Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o teaches at UC Irvine in Southern California. He is very sharp, articulate, and his sense of humor is out of this world. Spent time with him on the 13th, and here are my 13 takeaways. 1. He pointed out remarkable attributes of Professor Micere Mugo, portraying her as a combination of beauty, intelligence, and eloquence. She truly encompassed a well-rounded persona. And when she stood on stage to dramatize the play “Trial of Dedan Kimathi,” she was simply marvelous. 2. He laughed at "colonialism embedded in Patriarchy. He explained, for example, how some (married) women hide their given names and adopt foreign names along with their husband's surname. For instance, Eunice W. Mwangi might opt to be known only as Eunice (the colonial name) or Mwangi (the husband's name with patriarchal connotations) and hide Waitherero (W). This act, in a way, reflects a submission to the husband's authority and the traditional role he envisions for women. “Nikiii marakunîkîra rîtwa ithaka” he wondered. 3. He expressed the notion that a society is as great as the prevailing music and religion. Sadly, today’s church is no longer interested in welfare of the masses like “Kanitha wa Karing’a” of yesteryears. We reminisced on good ol’ music, listening to Kamaru and also explored Makibi James' music. 4. He emphasized the universal truth that no matter the extent of one's education, there will always be gaps in knowledge. Even if you hold ten degrees, encountering a broken lock would require seeking help from someone who possesses the necessary skills, often without any formal degrees. 5. His face lit up remembering Professor Micere Mugo. He highlighted her quick thinking, recounting how she declined an offer of about 30 acres of land from Moi. This created an ideological schism between her and her brother in law. 6. He touched on the concept he referred to as "normalizing the abnormality." It's that situation where what is weird in normal circumstances is mainstreamed and considered “woke.” For example, someone transitions from their rural roots (Assume Kîamûtûgû) to Nairobi, secures a job, and as soon as they don a suit and polish their English, they disconnect from their mother tongue and soon start thinking their grandparents are less knowledgeable because they don’t speak that kind of English. Another example is where less qualified or tainted people are given the mandate to lead, which is actually an abnormality. But we have normalized it. 7. He wondered how in the name of Kaimosi I got the name “Mukurima” in a society that glorifies foreign names. îî weee 8. The professor got some dance moves. I told him we have to go head to head soon. He laughed. I laughed. Man, I have to represent the Njaangai warriors who could move like contortionists. 9. He expressed his admiration for Carey Baraka's recent article in The Guardian. He wants readers, especially men, to prioritize their health and undergo regular check-ups: He appreciated how the article shed light on his prostate cancer, a hidden disease affecting many African men and misattributed to supernatural causes by society. “nîararogiro” people say, yet it’s prostrate cancer doing a number on the body. 10. The professor maintains a stance of not harboring personal hatred or disdain for anyone, including figures like Moi. His strong aversion is directed towards ideologies that dehumanize individuals. Isitoshe, 12. From Makibi’s lyrics in the song “Ngûhe Kîrîra,” Mîciî nî ndogo.. 13. We both share a love for “kamûkimo ka minji”. May the day break.

