No water.
Again.

Six-fifteen a.m., Nairobi. There's a bucket, and there's a sequence — nobody taught it to you. You just eventually fail your way into it, the way everyone here already has.

  1. 01 ARMS
  2. 02 NECK
  3. 03 ARMPITS
  4. 04 TORSO
  5. 05 LEGS
  6. 06 HEAD — LAST, ALWAYS LAST
Pro tip Do the head first and you'll spend the rest of the bucket rinsing soap off a body that's now wetter than the water left to clean it. You learn this once. Never again.
Working title — nonfiction graphic novel

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Actually Living Here

VOL. 01 — KENYAN EDITION

A field guide to the unwritten rules of a place — for the person who's supposed to already know them.

Read it as a book →
0.00 hrs
average monthly power interruption, FY2026
0%
of Nairobi's daily water demand actually supplied
0 hrs
of planned outages scheduled since March 2023
Sources: EPRA / Kenya Power (via kenyans.co.ke); Nairobi City Water & Sewerage Co. (via nation.africa)
Amber — pulled straight off kenruto.fluximpact.org, the glow on the writer's own name. The colour of an outage alert and a terminal that's still on. Every future edition gets its own signature colour; this one's already his.
Three pages, already written

Field entries

Full entries, in the format every page of the book follows: a real sequence, a pro tip, a closing line that earns its keep.

001 Utilities

The Bucket Algorithm

  1. 01 Arms. Cheapest real estate — burn your worst water here while you're still deciding how committed you are to this.
  2. 02 Neck.
  3. 03 Armpits. Non-negotiable. Do not skip ahead out of impatience.
  4. 04 Torso.
  5. 05 Legs. Last of the cheap zones — you still have clean water left and you're going to need it.
  6. 06 Head. Last. Always last.

This is not a hardship story. This is a skill. Nobody hands you the manual — you write it yourself, one blackout at a time.

Concept art — direction for Bob Nyaswenta's final illustrations
002 Utilities

The EcoFlow Gospel

You didn't buy a generator — too loud, needs fuel, runs out exactly when you need it most. You bought a battery the size of a cooler. It doesn't solve blackouts. It just changes the question from "is there power" to "what did I choose to save it for."

  1. 01 Router. Non-negotiable — a blackout without internet is a different, worse emergency.
  2. 02 Fridge, briefly. Not to run it — to buy it twenty cold minutes before the next cut.
  3. 03 One laptop charge. Not two. You will be asked for two. The answer is no.
  4. 04 Lights — last, and only the one you're standing under.

You didn't fix the grid. You just stopped being at its mercy for the four hours that matter most. That's not a workaround — that's the whole skill.

Concept art — direction for Bob Nyaswenta's final illustrations
101 Money & Hustle

The Agent Will Sort You Out

There's a kiosk on every corner with a green sign and a person behind a tiny window who is, for all practical purposes, your bank. No account number — a phone number. Cash in as digits, digits out as cash, the whole economy running through a text that says "confirmed."

  1. 01 Walk up. Nobody's "next in line" — it's a vibe-based queue, read the room.
  2. 02 State the amount, hand over cash or state the withdrawal.
  3. 03 Shield the PIN like it's a vault door. It is one.
  4. 04 Wait for the text. The text is the receipt. The text is the law.

The infrastructure that was supposed to show up — bank branches, reliable grids, paved everything — never fully did. People built around the gap instead of waiting for it to close. That's the actual subject of this guide.

Concept art — direction for Bob Nyaswenta's final illustrations
201

Matatu Logic — drafting now

Next up: reading a route with no posted map. No ETA — follow the suggestion box below if you want to help shape it.

How the rest of the book is built

The full index

Every edition fills the same ten categories with whatever a place actually requires. Two are drafted above. Eight are outlined below — a working table of contents, not yet written.

00
Utilities
Drafted
001 — The Bucket Algorithm002 — The EcoFlow Gospel
01
Money & Hustle
Drafted
101 — The Agent Will Sort You Out
02
Getting Around
Outline
201 — Matatu Logic: reading a route with no posted map202 — The Boda Boda Calculation: when faster means riskier
03
Bureaucracy
Outline
301 — The Stamp Economy: why every document needs three302 — Huduma Centre: the queue that has its own queue
04
Home Life
Outline
401 — The Askari and the Gate: negotiating security without saying so402 — Borehole vs. Mains: reading your own water source
05
Social Code
Outline
501 — Harambee Is Not Optional502 — Greeting Order: who you acknowledge first, and why
06
Food & Body
Outline
601 — The Chemist Knows More Than the Doctor (Usually)602 — Market Day Math: why the price moves when you don't haggle
07
Street Smarts
Outline
701 — Reading a Matatu Driver's Mood Before You Board702 — Lost vs. Just Not From Here
08
Language
Outline
801 — Sheng Is Not Slang, It's the Actual Language802 — "Niaje" Gets You Further Than Fluency
09
Digital Life
Outline
901 — The Default Is Data, Not Wifi902 — The App Nobody Abroad Has Heard Of
Entry 103, maybe

Missing a rule? Add it.

If you've had to learn a version of this the hard way — anywhere — tell us. Suggestions are shared live with everyone viewing this page.

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Why Kenya. Why now.

This isn't cold.

In October 2026, Alliance Française Nairobi ran East Africa's first regional comic competition under the theme "Inhabiting the World" — what it means to belong to a place. This guide is the same question, answered at the level of a bucket of water: how do you actually inhabit somewhere the infrastructure keeps forgetting to show up for.

And it's not just a Kenya question anymore. The grid failing has become legible everywhere — the US and Europe have had their own energy-resilience and climate-shock moments in the last few years. Kenya is volume one because it's the place the writer had to re-learn after years away. The format is built to travel.

Who's making this

Writer and illustrator

Ken Ruto
Writer

Nairobi-based founder of Flux, a research and technology lab working on civic infrastructure — including Kenya's largest utility dataset, 30M+ data points on the water and power systems this book is about. Haverford College, repatriated to Nairobi after years in Philadelphia. 42 published working papers before this one.

kenruto.fluximpact.org →

Bob Nyaswenta
Illustrator

Nairobi-based artist. Attached to this project as illustrator; sample work and style development ongoing.

@bobnyaswenta on Instagram →