KenyaOnAShoeString: Real Advice for Real Kenyans

There comes a time in many Kenyan homes when love quietly morphs into duty. The birthday calls stop. The small affirmations of care fade. Support becomes transactional, and affection is reserved for funerals and emergencies. We know our people are “there for us,” but we can’t feel them anymore. “Love is not the meal prepared, it’s the warmth with which it’s served.” In many Kenyan homes, love is measured in chapatis made, fees paid, and water fetched from the borehole. It’s graded in sacrifices, sleepless nights, and school trips funded just in time. From the outside, these are clear signs of care — but are they love? Maybe. But maybe they are duty dressed in love’s clothing.  From rural homesteads in Kakamega to middle-class apartments in Nairobi — emotional generosity is a rarity. We know how to provide, to protect, to discipline, to demand. But many of us, including our parents and their parents before them, never quite learned how to be emotionally generous. In many Kenyan fam...

Kenyans have mastered the art of silence. We call it ‘moving on,’ but what we’re really doing is running away—from pain, from history, from accountability. We tell ourselves that forgetting is the same as healing, that ignoring problems makes them disappear. But our silence has a cost, and that cost is becoming unbearable. "Peace isn’t just the absence of war; it’s the presence of justice." Post-Election Violence: The Wound That Never Heals After every election cycle, we hold our breath. We whisper prayers for peace. But peace isn’t just the absence of war; it’s the presence of justice. And justice requires truth. The 2007/2008 post-election violence left more than 1,100 dead and over 600,000 displaced. We never really talked about it. Instead, we got a political handshake, a commission whose report was buried, and a new government that told us to ‘accept and move on.’ The perpetrators walk free. The victims still wait for justice. The same tensions simmer beneath the surface...