Jacob

Photo: Will (left) and Jacob sitting next to Jacob's kiosk

Jacob is a Tanzanian Maasai who lives in a separate little house within my family’s plot in Nairobi. He’s 25, and because he didn’t score high enough on post-secondary school exams to enter university, he had to move away from home in Tanzania to find work. His brother helped my family here build the home, and because my Mama has the tiny house to rent, Jacob has a place to stay until he eventually moves back.

Jacob operates a little red kiosk on the street corner outside my house where he sells everything…food, drinks, cell phone credit, etc. He works each and every day from 5:30 am to 9:30 pm, never getting to leave the kiosk and its immediate premises. Jacob and I have become some pretty tight rafikis. Each time I walk by the kiosk (several times a day), I greet him with some Kiswahili and then struggle to understand his responses and get laughed at by him and his friends hanging around the kiosk. Whenever I’m away from Nairobi for more than a day I get a message from Jacob on my phone saying something like, “Ma hope is that all is good for you. Ma end, fine.” He’s great.

Lately he’s been talking about learning to email me so that we can stay in touch once I head back to the states. So, last night I invited Jacob over to the house after he closed up the kiosk so that he could learn some computer skills and practice his typing. I opened up Microsoft Word and Jacob went to work, although obviously ashamed and embarrassed that he had to search for each and every key and type with one finger. I told him not to worry about it, that it takes lots of practice to learn the keyboard and type fast, and that lots of Americans (cough, my parents, cough) still type the same way. Here’s the message he wrote while practicing, directly copied and pasted from the Word document I made sure to save:

“Hi Nate how are your studies? Its my hope that you will enjoy your studies at the end. My dear Nate, I have decided to tell you so because the Kiswahili language is the one which is used in Tanzania as common language.”

To help him out with his typing skills while I’m not around and he can’t get to a computer, I drew Jacob a little diagram of all the keys he’d ever use on a computer on a piece of paper. This morning when I walked by his kiosk, Jacob had the sheet out on his counter and was “typing” away. I loved it. People here appreciate the littlest things.