Back to My Roots: On Returning to a Village
April 27, 2013 § 1 Comment
Most of the women we work with at Nakate are mothers, if not grandmothers.
We tell the story of their lives alongside our own.
In 2010, we launched out of Kakooge with Agnes Kabugo, a mother of three, and around 30 grandmothers and mothers making handmade pieces to test out in an American market.
As Mother’s Day approaches, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the mothers in my life – not only my own, but these women I work with, and that stand with me at Nakate.
This mother’s day, I choose to honor the women that first stood with me.
The Kakooge Collection – a Journey Back to our Roots, is my way of taking you back to the stories that Nakate began with.
Designer Amira Mednick has partnered with me to create a line that re-purposes beads from my first ever buying trip to Uganda. Together with South American knotting techniques and sterling silver, 14k gold or brass, these beads celebrate Nakate’s Kuzua, or beginning, in Uganda.
We invite you to celebrate your own mother through returning to our roots with us – to travel back to the place where it all began, here at Nakate. Honor her through purchasing a piece supporting the kind women that make not only our businesses, but our very lives, the beautiful journeys we experience them to be.
Where Will She Take Africa?
Manhattan, Take 1 – What I’ve Learned in a New York Year
April 20, 2013 § 2 Comments
If you pinned parts of me to cork board like a dissected art class beetle, you’d find the stories of a race I’m not a part of.
I can still smell pine needles and oak sap around the open spaced sanctuary where I was raised in California. I’m 10 again, just like that – sitting on a green fabric chair in a blue, carpeted room. God didn’t choose my European ancestors to follow him through the Red Sea, but I was taught, nevertheless, that faith is a thing you stumble upon when you discover your shoes don’t wear out, and cracker bread falls from the sky.
Its been a lot of years since then. I don’t have a word for it anymore – not “Christian,” not “Buddhist.” I’m pro gay, pro abortion, pro sexual freedom, pro follow your dreams and stick it to the man – and I’m pro doing right by everyone around you, including the folks that try and tell you that you’re hell-bound, together with all that feminist freedom and your neatly rolled spliffs and birth control.
I ignore them, on the subway, yelling about hell. But I resonate with loving my neighbor, and I still like to imagine one particular story of the Israelites gathering stones to carry as remembrance of a river crossing – a big to-do. They’d made it a long way since Egypt, god said. They should stop and take note.
I’m following suit, this weekend – picking up fortune cookie sayings and saving champagne bottle tops to mark a year, now, that I’ve been on the road to my own promised land – earmarking moments to remind me that just when I thought the current might carry me away, it didn’t.
It also won’t.
Here’s what I’ve learned in a New York City year – the lessons I carry, like my own bag of remembrance stones from the foggy Hudson river.
Begin
I wasn’t ready, you know. I arrived on April 20th, all blustery weather and trains running along a system of numbers and letters I didn’t understand. I didn’t know anyone to speak of. I only had $137.50 in my checking account.
When you jump into something like that, it’s all mouthfuls of water and salt in your eyes. Full throttle, uncomfortable emotion. You don’t get to dip your toes in. There will be no wading. Your money, your reputation, your heart and your relationships are all in a neat row, set up together like targets, waiting for someone to punch them in the gut.
I guess I’d caught wind that was the only way to ever do it, really. Some lives you can live apart from some professions. But my life and my job are like water – pulling them apart like breaking down a river current for parts. I knew I had to go all in on myself, as an entrepreneur – balls out, all calculated risk and determination.
Stay
All that salt in my eyes and the water I choked down taught me a lot. But I had to start going through the motions of doing it before it made any sense. Like a dog paddling toddler in the water – “look! I’m swimming I’m swimming I’m swimming!”
I was drowning, half the time.
Doesn’t matter. I stayed in the water. And eventually, I started to swim.
Go
Entrepreneurship is a life you walk into the day you quit saying yes to everything else. I’ve learned that’s the only way you get going, or keep at it, for that matter.
The trouble is, it doesn’t feel natural. People mostly congregate in groups – religious groups, ideological groups, groups depending on where they grew up. Posse like. Follow the leader.
Don’t.
Make a home
Barbara Kingsolver writes that home is where you answer the question: “what life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?”
New York is the place where I’ve ever felt “home,” by her definition. They say that once you can make it here you can make it anywhere. I don’t believe them. I’m not sure that homes aren’t like best friends. You get only one real one, in your life – two or three if you’re extra lucky.
Decide
New York asks you who you are over and over and over again. This kind of work isn’t just what you “do” – it’s an ear mark on all your life pages – your friends, your bars, your groups, your places, your beliefs and commitments.
