“I Shall Pass This Way But Once”
THE ROAD TAKEN
One of those immortal lines that refuses to leave the recesses of your hard disk once you have heard it is a saying by Etienne de Grellet, a Quaker missionary who lived in the years 1773-1855.
In it, he says:
“I shall pass this way but once;
Any good that I can do
Or any kindness I can show
To any human being;
Let me do it now.
Let me not defer it nor neglect it.
For I shall not pass this way again.”
(Poem reconstructed from the original wording by this writer)
According to Wikipedia, the author was a Frenchman who escaped execution in his country in 1793 during the French Revolution and settled in the US. He encountered some missionaries there who impressed him so much that he converted from his Catholic faith to join their cause known as the “Society of Friends” or Quakers.
The Message
It is the content of the message that is so simply put yet so important and that is why you remember it so easily. When you think about it, life is short; seventy or eighty years as the bible puts it. When you are young, you have no time to think about your twilight years.
And then, somewhere maybe in your 50s, you realise that you may not have much time remaining on earth. Panic may set in and you start doing all manner of crazy things. Tragedy is, the more you try, the harder it becomes.
In my case, I started playing golf in 1996 at age 51 and got into it with so much passion that my handicap dropped rapidly - from 24 to 11 in under two years. With success comes in more severe tests as anyone who knows the game of golf will tell you.
My Golf Course Challenge
It was during the time that I was working on my game that it occurred to me that my little 9-hole club known as Vet Lab Sports Club was suffering from “lack of challenge” so to speak. It had been like that since it was founded by a few scientists working at the Veterinary Laboratories at Kabete more than 50 years before.
The reason for lack of challenge was because, after playing the first nine holes, doing the second nine was a lot easier largely due to the fact that the greens were exactly what you had played on the first nine. Only the location of the tees and length of the hole had changed.
That was why, when I became the chairman of the club in 2003, I made it my agenda to dd exxee x convert the club to a regular 18-hole club. This was easier said than done. We needed an extra 50-60 acres of land and the only land around the small golf course belonged to either the University of Nairobi or the Veterinary Labs.
To cut a long story, I managed to find my way to State House to the newly elected president of Kenya HE Mwai Kibaki and presented my case. Someone once said that if you are trying to do a good thing even the gods will come your aid. And that is what happened: the President happened to be the Patron of Kenya Golf Society a position he had held for many years.
And that is how we got allocated an extra 60 acres from the Vet Labs land to expand the course. He even came to officially open in 2013 but I was not even there as I had another challenge.
The Ndakaini Dam Challenge
As I was busy expanding the Vet Lab golf course, I had another “small” problem at my home village of Ndakaini in Murang’a County. The little problem was created to my fellow villagers by the Government of Kenya when it decided to acquire 2,444 acres of land to build a huge dam for getting water for Nairobi city.
The original survey work was done in the late 1980s a time of great political uncertainty in the country. I became aware of it when a couple of local people asked me if I knew what was happening. I offered to investigate and report back.
That is when I became aware of the magnitude of the project. I was horrified when I realised that my parent’s house built 15 years earlier was part of the land to be compulsorily acquired. I got to work mobilising the local people and sharing with them a map that showed how much land was to be taken. I even managed to get all the MPs from Murang’a to inform them about it. And that is when serious divisions crept up due to political affiliations.
The rest of the story is now known - the land was acquired for peanuts, the dam was built, we had to relocate our parents and, finally, the dam was officially opened in 1994 by the second president of Kenya, HE Daniel arap Moi. After making all sorts of promises about how the people were going to get all sorts of services like water, electricity and roads, nothing happened.
And that is why in 2003, I and a few residents of the area decided to form an organisation for the conservation of the area around the dam. We named the organisation NDEKA - Ndakaini Dam Environmental Conservation Association. This involved planting trees and other shrubs around the and creating a special instrument - Ndakaini Marathon - to sensitise the people of Nairobi about the problems at the source if their water.
Sixteen years later, I can proudly say that there is a tree buffer around the dam, electricity has been connected to most homes and wonder of wonders, the entire 21km route for the marathon has now been tarmacked.
Not a mean achievement given the hostility to our project.
Back to Grellet
For me, this second project was a grim reminder of how selflessness can bear results. During the entire period we relied on the the goodwill of all manner of individuals and organisations since the government still would not give us money to do what was, strictly, its job.
Now that both projects are over, I can report with pride that Grellet’s advice has been instrumental in letting me achieve what must appear as miracles.
Not that we did not have significant challenges along the way but, with God on your side, all things are possible.
JH Kimura,
Nairobi,
27th October 2019