2 years ago, a group of young Serbians took to the streets demanding accountability after a railway station canopy collapsed and killed 16 people. At that time, they were dismissed by some as students looking for an excuse to miss class. On Sunday, those same young people helped bring down a political establishment that had held power for 14 years. The world was shocked as results of Serbia’s October 25 parliamentary election started streaming in. Candidates backed by the student protest movement defeated the political camp of Aleksandar Vucic. After he conceded defeat, thousands of people poured into the streets to celebrate a result that had seemed impossible when the protests began. As a Kenyan, I watched those celebrations and thought about our own young people. In 2024, they took to the streets carrying the Kenyan flag, demanding accountability and insisting that the country could do better. Like the students in Serbia, they were dismissed and accused of being misled. They were deemed “content creators..” But there is another reason Serbia’s story interests me. Many Serbians have a deep love for their country, a feeling shaped by their history, their faith and the struggles they have endured. It is a love I came to appreciate while studying international conflict. It also helps explain why Serbia reacted so strongly when Kenya recognised Kosovo as an independent country last year. For many Kenyans, that decision may have seemed like a routine diplomatic announcement involving a place far away. For many Serbians, Kosovo is far more than a name on a map. It is home to medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries and the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, an event that holds a powerful place in Serbian national memory. Kosovo was an autonomous province of Serbia when Serbia was part of Yugoslavia. Its population is predominantly ethnic Albanian, and many Kosovo Albanians have their own painful memories of repression under Serbian rule and their own desire for independence. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, but Serbia continues to regard it as part of its territory. So when Kenya recognised Kosovo last year, Serbia condemned the decision, saying it had damaged a longstanding friendship between the two countries. That history takes me back to one of my classes. One phrase my international conflict professor loved repeating was “asymmetric conflict.” She would explain that in a war where one side is vastly stronger than the other, the two sides may not be fighting with the same idea of what it means to win. The stronger side may set out to defeat its opponent decisively. The weaker side, knowing it cannot match that military power, may focus on surviving long enough to make the conflict costly for the stronger side and its political leaders. One of the case studies we spent time on was NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, then made up of Serbia and Montenegro, during the Kosovo conflict. Oh remember Boutros Boutros-Ghali as UN Secretary General? On paper, the imbalance was obvious. NATO had overwhelming air superiority, advanced technology and the resources of a powerful military alliance. Yugoslavia, under Slobodan Milosevic had no realistic path to defeating NATO in a conventional air war. But military strength alone could not determine how Serbians would respond to their country being bombed. Even people who disliked Milosevic found themselves rallying against an external attack. The bombing did not produce an immediate popular uprising against his government. In the short term, it helped unite people who otherwise disagreed with him. After 78 days of bombing, Milosevic accepted an agreement requiring Serbian and Yugoslav forces to withdraw from Kosovo and allowing an international security presence to enter. He remained in power immediately after the campaign, but he was overthrown the following year after a disputed election and mass protests. That distinction stayed with me. Many Serbians could oppose the bombing of their country and still demand a change in leadership when they believed their government had failed them. Their loyalty to Serbia did not require them to remain silent about those in power. And that brings me back to what has just happened. The protests that led to Sunday’s election began after the railway station disaster in Novi Sad. The station had recently been renovated, and protesters alleged that corruption and poor oversight had contributed to the collapse. They wanted to know how a public structure could fail so catastrophically, and they demanded accountability for the lives lost. Isitoshe, The students organised, held assemblies and marched. As the movement grew, teachers, farmers, workers, professionals and other citizens joined them. They faced intimidation and violence, but kept their demands in front of the country. Eventually, they took that movement to the ballot box. Their victory was not achieved by students alone. It took people across generations and communities to cast their votes for the candidates the movement backed. But it was the young people who helped turn the tragedy at Novi Sad into a sustained national demand for change. There is still much to be seen. Winning an election and governing a country are different tasks, and the student-backed movement will now have to show how it intends to deliver the accountability and functioning institutions its supporters demanded. For now, though, what happened in Serbia is remarkable. A generation that had grown up under one dominant political establishment organised, built support beyond its campuses and helped defeat it at the ballot box. For Kenyans who watched young people risk their lives demanding a better country, the story is a familiar one. Serbia shows what can happen when that energy is sustained, reaches people across the country and is carried into an election. May the day break.

I thought is a national party and not representing a “community…” Or is this the new ODM

A few weeks ago, Microsoft began winding down its Nairobi Africa Development Centre. Employees were informed that roles were ending or that the centre was closing as part of a global restructuring. Today, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Exit Offer to about 60,000 employees or 27% of its 223,000 global workforce. Employees have until early December to decide and, if they accept, exit by the end of December. Microsoft expects a lower uptake than its earlier voluntary retirement program. The exit package follows Microsoft’s standard severance: up to 39 weeks of base pay (depending on level and tenure), continued stock vesting (typically 6 or 12 months), and a period of health coverage (plus COBRA options). The move is aimed at controlling headcount and costs while the company invests heavily in AI and data-centre infrastructure. Microsoft reports earnings this Wednesday after market close. May the day break

