The House With Cracks in the Walls
I can close my eyes right now and walk through every room.
The house I grew up in was a four-room mud and reed structure, the kind that the rain slowly unmade and the sun slowly remade, over and over, across seasons. The walls had cracks that ran from corner to corner like a map of everywhere the world had tried to get in. The floor was packed earth that collected dust and, with the dust, jiggers — those small parasitic insects that burrow beneath your toenails if you are not careful, and sometimes even when you are.

There was no electricity. No running water. No furniture to speak of.
We slept — brothers, sisters, all of us — in a single room. Our beds were collections of straw and old rags boxed in with boards. Later we graduated to four acacia poles driven into the ground. Our elders would fill lime bags from the road construction site with grass, and those became mattresses. We covered ourselves with a single bark cloth blanket, and in the night the wind came through the cracks and our feet were always cold because the cloth was never long enough to reach.

My mother cooked on a mud stove sometimes on three stone in a kitchen behind the house. Sometimes the smoke was so thick you could not see her face when you walked in. You would hear her voice before you saw her — and that voice, low and steady and practical, was the sound of everything being held together.

The toilet was half a kilometre from the house. No one went at night. You waited for the light.

I am writing all of this not so that you will feel sorry for me. I am writing it because I have spent years understanding that the things that formed me were not the things I would have chosen, and yet they formed me anyway, and I have had to make peace with that.

 The house was poor. But it was also shelter. The walls were cracked. But they heard everything — the silent screams, the laughter, the prayers my mother made in the small hours of the night when she thought no one was listening.
I was listening. Children always are.