KANY RISING

Dr. Wasiri packed his family every two or three years to visit his native country of Mezi. Every time he came back from Mezi he became less and less resolute to neither go back nor settle down in Mandi, the capital of the republic of Mezi in spite of pleas from relatives and friends. The overall spectacle of political corruption, military repression, vast economic and management waste left him shaken to the core, praying to see when the whole cycle of destruction would end. The rapid succession of military coups from General Falangi to Colonel Wapiyi to Major General Bomileh to a group of captains to a total civil war, foreign interventions, then finally UNMEZ for United Nations intervention force in Mezi, all that left Dr. Wasiri dizzy and hopeless for Mezi. It also left him more than ever resolved to look forward to a quiet retirement from a tenured teaching position at Frankfort, Kentucky. In fact there was a deeper and troubling ambivalence that Dr. Wasiri increasingly felt now about Mezi and he could not muster enough courage to share it with his wife: the degradation of social values he witnessed not only in the Mezi elite class but also among his own peers and inside his own extended family. He was certain that he could put up with the country economic mismanagement that the military dictatorship brought about. He reasoned that it was part of the growing pains of the relative young nation that Mezi represented. But he could not stomach the collateral social anti-values that the mismanagement engendered. The most disgusting was the case of corruption of minors of age, male and female. When the military elite was done with abusing girls of a certain age, they did not hesitate to clamp on the next lower age bracket to a point where it became routine for an old retired general of sixty five to be surrounded during his nightly escapades with fifteen, fourteen or twelve years old girls, while their longtime suffering and abandoned spouses were cavorting with younger male lovers of seventeen or eighteen years old. In the same revolting ambiance, when not satisfied to maintain one household, the same elite started the expensive display of maintaining two or three households of equal standing with much younger companions, draining without end the ever depleted country treasury. Unfortunately, the corrupting practices of the military elite were quickly adapted and practiced by Mezi business and social elites at large. If Dr. Wasiri can close his eyes on the tramplings of the nouveaux riches he did not associate with, he was much revolted by the rites of bowing nowadays. This was another aggravation altogether. Dr. Wasiri had nothing against the rites of bowing. He grew up with these rites when he was young. But the rites of bowing were reserved to honor age and wisdom, and in that specific order. He bowed to the chief of the village, to the elders, to the teachers, and to his parents of course. He was incensed now to see a complete perversion of the rites when monetary power, military armed power, and various forms of power of corruption became the norms for bowing. Age and wisdom were set aside. Anybody with an iota of power over anybody started demanding to be bowed at. A child of a military general from his chauffeur, a low level bank manager from his household nanny, a housewife from her servant, a manager from his subordinates, and so on. Whenever he left Mezi to come back to Kentucky, Dr. Wasiri was relieved to escape from the aggravating spectacle of perverted bowing practiced even in his own extended family. However, as much as Dr. Wasiri distanced himself from Mezi, Mrs. Hasbo Wasiri couldn’t be happier every time the family was in Mezi. She was not fazed by all the political agitations going on around them. Mrs. Wasiri, Hasbo as she was delighted to be called by her in-laws, extended her stay in Mezi sometimes way beyond the three months of summer vacation to learn more about the country and people of Mezi. She immersed herself in the Mezi cultural setting, she learned to speak and write Mambele, the local vernacular language spoken in Mandi, the capital of Mezi and by more than forty five percent of citizens of the country. She also perfected speaking Swahili, the second official language in Mezi, after the English. Dr. Wasiri has already taken care to teaching and tutoring his wife and children to Swahili at home to prepare them for rare visitors from Mezi when they dropped by in Frankfort, Kentucky. Whenever she had a chance, Hasbo said to her husband that she was much happier only when she was in Mezi. She added that with their three kids soon to be attending US colleges, it would be about time for him to try to take a sabbatical leave and settle in Mandi for a time to see if it was possible to live and settle there. Dr. Wasiri thought that his wife has gone crazy. He asked, “What about the endless coups, the civil war, the many rebel armies all over the place.” Mrs. Hasbo Wasiri was not discouraged. From bits her husband had shared in the past she came to learn how important and pivotal Dr. O’Shea has been in his formative academic background in addition to the fight over the Alpha-M paper. She enlisted the support of Dr. O’Shea in her campaign to go back to Mezi. Surprisingly she got more than she bargained for and much more. As usual, under the pretext of visiting his old friend Dr. Jeremy Winston at Kentucky State University, Dr. O’Shea came to Frankfort and met with Dr. Wasiri. They reminisced over old time but not a word was said about Apha-M until the day Dr. O’Shea was to leave. He mentioned it by accident in front of Mrs. Hasbo Wasiri. He said that he was more convinced than ever that Alpha-M can be extracted exactly where Dr. Wasiri has predicted in his paper. He has verified this theory with a lot of scientists from the world over in a recent conference he attended in St Petersburg, the former Leningrad in Russia. These scientists, unlike his esteemed peers from the University of Kentucky, never raised a finger or an objection when he surreptitiously presented the finding of Dr. Wasiri’s paper. He stunned his protégé by saying that his paper was received with a standing ovation at the end of his presentation. When he came back to US, he requested and finalized a well-deserved leave from his 32 year teaching position to dedicate his remaining years studying the intriguing Alpha-M mineral. He has extended his collaboration with the scientists he met in Russia although he cannot help to find that they all looked alike, a bit weird, almost like robots as he put it, in size, manner, and speech pattern. In passing, Dr. O’Shea joked that maybe these scientists were part of a cloning invention of the old Soviet communist system. He also said that his research was now privately funded by a grant set up by a British mining company controlled by one of those new billionaires in Russia new capitalism system. His name was Nadov Kiriyan.