WHOLE Volume 2, Issue 1

KamiLimu Magazine

WHOLE

The KamiLimu Magazine

Volume 2, Issue 1, June 2026

www.kamilimu.org

BRIDGETTE MUSANGO

THE 2026 KAMILIMU FELLOW

ON BECOMING A HOLISTIC ENGINEER

INTRODUCING COHORT 10

ALSO

PLUS

IDENTICAL TWINS WHO MENTORED SIDE

BY SIDE

THREE ALUMNI CARVING THEIR PLACE IN

THE WORLD

AND

WHOLE

TABLE OF

CONTENTS

FOUNDER’S NOTE

Welcome to Volume 2 of

WHOLE

BRIDGETTE MUSANGO

More Than Books and Pens

ELAINE MBUGUA

The Cohort 9 Valedictorian, In

Her Own Name

LEWIS AND TED

Same Great Taste, With Subtle

Differences

COLLINS WANJOHI

From Seeker to Steward

WAYNE ASAVA

Still Building

CONTRIBUTORS

Imagineering at KamiLimu with

Brian Kimani

THE PLAY STATION

A Crossword, Connections, and

a Jigsaw Puzzle

COHORT 10

A Decade In

WHOLE

A person is rarely made in a single moment. More often, they are built piece by piece, in

the times no one applauds, the work no one sees, and the decision to try once more after

a setback. This first issue of our second volume celebrates that kind of making: growth

that only shows itself in hindsight, consistency with no audience, and courage that works

in the background until, one day, it steps into the light.

You will meet that theme on every page: an engineering student on a holistic journey to

becoming a KamiLimu Fellow; a valedictorian who claimed her space; an alumnus who

turned a boy's curiosity into a company; a steward who leads quietly but with conviction;

twin brothers who mentored our first Software Engineering track; and a brand-new

cohort learning to think for themselves in the age of AI. Their paths look nothing alike, yet

they share a single thread: a commitment to keep showing up. A decade later, KamiLimu

is still doing the quiet work it began with: nurturing people who go on to nurture others.

Dr. Chao Mbogho

Founder, KamiLimu & Lead Editor

This issue has been inspired by the

song “Super Human” by Billy Black, a

song about everyday resilience,

because no one here needed to be

more than human, only to be seen

clearly enough to keep going. Tap

on the speaker icon below to enjoy

it.

This magazine is to be savored,

slowly and intentionally. It is to be

read and interacted with over

several days, talked about over

several weeks, and shared for the

rest of time. Welcome to the

WHOLE experience, Volume 2.

FOUNDER’S

NOTE

WHOLE

BRIDGETTE

MUSANGO

For a long time, Bridgette hid her love for dancing, drawing,

and public speaking, certain they were distractions from the

only thing she believed mattered: academics. Meet the

engineer who stopped hiding her many sides, the 39-year-old

radio that helped her find her voice on stage, and the 2026

KamiLimu Fellow who came back to widen the road for the

next cohort.

WHOLE

On the morning of September 20th, 2025,

Bridgette Musango's parents accompanied her

to KamiLimu, arriving long before the day’s

sessions started. Later that day, they watched

their daughter stand on stage, holding up her

father’s radio, a 39-year-old black Sony with two

large speakers and 13 push buttons that had

predated both their children. Bridgette was

using it as a prop in a speech for KamiLimu’s

public speaking semifinal competition, which

told the story of how, as a child, she competed

with the radio for her father’s love, as he carried

it with him everywhere, including on the farm

and in the cattle fields. She was nervous about

whether her speech would accurately capture

her father’s timeless love for the Sony. But

when, at some point during her presentation,

Bridgette looked out into the audience and

found her father's gaze and smile, she felt

steadied and relaxed. In the weeks after, her

parents would check in on her progress at

KamiLimu, quietly making room for all the parts

of her they had just, for the first time, been

invited to see.

For most of her life, Bridgette had been told, in

one way or another, that some parts of her were

too much. She had grown up as the gifted child,

teenager, and young adult whose life path was

already

mapped

academics

first,

and

academics always. She had other loves like

dancing, drawing, and public speaking. But she

kept them carefully out of sight, afraid that

naming them would invite the comments she

had come to dread: that her non-academic

passions were proof of a lack of focus. At JKUAT,

where she pursued an undergraduate degree in

Telecommunications Engineering, as if to prove

that she was not losing focus, she showed up to

every class, took careful notes, and spent her

free time sampling everything — intro to

Python, intro to cybersecurity, intro to AWS —

but committing to none of it. The one exception

was public speaking. In her third year of

undergraduate study, she joined Toastmasters

and discovered she could hold a room’s

attention. But she spoke from other people's

stories, not courageous enough to use her own,

considering her stories as not worth telling. She

sometimes wondered how much of a lasting

impact, if any, the impersonal speeches had.

