Breastfeeding Abnormal?

So there’s a movement in the US to normalize breastfeeding! My, don’t African mothers have it good! Remember earlier this year a young lady was ostracized for breastfeeding at her graduation in the US and it was all over the internet. It seems that for a mother to breastfeed in public in the US is more un-natural than soft porn. If you haven’t been following up what’s happening way out over there check this out>> THIS.

I can’t imagine being told not to breast feed when my baby needs it. Where doesn’t matter, what matters is that my baby needs to nurse and boobs are actually made to nurse little human beings… not amuse big human beings.

Now Kenyans being Kenyans those who believe to be ahead of things and on the cutting edge of social trends are starting to look down on public nursing. Try nursing, without a cover at the village market food court. Its not bad, on the whole, nice mature ladies will smile your way but every so often a supermodel looking girl will give you ‘the look’. This ‘’look’’ seems to say ‘’have some decency’’. As if breastfeeding is indecent. After that experience take a matatu ride with your baby (not for the faint-hearted though) or go to a public health facility (the Westlands maternal health clinic is my favorite, don’t look at me funny, I’m not paying I don’t know how many thousands of shillings for non-child friendly immunizations or adding a zero to the thousands for the child friendly ones. In public health facilities it costs between 50 bob and 300 bob). Should baby squeak as if to cry, everyone will tell you to give the baby what is baby’s… i.e. the breast. Trust me it doesn’t even come out lewd… its actually as loving as a Kenyan stranger in Nairobi will get.

In short I love that this breast feeding ‘issue’ is not in Kenya (except maybe in bougie Kenya) and would love to welcome young American families to invest in Kenya and use their energies on other things away from defending your right to be what you were made to be. Seriously though, I feel for young mothers out there trying to bring up children in a very unfriendly social and even legal environments (no one is going to tell me how to discipline my baby let alone take my babies away from me for trying to provide for them and for caning them every so often… that to me is nonsense. My mama beat me and dang she beat and pinched wherever was necessary to teach me a lesson, I’m not dead so my babies won’t die.)

Beautiful just the way God made it!

As I finish, when little man was about 5 months old, we took our first matatu ride to the clinic. I was shy so I pumped and put milk in bottles for him to suckle in the matatu. Now little man refused to have the milk in a bottle, the more I tried to force him, the more he wailed. The conductor in the Nissan 14 seater got tired of the racket and said ‘Mungu hakukuwekea matiti ndio unyime mtoto, mpatie mtoto haki yake!’ (God didn’t put breasts on you so that you can deny your child, give the boy his rights!)