It is half past five in the morning and your eyes are heavy with sleep. It is fascinating that they should be this lethargic, yet they would not close for a wink or two in the past eleven or so hours of the night. Lately your body seems to be operating on a paradoxical circadian rhythm– sleep when you shouldn’t and stay awake when you ought to be sleeping. You are a nurse and constantly tired. Translated, it means that you are one patient away from a mortal accident. You slap the alarm clock into silence, eyes half open set another alarm for half past six on your mobile phone, which has permanent residency under your three pillows.

You have been using three pillows for a while now. There does not seem to be one single shop in the world that sells decent pillows. The pillows in this city are as thin as a tongue. The lowlife of pillows. They smell of dying hope and unhappy thoughts. They are the sopranos in the pillow choir. Irritating but necessary. We therefore use three of them to allow them to accord each other some moral support. You miss fluffy pillows. Pillows like the ones you lay on at that posh hotel in Naivasha during your disastrous honeymoon a few years ago. Nostalgically, you go back to Naivasha in your sleepy mind.

There is a hazy recollection of that honeymoon. It was not meant to be because the wedding was not to be either. But they both happened. You know they did because you can hear yourself screaming in agony as another harsh word lands on your soul. But despite the honeymoon’s calamitous ending, you miss the pillows. They took to your torrential tears like a babe to its mother’s breast. They soaked the tears up perfectly and left no traces. He never once stirred. He was so drunk he could have been half dead. You had wished for the latter before you met Jesus. We do not think such thoughts nowadays and if we ever do, we will blame it on these scandalously uncomfortable pillows.

The summer morning’s sun tears precisely through your curtains like a surgeon’s blade. You love summer but you don’t like the glare of the morning sun. It is too bright. Accusatorily bright. Like it came to remind you what a slob you are for snoozing your alarm. It stands there, hovering over you like your mum when you wouldn’t complete your homework but wanted to read a Harry Potter novel instead. Mum would not go away, nor will the sun. Begrudgingly you wake up. Legs dangling onto the side of the bed, you will the rest of the body to join them on the peach-coloured bedroom rug on the floor. You miss the days when peach was just some fruit.

Eyes still closed, you head to the bathroom. You are startled into alertness by the girl staring at you in the mirror. She is as hopelessly worn out as a politician’s promise after campaigns. She looks like a thousand trucks ran over her and a group of snow-white owls perched on her hair. The wild hair tendrils falling on your face are a pasta disaster. My God, the lint from those pillows! You whisper. It is however more than just lint. Your eyes are red and puffed up. Like you hid two baby donuts under the eyelids and now the world can see your secret eating habits.

You are expected to be at work by half past seven, nursing patients. The COVID-19 pandemic rages on and you are not sure how much longer you can keep it together. Take that lovely patient yesterday, for example. She stood out from the first time you met her. She allowed you to needle her dialysis fistula as a new nurse. She was welcoming. Showed you pictures of May, her cat. Always had a joke for everyone. She entertained the unit with great panache. She had perfectly manicured nails which put your grooming routine to shame.

For fifteen years, kidney failure never took her life. But she died yesterday. She contracted COVID-19 and passed away. This is not an isolated case. The story keeps repeating itself. Like a repetitive bad dream, the carrousel of mortality keeps coursing through the hospital.  Too many dialysis patients have been lost to the coronavirus.

Nobody acknowledges it but your colleagues are gutted by her death. Their demeanour is typically British though, they are long suffering. They wear resilience on their faces and spot plastic smiles to hide the pain. British nurses are averse to complaining. They take it all in their stride. Either that or quit. What would you not give to be able to quit nursing right now!

On the other hand, you are an economic migrant in the United Kingdom. Your life in the UK is governed by the terms and conditions of your visa. The terms say you are to be a nurse for the remaining period on your visa. You cannot leave. You risk being deported to Kenya if you exit nursing at the moment. You are not ready for Kenya yet. You envy Amy and Moraine. Two highly skilled kidney nurses from Scotland. They recently quit nursing altogether. Amy went back to university to study accounting while Moraine has started a coffee shop. The luxury of choice.

