It was one of those slow Dar es Salaam evenings. The kind where time softens. Where people gather in twos and threes to talk about life, the day, the past, whatever floats between the dusk and the dust.

I found myself sitting with three people. Two of them were trying to persuade the third to sell an old car. The car had been parked for some time. Dusty. Worn. The paint had faded, the engine hadn’t run in a while. But the talk was full of numbers:

“It’s an old model, bro.” one said.
“You’ll need maybe 1.2 million to get it back on the road.” another added.
“I can give you 5 million right now. Cash.” the first offered.
“Six if you agree tonight.” the offer from another.

The price kept climbing.

But the owner… just shook his head. Softly. Not rudely. Not out of pride. Just… firmly. And then he said something that changed the mood: “You’re looking at it as a machine. I see it as a memory.”

And just like that, silence.

The two men saw a vehicle. They saw parts, paint, mileage. They saw how much work it needed, how much it could fetch, how it would perform after repairs.

But the owner? He saw something else. He saw his father handing him the keys. He saw road trips and breakdowns. He saw laughter from the backseat. He saw how that car stood outside their house like a family member. He remembered how it once carried groceries, people, stories.
He saw history. Legacy. Emotion.

He didn’t see an engine. He saw a heart.

And the thing is you can put a price on a car. But not on a heart. Not on what it carried. Not on what it meant.

That’s what he meant when he said, “It’s sentimental.”

I walked home thinking about that conversation. How often do we make the same mistake as those two men? We look at something or someone and immediately start calculating:
How useful is this? What can I get from it? What does it look like on the outside? Is it still “in shape”? Does it perform?

We do it with things, like clothes, houses, gadgets etc.
We also do it with people especially the old, the poor, the quiet ones, the ones who no longer “function” the way we want them to.

We forget that not everything valuable is visible.

That a faded car might carry stories.
That an old man might carry kingdoms of wisdom.
That a poor woman might hold the courage of a thousand lives.

Maybe we need to stop asking, “What is it worth?”
And start asking, “What does it mean?”

Because sometimes, something is not for sale.
Not because it’s expensive.
But because it’s sacred.