My Coworker Asked if Kenya Has Wi-Fi and I Said Smoke Signals

Here is my rule for surviving ignorant questions about Kenya: one joke, one fact, one invitation — and everybody gets exactly two chances. Write it on a sticky note and put it on your desk at work. This formula has carried me through twenty years of Texas break rooms without one fistfight and without one wasted teachable moment.

Last week a guy in receiving asked me, kindly and sincerely, whether Kenya has Wi-Fi. I told him no, we use smoke signals, and my mother is the chief signal officer for the whole village. He laughed. I laughed. And then, because I follow my own rule, I did not waste him.

The joke comes first because shame closes ears. If you mock the man, he stops asking you things, and a person who stops asking stays ignorant forever — except now he is ignorant and embarrassed, which is the worst combination you can have in an office. But hear me carefully, my friend: never end at the joke. A joke alone sends him home confirmed. He asked something funny, got something funny, learned nothing. The joke opens the door. It does not furnish the room.

Sample answers, so you understand the tone. Did I see lions on my way to school? No, but I walked seven kilometers in akala sandals, and Mr. Kariuki locked the gate at the dot of the bell, which is why I still walk like the bell is chasing me. Do I have a pet elephant? Not since the HOA found out.

Then the fact. One fact — not a lecture, not statistics, not the entire history of East Africa. One thing he can repeat at his own dinner table tonight. Mine was this: my cousin Mwangi, still back home, sends me voice notes at two in the morning insisting the Undertaker would beat Bret Hart. We started that argument in 1993 in front of a 13-inch black-and-white Greatwall with a crack across the screen — Tuesday night, Wrestlemania on KBC, one channel for the whole village. That television had one channel and a crack. Today Mwangi streams old matches over fiber and still has not conceded. I also told him I pay my mother's electricity bill in Murang'a from a parking lot in Texas, and she confirms receipt before I have locked the car. Mobile money reached my village before Americans trusted their phones to buy a coffee.

And the woman he is imagining, pounding maize by lantern light? When she visits, she argues with my GPS in fluent Swahili the entire drive to the store, and I am not fully convinced the GPS wins.

Then the invitation, because food finishes what facts start. Bring them to the table. My wife is Luo, from Kisumu, so fish is her jurisdiction; I handle the fire and the nyama choma; the children negotiate over the last of everything. In my experience, the man who asks you about Wi-Fi in March is defending Kenya at somebody's cookout by July, loudly and without being asked. Nobody who has eaten ugali in your kitchen still believes you grew up in a tree.

Now the two chances, because this is the part people skip. Genuine ignorance gets corrected twice, free of charge, with a smile. But if the third question arrives and he is still asking whether you rode something to the airport, that was never ignorance — ignorance is curiable, and this man has chosen a hobby. Stop teaching. You are a logistics man, not the Ministry of Education. Silence is a complete sentence, and you owe it to your blood pressure.

I will tell you why I no longer burn at these questions the way I did when I landed here at twenty-five with two sweaters and a dream. My mother sold her only cow to put me on a bus to Nairobi, and back then the world did not ask her questions — it simply assumed she was nothing. The questions used to cost us something. Now they cost me nothing. The one who is behind is the asker, not my mother, not Mwangi, not the village. My kids' cucu cried the first time she saw my daughter's face on a video call — and the picture was clear enough to cry to. The Wi-Fi was never the problem.

So the whole rule, small enough for one hand: one joke to open the ears, one fact they can repeat at dinner, one invitation to the table, and two chances — after the second, let your silence do the talking.

My daughter, who is seven, draws two houses with a flag on each roof, joined by a single line. For the longest time I thought she was drawing a road. She was drawing the signal. Does Kenya have Wi-Fi? Eish. That line between the two houses has never dropped a call between a girl in Texas and her cucu in Murang'a — and it needs no router.