Where children play to heal, and the caregivers who raise them are cared for too.

For most of my childhood I was the problem in the room. Not the child with a problem. The problem itself. I could not sit still. I could not hold attention where it was demanded of me, though I could disappear for hours into something that had caught me. I lost things, forgot things, interrupted people, started before I had finished listening. I could not explain any of it, because I did not know there was anything to explain.

The adults around me were not cruel. They simply had no framework for what they were looking at, and neither did I. So the explanations available were the ordinary ones: careless, rude, bright but lazy, does not apply himself. I heard them often enough to believe them. That is the part people underestimate. A child does not just receive those words, a child becomes them.

I was twenty-two when I learned the words for it: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and the anxiety that had grown up alongside it. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition. It shapes how the brain manages attention, impulse and activity. It is not a deficit of character or of intelligence, and it is not something a child outgrows by being told to concentrate. It is also, when it is recognised early, one of the most supportable conditions there is.

Nobody recognised mine. The relief of finally having language was enormous, but so was the grief, because I understood in the same moment how many years had been spent being managed instead of being understood. I think about that gap constantly. Not with bitterness. With urgency.

Ubuntu came out of that gap. But the more time I spent in Nairobi’s settlements, the clearer it became that the child is only half the story. Behind almost every struggling child is an adult who is exhausted, isolated and carrying more than anyone has ever asked them about. You cannot fix one and ignore the other. The Zulu word ubuntu, I am because we are, is not decoration on our name. It is the operating instruction.

We are young, and we say so. What we are not is unserious. We registered properly, we asked before we assumed, we delivered our first flagship day on our own money, and we accounted for every shilling of it. That is the standard we intend to keep as we grow.