Kenyans select their favorite breakfast fruit

Today Nairobi is a ghost town. The reason? Kenya is voting on a new constitution, and the government declared today a national holiday, presumably to make it easier for people to vote. Given that the campaign has been marred by violence (9 deaths, including 4 little boys) Tuesday was also made a holiday, in an apparent effort to keep people at home and out of the city center, where things could get rough depending on the result.

Naturally, this was a working day for me and other journalists. Tomorrow will be, too. And Thursday being a working day in this part of the world, I've scheduled a travel day to the Congo, so no Thanksgiving turkey-and-football extravaganza here. Basically, you name a holiday, and I don't get to celebrate it anymore.

Election day has been peaceful, thankfully. The few voters I interviewed at a downtown polling station this morning said everything was orderly, and they were hoping for the country to be reunified whatever the outcome. Kenya has some rebuilding to do. This has long been one of the most stable countries in a troublesome region. But the campaign brought out the worst in Kenya's leaders -- insults, tribal incitement, violence, accusations of treason and outright political giveaways, such as the president's recent announcement of pay raises for 3,000 local officials.

I'd tell you what the new constitution is all about -- but then you'd have an unfair advantage over millions of Kenyans who voted today. Long before the government circulated drafts of the document, it assigned symbols to each side to help illiterate voters -- bananas for yes, oranges for no. These symbols have overshadowed the substance such that every voter, illiterate or not, has traded orange-and-banana jokes over his or her cell phone. But it's not clear anyone has actually read the proposed constitution.

Anyway, this might not matter -- right now, the oranges have a big lead.