When a friend opened the next door to her

public speaking journey, she almost did not walk

through it.

When Steve Muiga, a friend she had met at

JKUAT and a Cohort 8 KamiLimu alumnus, sent

her a KamiLimu info-session poster, Bridgette

attended it out of sheer curiosity. Still reeling

from a recent rejection by a cybersecurity

program, she had low expectations. But what

she heard convinced her to chase down her

transcripts, write the application essay, and

apply to KamiLimu’s ninth cohort. When she got

accepted in March 2025, she was still grappling

with crippling uncertainty about which technical

field to pursue.

BRIDGETTE

MUSANGO

More Than Books and Pens

By Dr. Chao Mbogho

WHOLE

After several conversations with some of KamiLimu’s mentors and lessons in responsible

computing and human-centered design, joining the program’s Cybersecurity track did not feel like

a strange fit for her engineering background.Practical lessons on how to mesh technology directly

with users empowered her to imagine a career where people came first, and technology second.

She applied these lessons to the KamiLimu Innovation Competition, where she led the

development of HELBme, a web application that protects HELB beneficiaries from smishing scams

by verifying sender IDs and scanning embedded links for malicious software. Co-building HELBme

with her team members and fellow mentees, Augustine Chironga, Norah Kimathi, and Victor

Mwai, gave her a first taste of what it felt like to imagine a holistic computing career.

This same freedom to dream impelled her to apply KamiLimu's lessons in speechwriting in ways

she had not anticipated. On September 20th, 2025, seven months into the program, Bridgette

stood on the KamiLimu stage, holding her father's Sony and using her own story to hold a room’s

attention. Her parents, seated in the audience, watched a side of their daughter they had not

witnessed before. The same courage to share her story spilled beyond the stage into a Substack

channel where her writing found a voice and built a community around it. As she progressed

through the eight months of the program, she realized that the most unexpected gift KamiLimu

gave her was not only a potential career path, but also a mirror.

Delivering the speech, ‘Sony’ at public speaking semifinals

Bridgette’s parents at KamiLimu

WHOLE

That mirror was not always comfortable to look at.

For as long as Bridgette could remember, feedback

had felt like a personal attack; evidence that she

was not good enough. Much to her dread,

KamiLimu’s feedback culture started from the very

first application essay. As the months drew on and

she

interacted

with

fellow

mentees,

she

developed a new fear: that she was not good

enough to excel or be recognized at the end of the

program. While these uncertainties did not

disappear completely, Bridgette found comfort in

the words of her peer mentor and Cohort 8

alumna, Linet Ithara, who guided her to focus on

which parts of herself had grown during the

program rather than on those that would be

awarded at the end. She also found comfort in a

new friend, Amanda Gwendolyn, a fellow mentee,

who consistently reminded her to leave room for

magic and surprise.

When graduation day arrived in November 2025,

the recognitions came: her Cybersecurity team

won the innovation competition, and she placed

first runner-up in the public speaking competition.

But nothing had prepared her for hearing her name

announced as the 2026 KamiLimu Fellow. She felt a

pride and satisfaction that came not from winning,

but from knowing she had grown into someone

who could do so in an arena that did not center

academics first, academics always. "The cake was

the

irreversible

personal

transformation.

KamiLimu’s graduation was just the icing",

Bridgette would later say.

The cake was the

irreversible personal

transformation.

KamiLimu’s graduation

was just the icing.

Bridgette, Augustine, Norah, Victor at

innovation finals

After being announced as KamiLimu Fellow

WHOLE

Bridgette came back to KamiLimu in 2026. This time, to spend the year working alongside

the management committee as a KamiLimu Fellow, determined to widen the road for

Cohort 10 mentees. Today, Bridgette sees herself in the current cohort of mentees: in their

uncertainty, their newness, and their hunger to leave a mark. Two of her initiatives carry the

lessons she wishes to impart. The first, "More Than One Thing," is a quiet rebellion against a

phrase she heard for most of her life: you are doing too much. She had once shrunk herself

to fit the box of being only a techie, certain her passions were distractions. Now she wants