She’s a regular class bully. After you answer, New York will push you around a bit, and ask if you’re sure.
You have to be.
Show up
The night I met my flatmate, I’d shown up at a fundraiser I didn’t want to be at, and paid for an unlimited drink wrist band I couldn’t afford that week. But it was for the Congo, and then there she was, busting balls and wearing bright red lipstick. A month later, we were hiring brokers. Six months later, I wake up every morning and blink twice, just to make sure this big, beautiful apartment is for real, and my home life is really this full of peace.
It’s hard
Somebody, somewhere presented the idea that entrepreneurship was all excitement and heady feeling.
I’d like to kick them in the balls.
“I do wonder…whether some people opt for the entrepreneurship ‘experience’ over the lonely, exhausting, and terrifying real thing,” Eric Schurenberg writes in April’s Inc issue. “Companies get built in the spaces between you, your customers, your investors, your vendors and your team, where things get gritty and complicated and rarely go according to plan. They don’t get built, unfortunately, on a pitch-contest stage.”
Schurenberg nails it. Some days I’m terrified. That’s the worst of it. Others its just that I don’t feel useful, or smart or inspired. I don’t have a great answer for that – except that I keep trying anyway.
I think that’s the best anybody can do.
It’s only temporary
I’d paid my staff, my taxes, the business phone bill, my internet bill and bought chutney and red curry and had (very few) dollars to spare (I thought) for the week when a sneaky dollar fifty put me over the edge, clutching a coffee mug and wailing over my financial instability.
My father told me that it was a morning, not my life.
“Its the people inside your business that define it – the kind of work you do,” he said. “Not your bank account at 9 am on a Tuesday. This is called start up life, and this particular struggle will go away. But the people will stay, and so will the ideals you have built on.”
He told me there’s a wide road running between failure and frustration.
This too, would pass. And it did.
You’re going to need some help with that
The first time I moved in New York city, I did it on the subway, with big red rolling suitcases I had to drag up flights and flights of stairs. I had just about collapsed on my last transfer, when I felt my bag get lighter and realized the gentleman behind me was holding it up with his hands.
“You’re going to need some help with that,” he said.
God, have I. I wouldn’t know who to start with, if I listed out people to give credit to for every inch of this business.
I’ve learned that you can neither build nor enjoy a story by yourself.
It’ll come back around
I’ve learned that life is cyclical. On your team, even. She’ll pitch at you until you catch.
I try to live a lot, in the meantime, so I’m ready when she does.
Fall in love
I forget to love my life, sometimes – all caught up in bills and business deals, quality control problems and waiting to “make it.”
But I can and should and do fall in love with a million things around me every single day – the Albanian man who tells me that I have steel blue eyes, the flower stand I always pass on 84th and Columbus – the band playing Motown at Essex street on a Saturday morning, that one waiter in East Village, two weekends ago, who kept my coffee warm and my champagne filled just so — the sudden rain that one night I felt everything was ending until it soaked me through to my skin, running for my train.
I remember stopping in between 7th and 6th and crying, letting myself get all wet, getting it all out, alone on 23rd and feeling acutely aware that it really was going to be okay.
That was ten months ago.
Now, I catch myself falling in love with conversations and restaurants, brands of whiskey and certain Saturday morning traditions, coffee blends, champagne labels and familiar smells…people.
Most of all, I catch myself falling in love with what I have.
If that isn’t worth remembering, I’m not sure what is.
(photo by Sandi Elle).
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).
Death, Cultural Customs and the Interaction between a Mourning Period and Social Entrepreneurship
December 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
In 1997, a Makerere University study reported that for a widow to be socially integrated into local support systems, she needs four factors in her favor. The first factor is the composition and culture of her society. Second is her community, and how it can help her overcome her sadness. Third the widow’s recovery from her problems depends on the support she gets from the family of her late husband. Fourth is a favorable neighborhood and working environment.
I was in Uganda three days after the World Cup bombings. An explosive ripped through a city restaurant and sports club in Kampala. 74 people were dead. Yoweri Museveni declared a one week mourning period.
There are ways to be born, there are ways to celebrate love between two people, and there are ways to die. Our cultures and our families collectively dictate the way we do these things, and I believe we can learn more than we often realize from the way someone else does any one of them.
I remember sitting on a stoop in a compound, listening to seven women talk about their favorable conditions after their husband died. He left a long, U shaped building, with single apartments each owned by a single wife.
“Thank God he provided for us,” one told me. “He was a good man.”
