T for Turere: All He do is Win...Now matter what! #TEDTalentSearch

Sometimes to err is human, and to human is to exaggerate. I've been guilty of many exaggerations in my posts, and a lot more take-my-head-off-and-smash-it-onto-a-drum melodrama. This, however, is no exaggeration.

Do you have an 11-year old in your homestead? Does he skate like Evan Doherty and drive you crazy like a Kenyan matatu with his occasional falls off his prodigious pedestal? Maybe your kid even says the times table to the nth power? Impressive, aye? Well meet Richard Turere and get a bit depressingly impressed.

At the age of 11, I had made out with - and told on - about 11 girls since kindergarten and gotten over them. At 11, Turere had faced LIONS; conquered, gotten over them and all!!!.  I kid you not, Samson. And no, ladies and lions do not have any similarities. Save for the retractable claws. 

Here's how the cradle of brilliantkind did it. Without any knowledge of electronics or advanced art in science, Richard faced the possibility of losing his responsibility and livelihood as a cattle-herder in the plains of Kenya to the Man Eaters of Kitengela. Impossible odds, no? How about learning that he actually cared about the lions almost as much as he did his cattle, and did not see them as expendable creatures? Impossibler odds?

Well if anyone embodies possibility, this idea worth spreading is the young Turere. He came up with a system of dancing lights using a car battery and bike indicators, strategically lined along his homestead's fence. All this from the observation that lions did not like [read 'scampered off like little kitties'] at the sight of a flickering torchlight. And in this simple innovative way, complicated as Kenyan politics for a kid who shoulda been doing his tortuously impractical 8-4-4 homework, Turere avoided this:

Lion project - The face of predation

by using these:

                          and has now, at 13, graced Brookehouse Schools with his presence here:

Photos of Turere and the Lion Light from @PaulaKahumbu's post, WidlifeDirect

Food for thought, that, Mr List-all-the-problems-Kenya-has-NEVER-the-solution. Mrs Oh-My-Nailpolish-spilled-over Oooh-that'll-make-a-cool-tweet! 

Ati the T in T-Pain stands for Teddy? Natsing! Turere patented #Winning long before we had the hashtag! He now also joins FabLab. Inspired yet? I'll hazard a guess it's either that or utter standing ovation while inwardly green as a pea pod.

With great Responsibility comes great Power: Thoughts from @paulakahumbu's #TEDTalentSearch

Be honest...you smugly clicked on the link to correct the error in my heading. No? Ok...then you must have known that I was trying to pull some wool over your eyeballs. That not it either? One last shot at it then...third time charm and all - you just knew that with such a title the post would HAVE TO be interesting. No?

Well in whichever case you'd be disappointed. Because it's not an error. I'm not in the fabric business, so no wool here either. Maybe just a hint of fabrication. And of course I'm not here to tell you anything you don't know. So how could it be interesting?

She needed - and still needs - no introduction. Yet like the TED@Nairobi MC, I feel the need to introduce her. She shouldn't have had to - and still doesn't have to - care so much for the world YOU live in, yet she makes me want to share the sentiment. Every single one of the four times I have spoken to Paula Kahumbu this past month.

Her calmly clenched fist punched the air at Braeburn, cool lull of nature filled the silence in the hall as she projected her passion for the ecosystem to a captured audience. All that was missing in the picture was a broom, preferably a Nimbus of Firebolt, perhaps an invisibility cloak and headless Nick or two red-haired troublemakers, et voila. 

Paula's brilliance imbued the #TEDTalentSearch wavelength with such ferocity that I could bet you no-one dropped a gram of litter all day the next day. Her plea for a balance between mankind and wild-kind was so infectiously affectionate that I for one felt sorry for the lions killed in Maasailand. Much in spite - and malice - of the fact that they encroached on the morans's homesteads and got what was coming their way. Spears...and one man's poison.

"Lions are a National Symbol for Kenya." Paula, during a talk at Pop!Tech - Camden, 2009. 

I am certain she intended to complicate our understanding so - the understanding that there are two sides to encroachment on nature. That much as the lions were in the wrong place at the sharp pointedly wrong time, that land was once theirs to roam freely in. 

My freshman year communication skills lecturer said, in 2007, that we as listeners should not be swayed by our perceptions of anyone as they give a talk. I have never begged to, but I feel the need to differ with her today, all of 5 years later. Because with Paula, it's impossible not to flow with perception when you lend her a stage. 

Chief Nyamweya's work as captured by @afromusing, TED@Nairobi

Because with Paula, it's not a matter of power coming with responsibility. She takes responsibility everyday...and everyday, her power to change the world rises to greater heights. She on many occasions calls former President Moi's burning of ivory in the eighties "a massive global political statement."

She is wrong.

How? Here's how. Paula Kahumbu is THE "massive global political statement". Even without trying to be. Because she does not try to be.