I built the freedom to come home. Now the work is here.

I grew up in Kenya and left for Turkey at 15 for my education. Building a life in another country from that age, in a different language, culture, and economy, taught me that language is infrastructure. It determines what rooms you can enter, what opportunities you can access, and how far your ideas can travel.

I started teaching English in 2016 while I was still a university student, not as a grand plan, just as something I could do. When I graduated as a civil engineer, I worked in the field for one year. Almost immediately, I knew it was not for me. So I made a decision that felt uncomfortable at the time: I walked away from the degree I had spent years earning and went back to teaching.

I spent the next years in real classrooms with loud, energetic kids who tested every ounce of patience I had. I learned more about communication in those rooms than I ever did in a lecture hall. In 2020, together with partners, I opened a language school in Turkey. We had plans. We had students. We had momentum. Then the pandemic hit and everything closed.

What looked like the end of something turned out to be the beginning of something else. I stopped teaching general English to anyone who would sign up and started building something more specific: lessons designed around the real professional lives of my students. Engineers, architects, accountants, data scientists, bank employees, procurement officers, school principals, and university lecturers.

By 2024 I had built Engoverse, my own brand focused on professionals and IELTS learners. Through all of it, I was also building something with a quiet side effect: an online income that worked regardless of where I was sitting. After 15 years in Turkey, I chose to come home to Kenya. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to.

Coming home made the bigger problem impossible to ignore. Africa is full of people who have built real things, solved hard problems, and accumulated knowledge that the rest of the world needs. But that knowledge rarely gets packaged. That is what I came back to build.