Mr. Livinaari — The One Exception
There were rich people, some of them. But the rich, mostly, lived behind long metallic gates. They were enclosed. They did not care about how others lived.
I say mostly, because there was one exception I can still see clearly in my memory. Mr. Livinaari.

His wealth was a blessing to the community — not in the abstract way that people sometimes say this, but in the actual, physical, calendar-marked way. Thirsty and poor families used his large plantain plantation. When he hosted weddings and introduction parties for his sons and daughters, thousands of people came — from miles and miles, people who had not eaten meat or chicken or anything beyond the cycle of porridge and posho for months or years. They came, and they ate, and for one day the cycle was different.

I have thought about Mr. Livinaari many times as an adult. About what it means to have more than others and to use it the way he did — not as insulation from the village but as participation in it. About how rare that is. About how one person who opens the gate, metaphorically and literally, can become the organizing memory of an entire childhood.
He is still in my memory. I think he always will be.

The Current That Ran Beneath the Quiet
Do not mistake the gentleness of the people of my village for contentment.
Beneath the deceptive peace, there were strong currents of fear and anxiety. The fear of the next drought. The fear of HIV, which had moved through this region for decades like a slow tide, taking fathers and mothers and leaving children without the architecture of their lives. The fear that the balance, already so heavily weighted down on one side, would shift further.

We lived by making as few demands as possible. We were not outgoing. We pushed aside intrusions. We protected the small, fragile equilibrium we had because to step outside it — to reach for something beyond what was given — was, for most people, to risk losing the little that remained.

I knew this. I felt it in the village the way you feel weather coming before it arrives. And I also knew, from the time I was very young, that something in me was going to push against it.
I did not know yet what that would cost.

I was a strange child in Kisaka. I knew it and the village knew it. I hung around with people older than me. I observed everything. I was, as my father would put it in his careful English — the language he used when he wanted to say something that mattered — analytical. Different. Difficult to get along with, sometimes, because everything had to make sense before I would agree to do it.

People in my family said the Kaggwas were wise. I spent years trying to understand what they meant by that. I understand it better now. What they were describing, I think, was a particular heaviness of mind — the kind that sees too much, too early, and cannot stop seeing.

That mind was a gift. It was also a weight I would spend my entire childhood learning to carry.

And what I was carrying it toward — the thing that was waiting at the end of the road I could not yet name — was shaped, more than anything else, by two people.
One of them was my father.