A wise man once said that Usain Bolt may not be the fastest runner simply because he is, but because he was discovered. He had an encounter with opportunity.
The world is filled with millions of people who will never be discovered, souls who go down as statistics, while the small 1% write history.
Sometimes I catch myself wondering: if I left the world today, would anything change? Would the air shift, even slightly, because I once breathed it? Would my absence echo in someone’s life? Does my story matter?
I don’t always know the answer. But every time I whisper yes to myself, something inside me stirs, a fragile flame of hope. Hope that one day, I might become someone of meaning and value in this vast, crowded world.
And as I learn to think that of myself, I see it reflected in a child’s eyes. He doesn’t know it yet, but the world would be incomplete without him. And maybe, in some cruel way, it already is, because the world acts like he doesn’t exist. Forever unseen. Forever unknown. A legend, a revolutionary, an innovator, inexperienced by us all.
Perhaps that’s the greatest tragedy of our time: to miss a treasure that lies within reach, hidden in plain sight.
Kibera is one of those places, alive with hidden gems, with potential so raw and radiant it could light up the world if only given a chance. Children born into hardship, into stories they did not choose, yet carrying within them the same brilliance and possibility as anyone else.
I write this as a call to the child within you, the one who once longed to be seen, to be guided, to be told that they mattered. Because they did. And they still do.
At Kanzi, we seek to be that light, to remind these little ones that they, too, are seen. That their stories matter. That there is so much the world is yet to experience from the seeds of greatness hidden within each and every one of them.