I never thought more about the legacy a person leaves behind than I did in Uganda, that year. It showed itself in the material provision that individuals left behind, in the way communities mourned and in the manner in which the deceased’s family treated any relatives joined to them through marriage. We have elements of this in my culture too. But the societal expectation behind customs of mourning in Uganda seemed to put color and honor to death.
Here, you know, we “need to start moving again.” We know that, “life goes on.” The emotional expectation is that grieving will change the way we perceive our lives, but we laud pushing through as normally as possible. Society does not provide a widow or grieving mother protection from work, from the ripping feeling of time moving forward, from responsibilities. But, in Uganda, they demand that it all come to a grinding halt.
Ugandan surgeon and politician Speciosa Kazibwe wrote in 2008 that, “Most of us spend [more of] our time doing burials than any other thing, especially because of HIV/AIDS and malaria which is very prevalent in Uganda.”
Doing business in a culture takes customs from the classroom to life, so to speak. And, I believe that one of the benefits of “trade versus aid” is that business forces you to engage customs, while aid often provides an excuse for dismissing them as unimportant.
Mourning periods provided scattered timetables in my life this winter, pouring in and taking over weeks at a time. It’s been four this season: three artisans and our lead artisan’s son, three weeks ago.
“This will change things, this week,” my manager’s voice was apologetic, while we discussed our lead artisan. “We can’t reach her during mourning.”
How many days? I ask.
Five.
“You didn’t expect that, working in Africa?” someone said to me recently. Like I should have expected death to come climbing in and hunker down on my desk while I run my business.
No. I didn’t. With ARVs and money in my partner’s pockets for treatment, I thought we’d avoid so many deaths. Somehow I ended up blaming myself – like I should have started my business sooner, grown it faster – done something. As if my business could act as some kind of Messiah, saving a community through the sales of accessories. And, that’s never what this was about. This was about a mutual celebration of the beauty of a culture’s craftsmanship, and sustainable development through it.
“This isn’t just fucking normal just because its East Africa,” I threw out. “It’s not normal. Death never becomes normal.”
And, so, I came to an impasse. Either I pushed to have women work through mourning periods, or I created a plan around them. And I came to the conclusion that traditional practices are higher dictators than the business practices a social entrepreneur like myself is attempting to implement – its not my job to change that.
There are local minds working on issues like these already – minds that understand their importance, and what their erosion might give or take to a culture and its economy. In 2003, BBC Africa discussed the pros and cons of ending costly funerals. Ms Kazibwe suggested, in her piece, that funeral practices are moved to Saturdays, and that each constituency within Uganda should have a mortuary with a fridge that could preserve corpses. Burials take up lots of time as well as productive vehicles, she noted.
“The idea sounds good if more time is to be saved for the sake of work. However, given the strong cultural rituals attached to death and burial of a relative, it is practically impossible to keep the body,” George, a gentleman from Musaka, argued in the comments below Kazibwe’s piece. “I know, for example, from the traditions of Buganda that it is unacceptable in society to go to work when someone has passed away in the same village until the body is buried. It is a strong belief that has existed for ages. So to change the status quo requires a lot of effort. Remember that traditional practices are not easily eroded in society!”
I think its rude to act like death is more acceptable at a certain latitude and longitude, bit of my friend’s head for insinuating it – and yet I caught myself doing the same thing – wondering why our lead artisan wasn’t on her game as usual, and then remembering her son just died. As if five days, in any case, could possibly be enough to be back upright.
I read and I struggled and I oscillated on these issues. And I landed on the truth that they have nothing to do with me. I can debate the economic effects, but I am not in the midst of the affected economy. I can wonder about funeral rituals, but I will never bury a family member of mine in a similar way. And, so, I’m learning that what matters is my cultural respect – my smart movement around these things, out of an acknowledgement that I have chosen to run a business in a society unlike my own.
We decided that, for us, its important to allow customs room to breathe, until they prove harmful. And, what I mean by that is causing immediate physical harm. Like the time I helped name my cook’s baby, and noticed a thin, white film of amniotic fluid that was never washed off his body. My village partner, Agnes, explained to me later that this was because of his mother’s family, and their superstition surrounding a newborn child being touched by water. That week, a friend of mine bought the family a baby kit as a gift, and Agnes took it to them and explained the health concerns surrounding following the custom.
I was pleased to find out how successful she’d been in explaining the risks, and how receptive my cook’s girlfriend had been in accepting a new way of doing things – one that was best for her child. But this line is a tight rope – you get that? It’s not my place to question traditions surrounding death, and its not my place to challenge the Shaman or to debate the way that a bride price might affect a family’s well being. And, it was Agnes’ place – a woman in her own community – to explain to her someone how she might be harming her kid. This is why I partner equally with locals. This is why I am not the one always on the ground.