There is something worth revisiting that I read earlier in the year. In July, AtlasIntel, the most accurate pollster in the last 2 election cycles in America, noted that the Brazilian election outcome was increasingly being driven by the question of whom voters did not want to govern. That question matters because voters can back a candidate without a clear agenda simply to keep the other candidate out. Meanwhile, news of Lula’s victory rattled Brazilian stocks, with many falling sharply. The election results also remind us that turnout is the most important thing in an election. In Brazil, older voters were more motivated to cast their ballots, while many Gen Z supporters of Flavio failed to translate their support into votes. That is where the difference between campaign enthusiasm and electoral turnout becomes consequential. A candidate can attract huge crowds and appear to have overwhelming momentum, yet finish behind when the ballots are counted. Flavio had influencers and celebrities on his side including Neymar. They definitely gave his campaign visibility, but that visibility did not deliver victory. An influencer can attract millions of views, but not votes! We have to remember that political rallies are good, and they can make a spectacular show of support. But if those people do not turn out to vote, you will lose. Miracles and prayers are good. But getting people to vote is much better.

Nigerians are the most educated among Black immigrant communities in America. This is according to data from the A U.S. Census Bureau. Take Oluyinka Olutoye for example. When he graduated from medical school in Nigeria, he could not have known that years later he would make headlines in America for operating on a baby before she was born, then placing her back in her mother’s womb. Lynlee Hope Boemer was 23 weeks and five days into her mother’s pregnancy when surgeons brought part of her tiny body outside the womb. They needed to reach a tumor that had grown almost as large as she was. The tumor was taking blood Lynlee’s body needed and putting so much strain on her heart that doctors feared it would fail. During the operation, she needed a blood transfusion. At one point, her heart stopped, and the team revived her. The surgeons removed about 90 percent of the tumor, returned Lynlee to the womb and closed the uterus. Nearly 12 weeks later, on June 6, 2016, she was delivered by caesarean section. Doctors removed the rest of the tumor in a second operation when she was eight days old. Olutoye was one of the 21 surgeons and specialists who had helped her reach that day. His interest in medicine began inside his childhood home in Nigeria. A doctor came to treat an ill relative, and young Oluyinka followed him from room to room, watching what he did. After the visit, he began playing doctor himself. In high school, he read about Christiaan Barnard, the South African surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant. Olutoye was particularly interested in Barnard’s earlier research on fetal animals. It was the first time he had encountered the idea that surgery could begin before birth. He entered the six-year medical program at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria and graduated as valedictorian in 1988. He liked surgery because it offered a chance to identify a physical problem and try to fix it. His interest in how babies developed drew him toward pediatric surgery. Olutoye came to America for the technology and specialist training he could not readily access in Nigeria. But his Nigerian medical degree made it harder to enter a U.S. surgical training program. He took a pediatric internship at Howard University Hospital and kept working toward surgery. Mentors at Howard helped him apply for a residency the following year. Isitoshe, At Virginia Commonwealth University, surgery chairman Andrew Wechsler offered him a place, along with the chance to conduct research. Olutoye earned a doctorate in anatomy, completed his surgical training and went on to fellowships in pediatric and fetal surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. At Texas Children’s Hospital in 2008, Olutoye led an operation on Macie Hope McCartney, another baby whose tumor was taking blood her heart needed. She was 25 weeks into her mother’s pregnancy. Surgeons removed most of the mass while she was partly outside the uterus, then returned her to the womb. Macie was delivered ten weeks later. Lynlee’s case in 2016 brought that same difficult decision to Olutoye and his colleagues. By then, he was co-director of the Texas Children’s Fetal Center and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine. Her heart was struggling; the team could no longer wait. In 2019, Olutoye became surgeon in chief at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He now leads surgical departments and continues research into fetal wound healing and serious conditions affecting babies before and after birth. The medical degree that had complicated his entry into American surgical training was earned years before either Macie or Lynlee was born. He had brought it with him from Nigeria, along with a question he first encountered in a book as a teenager: Could a surgeon reach a child in time, even before birth? May the day break

