Unlimited wants, Scarce resources

As a young student in high school, the lesson on unlimited wants and scarce resource never made sense. After all it was just another lesson crafted by curriculum developers to fill the time that students spent in high school.

This lesson just flew into my mind the other day as I was digesting news that one of my uncles had died. Anyway I would not have attended the burial had it not been the close relationship between his children and myself, my sisters and brothers.

The late man who has mentored thousands of students in his career as a teacher, also mentored me as a young boy who used to visit his house.

It is there that I learnt that a man can plan for a whole month and does'nt have to live by the day. This is because at home we would only know that it was end month when my father came home drunk.

The rest of the days were lived as they came. It was in his house that I learnt that toilet soap, salt and sugar and other basic necessities are bought at the beginning of the month and not any when it gets finished.

Anyway, enough of him and back to story of the unlimited wants and scarce resources.

I am on now on my way home to the white highlands. And what I know is that expectation is high, their son is coming all way from the Coast. Right now I know that someone somewhere must be preparing a litany of unfulfilled wants.

Someone must be preparing to ask me for his shoes, I know there is someone who will tell me that they need a new phone as the one they have does not work. Someone will like my sweater and ask me to leave it to him. And every time I leave it when I come back it is usually reported as having being lost.

And then my concern is that there is someone in high school whose fees have to be paid. The maize needs fertilizer and we need cows here and this and that other unmet need.

For me, I know that economic recession is real. I do not have the money to meet all these needs. I do not have savings that will take care of all my uncles, my aunts and any other person who has a claim in me.

God I cannot meet their unlimited needs. Talk of unlimited wants and scarce resources.

Yet someone is most likely to say I am mean, otherwise how do you explain of a guy who comes all the way from the Coast and does not have money to philanthropise.

Damn. I am coming to bury Mwalimu Josphat Gathiru Kungu and not to do philanthropy.