Written piece
The Thread That Refuses to Break
YONA SHANNY
Tanzania
About this piece
A personal reflection on resilience after failure, exproling youth unemployment, entrepreneurship, and emotional endurance through the metaphor of a "thread" that connects individuals across the Commonwealth.
The Thread That Refuses to Break
By Yona Meshack Shanny, Tanzania
In, Igunga, Tabora, mornings do not wait for hope they demand action.
In 2025, I returned home with a Bachelor's degree in ICT with Management from Mzumbe University... and no job waiting for me.
I believed education will open doors.
Instead, I met silence.
So I built my own door.
Together with my uncle, I started a small ICT business in a rented frame. It was not just survival it was proof that knowledge still had value beyond paper.
For a short moment, I believed again.
Then 2026 came.
By January, everything collapsed. We lost the space, the business ended not because we stopped trying, but because we ran out of strength to hold it together.
After that, I lived in the space after failure, the place where dreams still exist in the mind but no longer in the hands.
There were days, I felt had failed my family, my future, and myself.
But even in that silence, something refused to disappear.
It is not hope.
It is not comfort.
It is something harder than both.
A thread.
A thread of endurance that survives every mistake, every loss, every beginning that does not last.
Across the Commonwealth, this thread is not mine alone. It lives in young people in different lands building, losing, rebuilding quietly holding families, futures, and dreams together.
My business ended.
But my story did not.
Because the thread I carry
Refuses to break.