A year abroad: Culture shock
The fact that I never carried ugali maize flour with me from Kenya is all the evidence anyone needs that no one prepared me for a year in America.
My husband was selected to undergo training at the US Army War College on account of his rank as a Brigadier, his experience as a senior instructor, a staffing officer, a military assistant to the Chief of General Staff and a Commander in charge of thousands of troops. When he told me about this next step in his military service, I could see what it meant for his career, but I struggled to understand how I could be away from home for a year.
Mrs Helen Nkaisserry. She played a crucial role in the growth of her husband's political career.
Photo credit: File
My business in the meat industry was doing well. We had done a lot of work at the farm to get us there and my shuttling between Bissil and Nairobi was the life of the business. And then the children. Wouldn’t a year away disrupt their education irredeemably? Siopot was in Form 3 at Moi Forces Academy in Lanet.
If we took her to America, she would have to repeat a year because no school would register her for KCSE finals in the third term of Form Four, a month before the exam. General struggled with the decision to leave her behind. “I just hope she understands that it is because I don’t want to disrupt her schooling,” he said.
My brother Frank was detailed to visit Siopot at school and she was to live with Papaoti during the school holidays. Fortunately, we were able to get her and Mum-ai to visit Carlisle in December 1996. By the time they arrived, we had all missed Siopot terribly.
While I had received the news of a year abroad with anxiety, Soila, Andrew and Ken welcomed it with squeals of joy. “When are we… I will carry my bag like this… and I will carry this…” Their excitement was unstoppable once we made everything official by going to their school at Moi Educational Centre to explain that we were pulling them out at the end of June 1996 for one year and would see how to place them when we returned. Meanwhile, the teacher in me worried silently about how they would cope with the American system of education.
My transition from businesswoman to housewife/house manager turned out to be the most difficult change in the family. Once he told me that we would be leaving for America, General went into overdrive with the planning while I was still worrying about the house, the business, the children. General was ready with solutions.
“Stephen will step in and manage that,” he answered.
We brought up Stephen, a son of General’s cousin, Lesiir, so General was confident he would do what was expected of him in these circumstances. General was explaining things very fast.
“Tomorrow, we sign a power of attorney for Stephen to take over. Go see this lawyer,” he said, handing over a business card, “he will help you.”
Stephen and his newly wedded wife Jacinta moved into our house at Lang’ata Barracks. General saw no sense in their continuing to rent a house at Ong’ata Rongai while struggling to manage the ranch in Bissil and our Maparasha Butchery at Yaya 2 Shopping Centre, off Lang’ata Road.
We sold several ripe steers, certain that we would need the money to settle down in America – buy a car amongst other things. We also wanted to minimise the risk of losses from drought and ailments while we were away.
In that season of preparations to leave, I saw the General at work in his real element of strategy, risk mitigation and mission focus.
But not even his foresight and speed in moving the family troops prepared me for my new role. For the first time in my life, I was going to be a housewife – no hectic schedules outside the home, teaching or managing meat distribution to institutions or supplies for the animals on the ranch.
My new life would revolve around the daily chores of ‘drive this one, pick that one, shop, cook, do laundry, supervise homework, prepare for a function, pay pending bills’. General would be busy with classes so I knew that once we landed in America, I would still be the one who kept the cheque books, planned holidays, booked tickets, and found accommodation.
I always thought being a housewife was not something done by anyone who had excelled at school. I thought I had achieved an important career trajectory, but now here I was preparing to run the home as a full-time job. Since all the wives of international fellows would be doing the same thing, I would have people to compare notes with, to help me forge a routine. In time, I came to understand the role of a housewife differently.
There wasn’t too much in Carlisle that resonated with our Maasai heritage. If anything, there were many times when American business and cultural practices conflicted with our ethnic ones and left us either laughing in wonder, or deeply shocked and shaken.
General gasped when we were shown the protocol we must follow at the welcome barbecue when meeting Ambassador Theodore Russell, Deputy Commandant for International Affairs at the War College.
I was to walk in front of my husband, always, and he would remain behind me as introductions were made.
What? But in Kenya women always walk behind men, way behind, as if they are not together! As the rest of the protocol was explained, General turned to me and asked in Maa, “So you are the one who is going to introduce me?”
It was unthinkable for him. Still, every time we were getting ready to go out, we would remind each other, “Joe, Helen has to be in front. You know, wives have to be in front.”
