Holding family ties across the Atlantic

By HENRY GICHABA
Published August 10, 2009

John Kimeo stood outside Mzalendo Store in Jersey City, New Jersey. His eyes were smoggy with sleep. His face buried in forlorn hope. Like a man so depressed, given up to grim resignation and despair. So depressed with dark imaginings, one, to escape the tortures of memory with the aromatic fumes of cyanide.

Kimeo worked as a security guard with Roy Clark Security. Today is Friday morning, payday. He is at Mzalendo to cash his bi-weekly paycheck and send the money to his wife, Mwende, and four children who live in Kenya.

“Habari John?” I greeted. He turned to me and lit our presence with a smile.

“Nzuri sana,” he replied. “Long time no see!”

“It’s because of work,” I said. “I’ve not had free time in months.”

“How’re your people; wife and children?”

“They’re fine,” he said. “My first born is going to Baraton University this year,” he revealed. “It’s the reason I’m here to send money for his college education.”

“Congratulations!” I commended. “You must be proud of your son and the entire family.” For a moment Kimeo was silent. A nameless dark had come to enshroud his face. The glamour of its aplomb vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition.

“It’s indeed difficult to keep a spouse; a family a continent away.” He spoke as though to his inner spirit.

Kimeo came to the US 30 years ago on a student visa. After arrival, he enrolled for a course in engineering at the University of Minnesota. But his education did not go far. He dropped out of school to work and pay school fees for his seven siblings in Kenya. His most coveted dream was to lift his aging parents from absolute poverty.

For many years, Kimeo worked as security guard in group homes and nursing homes. He virtually did every kind of petty jobs to pay his bills and educate his brothers and sisters. When his visa ran out, he married an American woman as a gate-way to obtaining his citizenship.

Ten years later he returned home to Kenya to a glamorous reception. Part of the entourage which had turned up at the airport to receive him was a young, beautiful woman called Mwende. His parents had sought and betrothed this young lady for him.

Kimeo fondly nurses the memories that, “Mwende was extra-ordinarily beautiful,” never hesitating to add, “she still is.” And independent observers who saw her agreed that if beauty were a religion, Mwende could be its cathedral.

On his vacation to Kenya, Kimeo spent all his time with Mwende. In the end he asked if she could marry him. Love, the conqueror of kings and despots alike, had its way. It opened them up to the slavery of holy matrimony at St. Peter’s Cathedral, Nairobi. For the bride, it was a way to access the stage as a true heir to the American dream.

Upon tying the ring, they looked forward to a life of eternal love, mutual companionship, procreation and upbringing of children. But fate put this holy union asunder when Kimeo returned to the US, leaving half of his heart behind.

On the day he departed, Mwende’s heart was distressed, her face soaked in tears. Emotions catalyzed by estrogen. Upon relentless sinking of teeth into Eve’s forbidden apple, Kimeo’s inchoate child had formed in her womb.

It was the way many souls had parted. Kenyan men returning home to marry and leaving their newly weds behind. To wallow in the torment of solitude and great expectations, fueled up by distance and worsened by the increasing difficulty of obtaining a US visa.

Most parents whose sons live, work or study in the US, feel greatly honored if the sons marry from their tribe. This way, the wealth generated from the US and sent home could remain in the family, under the control of the sons’ parents. It’s a case of most parents and siblings self-appointing themselves custodians of their kin’s stream of trickling manna from the land of plenty and opportunity. Whether or not their son is married is immaterial.

It’s about greed and insecurity. The parents fear their son’s wife may escape with his wealth or inappropriately spend it in the comfort of other men’s arms.

Yet reasons abound explaining why Kenyan men go home to marry and leave their spouses back as they return to live and work in the US.

Ben Onserio, a teacher in San Francisco says: “Most men are under the illusion women back home are innocent, unspoiled, living chastely.” It means our Kenyan cultures reduce women to chattels in the subservience of male chauvinism.

In America institutions which protect human rights are so established that it’d be especially difficult to deny women their rights as equal human beings. This includes access to affection, conjugal rights and wealth.

Kenyans undergo change when they come to the US. This is as expected and the process could not be anywhere near being shorn of reality if it excluded women. But in a prejudiced mind, a woman’s character must retain one constant – no change. For such supremacists, it’s a sin for a woman to adapt to a new lifestyle.

