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Vulnerability Is Not an Identity

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...
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A Country of Open Eyes and Quiet Blindness

There is a disturbing moment in the novel Blindness by José Saramago when a man suddenly loses his sight while waiting at a traffic light. His blindness spreads quickly through the city. Drivers abandon their cars. Streets fall into chaos. Institutions crumble. Society begins to unravel. But the true horror of the novel is not the epidemic. It is the realization that the blindness did not begin with the disease. The blindness was already there. People could see. They navigated their lives, went to work, obeyed rules, and participated in society. Yet they failed to notice the fragile threads that hold a community together—responsibility, empathy, restraint. When those threads finally snapped, the collapse appeared sudden. In truth, it had been forming quietly for years. Sometimes I think about that when I look at everyday life in Kenya. We are remarkably skilled at diagnosing what is wrong with the country. Conversations are filled with sharp observations about corruption, inequ...
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Our Attention Is Finite

Our attention is finite, yet we spend it everywhere but where it matters. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. Attention economics is the idea that in a world overflowing with information, human attention becomes the scarce resource. Whoever captures it, holds power. Over time, this has reshaped not just markets, but inner lives. What we notice. What we ignore. What we can tolerate. What we can no longer sit with. For a long time, people warned that television would rot our brains. In hindsight, television looks almost generous. A show required you to stay for forty minutes. A film asked for two hours. A detective story invited you to notice details, to remember names, to hold multiple threads in your mind at once. You watched. You followed. You waited. Listening to music meant staying long enough to learn lyrics. Reading meant sitting with confusion until meaning arrived. Writing a poem meant wrestling with language, not skimming it. Even boredom had a purpose—it ...
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The Things We Learned to Live Without

There are things we do not grieve, because we learned to live without them too early. Not because they were unimportant, but because the world rearranged itself in a way that made their absence feel normal. February asks us to speak about love loudly — romance, desire, grand gestures. But this is not that kind of piece. This is about something quieter and more foundational: our capacity for ordinary human closeness. The ease of speaking to a stranger. The courage to suggest coffee without pretext. The ability to sit in someone’s presence without agenda or performance. I think often about how entire generations adapt to the worlds they inherit. Not consciously. Not philosophically. We simply learn what is required, and shed what is not. When I watched a documentary about Hasidic Jewish communities in New York — particularly those who choose to leave — I was struck less by the act of leaving, and more by the origin of the structure they were leaving behind. After the Holocaust, survi...
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On Love, Capacity, and the Parts of Us Shaped Too Early

February arrives every year carrying a very specific demand. To feel. To declare. To perform love loudly, convincingly, and on time. I do not often write about romantic love. Not because it does not matter, but because in this part of the world, love rarely announces itself the way February expects it to. It is quieter, more restrained, more practical. It is shaped early—by survival, by responsibility, by environments that teach us to endure before they teach us to feel. And yet, February insists. So this piece is for those who love differently, late, cautiously, or incompletely. For those who sense that something in them is capable of tenderness, but also know that life has already left its marks. For those who carry affection in unfamiliar forms. For those who recognize love not as a feeling they lack, but as a capacity that has been shaped—sometimes narrowed, sometimes sharpened—long before the person who might have needed it most ever arrived. This is not a celebration of roman...
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What Kind of Basket Are We Carrying?

We are often told not to put all our eggs in one basket. The saying is usually offered as financial wisdom — diversify your income, your investments, your risks. But somewhere along the way, we did the opposite with our emotional lives. We consolidated. We placed our need for connection, understanding, intimacy, companionship, and belonging into fewer and fewer baskets, until in many cases, there was only one left. The romantic partner. The spouse. Sometimes the nuclear family. And everything else became secondary, suspect, or threatening. This did not happen accidentally. It happened as life became more fragmented. As communities dissolved. As adulthood became increasingly solitary. In the absence of inherited social structures, romantic relationships were asked to carry what entire villages, extended families, and friendships once held together. One basket began to do the work of many. At first, this felt efficient. Romantic love promised intensity, exclusivity, and meaning....
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The Disappearance of Normal Adult Companionship

There was a time when companionship did not need to be searched for. It was not something you worked at , scheduled weeks in advance, or justified with a reason. It existed quietly, built into the structure of life itself. In many Kenyan communities, companionship was inherited before it was chosen. People grew up among the same faces, attended the same ceremonies, worked the same land, worshipped in the same spaces. Marriage did not scatter people; it anchored them. Women married into homes where other women were already present—sisters-in-law, neighbors, age-mates—often navigating the same stages of life at the same time. Men remained near their childhood friends, their brothers, their cousins. Friendship was not curated; it was ambient. You did not have to explain why you were visiting. You did not have to perform usefulness. You did not have to be interesting. Presence was enough. Companionship was not a special category of relationship. It was simply life unfolding alongside...
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Where the Light Stays, I Will Let It In

There is a temptation, at the end of a year, to perform clarity. To announce intentions. To summarize lessons. To package growth into neat conclusions. But life rarely works that way, and neither does understanding. What we often call insight arrives quietly. It does not demand attention. It waits. “Where the light stays, I will let it in.” I have come to think of light not as revelation, but as attention . The moments we pause long enough to notice something true — not dramatic, not flattering, just honest. The places in our lives we keep circling because something there asks to be seen. Over this year of writing, I have noticed how often meaning hides in ordinary places. In disappointment. In repetition. In moments that fail to live up to expectation. In choices we justify instead of examine. In the quiet discomfort of realizing that the story we were telling ourselves no longer fits. Light does not always arrive where we want it. Sometimes it settles where we would rather not l...
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The Great Kenyan Home Ownership Madness: Dreams vs. Reality

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Daniel Arap Moi — The Shadow and the Shepherd: A Deep Dive into Kenya’s Second President

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Know Thyself: The Quiet Power of Naming Your Nature

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung We live in a culture that equates good intentions with goodness, and ambition with ability. But very few people in Kenya—or anywhere—truly know what they are made of. We can name our qualifications and our dreams. But ask someone their vices or virtues, and they hesitate. Worse, they lie. The Danger of Self-Unawareness In Kenya today, many of us are wandering through life making choices—big, small, and irreversible—without truly understanding who we are. We end up in jobs we despise, relationships we shouldn’t be in, or positions of influence we aren’t emotionally or ethically equipped for. And at the root of this dysfunction is a simple truth: we don’t know ourselves. This is not a spiritual or abstract dilemma. It’s a deeply practical one. To know oneself is to understand your vices, your virtues, your weaknesses, and your strengths—not in a vague sense, but in detail. Let’s ge...
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