I was struggling to get used to this culture where my husband’s title did not matter. Everyone – his colleagues, neighbours, even children – simply called him, Joe, in that casual way that Americans shorten your name without turning back to you for approval.
I was in for bigger shocks. One morning, I was carrying on with the typical chores of the housewife that I had become since our move to Carlisle – cleaning, laundry, and preparations for dinner – when the landline rang in another room. I dashed to pick the call lest it go to voice mail.
The front cover of the book.
“Hallo? Am I speaking to Mrs Hellen Nkaisserii”? asked the lilting American accent on the other end of the line.
“Yes,” I said, pausing to catch my breath after the mild exertion of the dash into the living room.
“I believe you are the new tenants at 126 Media Road, is that right?
“Okay and you are the international family that is scheduled to be at that residence for just under a year, right?”
Once again, I ticked the box with my short response, wondering where this quiz would lead.
The next statement from my caller, whose name I had barely caught when I first lifted the receiver, was a bombshell.
I was now hearing the caller’s voice in waves that drowned out the words in between the solemn word “grave”. Decoding the American accent was one thing, the bigger problem was “grave for you”. For me? But I was standing here talking? If someone was calling about a grave for me that meant they must have a corpse meant for me? Who? Kwaak!
No right-thinking Maasai would break the news of a death on the phone. A turning point like this calls for a visit. You go to someone’s home.
You sit down. You accept the cup of tea or milk or whatever else they offer as you “eat or chew words”. That’s what we call preliminary inquiries into someone’s well-being, that of their relatives, their herd of animals, the pastures they are on and so on.
To “eat words” is to show concern and give a visitor time to catch their breath before they launch into the agenda of their visit. If it is your weighty task to go to a home and break the news of a death, you make sure the person you are to take the news to is in a frame of mind to hear about this calamity.
Now these Americans! So, they just call people like this and immediately start giving you the instructions about burial, eh? Uusho!
The person on the phone had called me by name, knew where I lived and how long my family was to live there. That meant the grave they had was for a member of my family. Between the time I saw off each member of my family at the door this morning, and now what had … who was… I held back tears as I fought not to go through their names. I knew Ken had just walked a few metres to his school, so I was certain he was safe.
I picked the car keys from the kitchen counter where we always placed them. I was crying as I got into the car. A grave had been allocated. Whose? Who is left? My mind was racing. I was heading towards the War College, fast. At this point in our stay, I no longer needed to report at the Carlisle Barracks Visitor’s Center on Jim Thorpe Road, a road named after the first Native American to win an Olympic medal for the USA at the Stockholm 1912 Games.
Thorpe’s greatness was not on my mind that day, even though he achieved his athletic prowess while he was a student in this place, which used to be the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
I was just thankful that being an international fellow’s dependent, I was saving valuable time because I had long been issued with a pass. I flashed it at the gate and was waved through. I marched into the International Fellows Office holding my breath, only to be greeted cheerily at the reception. “Hi Helen?”
Why the good cheer and yet there was a grave waiting for my …? I didn’t finish the thought. Instead, I asked, “Hi. Eh, do you know where my husband is at this time?”
The receptionist glanced at the clock on the wall and quickly chimed, “Let me see the schedule for today.” She ruffled some papers on her desk and came back with, “He is at Upton Hall. There is a lecture.”
I thanked her over my shoulder as I raced through the door, my mind already at Upton Hall whose location I knew quite well. When I got there, I recognised the assertive tone of a teacher, the tone I had used many times over the years teaching in Nakuru and Nairobi.
I opened the door gently, peeped inside and instantly recognised my husband’s tall frame. Oh! Thank you, God! I shut the door gently.
Next, Andrew. I drove fast to Wilson Middle School and was directed to the indoor basket-ball court. Andrew’s class was in the middle of a lesson. He was not pleased to see me.
“Argh, Mum, I am playing! Why are you here?”
I mumbled some response and promised to see him at home then I walked across to Soila’s high school.
“Oh, Soila’s mum, are you here to pick her [up]? It’s a little early, but I can get someone to let her know you are waiting, and she will not be taking the bus home.”
“Oh, thank you so much,” I played along, but I was now getting embarrassed. When Soila finally got there, I invented an excuse about some shopping we needed to do to silence the question in her eyes. But first, we had to get over to the elementary school and see whether Ken was waiting for me to pick him up. As the three of us drove home, I was still processing that phone call in my head.