Kenyan women in the US acquire education. They’re exposed to higher income and improved standards of living. It’s a system that empowers their ability to be economically more independent than most of their counterparts in Kenya. An educated and economically independent woman makes a better wife but refuses the cultural tattoo-mark of male dominance.

So far, the US law protects all humans. For instance, it cuts to size the hateful habit of wife-beating and corporal punishment on children. In the US, the art is called assault on a female, prosecutable as domestic violence or/and child abuse. A few Kenyans I know are languishing in prison for wife beating and child abuse. Even though, after their sentences, they aren’t free men. They carry the burden of a criminal history. This cripples access to employment and reasonable income.

Joy Wanjiru, a Kenyan, recently sued her husband because he made love to her without her consent. A judge in Baltimore, Maryland, sent Kuria wa Gichie behind bars for seven years for the crime of raping his wife. With the sentence was the end of wa Gichie’s flourishing career and practice as a medical doctor. Even when the young man’s prison sentence ends, he’ll live with the indignity of his name on the US sex Offenders list.

In the US a wife has the legal right to sue and send her husband to prison if she thinks he raped her. Hundreds of men are behind bars for the crime of forcing their wives into conjugal union. Nevertheless, suing a husband for rape in the context of Kenya’s culture can be viewed as the peak of madness. The case could probably not be listened to in a court of law.

In spite of the bond which Kimeo and Mwende had built in the short moments they stayed together, Kimeo had not filed for her the papers to become a US citizen. Like many other Kenyan men, he believed America could poison the mind of his wife. However, Kimeo supported his family with sacramental circumspection.

Chibet, a businessman in Charlotte, North Carolina, has vowed never to marry again as long as he lives in the US. “Kenyan girls in the US,” he narrates, “Have all gone bad, decayed, too exposed – independent.” For a decade, the man from Bureti worked like a donkey and saved enough to buy a house. He’d conquered the American Dream. In the glory of his success, he returned to Kericho to marry a nice wench. An uncorrupted village ingénue with whom he victoriously returned to America.

For a long time the couple lived peacefully. His wife, Chelimo, conceived and gave birth to twins, boys, and in the following two years, a girl.

“It’s a woman’s job to take care of children,” Chibet had reminded her of the all-important cultural role women played. Nonetheless, he continued to work as hard as in his pre-marital era. Later, he bought another house that he rented out for more income.

As the children grew under the excellent care of their mother, they reached school-going age. Yet Chibet continued working as his wife stayed home with less and less domestic chores to undertake because the children would be at school.

Over time, Chelimo’s pure Kipsigis cultural ways, innocence were corrupted by the poison of American life. “She too became bad, rotten, too exposed – too independent.” During the long hours her husband worked, she remained home to gossip with other women on the phone. To chat on the internet; Facebook and Twitter – someone created for her a page on Youtube. She also joined the Internet group, Lonely Housewives.

“She was wiser in the American ways,” Chibet recalls. “I don’t know how long they had been lovers, but it was the greatest shock of my life that she had always invited this man to make love in our marital bed during my long hours at work.”

One day Chibet arrived home unexpectedly to the shocking revelation of rumor’s truth. A towering stranger was in the house, his car parked outside. He was half-naked, fatigued from a busy morning with his wife. It was a man he couldn’t physically resist. So the giant shoved him aside, got into his car and drove away.

“What’s going on here?” he shouted at his wife. He was baying for her blood.

“It’s your mistake,” she said. “You’ve been spying on me,” his wife said with guilty derision. “You may be stalking me,” she added.

“It’s crime to spy and stalk me.”

Chibet had no choice but give her a thorough beating. He didn’t stop until police were handcuffing him. They took him to jail. The ambulance’s siren rose and fell in ear-bursting diminuendos, rushing his wife to the CMC Hospital. Chelimo was treated and discharged that afternoon.

“I was jailed for one year,” Chibet recalls. “By the time of my release she had filed divorce proceedings, which were quickly ruled in her favor.”

It means Chibet lost his houses, property. His wife had spent all his savings while he was in prison. Nobody was willing to employ him when he left prison for the serious crime of wife battering. Now he has supervised visitation with his children in addition to the child support he is mandated to pay his wife.

Chibet’s case is one of the symbolic manifestations why many Kenyan men go home to marry but don’t favor bringing their spouses to the US. Truer is the reason why Kimeo has never processed for his wife to join him in New Jersey.

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Tags: marriage, Relationships