One hundred years ago today, President Theodore Roosevelt gave his Citizenship in a Republic speech. The Man in the Arena is a famous paragraph from that speech:

It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;

but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.

Roosevelt firmly believed that one learned by doing. It is better to stumble than to do nothing or to sit by and criticize those that are in the arena. He said, “The poorest way to face life is with a sneer… A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness.”

The speech emphasized his belief that the success of a republic rested not on the brilliance of its citizens but on disciplined work and character; the quality of its people.

A democracy needed leaders of the highest caliber in order to hold the average citizen to a high standard. They were to do this not by words alone but by their deeds as well. “Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand.”

Read the complete text of Theodore Roosevelt’s speech: Citizenship in a Republic

A head, a heart and a helping hand… Growing up, this was all my mother urged me to be. This was her legacy to me, as it had been her mother’s to her.

I was born on July 2nd at Agha Khan Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. I spent the formative years of my youth trailing my mother on her endless escapades to Mathare Valley, a shantytown on the outskirts of Nairobi, where she worked with women.

Mathare is a desolate place. People live in abject poverty with no functional utilities; no clean water, no sewage system or electricity. They live in shacks made of mud, bits, and cardboard and rusty corrugated iron. Crime is rampant and the streets are permeated with drugs, prostitution, and a lethal brew of illegal alcohol called Chang’aa. Over 90% of the households are headed by single women, many of whom have been in abusive relationships and now engage in these illicit activities to survive. Their children witness the deprivation and inherit the hopelessness.

My mother set up a grassroots program, which became known as Maji Mazuri, good water in Swahili, to empower the women through alternative economic and social activities. Years earlier she had come to the United States with an improbable dream to learn, return, and transform her country of birth. The third child in a family of eight siblings, she had grown up with endemic poverty in a sweltering rural squatter town during the colonial era. On the day of her birth, the country was rife with political strife. The state of emergency had just been declared. Houses were searched at random, property seized and people detained without trial. During these years her parents were imprisoned several times leaving the children to fend for themselves.

Ironically, in a sense, both my mother’s character and the community she serves stemmed from this existence.  In my mother’s situation, because of her own mother’s tenacity, vision, and resilience, the tenuous situation calcified her character. Many were not so lucky.

When fathers were detained in British gulags during the colonial occupation of Kenya, women migrated to the city where they sought jobs as nannies, hawkers, cooks, and cleaners. Perhaps because of their sheer numbers or the scarcity of opportunity most were unable to find work and had to resort to other ways to subsist. They camped in the barren lands skirting the city, forming shanty villages that were not quite rural, not quite modern. As their numbers exploded and resources became scarcer these settlements mushroomed into squalor towns. Poverty wrapped its gruesome tentacles around their lives, snuffed out their hope and despondency paralyzed their desire to do or be more. Families cracked under the pressure of paucity and their children fell through the cracks.

While I cannot compare my childhood to a child’s in Mathare, my own lifestyle was not lavish by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve often recounted my high school years with an incredulous feeling that I actually survived carrying buckets of water half a mile to my dormitory so I could take a cold bath in the grimy shower stall that looked like it had not received a good scrub since the British left campus in 1963. I remember scraping salt off the brown beat-up benches that served as dining tables (without chairs) so I could spice up the boiled kale we called bitter herbs and devoured almost daily. I never complained because I knew I was part of an elite group; among the fortunate few, who even got to high school. I had my eye on college. Then the prospect of coming to America was grim and unlikely. My mother’s income as a social worker was minuscule, in fact sometimes non-existent. College was costly and even small scholarships were few and far between. I must have sent out over a thousand applications in vain.

Then the letter came, they had a spot for me in a small Liberal Arts university in the Midwest called Ohio Wesleyan. Tuition was paid. I owed that to an incredible couple I met on their visit to Kenya. They had promised that when they returned to the U.S. they would keep in touch and when they did they did more than keep their word. They rooted for me, spoke to everyone they knew, scoured schools, and searched for an opportunity. They found one. Four years later I thanked them from the podium where I delivered a graduation speech as the president of my class. I had my degree in Chemistry and a minor in Philosophy.

