"Jerry doesn't try to be seen. That is what makes him visible."The year was 2017. The first time I stood on a skateboard.
Before that day I had been a skater for years already — watching Tony Hawk videos on YouTube, learning every trick with my eyes, manifesting the moment I would step on a board myself. When the moment came, I did exactly what I had wished and dreamed. No fear of falling. No tension in my mind. Just the want to push.
In Tanzania, skateboards are scarce. Most of us at the skatepark didn't own one — the boards belonged to the school and the seminary, and we shared them by rounds and by time. You wait. You watch. Then it's your turn to fly.
Through that scarcity I found brothers. Skating was not only what I learned to do — it was how I learned to belong.
I studied International Relations and diplomacy. I hold a bachelor's degree in the diplomacy field.
But the book learning was only part of how I came to understand the world. I worked as a tour guide with Kizito Tours, hosting visitors through Dar es Salaam, showing them a city most of them had never imagined.
To me, tourism is more than the job. Tourism is connection. Perspective. Hearing unheard stories from inside the journey instead of from outside it. It is freedom. Diversity. The courage to try, to go far, to keep going. It is how a person finds themselves.
I have always been curious about life, nature, people, and the world at large.
In 2021 I volunteered at a beach cleaning initiative in Dar es Salaam. I am an environmental activist — to me the planet is not a discussion topic, it is something you bend down and pick up.
That day, fate did its work. I connected with other aspired environmental activists, and one of them was Anyah.
We had a chance to talk. To share. To tell our stories from different angles of life. It was not only about beach cleaning. The energy on that sand was the same energy in our minds.
The beach was a bridge — like-minded people meeting, understanding each other, deciding together that you act on the things you care about instead of just discussing them.
— Jerry