Life

From a Maasai Village to Texas

Maybe ‘coincidences’ are real. Sometimes blind luck just favors a person. But can there also be something greater directing us?

Maybe ‘coincidences’ are real, like, just blind luck. God, spirit guides, synchronicity, fortune… Are they all one and the same? In hind sight, I can see clear articulations points in my life where I shifted. They weren’t all good things, but they worked out okay. I wished I hadn’t stressed so much. My wife, and yes, I can officially say that, is particularly resilient against typical stressors. I also see that she has had a series of good fortune. It’s as if someone or something was watching over her. I can’t not see it. Can you?

When Agnes Nashipae Kitango Mukwe was eight years old, she stood in her family’s village — no electricity, no running water — and told everyone she would one day live in Texas. The dream came after missionaries left behind a t-shirt with a map of the Lone Star State. She wore it until it fell apart.

Her childhood in rural Kenya meant walking 17 kilometers to school, sometimes barefoot, fetching water from the river, and studying by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Yet her family never called themselves poor. They had land, food, and each other. “We had everything,” Agnes…