KenyaOnAShoeString

I am always late for work. There. I've said it. And the frustrating thing is that my lateness isn't caused by traffic or some unpredictable morning disaster. Most of the time, it is entirely my own doing. I wake up and make my coffee. Then I get back into bed, which is right by the window, cross my feet, face the window and slowly sip my coffee. And when I say slowly, I mean slowly. I look at the trees. I watch the birds. I feel the morning sun on my skin. Sometimes I just sit there with my thoughts. I really love these mornings. I've also noticed something else. When I give myself enough time in the morning, my body usually does what it needs to do. A slow morning often leads to a bowel movement, which, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the must-haves of starting my day. And so I find myself wishing for more time. More time to sit. More time to drink my coffee. More time to maybe get outside and do some yoga or mat Pilates on the grass while the sun is stil...

When I was a little girl, I had these hand-me-down shoes that I loved. I wore them everywhere. Anywhere, really. I don't think I cared whether they were appropriate for where I was going. If those were the shoes I wanted to wear, then those were the shoes I was wearing. And when they became too small, I still didn't want to let them go. I would squeeze my feet into them and somehow convince myself that they still fit. I imagine an adult looking at me and thinking, Child, these shoes are clearly too small. Please take them off. But I loved them. And I think about those shoes sometimes when I hear us talk about things like seasons, letting go, releasing, creating room, moving on. Usually, when we talk about letting go, there is something wrong with the thing we're letting go of. It has become toxic. It doesn't serve us anymore. It is holding us back. We have outgrown it. We need to make room for something better. And yes, sometimes that is exactly what letting go looks li...

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...