Tells the story of a slim kid struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of two towns one in northern part of the country and another in the coastal part of the country—a struggle that takes him from the coastal heartland to the ancestral home of his parents in the tiny Borana village of Milimani.
The skinny kid opens his story in the land named after bows and arrows, where he hears that his hometown has not moved a bit—The news triggers a chain of memories as the kid retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his parents from small-town (golden town) to the coastal town; the love that develops between his parents and the new land, a love nurtured by greener pasture and the integrationist spirit of the early nineties; his parent’s departure from ancestral land when the kid was still a kid, as the realities of new environment and culture reassert themselves; and kid’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the indigenous and migrants worlds but within himself.
Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his parent’s legacy, the kid who has now grown moves to other parts of the country to study. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous cultural and status conflict, he studies to turn back the mounting despair of the poor neighborhood.
His story becomes one with those of the people he studies with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity. The kid’s journey comes full circle in golden town, where he finally meets the northern side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his hometown’s life.
The skinny kid opens his story in the land named after bows and arrows, where he hears that his hometown has not moved a bit—The news triggers a chain of memories as the kid retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his parents from small-town (golden town) to the coastal town; the love that develops between his parents and the new land, a love nurtured by greener pasture and the integrationist spirit of the early nineties; his parent’s departure from ancestral land when the kid was still a kid, as the realities of new environment and culture reassert themselves; and kid’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the indigenous and migrants worlds but within himself.
Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his parent’s legacy, the kid who has now grown moves to other parts of the country to study. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous cultural and status conflict, he studies to turn back the mounting despair of the poor neighborhood.
His story becomes one with those of the people he studies with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity. The kid’s journey comes full circle in golden town, where he finally meets the northern side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his hometown’s life.
Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and inequality, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, the Kid discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers,sisters,cousins,aunts etc living myriad of kilometers away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance. A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in coast,WALKING DOWN THE MEMORY LANE might be the most revealing portrait i have of a kid from an old town -a kid who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented..............
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BILLIE MEDIA