Elon Musk and his company SpaceX may have paused or watered down the recent growing concerns over AI spending by companies. This came up during SpaceX earnings call today. But let me get some stuff out of the way for better context Over the past week, tech companies have seen a sell off as most investors begin to question the enormous amounts of money companies are spending on artificial intelligence. This capital expenditure is being spent on data centers, buying advanced chips, computing power and so on On the first hand, that spending has created extraordinary opportunities for companies supplying the infrastructure. Nvidia, for example, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries. On the other hand there has been the lingering question: if companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI infrastructure, how much money will that investment generate! And that brings me to SpaceX quarterly report i mentioned earlier. SpaceX reported $14.6 billion in quarterly revenue, an increase of 161% from the same period last year. Net income came in at around $4.4 billion, compared with a loss a year earlier. I was particularly interested in the performance of its AI business. When SpaceX went public, I wrote on this page, explaining xplained that this was not just a rocket company. SpaceX has three businesses: Space, which includes Falcon, Dragon and Starship; Connectivity, through Starlink; and AI, which includes xAI, Grok and X. Starlink had already established itself as a substantial business, serving millions of subscribers across the world. The report today put the subscribers number at 13.6 million! SpaceX's launch operations had also demonstrated their commercial value. The greatest uncertainty surrounded AI, where enormous spending had yet to produce comparable profits. The AI division generated approximately $7.6 billion in quarterly revenue, more than eight times its revenue a year earlier, and reported around $431 million in operating profit. AI revenue has now surpassed Starlink's, although part of that growth reflects acquisitions rather than purely organic expansion. All in all, SpaceX has offered encouraging evidence that AI demand is producing meaningful revenue and that at least part of the business can operate profitably. Oh and when SpaceX price fell to $110 a few weeks ago, that was probably a generational opportunity to buy or add. Not sure if it goes back there any time soon…. And this sets us up for an interesting week. A number of AI companies or AI-heavy companies report earnings this week-including Meta, IBM, Lams Research, Texas Instruments, SAP and others. Throw in Tesla too! Buckle up!

You are also easy on the damn eye

I recently read a comment by someone who said they would never leave their country in search of greener pastures. Fair enough; maybe they are right. People have their reasons for staying, just as others have their reasons for going. It made me think of Juliet Lumati’s mother. She was a bank secretary in Surulere, Lagos, raising three children on her own. There was a friend who kept urging her to enter the U.S. diversity visa lottery. She ignored the friend for days. Leaving Nigeria with three children was a much bigger decision than filling out a form in some cyber cafe. Eventually, she applied and believe it or no, won and the family moved to Chicago. That opportunity changed Juliet’s life, though it did not make her path easy. Juliet grew up, went to the University of Georgia and studied biology and political science while working multiple jobs to support herself. On some days she volunteered at a hospital and that is where she was drawn to medicine. At that time, she could barely see how she would pay for medical school. Besides, there was no doctor in the family she could look up to. All that changed after a study trip to Tanzania, and helped her take the idea of medicine seriously. She met physicians working across borders and began to picture herself returning to Africa with medical skills. She still needed to work out how to get there. After college, she found a place in the Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholars Program, which took her to Washington. In Senator Tom Harkin’s office, while Congress was developing the Affordable Care Act, she researched Medicare, Medicaid and the uninsured. She learned how decisions about care were made. She also noticed how far the people making those decisions could be from the patients affected by them. Juliet wanted to be close enough to see both sides. She entered medical school at the University of California, San Diego, and later studied health policy at Harvard. For a time, she thought she might work in infectious diseases. Then she did a surgical rotation and found that she loved the operating room. She went on to become a cancer surgeon, specializing in operations on the liver, pancreas and digestive system. The policy questions followed her into the hospital. During research in Ghana, she found that having insurance did not necessarily mean a patient could afford surgery. People still faced bills for anesthesia, scans and laboratory tests. Some remained in the ward after treatment because they could not pay what they owed. Lumati even enrolled in the insurance plan herself to understand what it covered. Back in Nigeria, where she now works with cancer specialists in Lagos as well as treating patients in Chicago, she encountered another painful gap. Many people came to a cancer center for a consultation but did not complete treatment. A diagnosis could be followed by months of chemotherapy, tests, travel and missed work. Knowing the treatment one needs does not mean having the money to finish it. Juliet is now leading a study to find out whether someone can help patients through those costs. The trial is enrolling 200 people with newly diagnosed breast, colorectal or prostate cancer at two centers in Nigeria. Some will receive the usual care. Others will also meet with a financial navigator who can explain likely expenses, help them apply for available insurance or charitable support, and plan for the visits ahead. The researchers will follow what happens. They cannot yet say whether the help will keep more people in treatment; that is what the trial is designed to test. I think about Juliet’s mother ignoring that invitation in Surulere, then finally taking a chance on it. Years later, her daughter is asking questions that are helping even those who say they would never explore greener pastures, begin cancer treatment and be able to come back for the next appointment. May the day break

Let it come compete with Rìakanaù proper or Mbukinya!

