Scratch Cards

Christmas 2011 in America. I could not go home to Kenya — the ticket cost was beyond what my Walmart hours generated, the paperwork for re-entry was new and uncertain, and the practical reality of my first December here was that home was not available. I would spend Christmas in Northern Virginia.

What I did not anticipate was the specific quality of an American Christmas as an immigrant alone. The country shuts down in a particular way — not completely, not uniformly, but sufficiently. Stores close early. The traffic disappears. Everyone is somewhere specific, with specific people, doing a specific thing. The infrastructure of belonging is operating at full capacity and you are not connected to it.

I bought a scratch card.

In 2011, WhatsApp existed but it had not yet reached Kenya in any meaningful way. The smartphone penetration that would make data-based messaging viable was still a few years away — mobile internet in Kenya was expensive, feature phones were dominant, and the ecosystem of family group chats had not assembled. To call Kenya from America you bought a scratch card, scratched the panel, dialled the 1-800 number, entered the PIN, then the international number. The call connected through a slightly degraded audio channel that told you both the distance and the infrastructure gap.

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My mother’s voice on that call was clear enough. The warmth was clear enough. What the scratch card could not transmit was presence — the quality of being in the same room, at the same table, eating the same food that everyone around you is also eating.

I spent Christmas 2011 and Christmas 2012 in America. Both years the quality was the same: the knowledge that everyone was somewhere, and I was not somewhere specific enough. The Walmart shift on December 25th was a relief in a way that surprised me. Work gave the day a structure and purpose that the holiday itself did not.

The loneliness of the immigrant holiday is not the loneliness of being alone. It is the loneliness of being the only person without a specific somewhere to be. Americans in grocery stores the week before Christmas have a focused quality — they are buying for a table, for a tradition, for people who are expecting them. The immigrant watching this has a clear view of the infrastructure of belonging in operation, and an equally clear view of standing outside it. The scratch card was the bridge across that gap. It was a narrow bridge and the call lasted twelve minutes. It was better than nothing by a distance that is hard to measure.

WhatsApp arrived in Kenya around 2013, 2014 — slowly at first, then suddenly, the way these things go. The scratch card era ended. The twelve-minute call became a video call became a family group chat became a continuous low-level presence across eight thousand miles. The infrastructure of belonging extended.

The Christmas loneliness did not end. But it changed shape. That is the most you can ask of a communication technology.

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These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.