about food insecurity started, sugar cane was grown on farms as if the farmers were nothing but indentured slaves. This is still the case. The sugar company supplies all the inputs and does all the mechanised tasks. Once they have extracted what they want, the little that is left goes to the farmer. Often, farmers produce the sugar cane at a loss but there is no other cash crop with a ready market. In some cases, they lease the crop on their land to the sugar company to get some ready cash. Come the harvest, they have nothing left after they have paid their bills.

Farmers in this sort of situation already know what it means if foreign interests take over large tracts of arable land in Kenya. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, referred to as 'marginal' is threatened with this kind of incursion. And those who object are referred to as Luddites, anti-development, whatever. Those using this 'marginal' land will be dispossessed and the whole ecosystem that the land supports will be destroyed. And GMO manufacturers don't even need to lease or buy the land, like the sugar companies.

But this is the sort of world domination that GMO manufactures want. They don't want people to be able to produce their own food or to choose what farm inputs to use. They want farmers to effectively give over their land to a multinational that will tie the land into a system that will be virtually irreversible. Yields will decrease and input costs will increase, but the farmer will be forced to continue purchasing products from that multinational, and that's the important thing. Human rights, food security and environmental destruction are irrelevant to multinationals. As for the science, it is a handy political tool sometimes, but other times, it just doesn't give the right results.

[The possible contribution of GMOs to antibiotic resistance is discussed in this interesting article. While it doesn't fit into the above posting so well, it is of particular significance to countries that have a very high HIV and TB burden because these countries also have reduced access to drugs and often have to make do with older versions, for which pathogens are more likely to develop resistance in the near future.]

The Free or Almost Free Model

Walking around Nakuru town today, I was thinking about why a particular project was going so slowly. The project involves showing people how to make simple solar cookers. They just require cardboard or something similar, reflective paper, glue, tape and a blade. But the main problem has been getting hold of the materials in large enough quantities at as low a cost as possible. It's all very well to say 'just buy them' but I don't have a budget and if I buy them, what use will that be to the free or almost free model.

I would like to think that certain things can be constructed using free or very cheap materials. In Western countries, such as the UK, you can get all the cardboard you need by visiting a supermarket or department store. But here, you have to pay. I don't know about the lowest price yet, but I had to pay the price of half a kilo of maize for a single cardboard box. They are reused until they can no longer be called a box, and that's a very good thing. You don't see lots of cardboard box waste lying around, not until it's completely useless. Because this 'waste' is valued, it doesn't present the sort of litter problem they have here with plastic bags, say.

Similarly, I wanted to find some kind of durable reflective paper. I know that lots of sweets, biscuits, chocolate and other products are wrapped in such paper. Even better, car tyres are wrapped in a very durable reflective paper. Having identified these sources, I now need to identify places where people can get the stuff in large enough quantities. I'm still working on that. Some shops I visited were reluctant to hand over any more than a small sample, others simply said they didn't have any to spare. Perhaps this stuff is also reused for something, perhaps people are just holding out for an appropriate price. Tin foil would be Ok but it's expensive and not very durable.

Anyhow, I think people who are making these solar cookers should source the materials by themselves. They will get a much better price and will be better placed to source the materials for free. I just want to know that the materials are available so no one can tell me that I'm asking them to do something impossible. I'm getting closer, but I'm not there yet. Once I have found a good place to get adequate amounts of cardboard and reflective paper at a good price, hopefully free, then I can tell people where to go and get started making the cookers. I'll throw in a free pot of glue and anything else that is required!

I've had similar experiences with cooking baskets (also called fireless cookers). The main material for these devices, which insulate cooking pots sufficiently to allow partially cooked food to cook completely, is some kind of stuffing. An ideal kind of stuffing is a waste product from a local blanket factory. However, this waste product is also used for furniture, pillows, quilting, etc. So, again, you have to pay for it. Enough for a medium sized cooking basket costs about the price of two kilos of maize meal, enough to feed quite a number of people. I'm sure buying it in large quantities would bring the cost down but it's a challenge to the free or almost free model. Alternative, waste from local sisal factories could be used, but this too costs money as it is used to stuff furniture.

