Ubuntu Village · Kenya · Diaspora & Belonging
“Kenya is not simple. It has never been. It is loud and quiet at the same time. It is hopeful and frustrating. It is beautiful and broken. It is everything, all at once.”
Ubuntu Village believes that home travels with people — across borders, through generations, in memory and practice. Salim Mbogo writes from Kenya, for everyone who carries it.
By Salim Mbogo
Some countries are just places you live. Kenya is not one of them. Kenya beyond borders means experiencing a country that truly leaves a mark on your spirit and imagination anywhere you are.
Kenya is something you carry.
You carry it in your accent, even after years abroad. You carry it in your stubborn love for tea, for ugali, for nyama choma that tastes better when eaten with your hands. You carry it in the way your heart reacts when you hear the national anthem, or when you see the flag, or when you meet another Kenyan in a foreign land, and suddenly you are no longer strangers.
Kenya is not simple. It has never been. It is loud and quiet at the same time. It is hopeful and frustrating. It is beautiful and broken. It is generous and unfair. It is everything, all at once.
Despite all the challenges, we continue to proudly call it home.
A Land That Refuses to Be Small
Kenya is wide in a way that teaches you humility.
From the cool highlands where mornings bite your skin, to the dry northern lands where the sun feels personal, to the coast where the air smells like salt and history, this country stretches like it doesn’t want to be contained. Every region feels like a different mood. A different story. A different rhythm.
You can spend your childhood in one part of Kenya and still grow up feeling like there is so much you haven’t seen. Long bus journeys show you that. So do school trips, family visits, and those random travels where you watch the land change color through the window.
Green hills become open plains. Open plains become dusty towns. Dusty towns become busy cities. And through it all, people keep living, loving, surviving, and hoping.
Kenya teaches you early that “home” is not just one place. It is many places stitched together by memory, movement, and shared struggle.
Many People, Many Stories, One Everyday Life
We love to say Kenya has over forty communities. But that number only becomes real when you live it.
You experience such diversity in school, where your best friend’s surname does not sound like yours. You experience this at work, where you learn to pronounce names you didn’t grow up hearing. You live it in estates and villages where different languages float through the air, sometimes mixing in the same sentence.
Most of the time, this diversity is not dramatic. It is ordinary. It is normal. It is just life.
You eat each other’s food. You attend each other’s weddings. You laugh at jokes you barely understand but somehow still find funny. You borrow words from each other’s languages without even realizing it. You slowly become more than just “your people.” You become Kenyan.
Yes, we have had painful moments. Yes, we have seen how easily politics can turn difference into danger. Yes, we carry scars as a nation.
But we also carry something else: the daily decision, by millions of ordinary people, to keep living together anyway.
That quiet choice matters more than we admit.
The Kenyan Hustle: Tired, Brave, and Still Standing
If you want to understand Kenya, don’t start with politicians. Start with the streets.
Start with Mama Mboga arranging tomatoes before sunrise. Start with the boda-boda rider weaving through traffic like he’s negotiating with fate. Start with the office worker staring at a screen, dreaming of a better life while answering emails. Start with the student studying under poor light, convinced that education is still the way out.
Kenya is powered by people who are worn out but not defeated.
Life here is not simple. Prices go up. Jobs disappear. Systems fail. Promises broken. And still, every morning, people wake up and try again.
They open shops. They start small businesses. They sell, they save, they plan, they hope. They contribute to harambees even when they don’t have enough for themselves. They show up for each other in sickness, in funerals, in celebrations, and in crises.
There is a special kind of courage in that kind of persistence.
It is not loud. It is not glamorous. But it is the reason this country keeps moving, even when it feels like everything is heavy.
Kenya Beyond Its Borders
One of the strangest things about Kenya is how far its heart has traveled.
Kenyans are everywhere now. In Europe. In America. In the Middle East. In Australia. Across Africa. They left for work, for school, for opportunity, and for survival. Some planned to stay away for a short time and ended up building whole lives elsewhere.
But Kenya never really leaves them.
It lives in their voice notes. In their playlists. They try to recreate the food in foreign kitchens. They follow Kenyan news more closely than those back home. They fiercely defend Kenya against outsiders, even as they criticize it among themselves.
They send money home. They build houses they dream of returning to. They teach their children Kiswahili or their mother tongue, so nothing gets lost. They celebrate Kenyan athletes like family. They argue about Kenyan politics from thousands of kilometers away.
Distance doesn’t erase belonging. Sometimes, it strengthens it.
A Young Country with Old Bones and New Dreams
Kenya feels young. You can hear it in the music. You can see it online. You can feel it in the way young people question everything, challenge everything, and refuse to accept “this is how it has always been” as an answer.
And yet, Kenya is also old. Old in tradition. Old in memory. Old stories are passed down through generations.
What makes this moment both captivating and difficult is that both worlds are meeting in real time.
Young Kenyans are not rejecting culture. They are reshaping it. They are mixing the village and the internet. They are blending the traditional and the contemporary. They are blending the local and the global. They are trying to build a future that neither erases the past nor gets trapped in it.
There is frustration. There is anger. There is impatience. But there is also creativity. Energy. Imagination.
Kenya is not finished. It is becoming.
Loving Kenya Honestly
Being proud of Kenya does not mean pretending it is perfect.
Read next: A Seed in the Dust: How Hope Keeps Kenya Alive
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About the author
Salim Kiarie Mbogo
Salim Kiarie Mbogo is a Kenyan writer, community historian, and cultural educator based in Nairobi, Kenya. His work focuses on the preservation of oral tradition, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and the living memory practices of rural East African communities. He has documented community resilience across Kenya’s central highlands, writing at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, food sovereignty, and African identity. Salim contributes to Ubuntu Village as a field correspondent and guest writer, bringing direct witness to the organization’s East Africa programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. His writing asks what it means to carry a people’s story forward — and what is lost when that story is interrupted.
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