Category: Self
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Unmarried. Unburdened. Unapologetic.
I grew up watching women disappear. Not physically. They were still there walking to the river, cooking over open fires, sitting in church on Sundays, nursing babies, nursing husbands, nursing communities. But somewhere between the vows and the village expectations, they let go of themselves. Quietly. Without ceremony. The ambitions they once whispered to their…
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The Woman I Am Becoming
Sometimes, it takes a question from a stranger to make you see your own story clearly. Recently, I was asked how I came to live in Europe. Was there a plan? Family waiting? My answer was that I’d simply decided to leave Kenya to see what life held which felt like ordinary truth to me.…
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The Power of Yearning: Transforming Dreams into Reality
Have you ever felt a yearning so deep it becomes a part of you? It’s more than a thought. It’s something you breathe in and out. You feel it on your skin like a change in the weather. You see it everywhere; in a stranger’s smile, on a billboard, in the quiet of your own…
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Being my biggest Project
There are moments when giving up whispers as the easier option. But for some of us, that option was never on the map. The terrain of our dreams doesn’t have an exit route. The biggest risk I ever took was moving from Kenya to Europe. I grew up envisioning a life abroad as something beyond…
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Becoming My Own Home
Growing up in rural Kenya, I lived in a county where the land stretched endlessly. You couldn’t see its beginning or its end only rolling plains, acacia trees silhouetted against the vast sky, rivers, and grass. Nature echoed around us: birds chirped, cowbells rang from the distance, smoke curled from homesteads, and on good days, when…
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The Girl Who Packed Her Mother’s Prayers
When I left home, I carried no heirlooms, no land, no riches. What I packed instead were my mother’s whispered prayers unseen, weightless, yet heavy enough to shape the woman I am becoming. My mother is the eldest of twenty children. My grandfather, like many Maasai men of his time, had two wives. Polygamy was…
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Permission to Outgrow
To outgrow your world is to break its heart and your own, a little. It is never simple. It is freedom and complexity tangled together a delicate rebellion against the soil that shaped your roots. For me, it meant breaking away from certain Maasai customs, especially those that bound women tighter than men. It required…
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The Currency of Courage: Paying the Price for Reinvention
From a young age, I sensed I was meant for a bigger life one that didn’t fit the script handed to me. Growing up as my mother’s youngest child in a vast Maasai village, I had no siblings to play with. Our isolation was no accident; it was the legacy of colonial theft. When the…
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Walking Between Worlds: A Maasai Woman in Europe
I grew up in a world rooted deeply in tradition where values weren’t just taught, they were lived. In my small corner of rural Kenya, my mother was the anchor of our home. In the Maasai community, it is the mother who raises the children teaches them, molds them, prays for them, and gently pushes…
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Blooming in Foreign Soil
I grew up in a small Maasai village in Kenya, where life was marked by dusty roads, outdoor play, and the quiet strength of women. My earliest memories are of playing alone in the open fields, or when luck was on my side, with my cousins or neighbors’ children. I didn’t think much of it…