December 2020

The baby girlDomestic violence can be dangerous. I had not witnessed the incident, but my mother told me how an argument with my father escalated into a physical fight. My father had stepped on her stomach several times, and she became ill. The baby, born prematurely, later died. I love my father, and I could […]

The baby boy After my father came from detention, my mother became pregnant, but my father stayed at a rehabilitation facility before joining the family. My mother was in labor from early evening until morning when finally, the baby boy was born. In the middle of one night, my mother called me and asked me

My employer’s father While working as a house maid, I took breakfast to my employer’s elderly father. That man did not answer my calls, and would not wake up no matter how hard I shook him. When I removed the blanket from his body, it looked like he was still sleeping. I touched his face

DeathThe death was unknown to me – one morning, my mother had slept in too late, and I went into her room to find her. To my surprise, the baby was sleeping next to her, comfortably wrapped in a baby blanket. I touched the baby’s hands even before talking to my mother and noted that

We have grown up believing that it is an omen for the Gīkūyū man to be in the kitchen. However, this is not the mentality in the diaspora. On our first day in the US, we visited the home of a postgraduate student at Emory University. He is a family man, a Gīkūyū man, and

I think the wives in my generation were the last to place a bowl of food and tea in a kettle on the dining table and turn around, wash the husband’s hands, and serve the meals onto plates and drinks into cups for the husband to eat and drink. They would also collect the dirty