What is lost and what refuses to disappear

#MondayLetters

It’s strange how life rarely announces its turning points. You don’t wake up one morning with a sign telling you, Today, everything will change. It happens in the middle of an ordinary day, in the quiet corners of your own hesitation, in the moments when you take a step whether forward or backward—unsure if the ground will hold you.

Back in 2018, fresh out of high school, I took one of those uncertain steps. I started LiveUp Africa in Ojo, Lagos—not with a grand plan, but with a simple idea: what if we (young people) could create the change they always waited for? What if we stopped asking, “Who will fix this?” and started answering, “We will try to.”

What began as a small ripple turned into a tide. Over 15 schools. More than a thousand young people. And somewhere in between, I was learning that leadership wasn’t about standing at the front, but standing within. I watched folks step forward—not because they were ready, but because they simply cared, and I realized more than anything, that change begins the moment you stop waiting for someone else to fix things.

Then, in January 2022, life burned through everything—literally.

A fire tore through my home, reducing almost a decade of memories to ash.

There’s a strange kind of silence after destruction, the kind that hums in the back of your mind long after the flames and the sympathizers fade out. I stood in that silence, watching the pieces of my life flicker into nothingness.

You see, grief is not just about loss; it’s about what now?

People talk about resilience as if it’s a trait you either have or you don’t. But I think resilience is something you build from the ground up, brick by brick, after everything crumbles. And so, we dared to start again—not just rebuilding a home, but rebuilding a mindset, a purpose.

Then came another shift—this time, not a loss, but a realization.

In 2024, while balancing the chaos of my final year at university, I began working on a telehealth solution for maternal healthcare in rural Rwanda. It made sense on paper. A smartphone app. A seamless experience. Innovation at its finest.

But real life doesn’t run on paper.

I spoke to the women this solution was meant for, and their reality was different. Some didn’t have smartphones. Some didn’t navigate digital spaces the way I assumed. My "brilliant" idea was brilliant to me, but useless to them.

So, I pivoted. Brainstorming, trying to make something beyond an app— maybe USSD, SMS, voice calls, maybe health workers… I remember one of my first lessons in design thinking, “People ignore design that ignore people.”

And maybe that’s what life keeps teaching me—that the things we build, the things we lose, the things we adapt to, all shape the way we move forward.

Like MariTest, a project that started in a small room with a group o broke friends, yours sincerely, and a shared frustration: malaria was still misdiagnosed in certain remote regions, still killing people who didn’t need to die. We built a device—automated, bloodless, rapid. For people who desperately needed it. We believed in it, even when we were clueless on how and where to start. And now, it’s gone beyond a project.

I think a lot about the moments that define us. The days when everything changes. The crossroads we don’t recognize until we look back.

Maybe the real turning point isn’t just one moment. Maybe it’s the sum of all the times we chose to move, to rebuild, to listen, to try again. You see, the past few years have been filled with questions I never expected to ask and lessons I never planned to learn, but I would not have had it any other way.

Don’t hate life too much.

- Dee.