Another of our proposed projects is to construct a press that can compress briquettes made from organic waste. I spent some time looking for someone who could make such a press (it's not as easy to find someone as you might think!). When I found one, I gave him some plans I had found on the internet, a variety of wooden and metal ones. I was surprised that he recommended making the press from metal because the sort of high strength wood required would be very expensive. On the other hand, the metal could be sourced from scrap metal dealers. The labour would be cheap and I'm expecting to have a version of the press in the next week or so.

The briquettes can be made out of many things, fruit and vegetable peelings, charcoal dust, sawdust, waste from food production and other sources. Getting large amounts of waste in the right form may not be so easy. Sawdust has to be paid for, though the other materials are free (unless the word gets around that they are valuable). But they will probably need to be chopped or crushed so they can be mixed in the right proportions. And chopping or crushing machines are available, but they are very expensive. Ok, expensive means tens or hundreds of dollars. But where you only stand to make a few dollars a day profit at the most, no one is going to shell out large amounts for materials.

Economy of scale would make a huge difference, of course. But the aim of these projects is to be small and cheap. They need to be small enough and cheap enough for people who have very little money and probably very little education. If the money, training and education were readily available, there wouldn't be so much of a problem. So I'm looking for as many of these 'free or almost free' ways of either making money, saving money or a combination of the two.

Luckily, the organisation I'm working with, Ribbon of Hope, in Nakuru, has a number of other projects. We grow crops and support people to produce things that get them an income. Some of our clients keep livestock and we are investigating the possibility of breeding rabbits for food. These are all good 'bread and butter' projects because they provide people with income or food or both. But the more we can branch out and find other ways of making money, especially ways that don't require much capital, the better. Hence my aim to work on the free or almost free model to see how far it can take us.

Experimenting with Diversity

It's odd how the weather can go from very dry to very wet quite unexpectedly. During the wet season, there was sometimes too much rain all at once, which threatened to wash away crops which were about to be harvested. Rain delayed the harvest of beans, which also resulted in some losses. Then the dry season started, so after harvesting, we returned to the practice of irrigating the other crops that were planted to overlap with the harvesting, a field of watermelon. And then the dry season was interrupted by a week of torrential rain, which threatens the watermelon, due to be harvested in Late March.

With any luck, the dry weather will return and what is left of the watermelon crop, hopefully most of it, will do well. But the field is waterlogged and some of the smaller fruit and plants have been overwhelmed by the thick mud that has been stirred up. All we can do is make sure water is not collecting anywhere and that any plants and fruits that can be saved are saved. Things have been looking brighter and drier for the last two days.

And with the brighter, sunnier weather, we at Ribbon of Hope have been able to return to demonstrating solar cookers. We had a good day at Mogotio, North of Nakuru, last week before the heavy rains started. Over thirty people came to see the demonstration and the debate about whether it was or wasn't possible to cook with 'a piece of silver cardboard and a saucepan painted black' was noisy. Scepticism turned to interest as we checked the food's progress about one hour in; interest turned to amazement when we invited people to test out the result half an hour later.

Today, we went to a town called Salgaa, also North of Nakuru. Closer to 40 people turned up and asked many questions as the rice and ugali (boiled maize meal, the staple food) and sukuma wiki (kale) cooked in the hot sun. In fact, giving a lot of time to answering questions was good because many people cook things one way and one way only. Today, they saw their beloved staple food cooked without using boiling water and without stirring. The whole thing can be put on to cook while the chef attends to other things. And that's just one of the many advantages of cooking this way!

