The first time David looked at the control-room monitor, the entire screen was red. Every client. Every zone. Blinking the same alarm colour at once. It was intimidating. He looked at one of the controllers: How do you manage all this?

The answer became his first lesson: understand how the system works, learn how each client is configured, and only then can you tell “what is of priority and what is not of priority.”

David had been learning, in his own way, how to make sense of difficult situations long before he entered the control room.

“My father died in a road accident when I was two.”

They had been living in Nairobi. His mother had to return to school, so David went to live with his maternal grandmother in Lugari. His grandmother was old. His mother was away studying. He became “very cheeky and very stubborn.” His grades went south.

Then, in Standard Six, a new school told him he would have to repeat Standard Five. By the end of that term, he was number three. He kept going. By KCPE, he had scored 400.

“I knew education was the only thing that could help me.”

It is why he is particular about his daughter’s education. She is in Grade Two. His wife is doing her diploma.

“The big burden, especially for single mothers, is in terms of bringing up their children… If you are left alone as a person, you go through a lot of challenges, especially if you’re not properly empowered.”

He knows what happens when a father is suddenly no longer there. It would take becoming a father himself to understand what it means to be there.

“I have come to understand that word after I got my daughter.”

Now, when he gets home, his daughter is there. She welcomes him. They talk. They interact. And in those ordinary moments, he understands something he could never have learned as a child.

What it means to be a father.

He lost his father at two.

He became one himself.

And perhaps that is how he finally came to understand what he had lost