For a while, Josephat’s Nairobi was a triangle. Dandora to Hillview in Spring Valley. Hillview to Kenyatta National Hospital. Kenyatta back to Hillview. Then home. He walked all of it. This was 2007 and he had just joined Securex. His daughter Winnie had cancer.

The treatment was expensive, and Josephat needed every shilling he could earn. So he walked it. Daily. In all conditions. He would report to work, leave for Kenyatta when it was time for Winnie’s chemotherapy, then return to his post. The next day, he did it again. And again.

He never missed a day. Not even during the post-election violence when everything was crumbling around him with violence and death. Never missed a day. His bosses noticed. They noticed that Josephat kept showing up. They decided that perhaps a man who could be relied upon like that should not remain a guard. “And that’s how I became a supervisor.” Stationed out at a mall on Langata Road. “In fact I was part of the team that opened that mall.”

Sixteen years later, he is still one.

But the promotion is not the part of the story Josephat dwells on.

Winnie had already beaten cancer once. Eight years of treatment, then the doctors said she was cancer-free. For seven years, the family got to be ordinary again. Then the cancer returned.

There was treatment. There was another possibility too: a child, but it was perilous, given her condition. Winnie chose the child. “She stopped the treatment, knowing what that choice might cost her. She wanted to become a mother.”

She died after giving birth to Ivy.

Ivy is now eleven. She is bubbly, cheerful, and outgoing. “I see my daughter in my granddaughter.” He has three other children and two other grandchildren. He is 56 now. More than twenty-one years at Securex.

When he talks about those years walking between work and the hospital, he doesn’t talk about endurance. He talks about presence. “To put life in my daughter’s days, not days in her life.”

Maybe that was what all those miles were for. Not getting somewhere.

Just being there.