You take a quick shower, scrub your hair so hard as if you were shaking your brain from a lingering nightmare that it half hurts. Six and a half minutes later, you are staring at yourself in the dressing mirror. You have been in this flat for a year now and have never once used the dressing mirror like you want to use it today. To glam up the top half of your face.

Following a YouTube tutorial, you start applying acres of ridiculously expensive products on your exhausted face. Your patients are expecting a buoyed-up nurse; that is what they must get. This is why God created makeup. You pay close attention to your eyes. The windows to the soul. These windows needs some maintenance. The eyebrows are up first.

Your eyebrows are a strange phenomenon. The hairs are few and far between. You can never shape them perfectly to save your life. You scribble and doodle with some eye pencil YouTube influencers swore by and finally manage to draw two diagrams of West African evil spirits chasing after one another. Your signature mismatched eyebrow look.  Feeling accomplished, you open your eyes wide and, stroke after stroke, you apply mascara on your eyelashes. The damage is then covered in some dark eye shadow. Only the top half of the face matters. The face masks and visors worn at work have rendered the lower half of the face irrelevant. Who wants lipstick smears on their face mask? Not you, you conclude.

At twenty minutes past seven, you are at work already. You are helping prepare the dialysis machines. Jean, your nurse colleague streams in. She has had her eyes done too. She is wearing some glittering eyeshadow. Her eyebrows look like what yours would be like when they grow up. You can see a hint of foundation on her forehead. You let out a sigh of relief. God created makeup for tired nurses, you surmise.

I return from a two-week trip away from home to find my little daughter at the door as I enter the house. I bend down to give her a hug but she is not too keen on it. I was expecting her to grab my leg and declare how much she missed me while I was away. Instead, she is only briefly interested in my suitcase before she runs back into the living room. I hear her mother calling after her, “Come back baby, come say hello to Daddy properly.”

I have come to accept that my daughter is not like those kids on YouTube videos who wait expectantly behind glass doors and start jumping up and down in excitement at the sight of their fathers returning home. It is one of the first lessons I picked up as a parent. Children are different. My relationship with my children is not predicated on the things that please me. The power to parent lies in accepting your children as they are.

I remember when my daughter was only seven months old and we were moving to Amsterdam from Nairobi. We arrived at Schiphol airport in the early morning and made our way off the plane. I had her strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, facing forward. A middle-aged white woman in front of us in the queue kept turning back and making faces at her, trying to tease out a laugh, a smile, something. My daughter did not respond to her gestures. I could not imagine what was going through her little brain and wanted to tell the stranger to tone it down.

“She just got off her first transcontinental flight. She is calibrating new information.”

When she started going to day-care in the new country, her teacher said to me one evening when I arrived to pick her up: Your daughter does not show much emotion. Which I thought was odd. She was one of the few foreign nationals in her class, and I noted the emphasis placed on having her integrate into Dutch schooling life. We arrived home and my little girl burst through the door bubbling. At night, at 2am, alone in her cot, my wife and I heard her giggling. She giggled sporadically and then broke into a long laugh. It was a laugh of joy, drawn from her belly. One of the most beautiful sounds to wake up to in the middle of the night.

She was only a year and a half old and she had already learned how to close up in those spaces where she felt unseen.

In my former life, as a single man and a mainstream newspaper columnist, I used to be that chap who gave great parenting advice. Now I am the father of two little girls, trying to raise them in Europe, the epicentre of the pandemic, and I realise now why no one follows their own great advice. Experience has transformed my attitude to one of subordination to the insights of children and the young people around me.

Know Your Children As They Are is a book by Caleb Gattegno, one of the most influential educators of the twentieth century. The book begins with this statement.

Parents love their children. But do they understand them? 

We are often blind to the emotional needs of our children just as our parents were blind to our needs as children.

****

Time was the one positive consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gaining it. The city of Amsterdam shut down and the authorities encouraged us to work from home. We used to complain that our busy lives did not allow us to spend quality time with our children. Now, for some fathers, the lockdown period was like extended paternity leave.

The first month of the hard lockdown late in the autumn of 2020 required radical adjustments. Cooped up in the house for long hours, I worried that my daughter was watching too much television. Our outdoor life was limited. We were still too new in the country and did not yet have a circle of friends with children. The Dutch winter too was new to us.