Wow!

George Njoroge nearly left school to earn money. In 2011, the United States approved a new medicine for hepatitis C, which Njoroge helped develop George grew up watching his grandmother prepare medicine in Kamuchege, a village outside Nairobi. For some remedies, she boiled roots in water. For others, she warmed plants in oil. People came to her because they trusted what she knew. She had never attended school. George, whom she raised from the age of three, sometimes had no shoes. It would have been hard to imagine him one day working in an American laboratory, trying to design a medicine for a virus that had defeated researchers for years. At Thika High School, that future almost ended before it began. Njoroge loved biology, but his family needed money. He planned to finish school and find work instead of taking the advanced courses required for university. When two teachers learned what he intended, they offered to help pay for him to continue. He stayed, though he had no settled plan to become a chemist. On a school trip to a marine park, he met a game warden with Land Rovers and glass-bottomed boats. The job appealed to him enough that he went to the University of Nairobi to study subjects that might lead him there. Organic chemistry changed his mind. He learned how scientists could make molecules that interfered with a disease at a precise point. He also began to understand what he had seen at home: his grandmother’s water and oil preparations drew different substances from the plants she used. Her knowledge had come through practice rather than a laboratory, but he could see the chemistry in it. Njoroge graduated at the top of his class and won a scholarship to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. America was a difficult adjustment. He missed Esther, his girlfriend in Kenya. The winter was harsh, and an early quantum chemistry class made him wonder whether he should have left Nairobi. Esther later joined him and they married in 1987. He also completed his doctorate. A research job at Schering-Plough in New Jersey gave him the chance to make medicines. He worked first on cancer drugs, then joined a team trying to treat hepatitis C. The virus can quietly damage a person’s liver for years. Treatments available at the time helped some patients, but many remained ill. Isitoshe, The researchers focused on an enzyme the virus needed to reproduce. If a drug could attach to it, they might stop the virus from making new copies of itself. Njoroge had designed molecules to interfere with a similarly specific process in cancer research. Hepatitis C presented a nastier problem: the enzyme’s surface was so shallow that a medicine struggled to get a grip. Njoroge compared it, laughing, to the Kalahari Desert. His team kept working on the molecule. It took fifteen years. In 2011, the FDA approved the result: boceprevir, sold as Victrelis, the first oral hepatitis C protease inhibitor. Patients took it with existing medicines, and the combined treatment improved their chances of clearing the virus. Victrelis has since been replaced by shorter, more effective treatments. Its place in the story remains: Njoroge and his colleagues helped show that hepatitis C could be attacked directly. Another molecule he developed for cancer was later found to help children with progeria, a rare disease that causes premature aging. May the the day break

