My Name is Chiru.
And This Newsletter
Is For My Mother.

I grew up in Nyeri watching my mother work. Not the kind of work that gets noticed or celebrated. The quiet, relentless, daily kind of work that holds a family together when everything else is uncertain. She was capable of so much more than the circumstances she was handed. I could see it as a child even when I did not have the words for it. I always wished there had been someone to see it too. Someone to pull her aside and say: you have something here. Let me help you build it.

Nobody came. And that stayed with me.

I finished school in Nyeri, trained as a nurse and worked in hospitals across Kenya including Nairobi, where life had a different pace and a different kind of hunger to it. Nairobi showed me what ambition looked like when it had somewhere to go. It also showed me how many women were working incredibly hard with no real pathway to anything that belonged to them.

An opportunity came to work in the United Kingdom and I took it. I built a life there. I started a family. I had two daughters who are, without any exaggeration, the most beautiful human beings I have ever been trusted with. And all while holding a full time job, raising those girls and figuring out what it meant to belong to two worlds at once, I kept building. Because I had always known, from the very beginning, that I wanted to work for myself. Not one day. Now. In whatever form now allowed.

I am in my fifties. In my village they still call me Chiru. They have called me that since birth and I hope they always will. That name carries everything about where I come from and who I am accountable to.

Mwanamke Jasiri was not born from a business plan. It was born from a memory. A woman in Nyeri who had everything it takes and never got the chance to prove it. I think about her when I write every single edition. I think about what she would have done if someone had sat beside her, in language she understood, and said: here is how you start. Here is what you do first. Here is proof that women like you build things every single day.

That is what this newsletter is. It is the voice I wish someone had given my mother. Written now, for every Kenyan woman who is sitting exactly where she sat. Capable. Hardworking. Waiting for a permission that was never going to come on its own.