I started taking my daughter to the park daily. It was usually empty and when there were other parents, they kept to themselves. We were living in a 1.5-metre-social-distance society. I would trail my little girl around the playground, on the lookout for littered hazards like discarded cigarette butts, examining what grabbed her attention. Sometimes, there were other children in the park, with only adults as their playmates. This was new for me but by following my child’s lead, I began to focus on what held her interest and worried less about my expectations of the ideal environment for child’s play.

Charlie, a good friend of mine, once said over lunch, “Fatherhood is confrontational,’’ and I found myself mulling over that statement. Indeed, I have had to confront my own past and the need to dominate as a parent.

The first month of the hard lockdown late in the autumn of 2020 required radical adjustments.

I initially approached parenting with a written script of best intentions. Parents of multiple children confess that the first child is usually a bag full of nerves. We over-index on all fronts, trying to be model parents. When the second baby arrives, we are a little more resigned to the reality and worry less about what we cannot control.

Dr Gabor Maté is the author of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers and a respected voice in the fields of addiction and trauma. Drawing from his own personal experience of fatherhood, he talks about the challenges of fathering his son. Not having known how to be there for his son, he reasoned that he needed to wait for his children to become older so that he could engage with them intellectually.

Dr Maté asserts that the first three years of a child’s life are foundational. How many fathers are absent in the early stages of infancy only to return bearing gifts and engaging in remedial parenting in the hope of catching up on the lost years over a series of fun weekends? Dr Maté explains that children have an attachment need and in the absence of a nurturing adult to latch on to, they tend to fill the void with a peer group.

So, how do we remain aware of the emotional needs of young children in the midst of a pandemic that is upending our lives?

I have had to recall my past and return to a time when everyone believed Armageddon had arrived. I survived a previous pandemic in my youth – HIV/AIDS, the bogeyman that loomed over my teenage years. My parents never talked about AIDS in the way we talk about COVID-19 to the young. AIDS was a private illness but its manifestation and the death that often ensued were public.  HIV/AIDS came shrouded in moral language and its victims, it was said, were merely succumbing to the inevitable consequences of their immorality. But when the innocent started to die, loyal and faithful wives and newborn babies, everyone became a victim. The culture of shaming matured into one of silence and benign denial.

In the death notices in the obituary pages of newspapers, a phrase would become commonplace:

“Passed away after a long illness bravely borne, surrounded by loving family members.”

We became the generation of condoms, safe sex, VCT centres, (Voluntary Counselling and Testing) and HIV statuses, fated by our hormones to be a high-risk group. Condoms, once associated with family planning clinics, became at once symbols of responsibility and immorality in a society that warned its young to suppress their urges and abstain from sex. But most people did not trust the government and were unwilling to accept that an encounter with a virus that had no cure meant an inevitable death.

I have had to recall my past and return to a time when everyone believed Armageddon had arrived.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic was exacerbated by the storm of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed by the IMF and the World Bank to mitigate the economic crises of the 90s. The late Malawian intellectual Thandika Mkandawire compared the economic period that Africa endured under the SAPs in the 90s to the Great Depression of 1930s America. I lived through the collapse of the Kenyan economy, the disruption of the middle class, the decline of standards in higher education and the pulverisation of the public health systems. Citizens were hung out to dry and poverty became widespread as the middle class crumbled under the weight of a new disease.

By the end of the 90s, HIV/AIDS had wrought devastation in all areas of our lives.

Rural villages in my home county of Siaya became haunted spaces where frail grandmothers raised orphaned grandchildren. The funeral came to occupy a central place within the community, a place from which to draw strength in the midst of perpetual grief. Three decades on, it is near impossible to find in my country a family that was not affected, either directly or by association. Yet, in the beginning, no one thought it would last this long.

Our parents did not talk to us about how to live. They only whispered about the shame of dying.

