The village taught me first

I grew up in Kolong village in Kamobo, Nandi County. Long before I learned to program a computer, I was learning how to pay attention.

I was a naturally curious child. Without television, I read everything I could put my hands on. A book did not have to be written for me or even match what I thought I was looking for. If it was available, I wanted to know what it contained.

Radios gave that curiosity its first encounter with technology. I wanted to know how a voice got inside the box. Someone could be speaking far away, yet the sound arrived in our home as if the person had found a way into the radio. Watches created a similar puzzle. How did a small object know the time, and how did all those tiny pieces keep agreeing with one another?

I had questions before I had the vocabulary needed to ask them properly. There were few books available that could explain electronics, and I did not have someone nearby who could walk me through the answers. Not knowing bothered me in a productive way. I kept reading, looking closely, and trying to imagine what might be happening beneath the cover.

I also loved to sketch. I could spend notebook pages drawing what I saw and what I imagined. My parents did not see that as a useful way to spend paper. A notebook was for schoolwork, and paper was not something to waste. I understand that practicality now, but as a child I simply knew that I wanted to keep drawing. Sketching was another way of studying an object long enough to notice how its parts belonged together.

Village life taught a different side of resourcefulness. I watched people solve practical problems with what they had. I listened to adults whose knowledge did not come with titles. Work traveled between households, and very little was achieved alone. Even as a child, you understood that what you became was never entirely your own project.

By high school, my questions were becoming more specific. News about Scud missiles during the war in Iraq introduced me to the idea of GPS. Digital watches were also becoming more visible. Both seemed almost impossible to me. I wanted to understand the transistors, chips, and circuit boards underneath them, although I did not yet know those terms. In my mind, they were boards and wires arranged in some mysterious way that made remarkable things possible.

Curiosity gave me a reason to work hard in school. I graduated first in my high school class, but academic achievement did not mean I had a clear map into technology. I still had never used a computer.

When a scholarship later gave me the opportunity to choose a course of study, computer engineering seemed like the middle ground between my interests. It connected the physical questions that had begun with radios, watches, and drawing to a new world of information and logic I had not yet encountered. I did not fully understand the field, but I recognized the questions.

Looking back, it would be easy to arrange these memories into a neat story about a future engineer announcing himself early. Life was not that tidy. I was simply a curious village boy using whatever was available to understand a world that felt much larger than what I could see.

There is a version of my story that begins with what Kolong did not have. I understand why. The distance between that childhood and my work today is real.

But I prefer to begin with what the village gave me.

It gave me my first questions. It taught me to look closely, to keep learning when answers were difficult to reach, and to respect solutions that held up in real life. It gave me a durable curiosity that followed me into classrooms, onto running tracks, across an ocean, and eventually into every product I helped build.

It also gave me a reason to care whether opportunity can reach people without first requiring them to leave everything familiar behind.