Our aim is to increase self reliance through a variety of income generation schemes and ways of reducing day to day costs. So next week, we hope to return to Salgaa and show people how to make a solar cooker. Buying one is good, because people can save a lot of money and learn a great technique. But if they could make a solar cooker themselves, they could save even more money and they would always be able to make another when the original one wears out. Someone today was asking me if it was really sustainable to sell people a solar cooker for 500 Kenyan shillings (about 4 UK pounds). Well, it is a lot more sustainable than using charcoal or wood. But being able to make these cookers, and it's not difficult, would really put the icing on the cake.

On the opposite end of the scale in terms of self reliance, there is a big problem with the country's dependence on maize for almost all their food needs. It is not an indigenous crop and, for various reasons, it is becoming less productive. Because the weather has been so unpredictable lately, it would be far better to grow more resistant crops such as millet, sorghum, amaranth and many others. These do better in challenging conditions, like drought and flooding. But they also tolerate poorer soil and require less fertilizer and pesticides, substantially reducing the costs that farmers face.

Many farmers remain too dependent on a government that has never actually done very much for them. The scandal of the subsidized maize scheme, which allowed well connected people to make money out of 'relief' food supplies while the costs to ordinary people continued to rise and around a quarter of the country faced serious shortages, was less than a year ago. But the failure of farmers to produce enough food is partly their own fault. Some try to produce cash crops that end up making money for someone or some industry, but don't make much for individual farmers. Others, most farmers in fact, rely on rain fed agriculture, rather than employing some relatively simple method to harvest rainwater.

Small farmers are, of course, in need of ready cash, no less than non-farmers. But there are also those who produce far too little food for their own family and yet also make too little from cash crops to purchase additional food. There should be enough land in Kenya for the country to be food secure, regardless of how weather patterns are changing. True, the government should do a lot more, but perhaps people shouldn't wait for their politicians to do things that it has never done before. Hence the need for anything that increases self reliance.

Sadly, I am not an experienced farmer, I have to go around asking people for advice on what to plant and how to deal with problems that arise. But I feel that the very practice of experimenting with diversity is a good thing in itself. Equally, I think people need to experiment with cooking and eating different things and cooking them in different ways. I can't claim to have many converts yet but this kind of experimenting can be done without spending very much money. And development at low cost is, I think, well worth striving for, especially given the relative lack of success with development at high cost.

A Pill for Underdevelopment

An article published on the 24 of December last year claims that a three week drive to test as many people for HIV as possible succeeded in testing one and a half million people. Perhaps my scepticism is misplaced, but I find it hard to believe that over 6600 people were tested every day for three weeks. Still, if it's true that the country has the capacity to test this number of people this quickly, their aim to test 80% of the adult population by the end of 2010 should be fairly easy.

Unfortunately, providing antiretroviral treatment (ART) for everyone found to be in need of it may not be so easy. The Kenyan government has only ever provided a fraction of the money needed to supply ART to everyone who needs it. Most of the money came from donor funds, such as the (US) President's Emergency Fund for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), the Global Fund and the Clinton Foundation. But they are not due to increase their funding in line with the surge in numbers being found to be HIV positive. The Global Fund has even stopped some expected funding due to serious financial irregularities.

The funding gap is thought to be 2.5 billion shillings this year but will rise to many times that in the next few years. Kenya is currently almost out of stocks of some drugs and the Ministry of Health is applying for emergency funding that should tide them over for six months, if the money is forthcoming. The problem will be exacerbated by new World Health Organisation guidelines that recommend the use of more expensive drugs and putting HIV positive people on ART at an earlier stage of disease development.

Meanwhile, the advocates of 'treatment as prevention' are back in the news. They claim that rolling out ART to everyone found to be HIV positive and testing every adult about once a year could prevent nine out of every ten infections. If this is true in practice, testing everyone regularly and treating everyone found to be positive would be even better than very high levels of condom use (levels that have probably never been achieved). Of course, the approach to funding would have to be completely changed as current funding would be nowhere near high enough to cover the costs of 'treatment as prevention'.