the mentees to know that defining oneself narrowly is limiting. Through this initiative, she

has helped curate two of KamiLimu’s new models that provide humanistic scaffolding for

mentees: accountability partner pairs and hobby groups that explore interests ranging from

reading novels to knitting. The second initiative, "Flowers for Mentees," grew from a

childhood in which recognition felt conditional: a new bicycle was promised only for

coming first, but the process of getting there went unseen. She wants the Cohort 10

community to be celebrated for their milestones along the way, so that graduation is the

icing, never the whole cake. She is building all of this while carrying her own uncertainties: a

final semester, the looming question of what comes next, the fatigue of the final mile. But

she has decided that the way to be remembered is not through advice, but through

example: as a Fellow who lived the holistic philosophies she preached.

That holistic life looks, in practice, like a series of contradictions she has made peace with.

Bridgette thrives in structure and loves a detailed plan, yet she will wake up on a random

Wednesday, as she did on April 1st, 2026, pack a backpack, and travel 85 kilometers from

Nairobi to Murang'a for a day trip just to journal beside a waterfall. The trips are always

spontaneous, almost always alone, and oddly calming for someone who gets anxious about

being late to an event. Her mother once admitted she could never be sure where Bridgette

was; she might, after all, be in another country. Bridgette navigates life less by a map than

by a compass, letting her values guide which opportunities she says yes to and trusting that

one will somehow lead to the next. It is the same instinct that turned her love of public

speaking into a budding personal brand as a global moderator, complete with a TikTok page

and a recent stint as MC for a panel at the Women in Engineering and Technology summit at

JKUAT. Her mother, now a devoted follower of her TikTok page, commented on one of her

posts: “When I grow up.”

At Kanunga falls in Murang’a, Kenya

At the launch of Cohort 10

WHOLE

Lately, that same compass has turned her toward bigger

questions about the technologies shaping the world. Her

final-year project, a fall-detection and distress system built

with AI, had left her turning over the ethics of using AI in

medical contexts. So when she attended a fireside hosting

Dr. Chao Mbogho at ILINA , an African-led organization

advancing AI safety through policy, research, and talent

development, something clicked. She researched their work

and applied to their twelve-week Seminar, which she has

just completed. She is bringing this inspiration to the

Democracy and AI Hackathon, a joint effort between

KamiLimu and the Mozilla Foundation, held during the

Global Education Assembly. The hackathon on July 4th,

2026, marks the first time in KamiLimu's ten-year history

that it will organize one, and Bridgette is the main host. The

hackathon is the third phase of a five-part competition that

began with eighty-six students from nineteen universities,

narrowing phase by phase until a final handful build and

pitch their prototypes in August, where Bridgette will once

again take the stage as co-MC. For someone who had never

taken part in a hackathon herself, the symmetry is not lost

on her. She wants the students who walk through it to

leave convinced that there will always be a way to build

with AI rather than against it, and to ask not just whether

something can be built, but why, for whom, and at what

cost.

Bridgette shares many traits with her parents. From her

father, a people person, she gets her pull toward others; the

instinct to gather, to lead, to build community wherever

she lands. From her mother, she has learned that love often

lives in the small moments. For most of her life, she kept the

fullest version of herself just out of their view, certain it was

too much. Then one September morning, she finally invited

them in, and they made room. That, in the end, is what she

is doing for the Cohort 10 mentees: handing them the

permission she once wished for herself. She is an engineer

who speaks, a speaker who builds community, a planner

who disappears to waterfalls, and a KamiLimu Fellow who

came back to widen the road. Where the world kept telling

her to pick a lane, she chose, with no apology, to keep all of

them. As she told a room of mentees, mentors, friends, her

parents watching on, and her father’s radio in hand: go

ahead, press play. I am just getting started, and the best

tracks are yet to come.

10 WHOLE

11 WHOLE

LEWIS KORI

TED NGEENE

For most of their lives, Ted and Lewis have been mistaken for

one person, by teachers, by their own parents, even by a

scanner that once opened a door for the wrong twin. Meet

the identical twin brothers whose first mentorship was each

other, the soft-drink slogan that turned out to describe them

exactly, and the two engineers who became the very first

mentors of a brand-new KamiLimu track.

WHOLE

The biometric scanner at the co-working space does not know. It has been told, in the way

machines are told things, that the face belonging to Lewis is the face that has paid this month’s

membership. So when Ted forgets to pay and walks up to the same scanner, wearing essentially

the same face, the door opens. “It’s like having a VIP pass to my own life,” Ted says, with the grin

of a man who has gotten away with passing for his identical twin more than once.

