Eastlands taught me to make a lot out of a little. A stuck boat showed me where to aim it.
I'm from Eastlands, Nairobi, the hard-working east side of the city, where ambition usually outruns opportunity and you learn early to build something out of almost nothing. If you're reading this from a place like that, anywhere in the world, take it as proof: the ceiling sits a lot higher than they told you.
I trained as a civil engineer. On a university field trip, our boat sat trapped for five hours in a thick mat of water hyacinth on Lake Naivasha, the same invasive weed that traps the lake's fishing families every single day, clogging their engines and cutting off the catch they live on.
Five hours staring at a weed will make an engineer restless. Everyone around me wanted it gone. I got curious about what it could become. That question became my final-year project, and then it became HyaPak.
Lake Naivasha, Rift Valley. Where it all began