Another study claims that the sort of mass screening suggested above could allow HIV to be eradicated in 40 years (in South Africa). My reaction to these articles, and I'm thinking specifically of Kenya, is that if it were possible to test many millions of people every year, it may also be feasible to put millions on treatment. And if it were possible to successfully treat so many people, then transmission rates should drop radically.

But I would question the feasibility of testing most sexually active adults in Kenya every year. This is a country where health services are in very short supply and high quality services are only available to the very rich, if at all. Long term care for the chronically ill is in even shorter supply. Is the country really going to raise the money for and implement the vast improvements in health infrastructure that would be required just to make this level of HIV screening possible? And if this happens, will the country also develop its capacity to provide long term care to millions of HIV positive people for several decades to come?

Even if the money is forthcoming, I find it hard to believe that Kenya's levels of health care, education, infrastructure and social services will be raised sufficiently to make anything like these predictions about 'treatment as prevention' become a reality. Maybe it is true that 1.5 million people were tested in three weeks. And maybe the sort of funding required to eradicate HIV will be provided. But I can't help remaining highly sceptical.

My discomfort stems from reflecting on the fact that HIV spread rapidly in Kenya at a time of high and increasing levels of poverty and unemployment. Levels of health and education provision were low and are still decreasing. Health indicators, especially for maternal, child and infant health, were particularly poor and most have been disimproving since the 1980s. Gender inequalities have never been given very high priority and those among whom HIV spread most rapidly, women, commercial sex workers, men who have sex with men and intravenous drug users, are as vulnerable now as they were three decades ago.

If it is true that HIV transmission is related to the conditions in which people live and work, as I would maintain, provision even of astronomical levels of funding to test and treat millions of people will still fail to address these conditions. Therefore, I'm suggesting, HIV could still be a problem for countries like Kenya in 40 or 50 years time. In fact, we have hardly even started to address HIV transmission because we continue to ignore the conditions mentioned. But that's just my take on it.

Homophobia is the Problem, Not Homosexuality

Rabid homophobia continues in Kenya and is being actively promoted by political and religious leaders. Police had to 'rescue' three men accused of being gay in a coastal town. When you are 'rescued' by Kenyan police, you know you are in trouble. There was also a case of two men said to be getting married being arrested by police after neighbours complained about them being 'notorious gays'. Meanwhile, a Muslim and a Christian leader are united in their opposition to their town being turned into 'Sodom and Gomorrah'.

These religious leaders feel that if gays are not persecuted, their community will be 'doomed'. This is odd, because Kenya currently faces numerous instances of massive criminal acts being carried out by the country's most powerful and wealthy people. The country is, in a sense, already doomed. At least, a lot of people's lives are doomed.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for education, HIV and internally displaced persons have been stolen, the people behind the post election violence have yet to be tried and will probably never be punished, the power sharing government is a farce, the constitution promised in the first hundred days of 2003 is as far away as ever, millions are facing starvation while donated food is being stolen by politicians and surpluses are being destroyed because of lack of storage facilities. The list goes on and on.

Facing these conditions, why are religious and political leaders so obsessed with homosexual activity? They seem to think that the practice of men having sex with men or women having sex with women is going to turn the heads of heterosexuals and make them into homosexuals too. They imagine that same sex practices are un-African and that they didn't exist before being 'imported' by colonials.

They see homosexuality as a crime but who are its victims? The victims of corrupt politicians, church leaders, police, businesspeople, both foreign and indigenous, are clear enough. Most Kenyans are victims of the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. But who are the victims of the 'crime' of homosexuality?

Of course, there are victims of rape and sexual assault. But perpetrators of sex crimes are already covered by the law. It's just that these laws are not usually upheld, especially when the crimes are carried out by the rich and powerful. The police, who are so quick to go after people who are accused of being gay, are not usually interested in ordinary everyday crime, unless they happen to be involved in it themselves.