The scanner is in good company. Everyone in the family except their sister has, at some point,

mixed them up. Even their parents slip these days, especially after a long stretch without seeing

them. Teachers fared no better. Once, memorably, a teacher caned Lewis at school, and when Ted

came up next in line, the teacher waved him off, convinced Lewis had simply come back for

seconds. Ted walked free. The twins first noticed something amusingly unique about themselves

in pre-nursery school, when other kids and teachers couldn’t stop staring. The staring has never

stopped, and neither have the questions — are you telepathic, can you feel each other's pain,

which of you is older — the same handful asked almost weekly. "You often have to pretend that

it's your first time being asked," Lewis says. Then he adds, deadpan, “People think we have

telekinesis. I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

The world keeps trying to compress Ted and Lewis into one person, but their subtle differences

keep quietly refusing. The twins were once the face of the Kenyan launch of Coke Zero Sugar,

under the tagline "Same great taste, but with subtle differences", which turns out to be a fairly

precise description of their personalities. Both got into computers through the same machine:

their father's laptop, in the years when broadband was just landing in Kenya. They found Cartoon

Network's browser games, drained his data bundles at a rate he did not enjoy, and taught

themselves hacky workarounds, such as finding and installing the right Adobe Flash plugin to run

a game or sneakily download music. But the same father’s laptop opened two different doors.

LEWIS AND

TED

Same Great Taste, Subtle Differences

By Mark Tanui

Lewis

Ted

WHOLE

Ted's was Digital Fortress , the Dan Brown thriller

about a cryptographer chasing a cyberterrorist.

He read it in high school and decided, more or

less on the spot, that this was the path:

cryptography, code, and the romance of the

puzzle. Lewis's door was quieter: he watched

Facebook

eat

the

world,

the

internet

rearranging human life in real time, and the

curiosity that began with games deepened into

something permanent. He gravitated toward

software at university, though he'd like to return

to hardware "when my livelihood doesn't

depend on it," he muses. Same beginnings, two

different doors.

However different the doors, they kept walking

through them together. The twins’ first real

mentorship was each other. When Ted moved

from programming in PHP to Python at his first

job, Lewis — who had a head start with the

language — walked him through it. “He was

patient with my questions,” Ted remembers,

“and gave me the guidance I needed.”

A few years later, the brothers built an app to

connect mentors with mentees before either of

them had formally mentored anyone. They

believed in the idea enough to build software

for it first. So when KamiLimu came calling, the

soil was ready. The call came through Collins

Wanjohi, a high-school friend of Ted’s and a

Cohort 5 alumnus, who had been evangelising

the program on what was then still Twitter. “I

still can’t bring myself to call it X,” Lewis jokes.

Both, independently, were reeled in by Dr. Chao

Mbogho’s posts about computer science before

they ever connected her to KamiLimu. So when

Collins finally asked each of them to mentor the

Software Engineering track KamiLimu was

launching for Cohort 9 in 2025, both said yes

almost immediately, becoming its very first

mentors and guiding eight students through its

inaugural run.

At the launch of Cohort 9

At university graduation

WHOLE

What they found inside impressed them for the same reasons, but in two different registers.

Lewis points to the meticulousness. Clear, professional communication from the team, and

alumni who choose to come back and help run the program. A testament, he says, “to how

powerful KamiLimu is.” Ted points to the same machinery. The detailed communication, the

well-organized events, and above all, the mission. Lewis and Ted, unprompted, reach for the

same word — holistic — to describe what sets the program apart. When two people who

can finish each other's sentences land on the same adjective, it is probably the right one.

Week after week, for eight months, the twins did the unglamorous thing the program is

built on: they showed up. They taught their Software Engineering classes, equipping their

eight students with skills that led to two innovation projects, and had their students

graduate from the program. They also showed up for the rest of the calendar. The public

speaking competitions, especially, which Lewis confesses he looked forward to all week.

Ask each twin, separately, what KamiLimu gave them, and they give you the same two-

word answer: showing up. "Show up even on the days you don't feel like it," Lewis says. "The

discipline and responsibility that mentoring instilled will always be a part of me." Ted saw

the lesson modelled at the very top: he watched Dr. Chao hold the cohort together while

navigating personal grief from her mother's death, and the death of a Cohort 9 mentee.

