Deworming children as a Christmas gift

An article arrived in my phone’s newsfeed this week about how positive visualisation really works: you just imagine how you want your life to be and your dreams will come true, it declared. And there are hints in my own life this could be true.

For, when I have really wanted something and imagined it a lot, it has come to pass, sometimes against enormous odds.

This set me to thinking, can positive visualisation work for life as a whole and not just for our own experiences? And, if so, what would I really want for future Kenya, more than anything? What would be the biggest gifts, move the dial, change the game for our nation?

So, here is my Christmas list for Kenya that I am visualising day and night this week and maybe longer, just in case that small piece of imagining could deliver some dreams come true.

My first dream is about children and their future. In 2019, three economists won the Nobel prize for work on the impact of deworming on children in western Kenya.

One of them, Michael Kremer, had followed a cohort of kids for more than 20 years after deworming and proven they did better at school than those around them, earned more, did better in life. Yet the deworming tablets don’t even cost Sh50 each.

So my first dream, this Christmas, is that thousands of the millions of professionals and staff who head upcountry this season will buy deworming tablets for all the children in their village or communities, maybe for 100 children, in a single Sh5,000 gift that will change a hundred lives forever and the future for everyone there.

Imagine, if 3,000 bankers and marketers, administrators and accountants all dewormed all the children at home, it would be a third of one million lives changed. In one community, I just did this myself, so I know my dream will be a little bit true, no matter what now.

But my second dream, I cannot do, by virtue of my birthplace, outside East Africa. For my second dream is about politics.

I am imagining that hundreds of good men and women and true, tired of the gossip politics, tired of the graft and the ego, in pain at the drainage, will stand for election in 2022 and bring us more of a different and better kind of leadership.

In my dream, millions of Kenyans decide not to vote for any thief, no matter the notes given out at rallies and no matter their power. In my imagined future, elders meet, and teachers, mothers and fathers, and they vote for the most serious candidate by way of integrity and intent, no matter what.

Imagine if that put just 50 new MPs, or better still 100, into our chamber set on remedy and solutions and progress without the bribes, who then dedicate themselves to mending our systems every waking day: my new heroes. I am dreaming of them stepping forward, and getting selected.

And my third dream is about low-cost housing. In this dream, again thousands of professionals wake up on Christmas morning knowing that what they want to give their nation is decent homes, with latrines or toilets, and taps and water, and electricity.

In my dream, each of those change-makers looks at their own job and skills and asks, ‘What can I do, what can I add to get us closer to low-cost housing?’ and then they do it.

Imagine the marketer who engages just an hour a week helping with pitch documents for investors, or the banker who gives an hour a week to create a new low-cost housing fund.

Imagine the engineer whose hour a week identifies a 3D printing way to make decent housing for little more than Sh500,000; the journalist whose hour a week runs a column on ways and means of achieving low-cost housing; the editor who adds a weekly half-page on it; the blogger who launches a blog on it.

Imagine an army of low-cost housing champions changing our housing landscape, permanently.

And that is my dream, this Christmas.