Just why is the public so ready to become a baying mob of vigilantes when their target is a defenceless individual or group of individuals? They would achieve a lot more by objecting to the real criminals in this country but the most they do is complain about them. Not that I'm advocating mob justice, but there seems to be no sense of proportion in people's reactions to crimes.

Meanwhile, a politician in Uganda, Otto Odonga, has said he would agree to be the executioner even if the person being tried for homosexuality was his own son. Another politician there seems to think bisexuality is something that has been 'imported' into Africa. But thankfully, at the same meeting, someone else said that he had seen homosexual activity when he was young and that it was not a new thing. Like in Kenya, people in Uganda seem content to be living in one of the poorest countries in the world, made poorer by greedy leaders, as long as they can let loose their mob law against homosexuals or those thought to be homosexuals.

Interestingly, the Ugandan politician who wants to introduce draconian laws against homosexual activity, even against those who witness or know about homosexuality (or who are suspected of witnessing or knowing about it), David Bahati, thinks that everyone is susceptible to being turned into a homosexual. This means that it is possible for him or his friends, colleagues or family members to be 'made into' a homosexual, given the right influences. This seems like a very odd for a homophobe to hold.

What these Kenyan and Ugandan politicians should really be asking about is where the homophobia was imported from. Homosexuality exists in every country and always has, as far as anyone knows. You can't 'import' it. But homophobia is actively encouraged by religious groups, especially extreme right wing Christians. Several prominent American Christians and Christian groups are said to have been backing Bahati and people like him. No doubt they will support anyone who promotes their bigotry. Homophobia is the curse that Kenyans and Ugandans should be worried about, not homosexuality.

Punishing Victims; Protecting Perpetrators

Several Christian organisations and churches in Kenya are claiming 'victory' because the draft constitution has been rewritten to specify that life begins at conception. They threatened to sabotage the whole constitution if this was not done. As a result of their threats, other clauses have also been removed. Kenyans will not now have a right to health care, in particular, reproductive health care. Also, the clause stating that no one may be refused emergency medical treatment has been removed. And there is a phrase that specifically rules out abortion unless the life of the mother is in danger.

Abortion is already illegal in Kenya, but this has not prevented several hundred thousand woman and girls seeking abortion every year. The majority of these abortions, an estimated 800 per day, are unsafe, being carried out in insanitary conditions by untrained personnel. Those who go through these unsafe abortions are less likely to seek professional medical attention and less likely to receive it. As a result, over 2000 die every year, adding considerably to the thousands of maternal deaths that occur.

In what sense have these Christian groups achieved a victory? They don't appear to be opposed to the fact that rape and forced sex often goes unpunished because it is carried out by the more powerful against the powerless. It is carried out by adults against young people, even children. Those who should protect the victims, church leaders, political leaders, teachers, police and others, are often the perpetrators.

If, as Christians are so fond of claiming, life is sacrosanct, why are the lives of certain people so unimportant? Why are human lives so unimportant as to be denied the right to health and the right to make their own reproductive decisions? Women should be able to choose when to have children, under what conditions and with whom. Where these rights have been denied, why should they be made to pay for someone else's crime?

Nothing that these Christians have done will reduce the incidence of unsafe abortions, of seriously compromised reproductive health for women, of women suffering and dying unnecessarily. Nothing that these Christians have done will reduce the incidence of rape and forced sex. Victims of crime should be entitled to protection, not punishment. Perpetrators of crime deserve punishment, especially when those perpetrators are in a position that gives them a level of power that they subsequently abuse.

One priest has said 'we should not victimise the innocent unborn children' but what about the woman or girl who has already been victimised and is now to be punished, perhaps for the rest of her life? Kenya is in dire need of good leadership and the interference of interested parties, whether they be political, religious, commercial or whatever else, is frustrating this need. The country also needs good health care and equal rights for all people, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, tribe, wealth and anything else. But some of the Christian churches clearly have other ideas.