What about Machakos! Iii weeeee

On her second day in America as an immigrant from China, Fei-Fei Li went with her father to a gas station in New Jersey. Something was wrong with his car, and he needed her to explain it to the mechanic. Li was fifteen. She had barely arrived and spoke little English herself. Her father had been in the country for three years, but he knew even less. Somehow, with a few words and a lot of gestures, she made herself understood. It was a small errand. It was also an early lesson in what her family would ask of her: learn this new place quickly, then help us find our way through it. Last month, the company AMD announced an agreement to buy World Labs, the artificial-intelligence company Li co-founded, for $8.2 billion. Do not convert that to Kenya shillings. World Labs is the answer to a question Li had spent decades working on that sounds simple until you try to teach it to a computer: How do we understand the world we see? Li grew up in Chengdu, China, reading science fiction, books about nature and European novels. Her father encouraged her curiosity. Her mother encouraged her to read widely. Their life was comfortable enough, but her mother’s opportunities had been constrained by the family’s political history, and Li’s parents began planning a future elsewhere. Her father went first, leaving for America when Li was twelve. The plan was for Li and her mother to join him soon. Visa delays stretched their separation beyond three years. Li later recalled feeling, as a child, that her parents had chosen a dream she could not understand over the family being together. When she and her mother finally reached Parsippany in 1992, the family had less than twenty dollars. Li found the suburb unnervingly quiet after Chengdu’s crowded streets. At high school, she studied unfamiliar subjects in a language she was still learning, relying on a dictionary so large she remembered it as a brick. After school, she worked in restaurants to help her parents. Isitoshe, Her math teacher, Bob Sabella, saw how far she could go. The school did not offer the advanced course she needed, so he taught her during lunch. One teacher, one student. When Princeton offered Li a scholarship, she asked two advisers to check the letter because she could hardly believe it. College brought possibility, but her parents still needed an income. With borrowed money, including help from Sabella and his wife, Li bought a small dry-cleaning shop for the family. She studied physics at Princeton during the week and returned to Parsippany from Friday through Sunday to help run it. Because she spoke English, much of the business fell to her. She kept it going for seven years, including her first years of graduate school in California. During her first year at Princeton, her mother needed heart surgery. Li arranged to take an exam at the hospital so she could stay nearby and translate for her mother and the doctors. Later, when a well-paid consulting job offered a way to ease the family’s financial strain, Li seriously considered leaving science. Her mother urged her to choose the work she loved. That work led Li to study vision. People learn to recognize a cat whether it is facing them, hiding under a chair or partly lost in shadow. Computers at the time struggled with such changes. Li came to believe they needed many more examples of the world, not just better instructions. As a professor at Princeton, she began building ImageNet with other researchers. They gathered and labeled millions of photographs so computer systems could learn to identify objects, and scientists could test their progress against the same images. Some colleagues doubted the value of spending years on a database. In 2012, another research team used ImageNet to make a dramatic leap in image recognition. The project Li had fought to build helped change the course of AI. World Labs is her attempt to go further. Its first product, Marble, can take a written description, photograph or video and create a three-dimensional place a person can explore and edit. The company is researching how AI might understand spaces well enough to help with design, simulations and, eventually, robotics. AMD wants that research team to work alongside the people building the hardware on which such systems run. Once the acquisition closes, Li will become AMD’s chief scientist. The $8.2 billion for an immigrant who did not understand as a word in English at some point in her life. May the day break

In the spring of 2011, Imbolo Mbue walked past Manhattan’s Time Warner Center and noticed the drivers waiting beside a row of black cars. The men emerging from the building wore suits. They got into the back seats and were driven away. Mbue had been out of work for roughly a year and a half. She found herself watching the chauffeurs and wondering about their jobs. What did a driver know about the man behind him? Could he tell when that man was in trouble? And if the financial crisis cost both of them their livelihoods, what would happen to their families? She knew what losing work had done to her own confidence. She went home with the beginnings of a story. Mbue had come to America from Limbe, Cameroon, in 1998. Limbe was a warm seaside town where, as a girl, she carried her books to a neighborhood tap and collected water after school. She remembers loving that life. She also remembers how difficult it could be for someone born into poverty to change their circumstances. Relatives helped her come to the United States for college, an opportunity she knew was precious. At Rutgers, she sometimes sat in her dorm listening to country music when she missed home. She studied business, graduated in 2002 and later earned a master’s degree at Columbia. In New York, she found work in market research for a media company. Her education had led to the kind of job she had hoped it would. Then the financial crisis reached her. She lost her job at the end of 2009. Month after month, she applied and interviewed while people around her worried about mortgages, marriages and how long their savings would last. Mbue began questioning the promise that had helped bring her to America: if you worked hard and earned an education, would you be all right? She had been writing privately for years. After discovering Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in a library, she had begun trying to make stories of her own, mostly set in Africa. She had not taken a course in novel writing, and none of that work had been published. The sight of the chauffeurs gave her a reason to begin something new, set in the city where she now lived. Isitoshe, The story grew into Behold the Dreamers. The book is about Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant who gets a job driving Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende’s wife, Neni, is studying and trying to build a future for their family. Clark and his wife, Cindy, appear to have the security the Jongas want. Then Lehman Brothers collapses. Mbue put the two couples close enough to see one another’s lives but not close enough to share the same risks. Clark’s loss threatens his position and marriage. For Jende, losing his job could also threaten his family’s ability to remain in the country. Mbue did not want either couple reduced to a lesson. She has said the hardest part of writing the book was finding enough empathy for all four characters, even when she disagreed with their choices. It took five years and dozens of rewrites. Mbue kept working on the novel after the walk was long over, through the difficult business of making its characters speak and act like people rather than representatives of an argument. She found an agent after many rejections. The book was published in 2016, two years after she became an American citizen. The book won the PEN/Faulkner Award and became an Oprah’s Book Club selection. That choice carried a private delight for Mbue: she had first been moved to write after picking up a Morrison novel selected for Oprah’s club. When Oprah Winfrey called about Behold the Dreamers, Mbue told her so. Mbue went on to write How Beautiful We Were, about an African village confronting an American oil company, and Every Story Is a Love Story, recently published, about grief and forgiveness. The subjects differ, but she keeps returning to people whose lives are shaped by decisions made elsewhere. On the day she saw the chauffeurs, Mbue did not know the names of the men beside the cars or the passengers they were waiting for. She could have walked past them. Instead, after losing her own job, she stopped to wonder what each person might stand to lose. That question became her first published novel. May the day break

