Roses of Today

I used to think life moved in a straight line. A boy from Kobala village, sandals stitched with whistling thorns, could not imagine the path folding back on itself. Yet here I am, decades later, in a room where the lights never flicker, writing on a screen lighter than the hoe I once carried to the shamba, and I see it clearly: the path was never straight. It was a circle. Everything before was preparing me for today.

I had one school shirt. One. Wednesday evening, I washed it in the stream, wrung it out with small hands, and hung it on the thorn fence. Thursday morning I wore it again, sometimes still damp, cold against my skin as I walked the seven kilometres to school. Charcoal was too precious for ironing; it was saved for Christmas or for cooking important foods like chapati. So the shirt carried the creases of poverty the way old soldiers carry scars.

My sandals were patched with wire, nails, or thorns from the Dhano tree. Each step was a small negotiation with pain. I did not know then that resilience was being carved into me, one thorn at a time.

Every Saturday, I walked to Mirogi Catholic Church for altar-boy training. I dreamed of becoming a priest, partly to see pride in my father’s eyes, partly to please my mother, partly because, as a child, I believed that if I lifted the chalice high enough, I could bless people and lighten their loads. The thought that the blessing might already be flowing toward me never entered my mind.

Home was governed by a man who needed no explanations. My father was an intelligence officer, silent, watchful, decisive. Mistakes required no major trials; correction was immediate, physical, and final. We feared him the way you fear a sudden storm: not because it is cruel, but because it arrives without warning and asks no permission. Yet from a salary that seemed barely enough for four, he fed, clothed, and educated fifteen children. Not one was lost to the streets, not one abandoned to despair. How does a man raise fifteen children on such razor-sharp discipline? That mystery still keeps me awake.

My mother was warmth itself, but when her patience ended, the punishment was just as certain. Between them, I learned to live inside a paradox: fear and love can share the same roof, sometimes the same heartbeat. I still don’t know if what I felt for my father was respect wearing the mask of fear, or fear wearing the mask of respect. Perhaps, as Kierkegaard warns us, the distinction only matters if we insist on understanding life before we have finished living it.

Nietzsche’s line “What does not kill me makes me stronger” is too blunt for my village. We grew not just stronger, but subtler, able to carry opposites without shattering. The same father who lashed me for coming home late drove me in their work Land Rover to my high school admission, made me feel special and I felt a lot of love in his eyes that day. The same mother who whipped me for stealing sugar and her coins showed me lots of love and I saw her going out of her way to get me 300 shillings pocket money anytime we opened school, after my father’s death. Sometimes she fell short of the target and I would get 200 shillings for my pocket money. Fairness, I learned, is not the absence of pain; it is pain directed toward survival and love.

Epictetus taught that we are disturbed not by things, but by our judgments about things. A torn sandal is only tragedy if you believe comfort is your birthright. A damp shirt is only shame if you accept shame as the final word. We had no books of philosophy; we had dust, duty, and the next footfall, yet somehow we inhaled the doctrine whole.

And now? Now possibilities arrive wearing probably pressed shirts or polo t-shirts and polished shoes. Invitations come by email instead of word carried on foot. Sometimes the weight of choice feels heavier than the weight of poverty ever did.

Here is the dilemma that gnaws at me in quiet hours: What if every thorn, every damp shirt, every stroke of discipline that left marks on the body and deeper ones on the soul, every Saturday rehearsing the mass and few Latin words I barely grasped, what if all of it was the universe’s fierce kindness, forging a man who would one day be asked to walk corridors my village feet were never meant to enter? What if the boy needed exactly that severity so the man would not be blinded by the lights of rooms he was never supposed to reach?

Writing from the ashes of Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl said the last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any set of circumstances. In our home, we had no word for “attitude.” We had obedience and dawn. Yet every morning the choice was made: to rise, to patch the sandal, to wear the damp shirt, to serve at the altar, to fear and love the same parents who broke and rebuilt us in a single motion.

I will never romanticize poverty; it is a slow, daily theft. But I refuse to call it meaningless. The circle is slowly closing. The boy who owned one shirt now owns the memory of that shirt, tailored more perfectly. The man who once trembled before his father’s hand now lifts his own hands to write, to work, to bless in the small ways left to those who physically left the village but never truly departed.

Everything before was preparing me for today. And today, with all its unearned ease, is preparing me for whatever comes next.

Perhaps the only priesthood I was ever called to is this: to stand at the centre of the circle, neither denying the thorns nor forgetting the hidden roses that grew among them, and to whisper, honestly, gratefully, thank you.