As I stand here straddling two nations I often wonder what shaped my destiny. I have one foot in the world’s wealthiest economy and another in one of the world’s poorest.  In America men live free in dignity and security, striving for self-actualization. As a child, my peers from Mathare were barely subsisting. With over 60 percent of the population in Kenya living below the poverty line, how was it that I escaped into the new world and was not the pregnant teen in the slums of East Africa?

I have engaged in many passionate arguments about why Africa is engulfed in the jaws of calamity. I know of many of my countrymen whose lives are scarred and twisted, in spite of their intelligence and ingenuity. Why? What went wrong? Why has the sleeping Giant still not stirred? The answers remain elusive to me. Instead, all I have is a passion for peace, a hunger to help, and a sense of hope that there’s got to be a new beginning. One day our children will have the future they deserve. Curbed in a clock of global responsibility by my international experiences, I like to think I have moved beyond my race, creed, and tribal allegiance. In the faces of so many people I have met around the world, I recognize pieces of myself. I believe we are all bound by our unwavering humanity, all different yet all the same and significant.

My mother taught me many things, for which I am immensely grateful. She taught me to live simply, speak kindly, love generously, and care deeply. She shared with me her abiding faith in the possibilities this nation provides. She imagined me running with the best because she believed, not only in my abilities but in the generosity of this nation. What she lacked in material wealth, she has an abundance of in wisdom. She taught me to question my motives and put what I deem important at the heart of my mission.

So, I often ask myself, what are my core values? What do I want to achieve? Like many of my friends and peers, I come up with a personal game plan at the beginning of the year and evaluate how I’m tracking every quarter. I also have five, ten, and twenty-year goals but my attitudes and opinions morph at every stage of my life. Whether I choose to work for a for-profit, non-profit, or government organization, I feel called to make a difference. My heart remains open to counsel and the instantaneous advert of a new adventure. I am curious about the possibilities and thrilled with the promise of the future.

My story began with my grandmother. Her story was one of willpower persistence and principle. She pushed herself past anyone’s point of endurance so her children would have hope, a future. She worked day and night on her farm so that she had enough for her children, enough to share, and enough to sell. She had her children out of bed working before dawn. Late at night, they all studied by the light of a kerosene lamp with their feet dipped in cold water to focus and ward off sleep. She instilled in them the value of sweat, smarts, service, discipline, and delayed gratification. They in turn passed these values on to us.

Today arthritis has stolen the spring in my grandmother’s step and age has mellowed the intensity in her eyes. It is hard to believe she is the same lady who tore through the fields with a hoe or a sickle and taught women in the village zero-grazing so they too could provide for their children.

Still, she carries herself with grace, and the determination that rings in her voice speaks to her pioneering spirit. My grandmother was the first lady in her country to cycle to the dairy and drive to the market. She was the woman who saved her scarce pennies for a sewing machine so her children would not go naked. She is the only Kikuyu grandmother I know who can talk to her grandchildren intelligently about Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez, revolutionaries who fought for freedom many miles from her East African village.

I hope that my life is a tribute to my grandmother, who showed me persistence and valor, my mother who has the love of life, and the people along the way who have given me joy and meaning to it all. I hope that my life says I had a generous attitude, that I worked hard loved much, and learned from my mistakes. I hope my legacy is that I had a vision and lived with a mission and that my perpetual optimism was a force multiplier.

In America, I have had a decent shot at life and I am certain the doors of opportunity remain open. As I pursue my own aspirations, I still hold the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper. My experiences have tested and transformed me. I have been very fortunate and successfully navigated many of life’s land mines. I know there’s more to come. An old Swahili adage translates to “ore must go through fire to become gold.”

My past has taught me many lessons. I know, as the ever optimist I am, I will have faith in the face of uncertainty and hope will remain the wind beneath my wings pushing me far beyond where I garner my own immense potential can take me. I know the best is yet to be and this awakens in me a sense of urgency that will not be squelched.

I have built my castles in the air. It’s time to put foundations under them.