The Wise One of Ramogiland

Here is a read for the spiritually and politically connected. https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1130

I've Walked the Walk

I've walked the walk,

And traveled the distance,

And I've known how it feels

To be on the other side of midnight In an alien land--

Pumping gas into a tired car

In a village that goes to sleep

And no dog barks.

Yet I knew eyes were on me

As I swiped my credit card

Into a rusty old pad.

I've known what it feels

To sleep outside your soul,

For but a brief moment,

And I've resolved to blog, talk, tweet,

laugh,and get busy

For when the light goes out,

And the blog updates stop,

And the tweets cease,

And no more phone rings,

The silence becomes noisy and dissonant.

So I've resolved to think, talk, write, tweet,

and blog,and write a book online
Beacuse messages unseen, unread, unheard,...

Are but a collection of characters,

mere words left to gather dust and mold.

JR Alila. p

The Thirteenth Widow (A Novel): The Story (Part 1)

What if you woke up one morning with a broken arm, a broken rib, and six stitches of some fiber across your heavily bandaged face, and you were in a room you couldn’t see, except it smelled like carbolic acid (excuse my archaic language); you knew that you’ve been badly banged and your body ached generally.

Sure there was a feminine voice in the room, and the voice was saying that you’ll be okay; that you were worse a few days before; that some people she couldn’t talk about in public nearly killed you. “You’ll live, Mr. Okoth,” she says, walking out of the room before you could tell her that you were thirsty. Regardless she couldn’t have heard your mumbled words, and she couldn’t have obeyed your need because you were a Nothing-by-Mouth case.

You walked out a month later with a part of your life left behind. You move on back to your life as the headmaster of Soko Primary School, knowing quite well that a middle-school foe had been behind your ordeal; that the woman you remember having shared beer with; the woman you spent a night with, had been a police bait placed on your alcoholic path by friends of your middle-school foe—a bait that would deliver you to hungry intelligence dogs looking for Mwakenya sympathizers. Don’t worry if you never heard the word Mwakenya. Those who lived through Kenya’s politics in the 1980s know that Mwakenya was an underground movement whose sole agenda was to bring down KANU’s one-party state. You were beaten senseless because someone—your middle-school foe—claimed that you were Mwakenya agent, yet you were not, and you had nowhere to complain.

You, Okoth weren’t that lucky, for a few years later, the same foe now was the chief of your location at a time when Kenyan location chiefs wielded much power and directly answered to the President of the nation. You remained a mere headmaster of a Middle School. You drunk together with your chief, call him Chief Omolo, and the chief could insist that you escorted him home, and you did so because no one ever said no to the chief. Along the way to the chief’s abode, you sampled chang’aa (an illicit brew) and the chief did the buying, and you did the drinking. In fact, he only sniffed the bottles of chang’aa you shared. You felt happy as you ambled your way deeper and deeper into the chief’s village, sampling chang’aa as you went. To an observer, the two of you were just two buddies walking shoulder to shoulder. But you were drunk and he wasn’t, and the chief was up to something sinister.

What if you woke up early dawn on a strange headache, singing in praise of your wife Jane, except you were not in your home? You were two ridges away to the south in the house of some widow left behind by a distant cousin. She had been asleep before you sang, and your strange song ticked her off, and now she was ordering you leave her house before sunrise. In her deal with Chief Omolo, who had delivered you to her, the sun was not supposed to rise with you still in the home in mourning; your mission was supposed to have been so secret that even you, the drunkard, wasn’t supposed to have known that you had been in the home of curses. Now you understood the joke. You knew that the late Otieno died a strange death, a fact that had kept his brothers away from his beautiful widow. Your situation stunk: In your drunken stupor, you had inherited the spiritual burdens in your late cousin’s home. If you were a scholar of the Old Testament, or if you had read Apostle Paul’s Letter to Hebrews, you understood that you had become what the people of faith called the scapegoat—the goat that left the sanctuary with communal sins for an uncertain journey into the wild desert where predators roamed.

(To continue . . .).

Maya (A Novel)

MAYA, Joseph R Alila, author of “Birthright (a Luo Tragedy),” (http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-R.-Alila/e/B002QD5TDM) brings yet another narrative about the lives of ordinary people with human flaws, from which each of them can only run away, or ignore, at his or her own peril. Maya Boone faces a legal quandary over a death she has witnessed from her hideout on Eagle Street, Harmony, New York. First, she watches Raul, the troublesome husband from whom she is hiding, kill a bulldog. When Maya crosses Eagle Street to enquire whether the dog’s owner (Mike) is suing Raul, she instead falls in love with the heartbroken man, lures him to her bed, and even contemplates witnessing against Raul. The brief affair ends quickly because Mike becomes a victim to an enraged boyfriend’s arrow of passion. Wounded and helpless, Mike falls into the hands of a moonlighting evangelist named Booker who has a score to settle with him. There is no mercy for Mike, only a slow death, because Booker wishes to maintain his cover while moonlighting at Bar Delirium. With Mike dead, Maya’s distant past soon confronts her because, also witnessing the events leading to the murder on Eagle Street is Officer Jimmy Depuy—a child Maya abandoned at birth forty years before. Neither Raul nor Maya nor Officer Depuy knows about their shared bond. Then one Detective John unearths the blood knot linking Jimmy Depuy to the Rauls, and soon District Attorney Hess is advancing criminal motives against the trio. In MAYA, JR Alila weaves yet another intricate narrative that should appeal to those readers who seek to understand, in human character, matters beyond the mundane of daily life. Check here: http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-R.-Alila/e/B002QD5TDM

Socrates: Brazilian Soccer Meastro Dies

The tall Brazilian Soccer Magician of the 9180s, Dr. Oliviera (Socrates) dies at age 57. He too was a medical doctor and a writer.
Read Here:
http://msn.foxsports.com/foxsoccer/latinamerica/story/socrates-dead-age-57-brazil-legend-hospital-infection-food-poisoning-120411