******

I check my twitter notifications. Polycarp Otieno, also known as Fancy Fingers, is about to drop an album. Polycarp is the fourth member of the popular music group Sauti Sol, an afro-pop band from Kenya. The other band members, Bien-Aimé Baraza, Delvin Savara Mudigi and Willis Chimano have distinct, established vocal styles. The affable Polycarp built his reputation as the band’s talented guitarist, content to be in the background. No one had heard him sing outside a chorus. Polycarp has broken his decade-long silence with a delicately crafted debut album titled Father Studies about his journey through fatherhood, dedicated to his son. His voice is rich and his lyrics are stirring.

Our parents did not talk to us about how to live. They only whispered about the shame of dying.

I was drawn to the image on the promotional poster. Polycarp has his son, Sulwe, strapped to his back using a length of cloth that we call shuka in Kiswahili. It is a traditional African woman’s way of carrying a baby, common among mothers of young children. That image of Polycarp and his son is one of the most symbolic and sincere pleas for conscious fatherhood that I have seen.

Polycarp emerged out of silence determined to tell a different story about fathering and celebrating his commitment to the role.

The COVID-19 hard lockdown was for many first-time Kenyan fathers an unofficial paternity leave. With social life cut off, men had to confront the reality of a baby-nurturing life that we had been socialised to conveniently evade using our professional and social obligations, in keeping with our gendered roles as providers.

The young fathers that Polycarp represents appear to be navigating this crisis differently. They are talking about fatherhood loudly, with their chests. They are using art to make sense of it and writing their own stories about the ongoing pandemic. They have simply refused to turn to despair.

I wish our parents had been open to the power of the arts in a crisis.

I hear more young Kenyan men talking about the kind of fathers they would like to be, moving away from the previous standard of exaggerated machismo to one of conscious parenting. It is true what they say: Hurting people, hurt people. One has to be willing to break the cycle.

This generation of babies born during the coronavirus pandemic will have to unearth the stories of grandparents and parents who died suddenly and were hurriedly carted away in body bags to be disposed of as potential biohazards by men wearing protective hazmat suits.

I wish our parents had been open to the power of the arts in a crisis.

Unlike in the AIDS era, this should not be the single story of the pandemic. Young people should continue to re-imagine their worlds and paint them in radiant colours.

Polycarp Otieno seems to embody Mother Teresa’s enduring message,

“If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”

I know that I too have to navigate this epoch differently as I prepare my children to meet the future. One that is bound to be occupied by new variants, lockdown syndromes, pandemic exhaustion, vaccine boosters, racial profiling, testing and death.

But I remain hopeful, because our artists are not sleeping through the pandemic.

It was the time before corona.

Jamaa, a regional technology sales leader, often travelled from Nairobi to the head office in Stockholm. While on these annual trips, he never ventured beyond the confines of the head office or his hotel on his own. His spirit of adventure was limited to packaged city tours. He concluded that he could only handle Europe in small doses and usually, after a week, he was eager to return to the familiarity of Nairobi.

But after a generous company bonus, and with the urging of a senior executive who had subtly reminded him to prioritise his mental health, Jamaa decided to do something selfish – take a three-day solo holiday in Amsterdam. Before this, his experience of Amsterdam was limited to Schiphol airport, a transit point. This would be his first trip into the city.

The immigration officer who picked him out of the crowd of travellers asked for his passport.

What brings you to Amsterdam?

He thought about it and replied,

Tourism.

Oh! A conference on tourism in Amsterdam? 

No! I have come to Amsterdam as a tourist.

A tourist?

He repeated slowly as he flipped through the passport. He stopped and examined the Schengen visa and then handed him back the passport and with a stiff smile and said,

Enjoy your visit to Amsterdam, sir!

From previous travelling experience, he knew not to spread himself too thin by running through a checklist of attractions. He desired an upmarket experience in keeping with his new status in the company, away from the cliché tourist traps of the past. So he called Gili for a recommendation. Gili is a relative on his mother’s side who had worked in Europe’s hotel industry for decades and had recently returned home to Kenya for good. She had lived in Holland for many years.

She suggested a trip to Maastricht, a city in the south of the country strategically located between Belgium and Germany. Maastricht is where the Treaty on European Union was signed in 1992.

Even just saying it, sounds gisty! Maastrichtttt. . . she added.

Jamaa thought it sounded remote.

