What a Woman in Kenya Taught Me About Life
I hadn’t showered in two days.
I’d slept the night before in a tent outside in Kajiado, Kenya — red dust in my hair, the sounds of the African night surrounding me, miles from anything familiar. I was tired, a little hungry, and completely out of my comfort zone.
And I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I was traveling with The Humanity Share, a non-profit doing extraordinary work in rural East Africa. That morning, I sat down outside a mud hut across from a woman whose story I will never forget. Through a translator, she told me about her life — losing her husband young, raising her children alone, surviving hardship and abuse within her community. For years, she said, her heart was deeply troubled.
Then she found faith. And something shifted in her that never shifted back.
She spoke about her grown children with a fullness in her voice that every mother recognizes. She talked about her community — the people she served, the love she tried to pour into everything around her. She told me she wasn’t interested in selling her land for a bigger house or more possessions. Instead, she was giving it to God. To the church. She wanted to be remembered not for what she owned, but for how she loved.
And then she used a word I wasn’t expecting.
Wealthy.
She described herself as wealthy.
I sat there — a corporate executive who had spent years chasing titles, paychecks, and every external marker of success — and I looked at the cracked mud walls, the patchwork roof, the swept red dirt, and I felt something crack open inside me.
Everything I thought I knew about wealth had just been quietly, completely dismantled by a woman sitting on a stool in the dust.
She wasn’t performing peace. She had it. And it had nothing to do with what she owned, what she’d achieved, or how her life looked to anyone on the outside.
This interview was part of Project Legacy, a storytelling project I started to sit across from remarkable women and simply ask: what is your story, and what do you want to leave behind? I thought I was asking the questions. Turns out, I was the one being taught.
So here’s the question I’ll leave with you:
If you stripped away the titles, the square footage, the salary, and the social media highlight reel — how would you define yourself? And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort might be worth sitting with.
True wealth is an inside job. And it’s never too late to start building it. Start today by asking yourself one honest question: what would I have to let go of to feel genuinely full?
The most valuable thing you own has nothing to do with your bank account.