KenyaOnAShoeString

One of the easiest things in the world is to mistake an outcome for a story. A beautiful home. A thriving business. A failed marriage. A child in an expensive school. A forty-year-old with no savings. Someone who seems to have it all. Someone who appears to have fallen behind. We see the destination and instinctively begin filling in the journey. Hardworking. Lazy. Disciplined. Irresponsible. Lucky. Entitled. Deserving. Wasteful. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about human beings is not that we judge one another. It is how quickly we become certain that our judgment is correct. Because every life has invisible expenses. Not just financial ones. The kind that never appear on a bank statement or a résumé. Some are chosen. Some are imposed. Some are wise. Some are costly mistakes. Most are a complicated mixture of both. One person reaches middle age with very little savings because they spent years paying school fees for younger siblings. Another because they repeatedly made poor financi...

We have become so focused on identifying vulnerable groups that we have forgotten something important. Vulnerability is not an identity. It is a condition that people move into and out of throughout their lives. That sentence has been sitting with me for weeks because it has made me question how we think about opportunity in Kenya. Listen closely to the language we use. Youth empowerment. Women empowerment. People living with HIV. Rural communities. Low-income households. Persons living with disabilities. Every programme, every scholarship, every grant, every initiative begins by identifying a group. At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable. Resources are finite. Governments, NGOs and private organisations cannot help everyone, so they must decide who qualifies. The question I keep coming back to is this: What happens to everyone who falls between the categories? Not because they are privileged. But because life refuses to fit neatly into our definitions. Take school fees. A fa...

Don't sell people an incomplete map and then blame them for getting lost. I've been sitting with that thought for weeks because the more I look around, the more I realize that many of the frustrations we carry as a society are not simply about unemployment, corruption, inequality or even money. They are about the stories we tell one another. From the time we are children, we are handed maps for how life is supposed to work. Study hard and life will work out. Get a degree and you'll find a good job. Work hard and success will follow. Save consistently and you'll become financially secure. Find your passion and the money will come. Marry the right person and everything else will fall into place. Believe in yourself. Think positively. Stay disciplined. None of these statements is entirely false. But none of them is entirely true either. The problem is rarely what they say. The problem is what they leave unsaid. Because what is omitted from a story is often just as powerful...

Perhaps one of the most overlooked privileges is not wealth itself, but having enough margin in your life to respond to reality. Over the last few years, we have become fluent in the language of privilege, speaking easily about financial privilege, pretty privilege, racial privilege, passport privilege, educational privilege and social privilege, and in doing so we have become increasingly aware that people do not all start from the same place and that some doors open more easily for some than for others. Yet there is one form of privilege that seems to receive far less attention, and that is the privilege of being able to do something with the information you have, not simply knowing, but acting, because the truth is that information alone changes very little. We like to imagine that if people only knew better, they would do better, and entire industries are built around this assumption, from self-help books and documentaries to podcasts, awareness campaigns, public health initiative...

School fires. Public demonstrations. A growing sense of unrest that is often described in different ways depending on who is speaking. To some, these are signs of discipline breaking down. To others, they are signs of frustration finally finding a voice. To others still, they are simply chaos—things that should not be happening at all. But very little of the conversation seems to pause on a quieter question: what if these are not separate incidents at all? What if they are different expressions of the same underlying tension—one that we rarely name directly? Because there is an assumption that sits beneath much of how we interpret society: That what we survived is what should be survived. And what we endured is what should be endured. People often treat their own endurance of hardship as proof that hardship is normal, necessary, or fair. Once that shift happens, survival stops being just experience and becomes instruction: a silent template for how life should be lived. And in Kenya, t...

If I am always sacrificing my present self for my future self, when does my present self get a turn? It is a question that sounds almost reasonable—until you actually try to live inside it. Because most of us are taught, directly and indirectly, that life is built on sacrifice. Work hard now. Endure now. Save now. Push through now. The promise is always the same: the future self will benefit. A more stable life. Better opportunities. Security. Freedom. Relief. In theory, it makes sense. In practice, it is not always that clean. Recently, I left a job that was financially helpful but physically difficult. It paid well enough. But it came with costs I could not ignore anymore. My body felt it. My energy felt it. My sleep felt it. From a purely financial perspective, the decision did not make sense. I reduced my income in a context where stability is never guaranteed. And yet, something in me felt like I had to leave. Because I could feel my present self becoming sma...