This woman’s story triggers something very deep in me.
Naona picha zake nalia Tu.
I have not written anything about her since her death.
Perhaps because I have been trying to find the words.
Chemu is many of these women.
She is many of women who loved with both their hearts and our pockets.
Women who gave everything they had to the people they loved.
Women whose first instinct, when they begin to succeed, is to make sure the people they love are okay.
When you are a giver, the first beneficiaries of your success are often the people you call family.
And sometimes, painfully, those same people become the ones who break you.
The people you love can carry you to the edge of yourself.
Chemu did not simply wake up one day and decide that she wanted to die.
She was carrying a weight that had become unbearable.
The weight of betrayal.
The weight of disappointment.
The weight of loving people who did not love her with the same tenderness.
She was trying to escape pain.
And when someone is drowning in pain, they are not always thinking about tomorrow.
They are not always thinking clearly about the people they will leave behind.
Sometimes, even the people you are trying so desperately to protect become tangled in the pain you are trying to escape from.
That is what makes suicide so devastating.
It is not always about wanting life to end.
Sometimes, it is about wanting the pain to end.
And I am so sad.
So deeply sad.
Because as we continue to write about Chemu, I hope we remember the many women whose generosity becomes the very thing that destroys them.
The women who gave until there was nothing left to give.
The women who carried families, lovers, children, friends and forgot that they, too, needed somewhere safe to put their own pain.
Let us talk about suicide beyond the final act.
Let us talk about the loneliness that comes before it.
The betrayal.
The exhaustion.
The humiliation.
The feeling of being trapped inside a life that has become too heavy to carry.
And perhaps, most importantly, let us learn to notice when the people who are always saving everyone else are quietly drowning themselves.
Because sometimes the strongest-looking people are the ones desperately needing someone to say:
Put it down.
Put it down girl.
Put it down
You don't have to carry all of this alone.
😭😭😭
Iran is under some of the heaviest economic sanctions in the world. This is what their architects are building anyway.
Most of Iran is covered by earth, sand and rock, so brick is not a stylistic choice, it is what the ground offers. Iranian architects took that constraint and turned it into a discipline. Curved façades. Perforated screens. Brickwork laid to recall water moving through sand. A material that every culture has access to, treated here with a precision that most abandon for glass and steel.
Sanctions closed the import routes. The architecture got sharper.
Kaveh House Renovation + Park Residential Building, Tehran, Iran 🇮🇷 | Pargar Architecture and Design Studio | Behzad Heidari & Shirin Samadian | 📷 Mehrdad Emrani, Hossein Farahani
Watched an Alex Mwakideu interview the other day he was talking to the legendary judge from Vioja Mahakamani. Millennials, you know her ~That no-nonsense mama who took zero nonsense in that courtroom.
Now here’s the wild part they never had scripts. Not a single one. They’d just show up, pick roles, agree on the case, and go. Cameras rolling, take one, done.
So every punchline Alphonse Makacha and Dot Makokha ever dropped? Pure improvisation. No rehearsal. Nothing prepared. Just talent doing its thing in real time.
Kenya really had something special with that crew.
And here’s the part that gets me AG Amos Wako was fully behind the show. He’d supply them with real court cases and actual judgments from Kenyan courts. So when the judge passed her verdict on screen, it wasn’t made up. It was legally accurate, straight from the constitution.
Comedy on the surface. Civic education underneath.
That’s a level of craft most productions today can’t touch.
Golden era. Salute to those legends. 🫡
Dubai just shut down. The busiest international airport on earth. Closed. Indefinitely.
Dubai International and Al Maktoum International both suspended all operations on February 28 per official Dubai Airports statement. Over 280 flights canceled. 250 more delayed. The airspace that handles more international passengers than any hub on the planet went dark this morning because Iranian ballistic missiles were flying through it.
Now read the airline list and understand the scale of what just broke.
Emirates. Grounded. Etihad. Grounded. Qatar Airways. Suspended all flights to and from Doha after Qatari airspace closed. Air India. Every single flight to every destination in the entire Middle East. Suspended indefinitely. Turkish Airlines. Suspended flights to Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, Qatar, and the UAE until at least March 2. Lufthansa. Dubai suspended. Air France. Tel Aviv and Beirut suspended. Wizz Air. Israel, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Amman suspended until March 7. British Airways. Affected. Virgin Atlantic. Affected. Japan Airlines. Affected. Norwegian Air, LOT Polish, Scandinavian Airlines, Aegean, Iberia, Air Arabia, PIA, Saudia, Air Algerie. All affected. All grounded or rerouting.
This is not a regional disruption. This is the global aviation network breaking at one of its most critical nodes.
Dubai is not just an airport. It is the single largest connecting hub between Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Every flight from Mumbai to London, from Singapore to Frankfurt, from Nairobi to New York that routes through the Gulf is now either canceled, delayed, or burning extra fuel on thousand-mile detours around closed airspace. IndiGo just suspended flights to Almaty, Baku, Tashkent, and Tbilisi until March 28. Not March 2. March 28. A month of Central Asian connectivity erased because Iranian missiles crossed the flight paths.
The cost is compounding by the hour. Rerouted flights burn more fuel when oil is spiking past 100 dollars a barrel because the same conflict that closed the airspace is threatening the strait that moves 21 million barrels a day. Airlines are paying surge prices for fuel to fly longer routes around a war zone that did not exist yesterday morning. Every hour the airspace stays closed, the losses multiply across carriers already operating on thin margins.
And here is what nobody is calculating yet. Dubai’s economy runs on connectivity. Tourism. Trade. Finance. Logistics. All of it depends on DXB being open. The UAE just absorbed an act of war on its sovereign territory with a civilian killed in Abu Dhabi from missile debris. The country that built its entire economic model on being the safe, neutral, connected hub of the Middle East is now closed for business because the country it had no quarrel with fired missiles through its airspace.
Iran did not just attack military bases this morning. Iran shut down the economic engine of the Gulf.
That is a cost Tehran cannot afford to repay and the UAE will not forget.
One skill that isn’t talked about enough is mastering emotion regulation. Knowing how to stay cool under pressure, how to manage & work through negative feelings & mastering the art of never allowing people to get you out of character. Learn how to control & manage your emotions.
A major cheat code in life: The ability to reset fast. You're allowed to start over at 10am, 2pm, or 6:30 at night. Zero reason to let one bad hour carry into the rest of your day. You can’t control what hits you. But you can control how long you sit in it.