A YOUNG KENYAN'S DIARY

 Everybody loves a coming of age story. I bet you've seen the trope everywhere, especially in its most cliché form in Hollywood. Whether it is a struggling artist with a fierce belief in his/ her passions, an awkward teenager learning to navigate the adult experience in a changed world, I bet you can name three or more movies with a plot similar to those, more or less. We love to see character development, or at least depictions of it in this case. We want to see the little boy who survived a village massacre run off into the hills, train, become a kung fu master and avenge his people. We're drawn to these stories because at their very core, they are (sometimes) vivid depictions of vulnerability superseded by courage and conscious effort directed to redemption. Often we see characters get stripped of everything be it pride or dignity and later gather themselves and flesh out new foundations and eventually personas. There's a quote I've seen around about how even when yo...