I want something more posh and not far from Schiphol. 

Okay, look up Hotel Twenty Eight.

That name does not sound posh.

It is in a posh area. You will feel it in your pocket.

A few days later, Jamaa checked into the apartment hotel in the south of Amsterdam that Gili had recommended, happy with his decision to spoil himself a little. The apartment overlooked a town square lined with birch trees and decorated with suspended stone sculptures depicting various athletic disciplines. Around the square were sleek apartment buildings. Below them, at street level, he could see a bakery, a flower shop, a supermarket, a cosmetics shop and a few bars and restaurants. It gave off the vibe of an upmarket mall in one of those leafy suburbs of Nairobi where expatriates live.

Across the road, over a tramline was the inspiration of the area – the Olympic Stadium built for the 1928 Summer Olympics. At the entrance to the stadium stood a tall tower where the first modern Olympic flame was lit for the very first time, a prestigious national monument.

He desired an upmarket experience in keeping with his new status in the company, away from the cliché tourist traps of the past.

The stadium has since evolved into a multi-functional venue. One of its prime annual events is the Amsterdam marathon. Jamaa discovered that the first Kenyan to win the Amsterdam marathon was Joseph Jebet, in 1996. Since then, Kenya has produced the highest number of winners in the Amsterdam marathon. Had he arrived three weeks earlier, he would have witnessed another Kenyan taking pole position in the men’s event.

On his first day, he went on a long leisurely walk through the neighbourhood, admiring the architecture, the parks and the manicured green spaces along the canals. Back at the hotel later in the day, he stopped at a restaurant on the ground floor. The long bar was empty and two waiters stood in the corner engaged in conversation. He allowed them time to notice him but they did not acknowledge his presence. Just as he was about to draw their attention, he saw a blonde-haired young woman in a branded white shirt walking towards him.

She said something to him in Dutch and he asked her to repeat it in English.

Of course. . . I was saying can I help you? Are you looking for something? 

He did not understand why she would ask him that question as he was seated on a bar stool waiting to make an order. He felt irritation rising but kept his cool.

Can I get a beer?

She stared at him blankly for a brief moment and then switched to a professional tone,

Of course, what beer would you like?

A dark one.

As she walked hurriedly back to fetch the order, Jamaa began to wonder what she saw when she saw him.

On the second day, he followed another Gili tip and rented an e-bike for the day. It was a comfortable bike, designed to make it easier to ride against the wind. He found a leafy public park called Vondelpark that reminded him of the old Uhuru Park in Nairobi during public holidays – a place where people come to see and to be seen.

Later in the evening, emboldened by his newfound sense of adventure, Jamaa returned to the recognizable Olympic square. He found the lively bar that he had seen from his hotel window and anticipated the opportunity of mingling with the locals.

He found a bicycle parking rack nearby, locked his e-bike and put the key in his pocket. As he pushed the door to the bar open, he remembered that he had forgotten to chain the bike. Gili had warned him to chain the bicycle to something immovable like a lamppost and never to rely only on the bike lock.

They will steal your bicycle in Amsterdam, be sure.

Everyone chains their bicycles with a thick chain, the kind that you would use to secure a metal gate in Nairobi’s industrial area. Even old rusty bicycles. He found it strange that bicycles are not safe in a country that is closing down its prisons.

A middle-aged man with a round bald patch wearing geeky spectacles parked his bicycle next to Jamaa’s; it was branded with the Rent-a-bike company logo. He also used an extra chain. Probably a tourist, thought Jamaa.

The middle-aged man complimented Jamaa’s bicycle and they walked into the bar together and sat by the counter, leaving two stools between them. They both waited a long time to be served. The four employees behind the counter were busy doing their separate tasks. After some time, the bespectacled man leaned over the bar and demanded service politely but firmly and a young woman who had been arranging glasses turned her attention to him. When she approached, she found Jamaa ready with his order.

I would like to have what that gentleman just ordered, the dark one. I cannot pronounce it, my tongue is heavy.

Zatte tripel, Brouwerij ‘tij

Yes, that is what I am looking for. The dark one.

