I stand in my room and gaze outside the window as large snow flakes gracefully find their way to the ground. “Can we just have some warmth?” I think to myself, irritated by the temperature fluctuations. At this point, my heater has been failing, and the dropping temperatures have not been doing my situation any good. I begin wishing I were back in the tropics, adorned with my shorts, tank top, navy blue sandals, sunglasses, and the overhead March sun. “If wishes were horses…” I sigh and drink my warm cup of tea. At least this will make me warmer, and also remind me more of the desirable weather in the tropics.

The way I was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, breakfast was a great part of my life. Black tea was—and still is—particularly notable in all the breakfasts I have had since my first memory. At home, it is always black Kenyan tea. I simply do not remember a breakfast without tea. We had it sometimes with milk and sugar, and sometimes with just sugar. I learned the art of making Kenyan black tea, which is grown in the Kenyan highlands, from watching my mother make us breakfast on Sundays. From Monday to Saturday, she would always wake up before us to make sure that everything was prepared for my brother and me —and later on my sister, too—to get ready for school. Yes, we had Saturday school. This was one of the prices we had to pay for going to a private school in Nairobi: sacrifice all Saturdays that fell within the academic terms. At least that guaranteed that my brother and I would have our tea much earlier than our friends. What little joys this Kenyan tea brought!

“Thatcher, get me the matchsticks from the table,” my mother would always say, on the Sunday mornings I would manage to get out of bed in time for tea preparation. Her voice, though taking on a commanding tone, would gently coerce me to go get the matchsticks so she could prepare our green kerosene stove for some tea making. Or maybe it was just my desire to rush the process of making breakfast, simply to get to the drinking and eating part of it. Whatever the drive, it got the tea making started.

My mother would light the stove, put on water to boil, add milk into the water, add the loose tea leaves, and then finally add some sugar. She would sometimes add spices—mostly cinnamon or ginger—but these sometimes did not go well with the taste of our breakfast (bread and eggs, for example). I would be her audience, waiting for the tea to boil, and when it almost spilled over, I would smoothly say, “Mum chunga chai isimwagike.” To date, this has been the ultimate warning to the tea-preparer in our house: do not let it spill.

My mother would then take a sieve and pour the tea into two 2-liter thermoses, and leave some in a jug so that it could be used as a coolant. As she sieved the tea, the aroma was euphoric. I could smell most of the ingredients, simply because I knew what was in there; I had trained my nostrils to selectively detect the components of the tea. The earthy smell from the tea, the sweet smell of the sugar, and the milk that gave off a soothing sensation crept into my nasal tract, and finally to my salivary glands. Even if I were to be blindfolded, I would still salivate; I could not mistake the tea’s aroma—it had the smell that comes from wet ground after it rains, mixed with that of fresh maize and roasted chestnuts.  The tea had managed to borrow—and own—this distinct smell from its former home, the Kenyan highlands.

Flying out of the country, I could see those much-revered highlands from my window seat. They looked much smaller than I had imagined; the images on television clouded my idea of the Kenyan highlands. I pondered this for a while, as I flew from Nairobi to go to school in the USA. I transferred high schools, and found myself at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, CT. The idea of breakfast there was quite foreign to me. A lot of things were served everyday. It was not simply tea and something else like bread, or pancakes. There were always eggs, pancakes, and things that I had never set eyes on—such as hash browns. I still did not change my breakfast style; tea was always present. It was not Kenyan tea, but it was black tea. While there, I learned the art of making tea from my American roommate who drank it occasionally; coffee agreed more with not only her taste buds, but also with her need for alertness. The art? You take a tea bag, place it in a cup, press the hot water button, let the hot water fall into your cup, and viola! Your tea is ready. You could add milk or sugar, if you pleased. This was easier, but the taste was different. The cups were small, and I was my own audience. I was almost always the only one drinking tea at my table in the dining halls. Thus, the joy of drinking tea slowly dwindled.

Making tea in the school’s dining hall became a somber affair; there weren’t any sieves, or loose tea. The Lipton tea offered by the dining hall reminded me of concoctions that I used to drink at my grandmother’s when I was sick, and at some point, I became sick. Homesickness was what I was suffering from, according to my advisor. I was losing my touch of home, but not completely. I did not forget about home; I longed for home. When my advisor asked what she could do for me, I asked if she could get me some Kenyan tea.  “I will try, “ she assured me. She cupped my hands in her large manicured ones, with a sad look in her eyes. She tried to be comforting, but she did not have the tea.  Yet.

