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Showing posts from May, 2012

Emotional Wellness

http://nutritionafrica.blogspot.com/2012/05/emotional-wellness.html There's a good piece on the Huffington Post called " 10 Ways to Improve Depression and Anxiety without Meds ." It's written by a psychiatrist, Dr Sheenie Ambardar, and I believe it is directed at an audience of people living with mood disorders. But I think it makes great advice for a general audience. The first item on the list, "Limit Your Time on Facebook," cracked me up, but it is true. I think spending time on Facebook is okay if you're strategic about it, and do it for networking or professional purposes. Using your Facebook account as an extension of your personal life is another story. I think the seventh item on the list, "Pick a Goal, Any Goal," is not specific  enough. I can imagine somebody picking a huge task as a goal, and then getting anxious or depressed about not being able to achieve it. That would contradict the intentions of Dr Ambardar in w

Setting your own limits

http://nutritionafrica.blogspot.com/2012/05/setting-your-own-limits.html I have just come across a great blog post by the writer, Donald Miller. It touches on decisions that we can actively make to improve our emotional well-being. The post, Need to Manage Your Relationships? touches on the challenges Miller has faced managing his time and relationships in such a way that he can meet his professional and social responsibilities without exhausting himself. You really should read this piece. It articulates what so many of us go through daily, trying to be supermen or superwomen in our jobs and lives in general. We are under so much pressure to perform well at work, to be supportive friends, and to meet whatever personal goals we have set for ourselves, that we forget that we can't do it all.  Many of us go overboard, committing ourselves to too much, and then subsequently wonder why we are so burnt out and resentful in the middle of the week. I'm glad to say I ch

On popular perceptions of adoption in Kenya

http://nutritionafrica.blogspot.com/2012/05/on-popular-perceptions-of-adoption.html   In August last year, a Kenyan media personality, Caroline Mutoko, announced on her Facebook page that she had just become a mother. At first glance, it may seem like there was nothing unusual about this. After all, motherhood is part of the natural order of things. This, however, was a special situation. The radio show host had just successfully adopted a baby girl and was happy to share her joy with her fans. UGLY PERSPECTIVES Predictably, the responses to her announcement ran the full gamut. They ranged from those which lauded her actions to those which cast aspersions on her motives for adoption. Of those who wrote negative comments, some were sure that she had adopted because she did not want to 'ruin her figure' with pregnancy and childbirth. Others were certain that she had adopted in order to prove she was a 'self-sufficient woman', with no need for a man. Yet

The myth of linguistic purity

Professor Farooq A. Kperogi's piece on " The Arabic Origins of Common Yoruba Words " is an interesting read. While I do not speak a word of Yoruba, I can see parallels between the context he describes (in response to the Italian Professor Sergio Baldi's "On Arabic Loans in Yoruba") and the Kenyan one. I am a speaker of Swahili, a Bantu language whose lexicon has also been expanded over the centuries with vocabulary from Arabic, among other languages. Hence, I know for a fact that most, if not all, of Kenya's languages have in turn benefited from this expanded Swahili lexicon by themselves absorbing words from Swahili that are originally of Arabic origin.  WHAT LANGUAGES REVEAL There's nothing unusual about this. I think that every spoken language bears testimony to the interaction of two or more groups of people, and, over time, comes to include vocabulary from myriad other languages. Languages are, in this way, records of the history of human in

In America, everything is politicized

When I read this article , I had to laugh. It brought to mind a conversation I once had with my friend, Maina, a Kenyan living in the US. We were both attending an event organized by an African American student group. Some of the African American women attending the event were dressed in the best of African couture, but there was a distinct difference between the way they carried themselves and the way a Kenyan or Tanzanian woman dressed in a similar outfit would have carried herself. I put it down to the fact that the American women probably felt self-conscious in their dresses. Maina, who had lived in the country longer, had another theory. He figured that Americans didn’t know how to simply be. Everything they took up, every cultural practice or idea they picked up from another nation, they had to repackage, politicize and turn into a movement . I shook my head in doubt, but Maina smiled. “Believe me,” he said, “this lady in the Kitenge is probably wearing it to express politi

It's time we addressed the ethnic elephant in the room

It often seems to me that the specter of race is omnipresent in America. One cannot go anywhere or do anything without encountering some passionate debate about race or racism or being thrown into some limiting category (i.e. "You can't do xyz because black/ white folk don't do that."). As a foreign black woman living in the United States, it exhausts me. But I have to be honest with myself. It's not a uniquely American thing. In my own nation, we are obsessed with ethnicity. I do not see any difference between racism and ethnic hatred. They are one and the same thing. Race is first-and-foremost an invention of overzealous scientists of past centuries. So when the pseudoscience is swept aside, all that actually remains to distinguish people of different 'races' is their culture. That thing we call 'race' in America should really be called 'ethnicity,' because most of the time when people talk about race, that is what they are referring to