Bertha Ngumbi, my sweet mother, is one of the kindest women I know.
But when I was a kid growing up in Kenya with four siblings, her kindness annoyed me. My siblings — three sisters and one brother who has passed on — say the same thing.
My mother always made us prepare and serve black tea to every person who came into our home. It did not matter whether it was an expected or unannounced visitor, a close relative or someone passing through who was a stranger to us kids.
And if unexpected visitors showed up during lunch or dinner, my mother would invite them to join us and ask us to serve them.
Not only that, an additional guest at a meal would mean less food for everyone.
My young and selfish self was not happy.
My sister Faith reminded me that our mother would actually make us children leave our meal and go prepare tea for the visitor. She too hated those visitors. My sisters said they think some of these strangers took advantage of my mother's kindness by showing up at meal time.
Faith remembers how she was especially annoyed on days when we did not have enough firewood or it had rained and the firewood was wet — which made boiling water for the tea more of a pain.
My change of heart
Years later, as an adult living and teaching in the United States, I have a different perspective.
My mother's kindness had a powerful impact on me. Even when I am struggling to meet my own needs, I still strive to help anyone who needs my help — starting with my sisters and the children of my late brother but casual acquaintances and strangers, too.
And even though visitors rarely drop by my home in Illinois unannounced, if that were to happen, I would do exactly what my mother did: offer tea and share whatever food I had.
Oh, and I feed not only humans but birds. (Even my kind mother is puzzled by the bird feeding — she can't understand that we have bird feeders here in the U.S.)
I have always wondered about the origins of my mother's kindness. Where did it come from? And was she aware that we — her children — felt shorted by this lavish kindness toward others?
I wanted to solve this mystery, so I called her. I asked her where her kindness came from.
And it turns out it's not really a mystery. Just as her kindness eventually kindled my kindness, she credits her mother — my grandmother — for her generous spirit.
Growing up my mother had eight siblings. (She says the family was a "basketball team with a reserve.") Sometimes the children would come home for lunch from school — that was the practice in Kenya — only to find out there was nothing to eat because our mother had given their lunch to people who were passing by. Maybe these strangers looked hungry and tired. They'd surely walked a long way. So the sweet potatoes that her mother had been preparing for her own children were gone by they time they arrived.
But after half a day at school, my mother and her siblings were hungry, too. She recalls that sometimes they'd cry out of frustration if there was nothing to eat. Other times, their mother would give them some money to go buy bananas for lunch. And when there wasn't any money, she'd ask them to pick sugarcane from a neighbor's farm for their meal.
When there was enough food to go around, my mother's mother would feed not only her kids but their friends.
Flash forward to the years when my mother was raising my siblings and me. I asked: Did you know that we resented your kindness?
She said she did not. She was following in her own mother's tradition, and that's what mattered. When she knew families from her church or community were hungry, she'd invite them to our home. "How can they go hungry or be troubled if I can be of help?" she said.
So yes, as a child I was not thrilled by my mother's generosity. But now I fully understand how it came to be – and I know how it influenced me.
I am forever grateful for the seeds of compassion and empathy that she planted in me, my siblings and the hundreds, if not thousands of people that she has touched with her kindness.
I did ask her if she would have changed her habits if she had known that her own children were resentful. She told me she would never have changed, that nothing would deter her from being kind to others: "I would do it again and again."
Esther Ngumbi, is an assistant professor of entomology and African American studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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