If you ask someone who was born and raised in Ganze, in the hinterland of Kilifi, and has reached the age when coal turns to ash, what happiness is, he will probably not be able to answer you.

But when you are gone, he will reflect and answer himself that happiness is to feel the arrival of April rains in the air.

He will tell himself that he even likes the drops that enter the hut through the holes in the palm roof that he has not been able to repair.

It is thanks to those drops that his wheat will grow quickly and in a few weeks he will have food without depending on anyone.

Vegetables from the garden, polenta ground by the women of the house, waiting for him to return from the field.

There is nothing else here, but nothing else is missing either to be happy.

Without fear, with serene acceptance and a little fatalism.

And wheat is like fatalism, because it makes freedom grow.

Poverty does not exist when you have a full belly and a hut that no one can take away from you.

That's what happiness is: putting your freedom before everything else.