Boaz Leleina's Story, Part III: Life as a Moran
A Letter to the Boy in Samburu
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A Letter to the Boy in Samburu 〰️
- a story of remembrance and gratitude -
Boaz, as a young boy in Samburu, Kenya
“My dear boy,
There is a story I have been carrying for a long time now. It belongs to both of us, to you who has not yet lived it, and to me who is still learning what it means. Sit with me a while. Let me tell it to you.”
The Plane
I remember standing at the foot of that plane and not being able to move.
Not from fear, exactly. From something closer to awe, the kind that roots you to the ground right when the ground is asking you to leave it. I had seen pictures. I had heard stories. But nothing quite prepares you for the moment; the thing you once thought impossible is standing right in front of you, enormous and real, waiting.
I thought of you in that moment, little one. I thought of the boy with dust on his feet and the sound of cattle in his ears. I thought: he would not believe this.
And then I got on.
I remember the window. The cold of it against my forehead as the earth fell away beneath me. Somewhere down in all that red and green, the mothers were waking before sunrise as they always had. The men were taking out the herds. My brothers were doing the things brothers do when one of them has gone somewhere they cannot follow.
I pressed my forehead harder against the glass and let the clouds take it.
A Moran does not cry. But the sky, at least, does not tell anyone what it sees.
The Silence of a New World
Nothing prepared me for the quiet.
Boaz at Google Bay View campus, CA
You know our mornings, my dear boy, the clatter of hooves at dawn, the laughter of women at the well, the wind carrying dust and birdsong across the plains. Even our silence has texture. Even our stillness breathes.
I stepped out of that airport and the first thing America gave me was hush.
Wide, unhurried roads. People moving in straight lines, without greeting, without pausing to read the weather in each other's faces. Everything worked, the lights, the doors, the water from taps, without ceremony, without anyone needing to thank anyone for it. I stood on that first pavement, bag at my feet, and felt the strangeness of a place where survival happens out of sight, where nobody calls it a miracle when the water comes.
But then something else came to me, standing there in that quiet.
I thought of the classroom at Ndururumo. The old computers humming on their desks. The way that bluish light had felt like it was coming from somewhere far away, another world, a different kind of life. I had pressed my face close to those screens the same way I was pressing myself into this new air now.
Those machines had been windows. I just had not known what they were windows into.
Standing there on that pavement, I finally did.
Learning to Breathe Here
Little one, I will be honest with you. Those early days? You would have run straight to your favorite tree and hidden there until sunset.
The cold that crept through every wall. The lecture halls full of people who seemed to have been born already knowing things I was only beginning to touch. The food that tasted of nothing familiar. The size of everything, the noise of everything, and somehow still that relentless quiet underneath it all. There were days the distance from home felt so wide I could not see the other side of it. Days I sat in a room full of people and felt more alone than I ever had on the longest trek across the plains.
But here is what you do not know yet, my dear boy. You are going to become a Moran. A warrior. And a warrior does not run to the tree. He sits with the discomfort the way he sits through a cold night on watch, knowing the dawn is coming even when he cannot see it.
I would sit in that lecture hall, heart pulling toward Samburu like a compass finding north, and I would carry home the way you carry water. Carefully. Always aware of the weight. Always afraid of spilling it.
And on the hardest days, I came back to something older than my doubt:
"Meitoki adol olmurani oloita nabo olarrabal le keju."
A warrior who is going far does not look back at the dust of his feet.
So I did not look back. I read the terrain. I adjusted. I wrestled with the work the way I once wrestled with calves, not gracefully, not quickly, but with the stubborn patience of someone who has learned that things give way eventually if you do not.
And slowly, in the way that seasons shift without announcing themselves, something changed. The strange became familiar. The ground beneath me began to feel solid.
The Room I Had Always Been Walking Toward
The spotlight found my face and every word I had ever prepared left me.
I had carried so much into that room, little one. The journey, the studies, the longing, all those long nights wrestling with a world that did not yet feel like mine. I had arranged it all carefully, the way you arrange stones to cross a river, word by word, ready to lay it down. And then the light hit me, and the room stretched out before me, and all of it was gone.
I held onto that stage and looked out at the people before me, and something happened that I was not ready for.
Because in the faces before me I did not see strangers. I saw the women who had organized campaigns and fundraisers for a community that could not pay them back, who had written letters and made calls for people whose names they did not know. I saw the people who had cut checks and handed them over in faith. The ones who had boarded planes and flown to Wamba and walked on our red soil and got it on their boots and did not mind. The ones who had looked at a land the world had passed over and decided it deserved water.
Boaz at Splash Bash 2025
And as I stood there gripping that podium at the Splash Bash, The Samburu Project's annual fundraising event, my mind went somewhere I did not expect.
It went back to Samburu. To a well. To a circle of children with cups and calabashes, jostling and laughing in the heat. To the cool of that water in my palms. To a mother's face when their child’s thirst finally broke.
Those children were smiling. I could see them as clearly as I could see the room in front of me.
And I understood, with a certainty that had no business being that sudden, that I had met these people before.
Not their faces. Their hands.
I had felt their hands as a small boy, cupping water from a well that had no business existing in that dry and forgotten place. I had felt their hands in the cool of that water, in the relief on my brother's face, in the laughter of children who did not know the word donor but understood exactly what it felt like when one came.
I had been drinking from these people my whole life without ever knowing their names.
I gripped the edges of the podium. The room waited. And the only thing that came out, the only true thing I had, was this:
"I am proof that what you built traveled further than you knew."
The room went quiet in a way that felt different from how America usually goes quiet. It was the quiet of something settling into place.
I felt it too. Something I had been carrying for a long time, finally finding where it belonged.
What Gratitude Actually Weighs
Linda Hooper, TSP Executive Director, and Boaz at Splash Bash 2025
My dear boy, I want you to remember what it is to be grateful. Not the word, the word gets worn down with use, like a path walked too many times until it no longer feels like anything beneath your feet. I mean the weight of it. The way we say things in Samburu when we mean them to last.
I have not arrived. I want you to know that. There is no mountaintop I am writing this from, no finish line I have crossed. The road is still under my feet.
But I have seen things. I have sat in rooms I had no business being in and held my own. I have failed in ways that would have sent you running, and I got up anyway, slower some days than others, but always up. I have learned things that rewired the way I see the world, and I have forgotten things I swore I never would. I have been humbled by strangers and lifted by people who owed me nothing.
And through all of it, little one, something kept returning to me. Not a proverb, not a lesson. Just a feeling. The quiet knowing that every step, the hard ones especially, was shaping something I could not yet see the outline of.
I am grateful for the detours that turned out to be the road. For the nights I could not sleep and the mornings I got up regardless. For every person who saw something in me before I could see it in myself. For the moments I was lost, because being lost means you were moving.
So pick your head up, dear one. Sit up straight. Smile, because there is yet more you will see, more you will feel, more that will take your breath away in ways you cannot yet imagine. The road ahead is longer than anything you have walked, and it will ask more of you than the plains ever did.
But I need you to know this: I am still carrying you with me. Every room I walk into, every hard morning I get through, every moment I almost forget where I came from; you are there. Still learning with me. Still getting it wrong with me. Still finding the way back.
That boy from Samburu, with dust on his feet and stars above his head and a whole life he cannot yet see.
You are the truest thing I have.
— Boaz Leleina
The Samburu Project has been building clean water wells in Samburu County, Kenya since 2006.
To learn more or support their work, visit thesamburuproject.org.