It’s my place to give due honor to – show respect within – a culture that has different ways of giving birth and celebrating love and giving life over to death – and to allow that culture room to figure out these things on its own.
And, perhaps these rituals, in themselves, are teaching me something. These ways of being run like deep rivers beneath the women who work with me, carrying them along. I picture the erosion, like the caving in of deep banks of Ugandan red dirt, taking a culture with them. And I want to tread ever so lightly when it comes to inadvertently stealing tradition from a place – from a life running beneath a people who teach me how to stop, pay attention and appreciate all the new things I never knew about the world outside my own culture’s way of being.
And, so, we factored an extra week into our lead time, after this season – allowing for death, should it creep up, steal from my partners and sending them from their work for a week to honor the way that their traditions ask them to celebrate and honor the passing of life.
(Photo: Edward Echwalu for Nakate Project).
It Takes a Village: 10 Ways Bootstrapping Plays Out in Social Enterprise
November 2, 2012 § 2 Comments
I love Hillary Clinton. It’s not just about her foreign policy – it’s that I can get down with her love for the radical, the uncomfortable and the culturally risque. From the famed Saul Alinsky thesis to the gay parade marches, and – more lightly – the South African groove (grind?) she recently pulled off, Clinton’s nothing if not ballsy – evidence most recently by her taking the fall for the Libya Attack, and historically by her insistence on transforming herself post troubled marriage, failed presidential candidacy and her smooth slide into a career as the most traveled top diplomat in American history. Au contrare to The Corner, I find her 60s radical roots a bit, er, refreshing? And, I believe that her rejection of faith in revolutionary violence is, in fact, quite a, “meaningful distinction between 60s radicals and Hillary.”
As Susan Glasser so eloquently puts it, Clinton has managed to work out a, “perennially tough set of choices she faces between the human rights advocacy that means so much to her and the pragmatic politics that is often required of a hard-headed American secretary of state.”
I love her comments on Suu Kyi – the pressure of, “putting into practice everything she’s been thinking about and working on her entire adult life” – her assurance that Kyi, “cannot be immune from the criticism that will come because she is playing a political role.”
And – lest we forget – the famed, “Thanks for the many LOLZ. Hillary ‘Hillz.’” In her late 60′s, she’s insisted on re-connecting with an online generation she has never before entered into. And, she’s done it with flair.
Reuters calls her an, “adept behind-the-scenes operator, a tough negotiator not afraid to play the bad cop—or to make fun of the macho posturing of her many tough-guy interlocutors.” And, despite America’s insistence on putting Hillary in a women’s rights/development box, she has maneuvered sensitive issues such as rescuing Chen without blowing up the American relationship with China, and been lauded for taking her “people to people” diplomacy international.
But perhaps what I love most about Clinton is how she’s remade herself using the ubuntu philosophy she wrote of so long ago in her book, “It Takes a Village,” both by taking her role under her political rival with grave and humility, and through her commitment people to people diplomacy in the midst of her shift from advocacy to her new role as Secretary of State. Her lack of knowledge – not to mention a second language – has made being a team player has been a necessity for Clinton, and she’s made it work for her in unbelievable ways.
I’ve been watching Clinton as I’ve made my own small climb as the head of a social enterprise. I went through high school wearing my grandfather’s Vietnam army fatigues and high top red converse five days a week, and focused so heavily on internships and grades in college that I never read a single issue of the 5 style and fashion magazines my then boyfriend bought for me junior year. I left university as an idealistic, advocacy driven journ school graduate, back in 2010, with absolutely no idea what a business plan was, not to mention a pipeline, angel investor or a line sheet. And, I certainly didn’t know what colors were in for fall, not to mention that stylists, as such, rule the fashion world and are key to getting any product into the hands of and onto the right people.
And yet, here I was – looking to start a business entering into the fashion market and trying to make a splash.
Truthfully, I had no idea what the hell to do next.
You’ll read a lot on investors, but what you find less commonly is information about what comes before that point. And, frankly, need more of it. Its where the majority of us are – and where the majority of us need to make things work.
I’ve come to know bootstrapping as an all inclusive term, describing not only my financial situation but everything surrounding my company, and the large needs we have had to meet on a limited budget. And, while I hope that you land that impressive seed grant or large pipeline investor within your first year, reality is its far more likely you’re going to struggle for a few (very long feeling) years in social enterprise, before things begin to pick up – and you begin to get noticed by the right wallets and publications – not to mention your target market.
So, what do you do in the meantime?
Drink.
Ha, just kidding (mostly).
Here’s a few tips on how I’ve been able to hold things together (albeit sometimes loosely) while we’ve sought to grow as a company without seed funding, fashion expertise or an experienced leader (hey, at least I’m fearless – right?).
1. Find your “village”
Antonio Esteban is a celebrity stylist who has not only climbed quickly in his career as a stylist, but happened to know a friend of mine who reached out to him for me, and shared what I was trying to do. Esteban came on about a month after I started Nakate, and hasn’t left me since. Thanks to him, both my business (and my closet) is keeping up to date in the fashion world.
I would have never found Esteban if I hadn’t called a well connected friend and shared my need for someone. Our graphic designer, Shannon Labare, is a similar story – I met Shannon through a twitter SOS I put out for a designer. Shannon jumped in, decided work for us would be her commitment to change in Africa, and has been improving our design ever since.
What I’ve learned along the way as they keep answering their phones and responding to my cries for assistance is that these folks are not just my friends, they are believers in the vision of what I’m doing. Not to mention, the only person that expected us to make a large sum of money off the bat was…well..me. And, they understand the process of building something.
2. Admit to what you don’t know
When I first admitted that I didn’t have a business plan, or even know what a strategic plan, budget or predicted revenue agenda should look like, there were many, many people who jumped in to help me out. Contrary to my nightmares of ending up standing on a stage in bright orange underwear with everyone laughing at my messy word documents on a great big projector behind me, no one has ever laughed at me. To the contrary, everyone from a business advisor to import fashion lawyers, African fashion firms and, most recently, an import broker, have kindly walked me through even the most basic questions.
3. Trade your skills
Trading works like this: you meet someone you have common interests with, except they’re skilled in areas you’re not and vice versa. You engage in lively conversation. You laugh. You have a drink or two. You ask their advice, you learn through their expertise in conversation and – next thing you know, you’re grabbing coffee and catching up over an issue you needed assistance with. Two months later, you’re doing the same thing for them. This is, actually, one of my very favorite parts of networking – I love learning from people I not only respect but like talking to – people who break things down, help me along and don’t make me silly for asking my honest questions. Conversely, I love doing the same for others.
4. Air out your depression
There is an intense, hopeful idealism will carry you through your first six months. After that, you’re going to realize that you will have to make intense sacrifices for a result that no one can guarantee. You will lose faith. You will get tired of bouncing checks and living on a budget and telling your friends you can’t go out for drinks. You will also hit a point where you don’t know how to make things work – your talents and drive has limits. And, you will want to give up.
It’s time to call someone – not to remind you why you’re doing what you’re doing (though that would would also be a good idea) – but to help you get through your next set of hurdles.
I almost quit last year – at which point I called in a friend to work as a temporary VP while I re-gained my strength. He helped me move things past a point of shifting that I couldn’t do myself. By the time he took on a full time job and didn’t have the time to help me anymore, we had – together – moved past my point of crisis, and I was ready to go again.
5. Hire a coach
I have found that our generation is doing something unique in the world of socent, and is in need of unique skills and assistance. I needed an entrepreneur coach, more than anything, to help me believe in my business again, develop a strategic plan for how I was going to spend my time and to get me on track for branding that not only me, but would help us build business. At the end of the day, this is not about passion, for me – it’s about passion that will pay my bills. My coach, in particular, focuses on young female entrepreneurs, and helped me develop a working system that would stop me from feeling guilty for not working 16 hour days, and bring back some enjoyment into my budding career as I worked towards more revenue.
6. Do some hard streamlining
Don’t have the capitol to buy a large inventory, or invest thousands of dollars in your own business? I didn’t either – and now I’m paying the consequences of deciding to do so anyways. I’ve learned, along the way, that streamlining your processes works much, much better than preparing for a big boom that never comes. How can you create product development process that allows for growth without sitting on inventory or investing large amounts of money? It took me several months to figure this one out and, it took several volunteers on the ground in Uganda that were invested in my mission and could help me do so. Get creative. Find another solution. It will come quicker than you think.
7. Share your vision
On that note, I’ve learned that the best way to bring committed folks into your business is to share your vision. Sit down over skype or coffee and share – from your heart – about what you’re trying to build. You’ll be surprised how quickly people will say “ours” instead of “yours” – and how hard and far they’re willing to work to make a vision that they’ve now begun to share begin to take flight.
8. Offer up your failed ideas to the gods of great discussion
Umair Haque writes that, “My friend Steve…spent his twenties and much of his thirties in one failed venture after another — today, finally, he’s at the helm of a start-up that leaves him not just comfortable, or even ‘happy’ — but abidingly, almost overwhelmingly, fulfilled. ” I’ve already “failed” several times with ideas I thought world work. As I’ve worked through them afterward with others I respect, I’ve begun to see the holes in them – or the reasons they may have worked for someone else, but not for me. Airing all my dirty laundry has enabled better minds than mine to pick it apart and help me know how to put my ideas back together in a way that brings in revenue.
9. You just might need a part time job
A year into my enterprise, I was hoping I could start just living off my enterprise. While I expected to be on a budget, I didn’t expect that this would quickly drain the life out of my enterprise and that my little baby business was actually still at a point where I needed to be putting money in, instead of taking it out. So I landed myself a nanny job, and it was that job – and a strict budget – that got us through a restructuring period in year two.
10. Get some (like minded) friends
There’s nothing I love more than a productive, 16 hour work day. I could go days talking to absolutely no one, drinking huge amounts of strong coffee and sleeping only when its entirely necessary. However, every time I do this for weeks on end, this inevitably leads to burn out. And, I have to admit that I really and truly need friends – and friends that get it. Go join a meetup, get involved in a network or simply find a group of like minded entrepreneurs to drink with every Tuesday night. But, at the very least, find someone – preferably a few someones – who are living and working like you. What you’re doing is unique, and if you don’t have a community you’re going to burn out quicker than you think.
Lastly, it might help to let a little more humanist philosophy seep into your daily thinking. After all, “Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity” (Tutu, 2008).
Check out Nakate here.
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.
#dignity2012 – On the way Agnes Changed my View of East Africa and, with it, the World
April 14, 2012 § 5 Comments
I took Agnes to the pacific last week. We’ve been business partners for over a year now – her running the Ugandan side of our business, myself working stateside. We’ve worked together in East Africa. But, now it was her turn to enter my world.
We spent time in Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Santa Monica, introducing Agnes to shop owners and re-stocking locations with our new spring line. We found out she loves mango smoothies the way I love matooke. She loves coffee the way…I love coffee. She loves sandwiches the way I love chapati. In my world, we talked about my childhood the way we’d talked about hers during my last visit. We discussed my breakups the way we’d talked about her relationship with Patrick after she’d met him in grade school. We talked about the way I was born in San Diego and grew up in the Sierra Nevadas the way she’d talked about growing up in Kampala. And, after she met the head of the journalism department at my alma mater, we discussed our degrees – mine in journalism, hers in business.
She laughed through my dating stories. She told me she’d waited to get married on purpose to finish her education. We discussed Patrick’s views on women – his support of her. I nodded. I’d seen it – him waving goodbye from the veranda, watching their three children while we worked on our company. We traded stories about our cultures on the way into boutiques – the way Ugandans say Americans make love in the streets, the way Americans claim Uganda – and all of Africa, at that – is full of people defecating in the streets.
At the stop light on Broadway, we laughed so hard it hurt.
It was 3:30 pm when we were done – prime traffic time in LA, and I warned her we’d be late home. But Agnes had been smelling the ocean air for just about as long as she could stand without being properly introduced, and I caught the desperation in her eye.
“I’ve never seen it!” she pleaded.
I thought of myself asking to visit the Nile, and nodded, putting the truck in drive.
I’ve never introduced anyone to the pacific for the first time – let alone the ocean itself. The practice felt sacred to me, taking off our shoes on the edge of the boulevard and walking across the sand in our bare feet. I pointed out ships and surfers as we walked.
Agnes hesitated at the edge of the water, the way I’d hesitated when I’d first shared a pathway with a herd of Ankole cattle on my way through Wobulenzi. I laughed at her hesitancy the way the cattle herder had laughed at me, crouched at the edge of a herd of long horn cattle. I waved my arms – “come on!”
She did.
I watched Agnes and the ocean feeling each other out for the first time, and I thought about how many things this woman has introduced me to.
I met her when I was 21. It was my first day in Kakooge. Agnes greeted me with a loud voice and open arms. She gave me a hug and three kisses – left, right, left. She waved her arms around – “welcome to our home! You are so welcome.” By “home,” I soon learned Agnes was referring to the entire village – not just her half acre plot in the midst of it.
Skirt wrapped around her waist and an arm of bracelets, Agnes walked me through every part of town, little blonde NGO reporter that I was. We went to the outskirts of Kakooge, to the main street of Kakooge, to the village’s only indoor restaurant, to the east, where most of the children gather to play and, finally, to the bars, where drunken men recognized Agnes, and exclaimed over the Mzungu. I watched them, sitting on a wooden bench offered to the white girl, and I thought about the woman I’d just met.
She spoke about Jesus and women’s rights in the same sentence – often in church. With a booming voice and an out-streched arm, she regularly preached alongside her husband to a local congregation on wooden benches. And yet, here she was, a public figure in her village and a respected woman in her culture, laughing with the men in the bars and, later, I’d learn, with the prostitutes. Turns out, Agnes is not only progressive, she’s a bit controversial.
By controversial, I mean Agnes swims against the ancient wave carrying respected society away from anyone engaged in less than admirable activity, and pulling the religious and dignified away from issues like birth control, safe sex, AIDS, family planning and a woman’s right to express herself freely in every room in her home. Jesus doesn’t talk about condoms, does he?
Agnes seems to think he does.
After my 22nd birthday, she threw in her livelihood with me, and hired 40 women she handpicked to partner with us after meeting me once. That same year, she began to change my view of Uganda. She brought me into East Africa as a part of the woodwork, insisting that I wasn’t a visitor anymore. I had a place carved out in her home along the Kampala to Gulu highway, where the trucks run through to the West of my bedroom wall in the night, and the roosters crow on the half hour just before dawn.
Agnes must have known that any person transitioning into a culture needs to be taken in with their background, and taught new ways, instead of expected to know them, because she told me she saw me the third time I returned to Uganda. I was deep in a half eaten plate of matooke when she said it. I was struggling with a culture that I didn’t fit into – checking my iphone in between meetings running an hour behind schedule, and lying awake trying to teach myself to slow down. I was embarrassed by my white legs, and the way I kept cutting myself shaving in my bucket shower.
I stopped eating and stared. “Yes,” she nodded. “I see you. I see your heart. I get you. And, I believe in you.”
Her words, in the midst of a sea of misunderstanding, became my lifeline.
Later that week, it was Agnes, again, that gave me permission to have a large vision for my work in East Africa. She walked into a room she’d transitioned into mine for the two weeks I stayed with her. “I want you to open your heart,” she told me. “We’re going to be big. Big beyond Uganda. I have plans for Kenya, Rwanda, and the Congo. So, you let me know when you’re ready, and we’ll go.”
During that visit, I discovered that Agnes’ willingness to be controversial – to speak up, to speak out, and to go places where other women were not willing to go – had taken me to those places with her. She’d silently understood my desire for integration into her village, my desire to do business directly with the women in at, and with it – quietly been creating a place for me in Uganda – in the way she spoke about me, the way she helped me understand her culture and, now, the way she brought the two together.
She’d created a profile of my work, and my character. She’d been prepping the women working for me to meet me again. The woman she once went to visit in the bad parts of time were coming to greet her – and to greet me. Women that we’d gone to take pictures of in huts were walking across town to kiss me three times – left, right, left – and talk about our work. The prostitutes that had once pursed their lips at me were greeting me in English.
Six months later, at the age of 23, it was Agnes that gave me the grace to allow our plan take longer than expected, and for funds to come through more slowly than I wanted them to. After sales tax stripped our January bank account, I got an email from her quoting a scripture passage from the book of Zechariah. “Don’t despise the day of small beginnings,” it said.
More than matoke or Ankole cows, Agnes has taught me about the way a relationship with a person can change everything, as she’s staked her reputation on my ability to come through for her and the women she’s hired to work for us – taking months to explain cultural customs, work out our accounting on the ground, gather items and, now, to come and learn my culture so she could better integrate the needs of our customer base into hers.
As we walked on the wet sand, I pointed out kelp and washed up shells and explained crustaceans. I picked up different size shells. I pointed out the way the tide moves. But Agnes wasn’t interested in that. She was interested in the way children interacted the way with the water, and kept pulling on my arm to laugh and point them out.
I’d never seen the ocean that way – through children. One ran away from the ocean – terrified – and made a muscle, smiling at us, once he’d safely escaped the surf. Another was rolling himself in the sand and grinning underneath his gritty, gray hair. A third ran into the surf squealing with delight over waves that were too cold for me.
“I love the way they love it,” Agnes said. And, it was in that moment, watching a little girl dance the sand out of her polka dotted suit, that I realized Agnes had done it again – she’d changed my perspective on the world and, with it, the way I view the people around me, and my place in it, alongside them.
#whitegirlproblems – Bad Aid, Twitter Firestorms, and Cancelling Trips to Uganda
January 28, 2012 § 2 Comments
I created a firestorm on twitter this week.
Not the good kind.
