It’s our dada’s first day of work here today. Family relations took me a couple tries to get right here in Swahili. Easy: Mother is mama. Medium: Brother is kaka. (Yep.) Hard: Sister is dada and father is baba. I may have called a few old men ‘sister’ once or…

I can’t decide whether it’s a disadvantage that I can manage to go without food easily. Unlike others, I don’t get irritable when my blood sugar starts to dip when I haven’t eaten in a while. I don’t have to eat immediately after I get up in the morning. I…

I like Mwihidini, whom Adam and I usually refer to simply as Baba. One of our usual taxi drivers, Mwhidini does everything slowly. His slow driving makes me feel safe, and doesn’t jostle me too much as we bounce down my unpaved road. His slow Swahili makes him easy to understand…

‘Do you need anything before heading home? Wine, food, water?’ ‘I should probably get water.’ We pause to check for cars before crossing the street. Right, left, right again. Or is it left, right, left? No, the former. We’re on the other side here. We enter the grocery store. Mambo….

It’s blissfully cool these mornings. My large, loud ceiling fan churns, pulling up the dew-damp air that spills through my windows onto the floor. Somewhere someone has just lighted a fire; I can smell burning—if I had to guess—charcoal. But the kind of charcoal that looks like a completely burnt…