In my perfect imagination, with stern discipline I rise with the first bird, salute the dawn, have a healthy breakfast of fruits, wander over to my faux-oak desk, tap the On button on my Macbook Air, acknowledge the muse, and skip into the world where the story flows over the day and into the night.

It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.

Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.

I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.

For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.

Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing.