GIVEAWAY: @HTC and @nakateproject go #MobileEmpowered for #Internationalwomensday
March 8, 2013 § 21 Comments
HTC had been after me for two weeks when I dropped my iPhone in December.
Hot off the dance floor – 2:08 AM, in fur and flats and running to catch a cab.
Slip. Slam. I heard a crack.
I stopped. I covered my eyes. I waited for D to pick it up.
“Just tell me what it looks like,” I said. “I can’t. I can’t even look.”
“Awwww, girl,” I heard him say. “Just hang on. Hang tight.”
I felt him beside me, bending over.
“Well. It’s working…
(pause)
Only kind of shattered.”
He was trying to sound cheerful.
Monday night’s happy hour consensus said I should go to one of “those little shops” on 6th.
“They fix that for $29.99, you know. Gotta know where to go.”
“Where?”
“Just gotta know. Gotta get the right vibe. Know it’s a good place.”
I insisted I was fine. Then I dropped it again. This time, on it’s face.
I gave in the next morning, after I pulled the tiniest glass shard out of my cheek after a 5 AM Skype with Uganda – a baby of a glass shard I pulled out in the mirror, and stared, while I watch a trickle of blood collect.
It was time.
HTC sent me a phone to try on January 14th, the day before my 24th birthday. I shut down my iPhone, opened my HTC EVO 4G LTE. And, I cried.
To be clear, that was the pathetic I’m-a-control-freak-and-can’t-handle-a-new-phone-I-don’t-understand-yet kind of crying. As in, harder than my last breakup.
See, if you give girls like me the right phone, we can work anywhere, any time. That’s how we live – putting in ten minutes here, five minutes there. We’re running multiple social media accounts and turning in pieces on deadline, we’re going, going, going at our part time jobs managing interns while we bootstrap. We’re starting companies in our twenties, and, under the intense pressure of budgets and deadlines and meetings and contracts, we want a phone that can. Fill in the blank. Whatever it is, I want it on my phone.
I thought that’s what my iPhone was – a can do phone.
And then I switched to HTC.
It started a week after the crying fest.
“My phone doesn’t do that,” a founder friend said over my shoulder.
“What?”
“Open up spreadsheets like that.”
I shrugged. “I thought I just didn’t know how to do it on my iPhone.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think it does that. It definitely doesn’t do that.”
A week later, a recruiter I was gchatting with told me to, “keep going” while he ran into a meeting.
“I’ll go mobile,” he said.
Already mobile, I sent him a three paragraph schpeel from my EVO (yes, a schpeel is a thing) that he never got.
My phone buzzed a half an hour later.
“Testing. I don’t think it’s working. I’ll get it back at my laptop.”
The next time I saw him, he slipped my phone in his pocked, and smiled.
“Yeah, that fits,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve all been brainwashed by Apple,” he said. “Right? You like this, don’t you?”
He handed it back.
“I’ve been watching you work with it. I like it. I want one.”
I smiled – half for myself, and half for a community manager that knew just, exactly, what she was doing, sending a phone to a girl like me.
I thought back to an interview on African women in tech that I had last fall with Anne, a gender and trade specialist at DAI, an employee-owned, international development firm.
“Women are natural innovators,” Anne had said to me.
According to Ann, it was all about getting the right mobile phones in the hands of the right girls – improving access to markets and information, providing them with the ability to work from wherever they are, with up to date information and technology.
The more I discovered I could do on my EVO, the more I felt like she had to be right.
At Nakate, my LA based stylist and I partner with female artisans on the ground in East Africa to bring their work to high fashion and lifestyle markets across the world. We have stockists in Australia and in Canada, Ireland and the UK, not to mention contacts in South Africa, West Africa, and a manger on the ground eight hours ahead of EST that I need to be in almost constant communication with. Someone that we’re working with is always awake – and we’re still a very small operation.
- Switching to HTC has improved my access to google applications, and spreadsheets, which I can share, edit and interface with on the go.
- It’s increased my communication with my manager on the ground in Uganda, and contacts across Africa through easy access to gchat and google talk and hangouts.
- I didn’t have to pay $2.99 for tweetbot like I did on my iPhone, because the twitter app that comes with my HTC phone already blind tweets, and switches between accounts seamlessly.
- My phone immediately integrated to dropbox, where I share not only photos with dozens of shop owners, but editors, and go over shoots with stylist in LA in seconds.
- I’ve also found that applications like Paypal, Freshbooks and Square are easier to interface with – saving me time when I’m doing sales on the go.
- Thanks to HTC, I’ve close accounts while I’m walking up 6th, grabbing the J train and billed in a manner of quick minutes from my part time job. We’ve enjoyed better quality mobile cameras and the ability to edit and upload straight from our phones.
This International Women’s Day, HTC has partnered with my social enterprise Nakate Project to celebrate the mobile evolution of female entrepreneurs across the world through giving away one of the following phones:
· HTC One X+ (on AT&T or for global winners)
· EVO 4G LTE (Sprint)
· HTC One S (T-Mobile)
· DROID DNA (Verizon)
I’m the founder, see. I’m the CEO. That means I approve and reject, approve and reject, approve and reject – photos, deals, samples, accounts. If I can log on and approve and reject in thirty seconds while I pee during a restaurant meeting in midtown, projects move forward. If I don’t, they don’t.
That’s my bottom line.
1. Comment on this post to let us know how mobile has changed the way you work.
Then,
2. Follow @nakateproject and @HTC. You must follow both accounts to qualify.
3. Tell us how you’re working on the go with the hashtag #MobileEmpowered. To qualify, format your tweet in the following manner:
I’m #MobileEmpowered because _________.
Tell us how you how you have been #MobileEmpowered in your work, mentioning BOTH @nakateproject and @HTC, and include a link to this post. Only 3 entries per day. No purchase necessary to enter. Contest ends and winner will be chosen at random on Friday, March 15th at 12 PM.
(Some examples: I’m #MobileEmpowered because _________ http://bit.ly/15BGTOu (@nakateproject @HTC), or I’m #MobileEmpowered with @nakateproject and @HTC because ________ http://bit.ly/15BGTOu).
In Your Twenties, Building a Business is Building a Life
January 24, 2013 § 4 Comments
Two hours ago, my friend A called life “really fun.”
Fun, she said, even when its hard – and too fun, she pointed out, to choose not to enjoy yourself when it happens to be.
Here’s what I learned in 2012: entrepreneurship in your twenties has everything to do with building a life. A life is made up of people. The experience you have living it can be good or bad. It depends on who you know.
Here’s how I usually learn: hindsight. Here’s how I learned in 2012: showing up. That’s how I made real friends. Good ones. The make you laugh so hard you snort and then not get embarrassed by your snorting noises kind of friends. The have your back real quick kind of friends.
Here’s what changed: everything.
I learned that while building your first business is difficult, building a life doesn’t have to be. See, a social enterprise, like a life, is built on belief. Belief is kept alive through experience. Experience comes from people.
There’s a perception going around that us entrepreneurs are all grit and determination, living in basements with laptops in dark rooms and skipped paychecks. And, the truth is that nobody can keep that up for too long. We had to figure out how to do it differently. We had to start lives. Now, we’re in the light, laughing with people who know the difference between broke and poor and put cash down for our beers when we’re tight that week. We’re learning from passionate conversations. We’re finding ways to make things beautiful. We’re going all in on our passions. And, dammit, we’re figuring out health insurance and internet bills and signing leases just like the rest of you.
It’s just not all couches and credit cards anymore. Not when we’re building lives.
Here’s what I learned: all this has everything to do with a focused, disciplined life, and nothing to do with skipping out on living. Not skipping out on living has everything to do with relationships: with your mom, your friends, your grandfather…all the people that come together, and make sure your ducks are lining up like you need them to.
That’s how S and I landed a place to launch out in together. I met her at a party, all red lipstick and intense focus, drinking whiskey on the rocks and making a point to the men across from her. Three of them, all leaning in and listening. I wanted to listen too, so I asked her for her number. S is making a life while she works to create sustainable clean water solutions. We had a lot to talk about. Talking turned into eating turned into laughing turned into drinking turned back into laughing and eating again…turned into finding a place to build lives around what we do.
It was only after putting our heads together to find the perfect fit for our not so normal lives that I realized how much we were doing right, creating a physical and metaphysical atmosphere to live out of.
Two months later, we signed a lease on a place with an office, where we’ll hang four foot photographs of her work in Cameroon, and build a long desk to share on the days when we’re home. Our friends will come over this weekend to help us build beds and desks and a sofa. Somewhere along the way, I’ll hang up my Samoan tapa and that silly set of masks I bought the first time I set foot in East Africa.
As we walked through the apartment and designated the “office,” let potential roommates know how much we work from home and planned a rent budget for me quitting my part time job, I realized that I’d bought in. Hook line and sinker, my whole life – I’ve become an entrepreneur.
We finished signing our lease in the afternoon. My friends invited me out that night, to get on train to West Village to laugh and live with them while I take a break from my work – like any girl with a big, happy life – a fun life – would do at the end of a long work day.
This is what buying in and moving to New York for my social entrepreneurship gave me: a life.
Good Jazz, Shenlok and Music in the Unresolved
December 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
I didn’t hear the long, slow jazz note coming from our right last Wednesday, but E did. He stopped, leaned in and disappeared into a dark doorway, dragging me behind him.
He reached out for my hand and motioned for me to be quiet. In an almost empty room, a jazz trio was playing under a blue and green glow.
I wanted to stand there forever, even though I didn’t like the music. I got this warmed up feeling inside me, and I forgot how hungry I was.
E pulled me back outside into the cold, and in a second we were back dodging pedestrians on Houston and he was asking what I wanted to eat.
We talked about jazz on the way.
“Those are the kind of folks that are killing real jazz,” E said. “Did you hear that fucked up shit?”
What’s good jazz? I don’t know enough to know – except that good jazz rests comfortably on an unresolved note. Bad jazz seems to wrestle with it, like it wants to turn into something different. But good jazz? It just sits there unresolved and it grins at you.
There was a baby girl on the train today. She had Velcro shoes and chubby hands. When the woman with her picked her up, baby girl stretched her fingers and thumb out in an “L” shape towards the center of the train and bounced. The woman started to sing and she sang and she sang to her on the C train from 59th all the way to West 4th where I caught the M home to Myrtle Ave. The baby danced and she yelled and she held her chubby baby hands up to the center of the train and prattled and she stared at me.
There was that warmed up feeling, again. I wanted to stay on the train and watch her dance.
I’m told that you make a hell of a lot of mistakes, as an entrepreneur – that that’s ok. Par for the course. A Wall Street friend I go to for advice sometimes told me the important thing wasn’t that I didn’t make mistakes, but instead that I kept afloat through them – kept my chutzpah. He called it grit. He said if I could stay in the game for long enough and grow my capacity to change, I could make it work.
Willingness to accept change was, he said, the most important thing – to wake up each morning with the mindset – “Fuck it. Today will bring some crazy change and I’m going to embrace and go with it.”
I nodded, and I bit my lip, because I’ve been so dependent on all these things – like immediate results, dependable outcomes – paychecks. Things you don’t get when you start your own thing. And, giving all that up has been like the aftermath of a bad binge. Not the least bit comfortable. Not the least bit natural. Really bad headache. Nausea.
I decided to take all that seriously. “Fix your shit,” that’s what my Wall street friend said. So, I’ve been working on healing from my past perceptions of what my life would look like. And, I’m finding a home in the midst of this Buddhist recovery group on Sunday afternoons – sitting on this big blue cushion in between former heroine addicts and alcoholics and purgers and over eaters, and learning to meditate.
I’m letting go of control, and so are they, so I don’t see much difference in any of us. We’re all a little fucked up and a little too addicted to something and sometimes I don’t like getting out of bed any more than they do. So, while everyone’s spilling out their fantasies about stuffing their mouth so full they barf and how they got hot sweats during a date that weekend and what kind of anti anxiety pills they just switched to, I sit and I cry in the middle of all the recovery and I laugh with them until my sides hurt – and I don’t feel so alone in this crazy city I’ve adopted.
My group leader likes to draw distinctions. There’s power in naming things, she says. Sad and depressed aren’t the same thing. But they both can be healed by staying grounded in the moment. She talks about change – that we can’t control when things work, or how they work, but we sure can control the way we respond to them, and the way we respond to our uncomfortable feelings about them.
We read this bit on the definition of dysfunctional – that a person is never just one thing. A label – like dysfunctional, like depressed, like co-dependent, rests not only on the naming of things but on ensuring that they don’t take up more space than they ought to.
So, you may often find yourself depressed, but that doesn’t mean you’re depressed every moment. Perhaps you could even be defined as “depressed” this afternoon, but tonight you’re gleeful, or angry, or loud or drunk or expectant. And, that’s valid. That’s who you are, the same as sad or depressed or addicted or (fill in your blank here).
Things crashed last month, but my solution was successful Tuesday. We made a mistake on Wednesday morning, but on Wednesday afternoon I was brilliant. And, all of that matters equally. All of that defines me.
It’s the prattling of babies and the quick laughter of people I didn’t expect that makes my life light up, in the midst of learning to be comfortable with unexpected change. Like the videos my nine year old cousin, Sam, sends me from an old generation iPad my aunt lets him use. Ill be out walking in Brooklyn and suddenly there’s a blonde boy in my inbox, making silly faces and telling me to have a good night. And I want to kiss my aunt for kicking him that little piece of technology because I couldn’t be connected this closely to Sam any other way.
I sent him a video from the 81st street Central Park West train station tonight. Every few weeks this beautiful black man pops up by the South entrance and he sings out “Because He Lives” in a voice so rich and deep and full that I take my headphones out and I soak up every word – as if Jesus himself were on 81st street, smiling and saying that he’ll help me face tomorrow.
The 81st street singer makes me feel the same way I do when the videos from Sam come through on my iPhone. Full. Slowed. Grounded. So I pulled my phone out and I took a video for Sam, and kept it recording until the train showed up, because even if he doesn’t appreciate my train serenade, I know he’ll like watching the B roll through like that.
I’ve begun to surround myself with experiences like this – the ones that give me that full, slow, grounded feeling. I’m actively cultivating it. I find it in children, and I find it when I decide to look out, as my J train runs over the Williamsburg bridge. I get it around people who believe in goodness and in light, in having deep friendships, telling the truth and paying attention to the people around them when they talk. I get it when I really take the time to read. I get it with every small success in Uganda, and when I insist that I won’t let struggle take over…and I breathe, instead, and open the curtains by my desk and make a fresh French press full of coffee.
I get it when I recognize that I’d like to tell the universe to fuck herself, let her know that love is supposed to look certain ways and come out like this or that, and that, as a woman, what I need is XY and Z from my job or my life or my family – but I don’t. I stop wanting to, because I’m laughing so hard I hurt with this kid on the crosstown, or feeling the slow buzz of a dark Belgian ale out with a new friend of mine, and I know, instead, that have absolutely everything I need.
My friends on the blue cushions are teaching me that life comes in insistence that whatever is in front of you matters more immensely than anything else. Shenlok - it doesn’t matter so much that you’ve got everything resolved, but that you’re able to hold your seat comfortably while it’s not.
That’s when your make your own kind of music.
Everything after that is just part of the song.
On My Love for Bistec de Palomilla…and the Things Dating Taught me about the Female Imposter Complex
August 23, 2012 § 6 Comments
I only had to go to La Caridad once to crave it like mad for weeks afterward – bistec de palomilla on my mind night and day like a bad, bad crush.
An LA friend of mine took me there two months ago. She lived in NYC for ten years before she moved to the west coast to start a family with her angeleno boyfriend. He hadn’t wanted to leave the smog and the sun for the chilly east coast. Eight years and two children later, she was back to see her city, and giving me the tour from her days at Columbia. La Caridad was a not so great college boyfriend’s place of choice.
“I wished I’d found it on my own,” she said in passing. “I hate that.”
I resonated with what she was feeling – that twist in your stomach when something you love feels like it doesn’t belong to you.
The stomach twist stopped mattering 15 minutes later. Up to our eyebrows in pan fried steak and garlic, I’m not sure which of us was blessing her ex boyfriend harder – but that food was so.damn.good.
That was the weekend I stopped seeing the talent exec I’d been going out with for two months. Talent exec is half Korean, but he grew up in Japan. And, I’ll probably want to kiss his soft, olive colored skin till my dying day for all the Asian food he introduced me to in my first months in this city. I was on a tight budget and, lo! the land of sashimi and saki shots overflowing into my life with roe on the side. The man spoiled me rotten and gave me quick, hard kisses afterward on the streets of a city I was just beginning to dive into. We didn’t talk for weeks, after we parted ways, but I broke the silence to text him the night I couldn’t remember the name of my favorite Malaysian dish.
I recognized my own imposter complex – that stomach twist – the first time I walked into a liquor store he’d taken me to on Washington Street where he’d introduced me to Innis & Gunn. I was craving one hard, and felt devastated when I ended up standing staring at an empty rack of the beer talent exec had introduced me to.
“I have a guy who buys me out of those every week,” the clerk said apologetically.
“What a bastard,” I mumbled.
“Excuse me ma’am?”
“Nothing dude, I know your guy – Asian dude? Square glasses? Sneakers and white v-necks every day of the week?”
“Yeah! That’s my dude!”
“That bastard.”
“Ma’am?”
I asked him to recommend me a similar beer, and walked out cursing the monopolies affluent men were introducing into my formerly free and open market of good brews. Damn my budget.
Free market or no, I haven’t gone back to Washington Street since. Mostly because I couldn’t help but feel that I was cheating somehow, as if the liquor store on Washington Street was talent exec’s, and I was an imposter trying to take back my right to cask brewed goodness that had belonged to him in the first place.
Jesus, I’m crazy.
I’m crazy, but I thank God for my dating life every day of the week because it teaches me so damn much about business. And talent exec’s brew monopoly was just what I needed to meet my business imposter complex face to face this week.
I don’t need to tell you that, regardless of who found the restaurant or the brew first, fried steak and booze belong to the masses. That little girl yelling on your shoulder – the one screaming in your ear that you don’t belong in the room? She’s just a dopamine down gone wrong.
That little girl starts in your dating life, but she’ll follow you into business and academia before you blink twice. And she’s not so easy to dismiss, in those worlds. I have a friend that went to Columbia, worked in finance for several years in New York, moved into social work in East Africa because she was bored with finance, and still wakes up sweating, fifteen years later, afraid someone finally figured out that she didn’t deserve to graduate from an Ivy League school.
I spent my childhood terrified I would never make it into college. I just knew that my home school background wouldn’t count, after all, and imagined myself at thirty, finally graduating from high school after starting back in kindergarten at 18 – the result of 12 years of education gone wrong.
I guess we all have it. My entrepreneurial coach says so. She tells me the smartest, most educated woman in the world has an imposter complex in pigtails, screaming from her shoulder that she doesn’t belong where she’s standing – she got there the wrong way, someone who didn’t know the rules let her in the door, you know?
I worry every day of my life that my entire enterprise is a joke because I still work part time as a nanny to pay my bills and live in New York. It’s a Thursday, today, and I’m freshly sunburnt from spending the day at the Jersey shore jumping over crashing wave after crashing wave with a five year old who was screaming and laughing so hard his sides hurt.
I told his mom I feel inferior in the business world on a regular basis. “I’m always fighting to catch up,” I said. “I feel like I’m always learning on a curve. I missed writing. That’s something I feel good at. I missed feeling good at things.”
She looked at her son, digging a trench beside me, and almost as sandy from it as I was.
“You’re a really good nanny,” she said. “You should feel good at that too.”
My first thought was, “that doesn’t count.”
My second thought was, “my writing doesn’t count either.”
Nannying doesn’t count because I only do it in order to bootstrap. My column doesn’t count because you can’t be an unpaid columnist and still be a columnist. Also, can you be a legitimate businesswoman if you’re sending emails to East Africa in between warming milk in the microwave and trying to get the cheese it hand prints off your pants?
I can discount my entire life before I know it. There I am, back at age 8, worried I’m never getting into college, and they’re going to find me and take me and all the other dumb girls to jail, you know – the one where they put all the girls who pretended to be smart and run their own businesses and write their own columns?
That little girl on my shoulder has got to go.
I let go of her opinion yesterday, jumping over wave after wave after white crested wave with a five year old. Every time I jumped, I told that little girl on my shoulder that she was wrong. I told her it was a Wednesday, and I was at the beach because my hours at the beach, this week, are about to pay my iPhone business for a social enterprise I run out of East Africa. I told her it was a Wednesday, and I gotten up at six in order to get a solid hour of writing in before we left for the beach because I’m a columnist writing about issues I care about in the world’s greatest city.
“I’m for real. I’m for real. I’m for real,” I said with each crashing wave, with each jump, with each sandy kick up of the little boy’s legs beside me, all tangled and falling in the water and laughing beside me.
This afternoon I sat down at my desk to start working on responding to emails from import specialists that came in this morning. It wasn’t long before the girl on my shoulder was screaming that I’m an imposter, and if these people only knew all the things I didn’t know, they wouldn’t be speaking to me.
She’s a pusher, you know. She doesn’t shut up easily.
I let her talk, today, and I kept working anyways. Because, regardless of how she feels, I run a business and there are things to be done – especially since nobody more qualified has stepped in to take it from me yet.
Several hours of work later, I’m thinking it might be time for Innis & Gunn. Because, I’m not sure if you know this, but I’m Scottish. And, Innis & Gunn?
It’s a Scottish beer.
It’s a beer my people brew that beautiful, olive skinned Asian boys enjoy sharing when Scottish girls like me move to New York and have yet to discover it. But, there it is, no matter how we stumble on it – the fruit of our homeland, brewed in great, big Scottish caskets and brought to New Jersey for Scottish girls like me to enjoy after stressful days of bootstrapping in New York City.
Oh and, in case you’re worried?
They let me in to college just fine.
Volunteer Work, Newcomers – and the Way the Crazy, Mean, Wild World Changed My Life
May 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
There’s this thing about New York city – the drinks, the people, the trains, the scene. You’re a hot shot on the plane here, moving to the city, and all. It only takes getting on the wrong train twice trying en route to Manhattan to make you realize you’re the new kid. But, that’s not the end of it. New York is the almighty measuring stick. It takes the things you thought you were good at, spins you round, and shows you about 500 people doing it better.
Better keep up, baby girl. The girl to your left on the subway owns her own company. The man to your right is in hedge funds. The women across the way is a designer. And you, finding your way, are sitting in the midst of them, hustling and running on empty, trying to get your seat at a table where everyone present is the best of what the global business market has to offer.
SoyChaiLatte writes about watching people like me – the newcomers, the people still getting the sweep of the metrocard right on their way into the subway, still standing in the dank smelling corners of the 33rd street station getting run into while we fish deep into our purses for that necessary piece of plastic – still asking if the L goes to 14th street, and then realizing that the L stop on 14th is still two blacks from the Path stop on 14th.
“Had the girl beside me known how to hold the Metrocard and pass it through the metal slit that read her stripe and granted her entrance, her buzzer wouldn’t go off every time she swiped,” Soy writes. “She kept pushing and pulling the card the wrong way, and I was fascinated how she managed to try out every combination twice, just not the right one. It was kind of cute to see the girl learning a lesson from the toughest teacher in the world. I stopped to watch. Her friend, already on the other side, seemed a bit embarrassed….I used shrugging shoulders and a lopsided grin to signal that I knew, that the same shit had happened to me, too. You can’t expect to master this city in a weekend or a week, man.”
Some days the city kicks my ass, and I find myself exhausted, walking along some street I’ve never heard of using my iPhone like a compass, twisting and turning to get to the next C stop headed to Euclid. When I finally get on the right train, I pull my pony tail over my shoulder to play with my hair and study my BBC news feed so I can pretend that I knew where I was going to begin with.
One particularly exhausting evening, I had gone the wrong way four times en route to a meeting. When I finally caught the right train, I sat and I stared at myself in the window across the way, and I realized I felt identical to a girl I knew five years ago – 18, scared to death and tugging an over sized carry on across the tarmac in Port au Prince. I knew I was passionate about international work. It only took me about 3 minutes to realize that everyone else was passionate, too. The only difference was that they had a concrete plan of action to go with their enthusiasm.
In development – like New York – you have to carve your place out of concrete. There’s overwhelming talent everywhere, and it’s not about to make room. Two months before I hit New York city, a friend from Brooklyn told me that I would have to want to be here, because it wouldn’t be easy.
“If you are hungry for this city, then you have to be willing to do whatever to make it here,” he wrote. “If you don’t, someone will run you over while you are second guessing yourself. Nothing will be handed to you in this city.”
I was 19 again, when he said that – 19 and on my first flight to Jinja, Uganda, where I learned that there were other 19 year olds starting their own adoptions, their own organizations, their own feeding programs. Back home I was a local hero for my four week stint in Uganda holding babies in an orphanage on the Nile. In Jinja, I was nobody.
I traveled this way for three years – applying to organizations, receiving PDF guides of my work in country, raising money, and getting on planes to take care of children that were orphaned or abandoned by their families. I traveled for three years as nobody, paying my figurative dues in volunteer work during my summers, and interning for international companies while I finished my bachelors.
After three years of working this way – the frustration of separation from the local culture and the restriction of guidelines from organizations, I traveled to East Africa by myself. It was there, learning to wash my clothes in a courtyard and living on a cement floor in rural Uganda, that my journey into partnership began.
I learned, that summer, that I’d decided to enter a line of work that was difficult on two different levels.
First: the work itself was intense. The emotion and energy involved in handling a culture you are not familiar with – particularly one with a poverty level you aren’t accustomed to – is exhausting. The sheer force of being uncomfortable for so many moments a day wears you out. If Stockton had been writing on location, she might have looked at me and commented, “you’re not going to learn [this country] in a weekend or a week, man.”
The intimidation factor present in East Africa compounded the difficulty of what I was doing. I felt that I was continually running into that 20 year old brunette from Texas who was already running her own company, and supporting herself at it – to boot. A friend of mine in Jinja likes to say that, “everyone is someone in Africa.” Afterward, she always adds that, “the important thing is, are you here for the attention, or are you here because you want to be?”
The rub came when I was pressed hard against both these realities. A list of questions I’d been avoiding became crucial. Was I cut out for being judged by a set of cultural standards I did not grow up with? Could I handle the humiliation of making mistakes in an environment that did not ever “go easy” on me? Was the amount of effort I would have to put in worth the compensation I would receive financially, emotionally? Was this the kind of life experience I was hoping to take from my career? How badly did I want the challenge of transnational work, regardless of how people in the United States viewed me? Applause from “back home” fades when you’re alone with yourself in a village. It simply can’t fuel a successful career in development, though many live for a period of time as though it can.
It’s been five years since I first touched down on the tarmac. When I travel to East Africa, now, I do it in skinny jeans and flip flops. In the village, I wear make up, and my favorite summer dresses. And the children running down the street shout my name, instead of calling out for Mzungu. I have Ugandan friends in journalism, photography – friends who run companies, who run successful businesses – and I ask them questions, now, instead of other young philanthropists who once intimidated me.
Like any field, international development rides on experience, the mistake by mistake process of building on ones own journey grabbing the bull by the horns and figuring out where you belong in a place where you didn’t belong before.
I spend hours on Skype. I take a lot of time to write back and forth long emails as I work to carve out a place for my company in a corner of the globe I’ve only just begun to understand. I work as a kind of broker than enables around 50 Ugandan women to support themselves as artisans in the international fashion market. And, it’s that brokering type of position – the kind where you watch a woman get on her own two feet – that has begun to change everything I thought I knew.
All Africa recently lauded business philosophy that is not about audacious philanthropy, or using Africa to glorify oneself, but, “about taking on the challenge of doing business in Africa.” I believe I have taken on this challenge, five years into my international career. But I certainly didn’t begin that way. I started out believing in audacious philanthropy. I’ve been a hero in the states, used Africa to glorify myself and I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit giving hand outs instead of helping people have a hand up.
The important thing is that my experiences changed me. They moved me. They corrected my perspective. And they sent me on a path of partnership in East Africa that I hope to continue for many years to come. I’ve come to regret statements like, “I want to tell the stories of people who cannot tell them themselves.” I’ve deleted pictures I took hoping to spark sympathy in the American people. I’ve traded in marketing poverty for marketing dignity, and the power present in a female artisan. I’ve moved from holding babies to conducting business, and I’ve gone from wondering where my place is to knowing exactly where I’m headed when I hit the tarmac.
I often meet people who describe development work as I kind of go-to, something to fall back on when they aren’t sure what do with themselves and don’t want to go back to college. “I guess I could always just go to Africa with you,” a well meaning high school friend will say. “I just have always wanted to go to Africa,” a blogger will email me – “I am so passionate about Africa!” I want to throw a god honest fit when people say these things. I want to lose my cool and tell them that I’ve fought for my spot in the development world like I’ve never fought for anything in my life. I want to tell them they don’t know Africa until they’ve had six parasites in the course of two years and showered with a bucket in a cement enclosure for a month straight, or been screamed at by a local Muslim leader at the ATM that they’re a woman and they should take their place in line.
But, it’s those moments that I come to the same conclusion that Soy did in her piece piece on subway watching. In my mind’s eye, I picture a skinny blonde 18 year old getting off a plane in Port-au-Prince with a suitcase full of long skirts, headbands, and wild dreams, and I promise myself, like she did, that, “I won’t give up, and I vow to love everyone and to remember my own baby steps in this dirty spot in heaven.”
After that, I usually get back to the subway map on my iPhone, and start trying to figure out my way home. And, it’s in those moments, lost in a new city and doing my damnedest to carve myself a place out in New York’s international business market, that I will be the first person telling a well meaning volunteer with a scared face and a skewed perspective on handouts to go get on a plane and change the world. Because, chances are? It’s just that impoverished, crazy, mean, wild, wonderful world she’s out to get a piece of that’s about to begin changing her.
Note: check out Everyday Ambassadors for a condensed version of the concepts in this post.
On Finding My Place: In this City – In the World
April 23, 2012 § 2 Comments
In New York – a sex columnist told us in February – you can be whoever the hell you want.
My first Saturday in the city, a friend met me on Sixth Avenue and 23rd. I had missed her – “you’re here!” She wrapped her arms around me: turquoise jewelry, upper bicep tattoos, warmth. I felt the rush of familiarity – the relief of seeing a person you know in a place you don’t.
We spent the afternoon looking for orchids, sipping iced coffee and running into people she knew on the street. A quick exchange got me invited to have dinner with her in someone’s Soho apartment on Monday night.
“I don’t know if you’re interested, but…”
In your first New York week, you’re always interested. A chance to belong, to mingle, to mix and to find your niche is an opportunity you’re desperately grasping for. When it lands, you snatch it, hoping to land another with it, and another, and finally, a corner bar, a friend’s apartment, a coffee shop or a happy hour that belongs to you.
It’s that feeling of belonging you’re looking for. It doesn’t matter how many other desperate seekers are there huddled around you – on that bar stool, clutching that particular drink or carrying on that particular conversation – the city is yours.
It happens in unlikely places – a Starbucks bathroom where you can breathe, an awning to stand under and check your iTrans app to get your bearings – a bar you didn’t know existed, an orchid man you recognize from two days before.
My friend had found such a place in the Rabbit Club, a dark, cement encased alley way down a tall staircase I laughed at, imagining myself half buzzed and falling down in stilettos some unsuspecting Friday night.
Just when I was envisioning myself being picked up by sympathetic strangers, she announced that it was closed until 6, and we moved on to find somewhere else to sit and enjoy the early evening until it opened.
We ended up at Sullivan Bistro, where the bathroom is dark, and covered in the names and photos of cities across the world, with a big “New York” glowing red and black like an apocalypse above them. We grabbed a table to the left of the bar, where the sun hit our feet, and a set of french doors opened to a patio with suited men speaking a language I didn’t recognize, drinking beer bottles wrapped in labels I’ve never seen.
I was deep in a people watching seance when she said something I had been feeling about the international development community, but hadn’t put my finger on.
“Negative energy” was the phrase she used. She was saying that she appreciated the insight that international experts were offering on the difference between good and bad aid, but that she was tired of the negative energy that came with it.
She’s the kind of friend that catches you as you begin to fall. And, I was – falling, that is. I was falling into the negativity, and she was giving me a hand back up to see that I started out working internationally because I wanted the experience for myself.
I wanted to be a woman who was well traveled. I wanted to be a woman who had formed opinions out of experience. What I had never planned on being was a woman who got there by criticizing others.
I told her I knew what she was saying. But what I meant was that I felt what she was saying. I had been feeling weighed down – carried away, even – by this tremendous current. It comes in all shapes and sizes – a witty tweet, a sarcastic snark of a comment, a blog that explains why Toms has a horrible aid model, or why #KONY2012 is a failure of a campaign when it comes to actually helping.
I know these corrections are necessary. It appears that at least once every two hours someone needs to remind the general public that Africa isn’t a country. And, sometimes I feel like I’m repeating Andrew Harding like some kind of mantra this Spring: ”the awareness of American college students is NOT a necessary condition for conflict resolution in Africa.”
But, regardless of the need for correction – I can’t help but feel that it’s the need for correction that’s begun to carry us away. As Kate Otto so eloquently put it over coffee this afternoon, “Too much negativity is not a way to really get much of anywhere.” She moved her hand up a figurative ladder and then plunged it back down on the table between us.
“No one gains long term success from being constantly critical.”
The Rabbit Club was open for business by drink 3, on Saturday, and in the dark, near a bar that felt familiar to her, with a 9×12 paper covered in German and Belgian brews, my friend told me about how New York can change a person, if she lets it.
“You know, you fight for everything here. And, bit by bit, you find yourself becoming harder. You’re so damn tired of being pushed. You’re so damn tired of being shoved. You’re so damn tired of someone taking your space, your area. That, finally, it’s like – ‘look! This is my damn spot. Don’t mess with my spot.’”
I nodded, halfway into a heff I’d ordered by pointing, because I couldn’t pronounce it.
“Bit by bit, it hardens you, if you let it,” she continued. “I keep coming back to that need to re-soften, to re-find your center, to take the edge off – have another beer so the way they push you on the subway ride doesn’t grate on you so much. Find a girlfriend to talk to where you can really talk, instead of just talking shop. Find a place you can let your hair down, and feel at home. Find a way not to just become another hard, jaded person who’s let it all get inside you and change who you are in ways you didn’t want it to.”
The phrase about becoming a jaded person caught me. I thought of the way Haiti feels the first time you get off the tarmac by yourself – the way you fight, especially at 18, for a place in place that doesn’t belong to you, the longing for a quiet moment – somewhere – where you belong, and feel that you’ve carved a niche for yourself: on the ground, on twitter, in the online community. I thought of the first time I’d been to an event in Nakasangola where volunteers and missionaries had been present – the way they looked at me from across the room but never came to speak to me. I thought of the way I cried myself to sleep at night on my first volunteer trip alone.
I thought of all the ways I’d failed that month, and how much I changed in the months following.
Kate and I talked about the organic learning process a person goes through while traveling – your first trip, in long skirts and thick tank tops, the way even the shitty catsup feels exotic – until you realize it’s just that: shitty catsup. Laughing with her, I thought about my journey over the past four years – the bad aid mistakes I’ve made, the volunteer positions I was proud of that I equate with the mistakes of those organizations, now. I thought about the way that they have made me who I am, and driven me to do what I do.
Like any field, international development rides on experience, the mistake by mistake process of building on ones own journey grabbing the bull by the horns and figuring out where you belong in a place where you didn’t belong before.
On Saturday night – my second night in New York – I made myself a promise. I’d work to find the positive in the development community.
Beyond that, I’d assume that everyone around me was just as tired of being pushed and shoved as a girl on the subway that’s been fighting her way through a city that doesn’t know her from Adam.
I’d try and keep an awareness of the tendency to let myself become anther jaded individual.
I’d work to re-soften, when it came to my work.
More than that, I’d work to be gracious.
A woman getting on the PATH yesterday swiped her card wrong four times. I went around her, bored with her mistake, rushing to catch my train to 9th – one train, at least, that feels familiar to me.
Holding the metal bar above my head on the way into the city, I remembered my first subway ride – how many times I’d swiped my card wrong in Washington DC on my way to the first day of an internship where I was first introduced to global water issues in Kenya, and felt my love of writing and international work intersect.
I thought about how I never would have continued on this path if someone had been breathing down my neck for the next 8 months, telling me that my first pieces on clean water weren’t savvy enough.
When Kate and I wrapped up our conversation this afternoon she pointed out that the truly effective people – the ones touching the most around them, are the people who don’t have time for negativity.
They’re too busy doing their own work – and, with it – finding the lessons in their own mistakes.
On Work in Africa as a Career, Rather than a Religious Crusade, Campaign or a Movement
March 19, 2012 § 2 Comments
There has been loads of interaction regarding Uganda in my life these past two weeks. I work in Uganda, so that shouldn’t be surprising. But, after #KONY2012, my life feels a bit like a viral discussion. Phone calls, emails, facebook posts – messages…it goes on. And, I couldn’t be more grateful to IC for sparking such a valuable conversation.
It was, however, a very small interaction that caught my interest last week – one that could have easily been overlooked. And, one I did overlook at first.
It was when I posted the Kony 2012 Drinking Game to my friend Sheila’s facebook wall, and she replied with this:
“Nice. I say, bring it on. One day we will get this whole thing right. Right??”
What has me coming back to this post was her use of the vernacular – “we.”
After living in Bots as an expat for more than a year, if Sheila knows one thing – it’s that none of us have figured it out yet, and no one Mzungu can stand up in front of all the others and announce that they have the answer to how to do this dance just right.
“We” are all trying to figure out how, exactly, is the best way to weigh in on our little piece of global issues that people have been trying to solve for generations. “We” have all signed up for jobs outside of our comfort zones, our cultures – our usual frame of reference. “We” all have the propensity to get carried away in our desire to help, and misstep.
“We” all like our alcohol/marijuana/cigarettes/insert-your-crutch-here when the going gets tough. “We” have all had moments of public embarrassment – my friends are still teasing me for drunkenly burning my lip a month ago trying to smoke the wrong end of a cigarette.
But the point is that we’re all trying.
I had a long conversation with a shop owner I have an account with this week. He smiled when I walked into his office – “I’ve been wanting to you about this whole Invisible Children thing,” he said. “Tell me what you think.”
But, before we got there, he said something else. He said – “You know, personally, I get the criticism, but then, I think. ‘Hey, so, they got the story wrong, they didn’t do it just so. Regardless, there’s an army of informed people standing around telling people the real story. And, at least Invisible Children got everyone lookin’ east. At least we’re paying more attention, now.’ And, come on, that in and of itself is valuable right? Those guys could have careers marketing all kinds of things. And, they picked something they’re passionate about in Uganda. So, you know – there’s some good in this, right? At least in the dialogue? I mean, they could have been telling us all about phones, or Nikes…but they picked Uganda.”
Once he finished, I really didn’t need to tell him what I thought. He had covered it. And, as I walked out of his shop, I felt like he had been the one educating me.
I walked out of his shop feeling humbled, again, by the truth that I’ve picked a career that puts a target on my back. We all have, and we’ve done it willingly – because we’re people that wanted to help.
And, it’s exactly because of that glaring, damned target that all need the rest of us to remember that we’re human when we fall – particularly when we may have set ourselves up for a little too far of a tumble. And, let’s be real – we all do it.
Not to mention, we all tend to forget that, regardless of how we feel, this desire to help has become a career – and it does not equal the sum total of who we are as people. And, when it does, we’ve made a grave mistake.
I ended up sitting on my bed – crying – after a Skype meeting last night. It wasn’t anything that was said. It was just the realization that I crossed a line – somewhere – and I keep teetering back and forth on it, this reality that my personal investment in Uganda is so huge that when things don’t go like I hope, it affects more than my company – it affects me. When we struggle financially, when lines don’t release the way I hoped, deadlines get pushed, or confusion sets in – I think about it on a personal level, and it takes everything I’ve got to learn to make that separation.
But make that separation I must. It is absolutely necessary to know that my work in Uganda is not the sum total of who I am – and that our failure or success is, quite simply, not about me.
In this profession, the personal and the professional mix in a big jumble of emotions that crux somewhere between wanting to make a career out of providing help, and wanting the way you help to make you a career.
The reality is that it’s a career – not a religious crusade, a campaign or a movement. And, at the end of the day, the people behind these careers gone religious crusading campaigns and movements are only human.
And, you can be certain that the little scar on my bottom lip is a quiet reminder that, no matter how good we get at separating the personal and professional – we are all, indeed, still working on getting it right.
(Pictured above: Sheila, playing with some of the children in Kakooge on her last trip with me).
Nakate’s Answer to the (week) Old Question: Why Don’t You Just Raise Money?
March 12, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Happy Monday!
Today, I’d like to introduce a dear friend of mine – Mike Handy. His work behind the scenes, coupled with the vision of Antonio Esteban, design from Shannon and Gina, and a few stress induced americanos on my end, have been the drive behind any success my company has had – and I am incredibly grateful.
We brought Mike on as our VP of Business Management at Nakate this month. He will be helping Nakate to reach our full potential as a company.
A little about him: Mike is a die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan who judges any and every restaurant we go to by its BBQ chicken pizza. Through his background in business development, and community management in social media and data analysis, Mike plans to help Nakate change lives, change the world and maybe even change the way business is done.
Mike has been working alongside me since the beginning, dealing with my questions, my doubts, the company’s developments, and everything in between. So, when I asked him provide some of his insight on why we do things the way that we do, here at Nakate, I wasn’t at all surprised when my heart gave a little figurative fist pump to everything he said.
Below are four of the core values he provided me with to share with you, this week.
From Mike:
We believe that profit is a mechanism for generosity. Profit is a tool. Most use profit for greed, their own gain, but that doesn’t need to be so. We believe profit makes generosity sustainable.
We believe that the creation of goods other people value does something for the producer of the product. We view our Ugandan artisans as talented artists. Artists take pride in their art. And, to know they are adding value in the global economy changes the way they view the world. By selling product, we empower them.
We believe in adding value. Making and selling a product means we, in the States, have to respond to the market. We are able to engage with the world and we have to add value. As an organization we could get a big donor, and not think about this anymore. If we were to do that the requirement of our organization to produce sustained value would disappear. It also goes without saying we would be accountable to that person or organization.
We believe generating sustainable income is far better than a quick fix. We are empowering women, and that is intentional. Women with businesses change the local political environment for the better, and we are also helping them start their own businesses in other areas by working with us.
Q and A with Alex: Bookkeeping, Small Business Owners and Sustainability
October 5, 2011 § 2 Comments
My bookkeeper, Alex and I met when I showed up at her house on a rainy Portland day asking for a room. Within ten minutes, I had left for an ATM to give her a deposit, and she was taking her craigslist ad for a roommate ad down.
It took about the same amount of time, after moving in, to realize that I was gaining much more than just a roommate in Alex. I was gaining one of my first friends in Portland. A week later, while we were dueling laptops working from home on the couch, she told me that her real love was accounting.
I almost spit my coffee out.
Someone who LIKES numbers? Shut the front door.
Alex had my books in order within a week. She helped me organize my receipts, figure out what I should throw out, gave me advice on how to keep records in the future, and made it possible for me to remotely keep track of everything with her while working remotely from California for the next two months.
Alex got inspired by her love for numbers, after our work together. She launched a business called Books by Bike, where she focuses on women-owned businesses, creative businesses, and sustainable, paper free bookkeeping.
Meet Alex:
Me: What is the most common mistake you see female business owners making?
A: I think the most common mistake I see female business owners make is simply not having accurate accounting systems in place. I believe wholeheartedly in setting up a system and sticking to it. The system that you set up for your business does not have to be complex, or one that would work for any other small business owner. It can be as simple as you want. In fact, I often find that simplicity works best! The only requirement is that it be a system YOU can and will use.
Me: What is your best advice on record keeping?
A: This question really should be directed to an accountant or tax lawyer. What I can say is that it is essential you keep accurate financial records for your company. Fortunately we live in the day of cloud computing, online storage, and +1TB hard drives and it is no longer essential for small business owners to keep physical receipts, bank statements, etc. If you choose to utilize electronic storage for your financial data, please ensure that you are backing up your information appropriately and storing it safely.
Me: Is there some “blanket advice” you have for setting up a simple system?
A: This is going to be different for each small business. I would prefer not to go into the specifics, since there is really no way for me to accurately understand the bookkeeping needs of your specific business. This really goes back to creating a system that works for you and that you can and will use. Most likely once you start working with a bookkeeper they will help set up a system that is easy for you to utilize, and is appropriate for your bookkeeping needs.
Me: How can female business owners make things less difficult for themselves, or a bookkeeper or accountant when it comes time to file?
A: I don’t think there are a lot of practices like the specifics that you pointed out that make managing the financials for a business more difficult. But, I think it is essential you find a bookkeeper who has experience working in some of the same ways you do. For instance, the first time I worked with a small business owner who utilized paypal for the majority of their business there was a bit of a learning curve. But now that I have experience keeping books for a business utilizing paypal it’s easy-cheesy!
Me: Sometimes sales happen on the go. For instance, I had a girl buy a necklace off me in the middle of Anthropologie one time (shhh, was that soliciting?):
A: There is nothing different about these sales-on-the-go except for the lack of documentation. All you have to do is make sure that you are documenting what happened, and the paper trail can follow the money. I encourage clients to do this immediately. For instance, if you sell a $40 necklace off your neck at the mall your system may look like logging onto your phone and sending an email to yourself with the date, item you sold, and amount you sold it for. Then deposit the cash or check, take a pic of your deposit slip with your phone, and email that to yourself.
Me: Talk street fairs to me. Events are key, especially for those of us in Portland. How should we document these things?
A: The key to street fairs, trunk shows, 1st and last Thursday, etc. is to come prepared! I encourage business owners to document exactly what they take with them to the show, and count what they haven’t sold immediately after the show. Be specific! Know you took 5 of those brown bags with the blue lining and 6 of the brown ones with the purple lining. Also, try to document as you go along. I find it helpful for my clients to make the simplest spreadsheet with spaces for listing what is sold for how much. If you complete a detailed inventory before and after the show AND know how much revenue you made it should be easy to determine exactly what you sold during the show, even if you missed documenting one or two sales during the excitement of those fire dancers who strolled by.
Me: What is your most important piece of advice?
A: Set up a system and stick to it. That is it!
Me: Do you think every small business owner needs a bookkeeper?
A: I don’t necessarily believe that every small business needs a bookkeeper. I’m sure that somewhere out there is a small business owner who would rather spend their time entering numbers into QuickBooks than running their business. It just doesn’t seem like a very wise business move. My small business (Books By Bike PDX) works predominately with owners of creative businesses, and most of my clients would rather be working on their passion/business than bookkeeping. Fortunately, my passion is bookkeeping. 
You can contact Alex about working with her bookkeeping business Books By Bike at booksbybikepdx@gmail.com.
Graphic #1 via Small Screen Designs.
Graphic #2 via Keep Calm and Carry on Shop.
Graphic #3 via Society6.
Learning from Method: great techniques vs. being an asshole:
September 26, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Photo via: Method
I’m a huge Fast Company sucker. I pick up the new issue like it’s the hottest magazine on the rack, and it’s my guilty bath pleasure, my favorite read with a beer at night, and one of the magazines I feel is most important to keep up with. As a female business owner not only starting my own company in my early twenties, but doing it in a way that I hope becomes more and more innovative, up-to-the-minute and internationally successful, I not only like keeping up on Fast Company’s news, but on the techniques and advice in their publication.
Here’s part of a fabulous excerpt they posted on the Method Method. I found it helpful:
Appropriation is a great technique for creating soft innovations. It’s the act of taking a small part, like a quotation, from something created by someone else and using it for your own purposes without permission. It’s a fancy word for stealing (on a small scale), but it’s vital to any artistic business. We “steal” all the time. We stole the idea for the huddle from Innocent, and we stole the fragrance idea of sea minerals from Bare Essentials. Take the upside-down dish soap inspired by a stapler that sits on its end for easier use, or our original squeeze-and- pour laundry detergent bottle design borrowed from Act mouth rinse. Furthermore, we invite you to steal ideas from us. These are victimless crimes. There’s a big difference between appropriating an idea from a foreign category and doing a knock-off of a whole product in your own.
Creating a knock-off (stealing other people’s work to compete directly against them) says you’re not only an asshole, but you also lack the talent to come up with your own original ideas. (Can you tell we deal with this all the time?) But appropriating ideas from another category is about being inspired and translating someone else’s innovation to a new purpose. It’s about spotting a trend in a distant category or country and recognizing that the same consumer motivation being satisfied there could also be satisfied in your category. It’s a way to create more predictable innovation, because you are taking something proven and applying it to your product. In essence, the brand concept for Method — Bring personal care to home care — was an appropriation play. We looked for ways to translate what people loved about personal care and brought it to home care. Beautiful fragrances, like lavender, bottle designs that made a personal statement, and formulas that were healthy to touch — all stolen from our friends a few aisles away.
