I don’t remember if she spoke, that small dark woman with her handful of short beaded necklaces that her husband offered up to us as gifts with the hope that we would return home to our American churches and convince our American congregations to send American money to feed their Kenyan children. He spoke of himself as a good Christian, trying hard to feed his family, to support his many children. He did not mention whether  he had a second wife to feed as well. Polygamy was the norm until the missionaries brought the gift of guilt that, once internalized, could be traded  for the developed world’s money. She did not have to speak, her eyes spoke for her as, at her husband’s prompting, she silently extended her hand full of the proffered necklaces, multi-colored beaded strands of small flowers, nothing less than food for her children. Her eyes said, “I have no choice He says ‘give these Americans necklaces,’ so I give you necklaces.” We had bought purses from her already so perhaps her babies’ bellies were already full, but her silence spoke deafeningly revealing her husband’s plan as not her own. I wear those beads still, blue flowers with white centers against a background of deep red, like old blood. I wear them as a talisman against the constraints of a world that daily demands a silence that is all too often read as complicity and not revolt.