The cow is not a loan. Stop repaying it with money alone

The cow is not a loan. I want you to sit with that, because everything you do for your parents flows from whether you believe it. Money alone will never settle that animal — not the amount, not the sender, nobody. The cow was seed, and seed is repaid at harvest, and you, in Dallas or London, are the harvest. The principal was cleared the day you landed. What remains outstanding is interest, and interest is paid in only one currency: your voice.

I say this from my bench under the avocado tree outside my plot, a tree older than most of the buildings now crowding it. Forty years on this street, and I can tell you which family sold what. Between 1996 and 2004 alone, my rough count is eleven cows and a heifer sold on this single street for fees and plane tickets. The heifer went for the girl who is now in London. Nobody has asked her to pay it back. Everybody waits to hear her voice.

I sold one Friesian cross in 1993 for my son's second year. My wife sold her gold earrings the year after, quietly, without telling me until the fees were paid. She rests now in Murang'a under a mango tree I planted in 1984. My son is in Dallas. Two of my grandchildren there I have never held — I know their teeth from WhatsApp as they change, one by one.

Here is the mistake I watch you all make: you treat the sacrifice as an invoice, and guilt does the paying. Money lands on M-PESA and you feel the account is quiet for another month. But ahadi ni deni — a promise is a debt — and a cow is not a promise. It was a gift thrown forward, the way a farmer throws seed without standing over it demanding receipts. Guilt sends money. Love sends voice. Send both, but know which one is which.

So here are my five rules. One: fix the call. Same day, same hour, every week. Let your mother plan her week around hearing your voice — she wants that job, give it to her. Two: send the ordinary. The inside of your fridge. The burnt chapati. You waiting for a bus in the cold. We already believe your promotion; what we doubt is your Tuesday. Three: ask your father a question only he can answer — the price of a healthy heifer today, how he mixes feed for kienyeji chickens. A parent consulted is still a parent. A parent who only receives becomes a project, and nobody respects a project. Four: before your child turns ten, make sure they know cucu, guka, and one full sentence in your mother tongue. The day my grandson in Dallas called me Guka without being prompted, I walked taller for a week. Five: come home when there is no audience. I have written before about December and its theater. Come in May, in the rains, when nobody is performing. You will meet the family, not the cast — and the fare is kinder to your pocket.

And one rule for my fellow wazee, since we also misbehave: when the call comes, do not open with the price of unga. Receive the voice first. The money is a byproduct of the child, not the child himself.

That mango tree in Murang'a did not fruit for years. When it finally did, the ones eating were children who never saw the planting. That is how these things work — a man sells an ox in 1999 and the sweetness arrives in 2025, in a video call, in a child saying Guka. So stop sending money as apology and start sending yourself. The cow closed your account long ago. It is your mother who still keeps the phone charged.