Part One: Kenya — Where Climate Change Was Never a Debate
Imagine living in a small town or rural village in Kenya where you don’t need a calendar to know the season is changing. You watch the clouds, the birds, the way the cows lean their heads toward the wind. You read the sky the way others read a clock instinctively, without thinking. Climate change, for many people, is a headline. A statistic. A conference held somewhere far away with delegates in suits. But for me, it has a face; dust and dry grass. It has a sound; silence, where there used to be birdsong and bleating. I have lived it in Kenya, and then I lived its European twin in the Netherlands and in Germany. This is my attempt to give that shared, invisible thing a name that people on both continents can recognize.
This is the first of a three-part series exploring climate change through my eyes from the parched plains of Kenya, to the heat-stricken cities of Europe, and finally to the policy rooms where the future is being negotiated. Today, I begin where it all started.
For the pastoralist, the smallholder farmer, the woman selling vegetables and groceries by the roadside, the boda boda rider, the fishmonger at the local market, or anyone whose daily bread depends on what the environment gives, climate change was never a theory to be argued about in a lecture hall. It arrived first, and it arrived personal:
Our peaks are losing their crowns. The white cap on Mount Kenya that fed rivers for generations is quietly vanishing as a slow bleeding of ice that few tourists notice, but that farmers downstream feel in their taps.
The seasons have stopped keeping their word. Rain that once arrived gently now either drowns the land in a single violent week or skips the year entirely leaving a community guessing, planting on a gamble rather than a pattern.
Land that once fed us is learning to starve us back. Grazing fields are turning to dust, harvests are failing more often than not, and hunger has shifted from an emergency to a standing assumption.
The ocean is quietly walking inland. Kenya’s coastline is losing ground to a rising sea, threatening homes, fishing livelihoods, and the freshwater that coastal communities depend on.
The body pays what the land can no longer afford. Heat stress, water-borne illness, and malnutrition are rising together, a public health bill that keeps compounding.
Everyone is affected by this, whether they know the name for it or not. That’s exactly why we need to say the name out loud: this is climate change.
Let me describe a dry-season’s day the way I remember it, because statistics rarely carry the weight that memory does.
There is a swift wind that moves across the plains like a small, angry spirit; a mini tornado sweeping up the dry, grassless earth into clouds of dust. The sun is not just hot; it is scorching, pressing down until it feels like it could crack a skull open. There is a strange silence over the village. The birds have migrated. The cattle have been walked long distances to wherever there is still water and pasture. The sheep have stripped the last blades of grass from the ground, and even they seem to carry a kind of sadness in their thin, bony bodies; that particular, mournful expression that hungry animals wear. No one is outside. People hide from the heat inside their houses, and there is little laughter, because when the environment suffers, the household budget suffers with it. School fees go unpaid. Meals are skipped. People live day to day, scanning the horizon for the dark, heavy-bellied clouds that might, if they are lucky, bring rain.
This is not a poetic exaggeration. It is a description of what climate change looks like on the ground, in real time, for people who did almost nothing to cause it.
The Weight of Watching
I have carried this memory with me across continents. It sits somewhere deep, surfacing at unexpected moments when I overhear someone in a cool, air-conditioned office complain about “the heat outside” as if it were an inconvenience rather than a warning, when I read headlines about climate conferences that seem to produce more statements than solutions, when I meet people who still speak of climate change as something distant and abstract.
What does it do to a person, to have witnessed this? To have stood on land that was once lush and watched it turn to dust, and then to walk into rooms where people debate whether the problem is real?
I have learned to hold two truths at once. The first is grief. The ache of watching something you love diminish in slow motion, knowing you cannot stop it alone. The second is resolve. A quiet, stubborn refusal to accept that this is simply how things must be. That resolve is what brought me here, to this blog, to these words.
Because the people who felt this crisis first: the pastoralists, the smallholder farmers, the vegetable sellers whose stock rots faster in the heat, the informal traders whose entire livelihood depends on a functioning environment must not be the last to benefit from its solutions. That is the promise I carry with me, from the dust of Kenya to wherever this journey takes me next.
Coming Next in This Series
Part Two: The European Climate Experience: I take you to the Netherlands and Germany, where I discovered that climate change arrives through different doors but speaks the same language. I explore what it feels like to live through European heatwaves, to watch the Rhine shrink, and to carry the weight of two climate realities at once.
Part Three: The EU-Africa Policy Analysis: I step back from the personal to examine what Europe owes Africa, what Africa should demand in return, and how this relationship could be reshaped from one of donor and recipient into one of genuine equals.
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