It was not long after my advisor’s sad eyes looked into my own that I found tea sitting on my desk. I came back from soccer practice and saw the tea leaves carefully placed on the light brown piece of furniture. “For you, dear!” a piece of paper beside it said. “ I hope this makes you feel better.” I held onto the tea as I sat in my bed, and cried myself to sleep.  

I stared at the cup of tea as I tried to figure out how many hours it had been since the plane had left New York. I was on my way to China, taking a break from my high school’s campus. After seventeen hours of drinking a lot of tea and water, and frequent trips to the bathroom, I was finally in Beijing. I had never understood why people said, ‘I love you more than the tea in China,’ until I lived in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhangjiajie. I had always associated the abundance of tea with Kenya, because it is one of the country’s main sources of income. In China, however, I drank a lot of tea too, much more than I thought I could ever drink outside my home.  I did not find much black tea where I lived in Beijing and Shanghai, but green tea was plentiful. I learned to love the taste of green tea, first with sugar, then with honey, then without anything at all. When served, the green tea smelled like freshly steamed corn, and sometimes bamboo shoots. It had a woody taste, maybe because of the containers in which the leaves were stored.

In Zhangjiajie, I witnessed the locals of the little village pan-fry green tea leaves using oil they extracted from tea seeds and some plants that were native to the region. The cups there were smaller than those at Choate, but at least a teapot came with them. This was the art. The cups were small so that you could drink the tea without letting it become too cold, while the much bigger pot would quench your thirst for more tea. “At all costs,” one of the villagers told me, “avoid big mugs.” I understood. With a big mug, there was a tendency to leave the mug, simply because the tea was hot.  I had previously been guilty of that: make a delicious cup of tea, find out that it was too hot to drink, then leave it there for what would count as eternity for the tea, if tea had its own years like dogs do.

I poured the cold tea down the kitchen drain and turned on the water heater so that I could make a new cup. Several years had passed since I was in China; now, I was visiting Switzerland as an exchange student in college, and had been in my apartment for most of the weekend, and had gone out only when it had been absolutely necessary—such as going to buy milk downstairs. The cold wind from the Swiss Alps discouraged me from going outside. I do not have any respiratory problems, but that wind made me doubt my lungs’ functional capabilities. To keep myself assured of my good health, I stayed indoors with my roommates. We participated in our own indoor activities, which included watching movies, cooking, eating, and most importantly, drinking tea.

My Spanish roommates were astonished by how much tea I drank. “Ai, you finished the whole box already!” one of them exclaimed, with his then-heavy Spanish accent. It had not even been three weeks since we had bought a whole large pack of Tetley English Breakfast Tea. They just did not understand why I seemed to consume gallons of tea. That was until I made them tea during our habitual afternoon snack time. They were amazed by how good it tasted. It was shocking to me, really. I had gotten so used to the sweet toasty smell and taste of the tea that I had forgotten how wonderfully alarming it could be to one who had been used to the taste of coffee, as my two Spanish roommates had been. And there it began, a journey of tea sampling with my roommates. We bought all sorts of tea that Tetley had to offer us. We settled on English Breakfast and Earl Grey; they were the best, we decided. I was proud, for I had shared my home with these strangers who had just moved into the apartment, and would become my closest of friends. Maybe the tea had something to do with it. After all, their taste buds agreed with my choice of drink; their souls accepted my home and me.

I still make tea the way my mother taught me. At Smith, I meet with my Kenyan schoolmates every Sunday afternoon to make tea. During the week, I make tea the way my American roommate taught me; this has stuck with me too. It is not hard to keep up with this method, given that there are hot water dispensers and tea packets in our dining halls too. I sometimes bring my own loose leaf tea to the dining halls. The smell of loose leaf Chinese green tea still brings me back to Zhangjiajie.

In each of the places I have been, I have kept my tea drinking habits, refined them, and even gotten other people into this habit. Those who have spent a lot of time with me have undoubtedly suffered many occasions where they had tea simply because I generously offered the cup, slyly poured it for them, and tenderly talked them into drinking it. They have slowly grown to love tea too; they have slowly integrated into being my home. This is the joy of internationali-tea.

The snowflakes accumulate and make me wonder if classes will be cancelled tomorrow. I take the last sip of my tea and get back to working on my assignments. I am certainly not in the tropics but my warm slippers and my pink robe will be my sun, while my tea will bring me back to those Sunday mornings in Nairobi. I am undoubtedly at home.

 

Thatcher Mweu is a Government major and alumna from the Class of 2015. She has been blessed with the opportunity to travel, and meet people from all walks of life. She is interested in finding the interconnection between all these places, and how they add  to her personal life.

 

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