I Arrived. I Started Noticing. I Never Stopped.
americansandtheirthings.com — field notes on American life
I arrived in America from Kenya in 2011. One advantage of being new to a country is that almost nothing is background yet. The ordinary things have not had time to become invisible.
I noticed the shelves. The roads. The lawns. The portions. The way people queued. The way they spoke to strangers. The things they bought and the things they stored. The rules people followed without being told. The rules they ignored without appearing to notice. Words such as freedom, service, privacy, choice and home seemed familiar until I watched what they meant in practice.
The original joke in the title was about possessions: Americans and their things. But fifteen years made the word things much larger.
A thing can be a cereal box or a pickup truck. It can also be an accent, a library card, a highway, a workplace assignment, a military oath, a self-storage unit, a fireworks display, a social habit, a rule, a room or an institution. Anything ordinary enough to disappear into daily life can become evidence once you look at it closely enough.
I did not arrive intending to study America. I was trying to live in it.
That distinction matters. These are not observations made from outside the glass. I have worked here, volunteered here, served here, driven across it, bought groceries here, misunderstood people here, learned its rituals and adopted some of them. America stopped being simply the country I was observing. It became one of the places from which I observe the world.
That makes the position more complicated, not less. I can be grateful for an institution and still notice what it does badly. I can admire an American habit and find another one baffling. I can belong to a place without losing the ability to see it.
The experiences recorded here begin in 2011. Some details were recorded close to when they happened; many remained in memory, photographs, records and stories I kept returning to. In 2026, I began turning those accumulated observations deliberately into field notes.
The gap is part of the project. There are things you can see only because you have just arrived, and other things you can understand only after you have lived inside them long enough for the strange to become ordinary.
Then, occasionally, something makes the ordinary strange again.
On Method
Every piece begins with something concrete: an object, a scene, a phrase, a transaction, a habit, a journey, a rule or an encounter. The concrete thing comes first. The theory has to earn its way in.
I try to distinguish what I observed from what I remember, what I can document from what I infer, and what one encounter can support from what it cannot. When a factual claim needs evidence beyond my own experience, I source it. When another explanation fits the evidence, I would rather put it on the page than pretend it does not exist.
Comparison is part of the method, but not because Kenya is the control group and America is the experiment. Moving between countries changes what becomes visible in both. Sometimes I understand an American institution because Kenya lacks it. Sometimes I understand something Kenyan only after America gives me a contrast.
The object, scene or encounter is therefore an entry point. What interests me is the mechanism underneath it: what a society rewards, what it hides, what it makes easy, what it makes difficult, what people learn to stop seeing and what outsiders misunderstand because they have not lived inside it yet.
When one of those mechanisms becomes clear enough to state plainly, it appears in a gold-bordered box labeled FIELD OBSERVATION.
This is not an attempt to explain America once and for all. A country of hundreds of millions of people will defeat anyone who tries.
It is an attempt to keep noticing.
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