Meza Yetu Collective

10/09/2026

"Do not just accept what you are told. Ask questions."
After all she has experienced, Maggy now shares this advice with other women.
She got married at sixteen. She has been pregnant five times and lost three children. She has spent more time in hospital wards than most people do in their whole lives.
The first time she lost a baby, he was only three days old. The doctors said her child was "in distress." She asked what that meant, where it came from, and why. No one answered. She was given a small coffin and sent home.
She now encourages other women to speak up in spaces where they were once expected to remain silent.

08/09/2026

Most women who have spent real time inside clinical care in Kenya know a specific version of losing their own voice. It happens by degrees. A doctor uses a word she does not know, and rather than ask, she nods, because the room is busy and the woman behind her is waiting. Later, she stops noticing that she no longer asks.

The second half of Margaret Wajohi's conversation in Episode 7 of We Were Not Taught watches a woman find her way back to that voice, in the room where she had the least reason to trust her own judgment. Her newborn's arm swells and turns black after a drip goes wrong, and the doctor says it has to come off. Margaret refuses to sign, waits until he is out on rounds, then asks a nurse for a needle, Betadine, and spirit, and works on the hand herself for over twelve hours until the swelling goes down. The arm is saved.

She has not stopped trusting doctors. She has learned that trusting a doctor and staying quiet are two different things.

▶ Part Two is OUT ON YouTube. Link in bio.

02/09/2026

This is not a new story in Kenya. Women's pain is routinely dismissed as emotional, sedatives are prescribed in place of investigation, and the bias is present in the room before they speak. Margaret keeps asking why no one ever told her what the scans had already revealed.

Margaret Wajohi's account is shaped by years inside Kenya's medical system, moving between hospitals and clinics, often left in the dark about her own body. At fourteen, she leaves Kirinyaga for Nairobi to work as a househelp. By sixteen, she is married. Soon after, she collapses and wakes at Kenyatta Hospital, facing emergency surgery for a ruptured fallopian tube caused by an ectopic pregnancy. She is treated and returned to daily life, never told what her body has endured or what the future may hold.

A team at KEMRI unblocks her one remaining fallopian tube, and from there her body becomes a site of repeated attempts and repeated losses: a first pregnancy that does not survive, a son born with an omphalocele who dies in infancy, three miscarriages after that. Across all of it, the medical answer arrives as a shrug, and when she asks about protection she is told not to use it, because with one tube she will conceive easily and they would like her to keep trying.

Episode 7 discusses pregnancy loss, medical trauma, and violence within a marriage. Please take care in how you listen.

Watch Episode 7 now on – link in bio.

28/08/2026

24/08/2026

Lucy Njeri and Natasha Muloko share what it means to live with chronic illness in Kenya. Lucy has faced breast cancer for a decade. Natasha lives with lupus and has been on dialysis since 2012.

Lucy describes how her diagnosis brought fear, shaped by stories of loss. She shares how she learned that her journey would be her own, not a repeat of others' endings.

Natasha calls herself a survivor, but for her, survival means living each day as it comes. She leads Thrive KommUnity, supporting people with autoimmune conditions.

Illness changes more than the body. It shapes identity, shifts relationships, and turns caregivers into those needing care. These stories go beyond clinical language. Both women are now advocates. Lucy campaigns for better cancer care. Natasha works to support mental health and ease the financial strain of treatment. Their advocacy is rooted in lived experience.

Kenya's health system is still evolving. Patient voices have already shaped coverage, but many costs still fall to families.

We Were Not Taught is a series where women break the silence around illness, money, widowhood, and more. They share lessons no one taught them.

Watch the full episode on our YouTube page or tap the link in Bio.






WomenAndHealth
FeministKE

20/08/2026

Are you caught up with all the past episodes? You should, so much to learn, so much shared. If you were waiting for a sign, this is it!

We Were Not Taught is a series of conversations between women about what silence protects and what it costs. Across nine episodes, women of different ages sit together and name the things they were never taught to name, moving through money, widowhood, living with illness, medical silence, and shame.

15/08/2026

"Sympathy will never be sustainable. Sympathy actually lowers your dignity as a human being."

Episode 5 continues the caregiving conversation that Episode 4 opened.

Purity Jebor joins the conversation with a challenge. Kenya has finally measured unpaid care, but the country is acting like the work to recognise it is finished. Purity makes it clear that the work has only just started.
She explains that girls first learn care by watching their mothers. This learning follows women from home into workplaces where they serve tea, clean the room, and manage the atmosphere, often sacrificing the skills they were hired for. It continues as women turn down promotions, delay political goals, and reproductive policies get stuck because the women who could speak up are not in the places where decisions are made.

Purity says sympathy is the wrong basis for a care economy. Sympathy does not have a budget. She also changes the generational view: millennials are caring for their parents now, but Gen Z has already made it clear they will not take on that responsibility.

Watch on YouTube. Link in bio.

10/08/2026

Caregiving is where silence gets called love. Much of the work women do inside a household, for a parent, a partner, a child, or a sick relative, is absorbed into the language of family duty, which makes it harder to name what caregiving quietly takes from women: the exhaustion, the income they never earned because the work was never paid, and a life slowly narrowed by decades of assumed duty.

We Were Not Taught is a series of conversations between women about what silence protects and what it costs. Across nine episodes, women of different ages sit together and name the things they were never taught to name, moving through money, widowhood, living with illness, medical silence, and shame.

Watch the full episode out now on YT, link in Bio.

06/08/2026

Unpaid domestic and care work in Kenya is worth KSh 2.24 trillion per year, about 23% of the national GDP, comparable to formal agriculture and greater than manufacturing, construction, and transport combined. This is the first national valuation of this work.

Yet the impact on the women who perform this work remains unclear.

Women work 25.8 billion of the 30.7 billion unpaid hours each year, nearly five times as many as men. If paid, a Kenyan woman aged 15+ would earn KSh 118,845 a year, compared to KSh 22,676 for a man.

This pattern is typical of Kenyan households. When hospitals discharge patients early, care moves home. Daughters and mothers usually take on care for elders or children, often at the cost of paid work or long-term security.

Caregiving means the country is quietly, permanently subsidised by women.

But numbers alone cannot capture what caregiving means in the home. Episode 4 of features two women sharing their experiences.