Dayo Julieta, a Kenyan woman who moved to Dubai with nothing but determination and faith, fulfilled her father’s lifelong dream of flying on an Emirates plane just over a year before he passed away.
In an emotional story shared on Facebook, Dayo narrated that she arrived in the UAE with no family, no contacts and no safety net.
From Bed Space to Signed Offer Letter
Unable to afford a private apartment, she rented a bed space for 620 AED (roughly KSh 21,700) a month, sharing a room with as many as 20 other occupants.
The conditions were far from easy. Some of the women in the shared accommodation would quietly attend job interviews without alerting her, leaving her to find out only after they had already returned.
Rather than letting the exclusion discourage her, Dayo chose to go it alone, stepping out each morning to pound the streets of Dubai in search of work, with no leads, no referrals and nobody to call.
Three weeks in, she landed a job. While her paperwork was being processed, she stayed back at the bed space, sleeping in, listening to music and keeping entirely quiet about her offer letter.
“My roommates assumed I had given up. What they didn’t know was that Makora had already signed her offer letter,” she recalled.
Birthday Gift That Became Lifetime Memory
When she finally moved out, whispers spread that she must have had connections. She said nothing.
Her new workplace brought fresh exposure. The company’s senior leadership was largely made up of expatriate executives, and the culture was unlike anything she had experienced before.
As her finances grew steadier, Dayo turned her focus to something that had stayed in her heart for years: her father’s dream of boarding an Emirates plane.
Having watched him light up whenever the airline appeared on television, she began saving and supplemented her income through personal shopping work.
Planning around her birthday month of March, she arranged everything in secret. She processed her father’s visa, purchased his ticket on Emirates and covered his accommodation in Dubai.
On March 8, 2020, her father stepped off an Emirates flight in Dubai. They celebrated her birthday together.
“From arriving in Dubai with nothing but faith and a dream to being able to process my father’s visa, to buy him an international flight ticket, moreover the plane he kept admiring on TV,” she wrote, describing the moment as true abundance.
It was his first flight to Dubai. It was also his last, as one year and four months after that birthday celebration, her father died. The date, March 8, 2020, is one she says she will carry with her always.
“Abundance is simply having one beautiful moment with someone you love,” she wrote. “A moment you never knew would become a lifetime memory.”
