KenyaOnAShoeString: Real Advice for Real Kenyans

There’s a kind of tiredness that doesn’t show on your face. You go to work. You show up. You laugh with people. You move through the motions. But inside your head—it’s chaos. There’s the to-do list. The bills. The unspoken fears. The small, constant calculations. The weight of everyone else depending on you. The pain you never had time to process. The dreams that quietly died in the background. You sleep, but you’re not rested. You take a weekend off, but your mind is still sprinting. You sit down to rest, and your brain opens a spreadsheet of everything that could go wrong. That’s not just stress. That’s mental exhaustion. The Storm We Don’t Realize We’re In In Kenya, we’ve normalized mental fatigue so much that we barely notice it anymore. You're in your 30s or 40s, and it hits you: you’ve been running for two decades straight. Not just physically—but emotionally, financially, mentally. A single mother works two jobs but still finds herself sleepless at 3 a.m., not because o...

In Kenya, rest can feel like a distant luxury. We live in a society where every move, every decision, and every shilling spent is driven by the fear of uncertainty. Rest is not always a reward for hard work; sometimes, it feels like a risk. The underlying anxiety that if we stop, even just for a moment, we might lose everything can overshadow our ability to truly pause. For many, rest is not a given, but a gamble. In a country where nothing is guaranteed, and survival often means holding on by the thinnest thread, finding peace of mind seems like a far-off dream. Even with the strides some people make toward stability, the constant tug-of-war between short-term pleasures and long-term security keeps them from truly feeling secure enough to rest. The Emotional Toll of Constant Preparation Think about a young woman who has scrimped and saved to buy a boda to supplement her income. But instead of investing in that bike, she takes on the responsibility of paying her younger siblings’ schoo...