"Their ability to maintain focus on the program's objectives despite such adversity left a

lasting impression on my approach to commitment and resilience.“

The discipline and

responsibility that

mentoring instilled will

always be a part of me.

Lewis presents an award at Cohort 9 graduation

WHOLE

The same ethic shows in how they work. Early in their freelance days, a client needed a website

built fast, and the first attempt satisfied no one. Not the client, not them. So they did the thing

that, in retrospect, tells you everything about how they operate. They scrapped the website,

packed bags, and left for Shela, on Lamu Island, where they locked themselves in for a week and a

half, rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. They came back with something they were finally

proud of, and the work spoke for itself, bringing more inquiries than two freelancers could keep

turning down. "People wanted excellence in the local market, trusted us to deliver, and so far,

we've tried our best not to disappoint," Lewis says. And so Inflection Studio was born. But the

company had a second, more sobering parent. In 2023, while consulting at the same firm, the

twins watched the industry's wave of layoffs erase more than 600 jobs around them. They were

not affected. They noticed anyway. "That experience really reinforced the need to have a fallback

plan," Ted says. Inflection became the fallback that outgrew the name. The studio now has the

Kenya Revenue Authority's staff pension portal on its books and Desturi, a multi-tenant SaaS for

tour operators, five clients in six months and counting.

For all that shared work, the longer you look at twins, the less subtle the differences. Ted is a year

and a half into restoring a 1978 Mercedes-Benz W123, coaxing a classic back to road-worthiness;

Lewis enjoys the finished ride and has no interest in the wrenching, supporting Ted, as he puts it,

"from the sidelines." Ted reads fiction and non-fiction and gives his Saturdays to running. He

recently finished the Kilimanjaro Half-Marathon in Moshi. By contrast, Lewis writes literary and

technical blog posts, a habit with the page that Ted concedes he has let lapse. "He writes more

than I do. But I should probably get back into that." Lewis took up boxing last year, runs the

occasional half-marathon, and has become, in his words, "a strength-training enthusiast". He is also

studying finance with an eye to becoming a better investor. Asked what he doesn't share with his

brother, he claims it is "my engineering brilliance", and you can hear the grin behind it. And yet the

overlap persists: Ted and Lewis are at the gym together every morning at 5 a.m.

Out and About

16 WHOLE

Asked how young software engineers should navigate the AI era, the twins give

complementary answers. Lewis points to the core principles. He argues there is a great deal

of low-quality software out there that future engineers will have to fix, and the world

needs people who can think critically about it. Ted urges starting with the fundamental

skills, because AI generates the code, but humans make and own the decisions. "Embrace it

as a tool for learning and building," he says, "not a replacement for thinking." You could fit a

credit card between those two answers. It is also exactly what eac h of them said to their

KamiLimu mentees on a Saturday morning sometime last year.

The biometric scanner could not tell them apart. Neither could the teachers, nor the family,

nor the strangers who have been asking them the same questions since pre-nursery. But

spend a little time with Ted and Lewis, and the real differences surface. The ones no scanner

would ever catch. Ask them to imagine a single mural for Kenya, and you see it plainly.

Lewis pictures a country where the systems finally work, while Ted pictures people from

every community living in harmony. The same hope, split two ways, with one brother

reaching for the structure, the other for the people inside it. Same great taste, with subtle

differences. You just have to know where to look.

Victor, Lynet, Sharleen, Lewis, Vanessa, Daniel, Ted, at Cohort 9 graduation

17 WHOLE

ELAINE

MBUGUA

For years, Elaine tempered her voice, certain that being

opinionated was ‘too much’ and something to apologize for.

Meet the Computer Science student who stopped holding

back, the dorm window she once leaped out of, and the

Cohort 9 Valedictorian who came back to mentor the next

cohort.

WHOLE

ELAINE

MBUGUA

In Her Own Name

By Stephanie Mukami

For almost ten years, she gave people every name but her own. “Elaine” was the one she had

grown up disliking, rarely said right, and in her mind, tied to someone she was trying to leave

behind. So she went by “Jay”, her Catholic name, the one that fit the tomboy who was always up

for an adventure. Then KamiLimu put her full name, Elaine Wambui Mbugua, on every list and into

every session, until there was nowhere left to tuck it away. And somewhere over those eight

months, she stopped wanting to. By the time Cohort 9 graduated, and she had been named its

Valedictorian, it was Elaine who rose to deliver the Valedictorian's speech on stage. The girl who

had spent years being told she took up too much space was being honored for taking up exactly

that, and standing in her own name to speak to everyone.