Finally, back at home and certain of the safety of each family member, I called our sponsor family. It was EJ herself who answered the phone. Midway through my query about a call concerning a grave for me, I heard her choke back a laugh as she interrupted me to say, “Oh, Helen, I am so sorry. I should have told you. They sell everything and anything over the phone.”
Random selling? Seriously? So the caller was just taking a chance on the fact that I might one day need a grave? God, no. Not in this America without protocol and respect, I prayed silently.
When General got home and heard the story of my run-around day, and why I had come to the College, he shook his head many times and exclaimed, not for the first time: “Hawa wazungu! How unbecoming!” In Maa this exclamation is outrageously funny, and General always used very direct, even strong, language that could be misinterpreted because of the directness.
For now, his potent expression marked our relief, but we never got over this idea of selling graves to people with no immediate need for one.
Perhaps the only other incident that gave General as much of a shock as the one I got with the grave phone call was the time he had to take Soila to hospital. In America, you are not allowed to leave children under the age of 16 home alone, without an adult.
I am not sure why we decided that I should be the one to stay home with the boys, and General should be the one to dash Soila to hospital. When they came back, there was stony silence between them, and it took days before I found out the source of the icy relations.
Neither one of them had been prepared to deal with the invasiveness of the questions at triage. Soila was 13. The nurses informed her father that the standard procedure when examining a female patient of menstruating age included a pregnancy test. I don’t know where General’s mind flew, but I am glad he did not fly into a rage. He clammed up, stone silence, no questions, or reassuring words, just a silence of complete discomfort.
Soila was already experiencing the liberalness of an American education – anything and everything could be talked about in public but now her dad wouldn’t even look at her. Confused and a little hurt, she also kept quiet. They rode home in that awkward silence, unable to look at each other, unable to find the right words to re-establish normalcy. Soila still laughs at her father’s conservative social stand.
A soldier's wife: Living in barracks, raising a family
What is casually called Lanet is a vast military complex. Our trip there the day after our wedding had been uneventful until we got off the main Nairobi-Nakuru highway. We branched right onto a smaller road that led to Dundori, a rural settlement known for potato farming.
And then I saw the familiar fencing on the right. It looked like the fence around the Lang’ata Barracks where we had had our wedding reception, but this fence stretched as far as my eyes could see.
After the formidable main gate and the service card rituals of gaining entry, we drove past the 3 KR base, past the base of the Paratroopers Battalion, followed by several other units and then we got to the gate of AFTC, the Armed Forces Training College.
We drove right through the camp, past the training fields until we got to the last house, where the road ended. Below it lay a vast open field.
Like all the other residential houses we had driven past, ours, this last one, also had a low wire mesh fence that gave it an additional sense of security as if it was sealed off from the open field.
I had lived in earth-floored manyattas, I had lived in boarding school dormitories with varying standards of cement flooring, but never had I lived in a house with this kind of floor. Why was it so shiny? How was I supposed to clean it? Was I to splash buckets full of water on it the way we used to clean dormitory floors at school? I was drowning in the vastness of my new home and its posh fittings – the terrazzo floors, electric cooker, fridge, can opener, so many unfamiliar things.
I suspected my husband was struggling too, seeing as, like me, he had only lived in manyattas and school dormitories. When we were dating, I had never gone beyond the Officers’ Mess to see what his dwellings there looked like, but from his description, it was no more than a single cubicle-kind of room.
And yet here he was now behaving as if he had always lived in such largesse, a fully furnished three-bedroomed bungalow with a pretty garden and neat little fence.
Certainly, he was bolder than I was in using the gadgets in the house. We learnt together even though he acted as if the electric cooker, oven and so on were second nature to him.
And what was I to do with the little glasses not much bigger than a thimble? Were they for feeding milk to a baby? Nani atashiba (Could they contain anyone’s hunger)?
On our third day in Lanet, a quartermaster came to the house. He was there to take an inventory of everything we had been provided with in the house – sofa set, beds, fish forks, wine glasses, assorted spoons, pans, linens, baby’s playpen, buckets, brooms, even a duster for wiping the floor! And everything was either stamped or engraved KA. Every item I touched in this house was property of the Kenya Army.
As he checked and supplied whatever was not yet in the house, I began to fear that I, too, would be issued with a uniform. At any rate, I had to figure out how to use all the things in that expansive house, and needed to learn the lingo of military uniforms.
©Helen Nkaisserry / Santuri Media, 2022
