Back to the Village

By 2018, I could walk into the fields where I once herded cows, open my MacBook, connect through a Safaricom modem, and merge a pull request into software used far beyond Kolong.

It was not fiber, and it was not always fast, but it worked.

I can sit in Kolong and write code.

That sentence still amazes me.

Kolong is rural. In the fields, I can hear animals, people, and the ordinary movement of village life. At night, the sky opens wide enough to make the stars feel close. My parents have never quite understood what I am doing when I sit there pressing keys. To this day, they do not really know what I do for work.

In one sense, that has been true throughout my life. Even in Alexandria, people around me often did not understand what I did. Once, students I had been teaching to code were caught hacking into their school's software and falsely implicated me. The police and the FBI investigated and interviewed me. The Kenyan man who rented part of his own office to a marketing company was recast as a hacker. The marketing company, meanwhile, was mistaken for my employer and described as a front for financial crime, or something of that sort.

That story deserves its own telling, from my perspective. I mention it here because connection does not automatically produce understanding. In Kolong, the mystery around my work could inspire innocent curiosity or, in one true story, a conspiracy theory about the Illuminati. In America, race and outsider status could turn the same mystery into institutional suspicion.

The child who wondered how voices got inside a radio would have understood the urge behind all that key pressing. Looking back, I see that I was already trying to understand the world from first principles before I knew the term. I wanted to know what was underneath, why it worked, and whether I could build something from what I learned.

The village did not have electricity or running water when I was growing up. I read at night using a kerosene lamp and, when there was no paraffin, candles. My parents never restricted those late-night reading sessions, even when the light was scarce.

Electricity reached our family home around 2016 while I was in the United States. On my next visit, seeing the dark village lit at night was mind-blowing. Dinner no longer had to follow the light. My family, accustomed to eating around six, could sit down closer to eight. I could charge my phone at home instead of going to town or carrying a massive power bank.

By then, communication had already transformed. In earlier years, I wrote letters or sent an email to a cyber cafe and trusted whoever worked there to deliver it to my family. The privacy implications now seem horrifying, but it was sometimes the only way to send an urgent message. Mobile phones, data networks, WhatsApp, and M-Pesa collapsed distances that once controlled our lives.

Those early Safaricom modems made remote work possible in short stretches. By 2018, the mobile network was reliable enough for meaningful work. I still traveled with some fear. If an emergency reached Enhancesoft, would the connection hold long enough for me to respond? Over time, the answer became yes.

The world had become flat enough for code written from a field in Kolong to reach teams in Eldoret and Alexandria, then travel into organizations I would never visit. With the right tools and knowledge, an idea could move outward from almost anywhere.

But access is not the same as opportunity.

A meaningful digital divide remains. Many students encounter computers only during an occasional class, if their school offers one. Some schools do not have printers and must ask students for money so examinations can be printed elsewhere. A room full of devices may look like progress, but devices without teachers become gadgets.

Technology also cannot install a global mindset. Connections help only when we change how we think about what can move through them. Old hierarchies, short-term expectations, and limited ideas about who gets to build can survive perfectly well beside a mobile tower.

That is one reason technology is part of the Rotich Foundation's longer mission. The answer is not to drop off computers for a photograph. It is to build the teaching, confidence, maintenance, and meaningful opportunity around them.

Kolong itself has changed without becoming unrecognizable. The people remain familiar. So do some of the struggles. Alcohol continues to hold parts of the community back, and even the name Simteret carries an echo of local brewing. I do not say that with shame. Roots are not honored by pretending they are flawless. I can claim where I come from while helping change what should not remain.

That work can be frustrating. Sometimes a conversation about a long-term possibility is reduced to chai, something small for today. I have learned that wanting change does not let me control its pace. I have to keep listening, keep showing up, and choose the work I can do well now.

I also see young people imagining futures that were unavailable to my generation. I see the same curiosity I carried, now surrounded by evidence that technology can be made, not merely consumed. To the child in a village or small town wondering whether they can do something meaningful, I want to borrow a simple answer from Barack Obama: yes, you can.

My story can be told as a sequence of places.

Kolong. New Orleans. Alexandria. Eldoret. Kolong again.

But a life is not a list of locations. It is the meaning that accumulates between them.

Kolong taught me curiosity before I knew where curiosity could lead. Running opened a road. New Orleans expanded the possible and gave me the tools to build. osTicket showed me how a useful idea could travel through open participation. Katrina changed my direction. Alexandria gave the company a foundation. Eldoret gave return a practical form. The Foundation turned gratitude toward the next generation.

Now the road bends toward unfinished work. I want to help build an entrepreneurship culture in Eldoret and help the City of Champions become a technology hub on its own terms. I want Enhancesoft and the Rotich Foundation to become institutions that continue beyond me. I want to keep learning what return requires.

That is why this is a living memoir rather than a completed account. I still have thousands of miles ahead of me. I expect to add memories, revise ideas, and complicate the parts that currently look too clean. This may be Chapter 10 today and Chapter 15 someday.

StraitOuttaVillage is not a claim that I made myself from nothing. No one does. It is an acknowledgment of origin and all the people, places, chances, disciplines, disruptions, and acts of trust that turned a village child's curiosity into a life of building.

I once had to travel a very long way to encounter the tools I use today.

Now those tools can travel home with me.

I am not back because the journey is complete. I am still finding my way back, carrying what I have learned toward the place where my questions began.

Along the way, I have discovered that the village has joined the world, and the world has become a village.