Charles Muiruri was working behind a bank counter in North Carolina when a Duke doctor asked him to examine an HIV study translated into Swahili. Muiruri read it and found a problem. The researchers, he thought, were not asking their questions well. He told them so. It was not what Dr. John Bartlett had come to the bank for, but it changed what he understood about the man serving him. Muiruri knew the language and the region where Duke hoped to conduct the research. He could also spot a weakness in the study itself. Just a few years earlier, Muiruri had been running an information-technology company in Nairobi. A University of Nairobi graduate and former football player, he won a place in the United States through the green-card lottery and moved to Durham in 2002. He planned to build on his business experience and perhaps study computer science. Instead, his first American job was baking part time at a Kroger supermarket. He took the work because he needed to get established. Still, there was a distance between the life he had led in Kenya and the one strangers could see in Durham. When a choice arose between driving a soda-delivery truck and working as a teller at a Wachovia branch inside Duke’s medical complex, he chose the bank. Doctors and researchers came through the branch to do their personal banking. Bartlett, an infectious-disease specialist, was one of them. As they got to know Muiruri, Bartlett and his colleagues learned that he understood East African institutions and the practical difficulties of moving money there. They were beginning an HIV research partnership in Tanzania, and that knowledge was useful. Then Bartlett asked him to review the Swahili translation of the study. Muiruri’s criticism could have been awkward. Instead, the researchers listened. They needed someone to coordinate their work with Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College in Moshi, and Bartlett offered him the job despite his lack of research-administration experience. The teller who had questioned the study was now helping make it happen. The work led Muiruri somewhere he had not planned to go. He became interested in how studies were designed, what the data revealed and whether the questions mattered to the people being treated. While working at Duke, he earned a master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then a doctorate in health policy and management. In 2019, he joined Duke’s faculty. His research now focuses partly on people living with HIV who must also manage conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. A visit to his mother in Kenya helped sharpen how he thought about their decisions. As she prepared to meet friends, he noticed she had not taken her blood-pressure medication. The side effects made her feel unwell. She was not forgetting her health, she explained; she was trying to enjoy her day. “She was managing her life, not managing her hypertension,” Muiruri later said. The exchange stayed with him. A treatment might work medically and still be hard for a person to live with. To improve care, he wanted to understand what patients valued, feared and could manage alongside everything else in their lives. Isitoshe, Muiruri has also studied why some patients in Tanzania move HIV medication out of its original packaging, including to protect themselves from stigma. It is the kind of detail a researcher might miss without asking people how treatment fits into their days. By 2024, he had published more than fifty research papers and helped strengthen the partnership between Duke and its Tanzanian colleagues. He still plays football when he travels. At a meeting, he has said, he often asks where he can find a game. It gives him a way to meet people before asking them to trust a visitor’s ideas. Back at the bank, Bartlett had asked Muiruri to look closely at a set of questions. Muiruri’s answer changed his career. It also pointed toward the work he does now: listening when someone says the question needs to be asked differently. May the day break

Boston Celtics look scary

United will concede and then start playing like their lives depend on the outcome Why not play better now?

The ref never stopped the play. Goalie assumed there was an infraction. Play on