Homeward Journey

“We shall not cease from exploration,

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.”

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

When I left Kenya, my parents were still young. At least that is how they seemed to me.

Over the years, I have watched them slow down. The changes arrived gradually enough to ignore until my father's dementia diagnosis changed the equation. He is a reserved man and always has been. Watching him begin to forget us has left me feeling that I missed the chance to know more of him while his memories were still within reach. Conversations I assumed we still had time for may no longer be available to us.

There is a painful duality in that realization. I grieve what the disease takes, but the life I have built also gives me the ability to care for my parents, and I continue to do so. Distance cost me time with them. The work that kept me away also created the means to care for them now.

Memories are precious while they can still be shared, and ordinary time together cannot always be postponed until work becomes less demanding. Time waits for no one. Dementia makes that truth cruelly visible.

So I have stopped wasting time. The urgency has brought a kind of focus I had never known before.

For years, returning remained an abstraction, something I could imagine without having to decide. COVID made the decision harder to postpone. The politics taking root in America also made me question where I wanted to spend the next part of my life. Even with resources and stability, not feeling at home became a cost I could no longer dismiss.

For now, returning means dividing my time, with most of it increasingly spent in Kenya. I sometimes joke that I have become allergic to the United States. My body seems to agree. The food and weather wear me down in ways they did not before. The long-term plan is to relocate fully, but until then my life remains split across places.

Kenya's climate feels heavenly after living through Louisiana summers. Still, returning does not make every part of Kenya easy. Slow processes and corruption frustrate me, and simple work can become heavier than it needs to be. I am no longer sure that feeling at home is the phrase I am looking for. Kenya is home, yet after so many years between countries, I sometimes feel that I do not fully belong anywhere.

But what I feel in Kenya is peace. That has become a more reliable signal for me.

Peace matters, but Kenya itself has changed too. In my early years abroad, communication might involve a fax or calling a phone booth because mobile phones were not yet part of ordinary life. Now M-Pesa makes my credit card feel like I am paying with a check. The joke is that people in the United States still send actual checks.

I have always believed in building a company with global reach. Alexandria taught me that a business can be rooted in one place without being limited by it. By the late 2010s, I could see the same possibility taking practical shape in Kenya. The infrastructure, talent, and timing were coming together. The belief was not new. The opportunity to act on it from Eldoret had finally arrived.

Eldoret is not the obvious choice if the goal is to follow Kenya's established technology map. It has only recently gained city status. It is far smaller than Nairobi, although, in an irony I appreciate, still much larger than Alexandria.

Nairobi feels like New York to me. Eldoret feels closer to the scale and rhythm I want. It is near my hometown and the people who shaped me. It is the City of Champions, known around the world for discipline and human potential. My dream is to help make it a technology hub without requiring it to imitate Nairobi or Silicon Valley.

The Enhancesoft office in Eldoret gives that dream an address. It lets me remain close to my parents without stepping away from the work. The team also makes the return useful beyond me. Young people can do consequential work from Eldoret without treating departure as the price of ambition. That is one practical response to the brain drain.

The office began as an empty space that needed to be remodeled. At the beginning, it was just me and the contractor. There was no team and no rhythm yet, only construction decisions and invoices arriving before I had proof that the idea would work. I looked around at the unfinished room and wondered whether I had made a mistake.

The answer did not arrive in one dramatic moment. It came as the room filled with people and work. The empty space became a team.

Today, the office connects parts of my life that once seemed separate: family and ambition, Kenya and a global market, return and forward motion. I can build globally without treating Kenya as a place I have to leave again. Return is no longer only an emotion. It has an address.

Kolong is where my story began, and it continues to shape what I choose to build. T. S. Eliot's words ring true because the journey has changed what I am able to see in the place where I began.

This homeward journey is not an attempt to undo the years away. I am not returning as the person who left. I am returning with obligations, scars, skills, and questions that have taken decades to form. I may never resolve what it means to belong fully to one place.

But I know where I feel at peace.