The two strangers raised their glasses to each other and moved closer, finding affability in a beer and a shared language. The bespectacled man soon launched into a complaint about the standard of service in Dutch bars. He found it too slow and made a diagnosis.  Most bars are staffed with temporary employees who are not trained professionals. They simply do not care about your feelings.

The Dutch like to say they are direct but I find many of them rude! But they treat you better once you become a regular at a bar.

He informed Jamaa that they were not drinking a dark beer but a strong blonde beer from Belgium. He went to great lengths to explain its production characteristics and its taste. Jamaa would normally have settled for the recognizable Heineken beer and he was glad to discover and enjoy a drinking experience outside his comfort zone.  And then the bespectacled man touched on a sensitive subject.

You speak very good English. 

Jamaa was not sure whether to read that as a compliment or as patronising ignorance. In his younger days, his response would have been immediately militant, but the years had toned him down as he had grown weary of assuming a defensive posture every time he came across prejudice in white spaces. He preferred to counter it with sarcastic wit.

I am from Kenya, the Queen’s favourite colony.

Kinya!

Kee-nya!!!

A little disclaimer, I am English.

Of all the Europeans Jamaa had interacted with, it was the British that he was best acquainted with. He had played rugby against them in Nairobi, stayed at safari camps run by khaki-wearing conservationists and mingled with their corporate executives in private members’ clubs. He knew the reputation of the young and restless soldiers at the British army base in Nanyuki and the old, broke “wazungu kimbos” stuck in Mtwapa along the Kenyan coast. He had hoped to strike up a rapport with a native Dutch speaker and get intimate with the culture. All was not lost. The Englishman was an astute observer of Dutch life.

The two strangers raised their glasses to each other and moved closer, finding affability in a beer and a shared language.

Do you live in Amsterdam? Jamaa asks the Englishman out of curiosity.

No, I am from London, here for business. What about you, do you live here?

No, I live in Nairobi.

What brings you to Amsterdam? Work?

Tourism.

You are a tourist? And where are you staying?

Across the road?

Where?

At the Hotel Twenty Eight.

The Englishman looked genuinely surprised and offered unsolicited advice.

That is expensive. You can get a much better deal where I am staying at the Olympic Hotel just behind the stadium.

But I like it. It doesn’t feel too much like a hotel.

There was a lull in the conversation as the two men returned to the beers.

What did you say you are here for? asked the Englishman.

Tourism!

For a tourism conference in Amsterdam South?

No, I am a tourist.

Jamaa could sense the Englishman was trying to get something off his chest and eventually he did,

Forgive me for being so forward, how long did it take you to plan for this holiday?

A week.

So you must be rich?

Not in my country. 

The Englishman returned to his beer and took a generous gulp.

Is this your first time in Europe?

Jamaa decided to nod; he was enjoying the perplexed expression on the Englishman’s face.

You will love it here, the architecture, the history, the art, roads that date back to the sixteenth century still exist.

I look forward to it. . . Have you been to Africa?

Never been and I wouldn’t go.

Jamaa noticed the fidgety eyes and did not press for details but instead changed the topic.

What should I know about the Dutch?

At this, the Englishman perked up and dropped his eyes as one does when about to gossip.

I have been coming here for five years. Everything is expensive compared to London. Be blunt, they don’t trust overly friendly people, and Amsterdam is not the Netherlands.

Forget the liberalism you see in Amsterdam. They have a Bible Belt. Just like in America. Some parts are so conservative, the women do not wear trousers. Ever heard of black stocking churches?

Jamaa was not sure whether to read that as a compliment or as patronising ignorance.

The Englishman continued to entertain Jamaa with his travel tales, answering all his questions about popular Dutch national stereotypes, the people, the country and its history. Eventually, Jamaa realised he was running late for a scheduled phone call to his family in Nairobi and bade his acquaintance goodbye after paying for the drinks.

The Englishman was surprised by his generosity and offered to buy a last round. Jamaa declined as he slipped into his warm jacket ready to leave.

I am sorry, I never asked your name?

My name is Jamaa.

Jamaa. . . Does it mean anything in your native language?

It means a regular guy.

He looked at Jamaa unconvinced.

There is nothing regular here! You are posh!