Dreaming of a Better Life in the Face of Adversity

The table covered with a white table cloth embroidered with sunflowers;a spread of local coastal delicacies on top.Five bottles of beer and one bottle of wine at the corner and next to them a bowl filled with ice cubes.Music is playing ''Pwani kuna raha'' ;a song infused with longing for the beautiful coastal beach.The guests start arriving in dribs and drabs;a mark of a joyful coastal evening.They are friends from across the spectrum of society;muslims,christians and some indians.All this would not have been worth noting some years back but now it is a crucial reminder of how diverse life is.

Everyone has a story to narrate.There is laughter and song.Glasses toast each topic.A TV screen tuned to an international satelite channel is showing the recent attacks at a local church in Likoni whose savagery,indiscriminately unleashed,claimed lives and injured scores of innocent worshippers.The attacks overshadows their conversation but the guests try to keep their spirits high and cheer again.They never thought that some of their friends would be dead today and that some of them would be victims of bungled attempts at their precious lives for raising their voices against religious fundamentalism.Five of them bear the scars of the nefarious attempts on different parts of their anatomy.Most conspicous are the bandages swaddling their heads to cover wounds sustained during a close shave with death.

These people thought that their well-intentioned cause for peace and tolerance yield fruits.Their attempts to offer a cross-cutting ideology diametrically opposed to the hateful fundamentalism were met with incessant assassination attempts on them;a sobering reality that has forced them to seek refuge in self-imposed seclusion.They were part of local coordination committees which organised drives purposely engineered to counter hateful extremist messages with the real potential of ripping apart the fabric of ther society.