Tech was not where Elaine expected to end up, and on stage, even less so. Her first brush with

computing was a Computer Studies class in high school, a subject she would happily have

dropped for music. It was her parents' insistence that kept her in it long enough to shape

everything that followed. By the time she was pursuing a Computer Science degree at the

University of Nairobi, the very thing she had almost abandoned had become her entire horizon,

but she felt a step behind everyone else. Unlike some of her classmates, she had arrived with

nothing, but that single high school class behind her; no short courses or portfolio projects. And

the university itself was just the steady loop of lectures, assignments, and exams. What she had

were two interests she had not yet found a way to use: a growing pull toward Cybersecurity and

a quiet marvel at public speaking.

In her second year of university, Elaine finally got a chance to invest in her interests. Her lecturer,

Mr. Christopher Moturi, shared a call to apply for KamiLimu. A structured mentorship program was

what she felt she had been missing, and so she excitedly applied to be part of the upcoming

Cohort 8. A few weeks later, the email response to her application came, but it was titled

“Feedback” instead of “Congratulations”. Her heart immediately sank. She read through the email,

and although it contained helpful and targeted feedback, it did not numb the stinging pain of the

rejection.

WHOLE

Disappointed, Elaine resolved to put KamiLimu behind her, only for her to encounter it once more

later that year. She stumbled across ‘ Mentees for Good’ on LinkedIn, an open event hosted by

KamiLimu where mentees teach various topics to non-KamiLimu students, and decided to attend.

The three-hour session made her feel right at home. She was awed at how well the KamiLimu

mentees, her peers, conducted the sessions and wanted to be just like them. She also shared

questions and comments during the session, and found that her voice was both appreciated and

encouraged. That was the most alive she had felt in years. The session reawakened the hope that

she could belong in such a space. She reconsidered applying again, but the fear of rejection still

gnawed at her. She even sat her parents down to ask how to handle rejection and whether it was

worth trying again. Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth between fear and hope, she handed in

her second application on January 12 at 11:56 pm, 4 minutes before the deadline. This time, she got

in!

Elaine still remembers the jitters she felt on the launch day of Cohort 9 in March 2025. Would she

be successful in the program, given that she had tried twice to get there? However, by the end of

the event, she had met her peer mentor, Abigail Mbugua, a cohort 8 alumna, whose bubbly

personality quelled all her fears. On that day, she made a promise to herself: that she would do her

best throughout the program, come what may. The program kicked off, and Elaine settled into the

rhythm of the planned sessions and activities. She immediately noticed that, unlike university

teaching, everything at KamiLimu was taught through a practical lens. She fondly recalls a session

led by Elijah Bakari, a KamiLimu mentor, which reshaped her perspective on her sense of self. The

session taught her to own her voice and wins rather than hide behind the guise of modesty. Elaine

had always been boldly opinionated, but often shied away from being as unmissable as she

naturally was. However, at KamiLimu, she felt encouraged to be her true self, to ask and answer as

many questions as she liked, to think out loud, and to let her personality run at full volume in a

room that only leaned in closer. KamiLimu became her safe space.

At Cohort 9 launch event

20 WHOLE

Over the eight months, she never missed any

of the 98 sessions, sought out fourteen more

individual

consultations

with

mentors,

committee members, and alumni, and ran on

three hours' sleep more often than she would

have

liked

while

polishing

competition

submissions. The two interests she had carried

into KamiLimu but never put to use,

cybersecurity and public speaking, finally had

somewhere to go, and she reached the finals

in three of the program's four competitions. In

the innovation track, she led her three-person

Cybersecurity team, working with fellow

mentees Hawatif and Dennis on AfriSkana, a

web tool that scans hospital networks for

exposed, vulnerable ports on devices such as

CT scanners and flags them before attackers

can exploit them. In public speaking, she made

the finals with "Vertical Travel," a witty, prop-

in-hand speech that spun her schoolgirl habit

of leaping out of dorm windows into a small

philosophy of resilience: "When life locks the

front door, I look for my window." It was,

fittingly, the very thing she had done to reach

KamiLimu in the first place. She was a

scholarship finalist too, and the same drive

showed up beyond the program in a

networking internship at Pavicon Kenya

Limited and a logistics role in her university's

AIESEC chapter.

Hawatif, Dennis, Elaine at Cohort 9 innovation finals

Delivering ‘Vertical Travel’ speech at

cohort 9 public speaking finals

Interning at Pavicon Kenya