Things My American-Born Kids Will Never Understand About My Childhood

Last Tuesday, at the dinner table in our house in Texas, my son Jimmy looked up from his plate of chicken alfredo and said something that made me put down my fork.

"Daddy, why do you always say you walked to school? Everyone walks to school."

I looked at him. He is ten. He has never walked more than 200 meters without complaining about the heat. His school is a twelve-minute car ride, and I drive him every morning because this is America, where children are driven everywhere and walking is a lifestyle choice.

"Jimmy," I said, "when I say I walked to school, I mean I walked. Seven kilometres. One way. In akala sandals. In the rain. Sometimes in the dark because I wanted to arrive before Mr. Kariuki locked the gate."

He stared at me with the expression of a child who has just been told his father once lived on the moon.

"Seven kilometres? That's like... from our house to Costco."

"No, Jimmy. Costco is three kilometres. I walked more than double that. Twice a day. For eight years."

He went back to his alfredo. He filed this information in the place where children file things their parents say that sound like mythology. And I sat there thinking: this child, whom I love more than my own heartbeat, will never understand.

He will never understand that electricity was a rumour. It went off at seven in the evening and came back when it felt like it — sometimes at nine, sometimes at midnight, sometimes not until Thursday. You did your homework by a koroboi — that kerosene lamp that smelled like a petrol station and gave light the color of old butter. And when the power came back, the whole neighbourhood would shout "Imerudi!" and children would run indoors because the adults said the wires were still hot.

He will never understand the Greatwall television. Not a Samsung. Not a Sony. A Greatwall — thirteen inches, black and white, with a knob you turned until your fingers hurt. The screen had a permanent line across the top because Mama Njeri's firstborn had thrown a toy at it in 1987. And it belonged to the family two homesteads away.

Every Tuesday at seven, twenty of us would squeeze into their sitting room to watch Wrestlemania on KBC. There was one plastic chair for the owner of the TV. Everyone else sat on the floor. If you arrived late, you stood by the door and watched at an angle, which meant Undertaker looked like he had four arms and Yokozuna looked like a mountain range. But we did not care. When Yokozuna sat on his opponent and the referee counted to three, twenty children would scream so loudly that Mama Njeri would come from the kitchen and say, "Nitazima hiyo TV" — I will switch off that TV.

I was a Bret "Hitman" Hart man. My cousin Mwangi swore by Undertaker. We nearly came to blows over this on a weekly basis. The argument would continue the next morning on the way to school, pause for classes, and resume at lunch. What was there to argue about? Jimmy asks me now. You just... watched. No, Jimmy. You did not just watch. You picked a side. You lived or died by that side.

He will never understand the joy of a cold Coca-Cola because it happened twice a year — Christmas and the day the KCPE results came. A whole year of anticipation for one bottle. My daughter has four half-empty juice boxes in the car right now and calls them "yucky."

He will never understand tough feet. Before my first pair of real shoes — Bata Toughees, age seven, for primary school — the soles of our feet were like tyres. We played football on gravel with a ball made from plastic bags and rubber bands tied so tight it could take out a tooth. We ran on paths with thorns that would make his feet — my beautiful American son, who gets blisters from socks — cry for their mother.

He will never understand githeri. Not githeri as a meal — githeri as a lifestyle. Five days a week at boarding school. Maize and beans. No salt on Mondays. No beans on Fridays if the cook was angry. You ate it because the alternative was hunger, and hunger was not a concept in boarding school. It was a roommate.

He will never understand the blueband sandwich. Not a sandwich with blueband as an ingredient. A sandwich where blueband IS the ingredient. Two slices of bread. A scraping so thin you could see the bread through it. And you were grateful, because the boy next to you had bread with nothing, and bread alone, in Kenya, is not food — it is a rumour of food.

He will never understand that I am writing this on a phone that costs more than my father earned in five years of teaching, sitting in a house with air conditioning and a refrigerator full of food we throw away, while my children ask "What's for dinner?" as if the answer is a right.

And I am not angry about any of this.

I do not want my children to walk barefoot. I do not want them to know what a koroboi smells like. I came to America so they would never have to understand these things. The akala, the githeri, the thin mattress in a dormitory of forty boys — those were not character-building. They were poverty, and I escaped, and my children are the evidence.

But here is what I do want them to understand.

I want them to understand that when I call my mother on Sundays and she speaks for four minutes and hangs up, it is because she has said everything she needs to say. In her world, love is not measured in minutes. It is measured in whether you called at all.

I want them to understand why I cannot throw away leftover food, even a spoonful of rice. It is not because I am cheap. It is because I remember the githeri, and my body has not forgotten.

I want them to understand why I speak to them in Swahili even though they answer in English. Because Swahili is where my heart lives, and English is where my job lives, and I refuse for my children to know only my job.

I want them to understand that when I insist they greet every adult at the Kenyan church — shake hands, look them in the eye, say "Good morning" — it is because in my world, a child who does not greet adults is a child whose father has failed. And I refuse to fail.

I want them to understand that when I send money to Kenya — the money that means we drive a Camry instead of a Lexus — I am not being irresponsible. I am paying a debt. Not a bank debt. A debt to the woman who sold her only cow so I could board the bus to Nairobi with one suitcase and a heart full of intentions.

Last Sunday, my daughter, who is seven, drew a picture at school. Two houses connected by a curved line. One house had stars and stripes. The other had black, red, and green. She gave it to me without explanation.

I looked at it for a long time.

She may never understand akala sandals, or the koroboi, or the Greatwall TV with its cracked screen.

But she understands the line between the two houses.

She drew it herself.

And that is enough.