The problem was twofold:
1. The tweet I sent out didn’t go with my usual messaging/brand. I’m for African aid the way Africa herself has figured out it works best and
2. I didn’t follow my own advice, and Africa – at her best – called me on it.
I tweeted about donated condoms, pads/tampons and baby clothing. A friend had wanted her nice hand me downs to go somewhere more useful than her local thrift store, so she sent them to me to take to Uganda and, after receiving the package I sent a tweet out that I’d accept more.
TMS Ruge, a gentlemen from Kampala and a the cofounder of Project Diaspora, called me on it. “Of all people,” he said to me, “YOU are going to encourage people to give their cast offs to Africa?”
He was right. I hadn’t thought through it. And, in a word, I was being lazy. It was around 5:30 am and I was about halfway through my first cup of coffee but, more than that, I just wasnt thinking through the effects of what I was doing – something I’ve learned never to do in Uganda.
I think that’s the problem though. That was the heart of the issue – I let my guard down. I was thinking of myself as a woman who has learned instead of one who is learning.
I think the root of most of our problems come when we stop thinking of ourselves as learners.
I was humbled, and quickly recalled that I am a learner. An embarrassing moment, and my swallowed pride, turned into a helpful dialogue with TMS Ruge that not only gained me some twitter followers, it helped to remember a few important concepts -
1. Don’t ever give away things that promote the cycle of “guilt” – ie Mzungus feeling bad for impoverished individuals and giving them their cast offs because “they have nothing and anything helps.”
2. Don’t assume that just because you’ve spent time in Africa and you have local good friends you’ve stopped being a Mzungu. You’re still a Mzungu. Youre still different.
3. Consider each decision you make- to hand out a summer dress, leave your box of tampons, contact aids organizations for donated condoms or give away your favorite (or only) sports bra (guilty). Ask yourself – “is this gift promoting the perspective that the people I am working with are my equals, or prompting the ideology that they are lesser people, in need of my charity?”
I know these things theoretically, but they’re still being engrained in me when it comes to my every day actions. Like TMS Ruge commented, I handle business like I’m working with artisans on an equal level – I need to handle my relationships on the ground the same way.
Our discussion led me to a few other realizations through out my day. They aren’t new to me, but our conversation, and the ripple effects of it throughout the twitterverse, sunk them in a little deeper. You see, there were two different responses to my tweet. The first were Africa’s responses – and they came from whites living there as well as locals. They were helpful in their criticism
- they gave me link to alternative ways to buy tampons and pads locally and support the Ugandan market. They suggested ideas of how to distinguish between charity and gift giving (a difference bridging the line between self respect, and self depreciation). And, many of those who had called me on my bluff followed me after our dialogue was finished. Not only that, but they asked about my work and followed my company.
The other group was made up of a few different European/American woman doing aid work in Africa – they retweeted messages that made me look bad, they used me handle in association with tags like #badaid and #dontdobadaid, and they used my conversation, and the criticism in it, to make themselves look like experts on #badaid vs #goodaid. I was the stepping stone, the neck that got in the way of “aid expert” label that we all want so badly. They didn’t follow up or seek to understand that I actually have spent a lot of time educating myself on bad vs. good aid. They were content with associating my handle with something negative, and moving forward. And, I was pissed.
Pissed, that is, until I realized that the universe had reached down in all it’s kind quiet teaching, and held up a mirror for me to see myself.
White girls working in Africa have an attitude. Or, at least most the white girls I know. We’re competitive, strong, driven women working in a market that depends on our grit and determination, our knowledge of a culture naturally critical of our way of doing things. Success, in our field, can easily feel like connecting better with the locals than the last girl did.
But, when I saw those tweets, I began to see myself differently. And, I began to understand the sick, damaging cycle behind the ways we cut each other down, as women working in Africa. Suddenly, I remembered all the times I’d sat in my favorite pair of wedges and skinny jeans and bitched about girls starting orphanages, girls trying to act like locals when they aren’t, or made fun of the classic white girl missionary skirt while drinking coffee in Kampala with Morris.
I’ve got my local relationships down, I’ve read my books about bad aid, I know how to handle village life on my own and I’m learning to speak Luganda so the real question here is….what can YOU do?
I’ve lived out the virtual #badaid retweet to the detriment of other women’s reputations, stepped on the neck of girls in jinja and kampala and gulu to get to the “aid expert” pedastool – and I’ve done it to girls like me. Girls trying to figure out how to work in a country naturally biased about them, girls working on getting rid of parasites they picked up from a jerry can on a less than careful day, girls that, quite possibly, end up crying on a Friday morning before 7 am because they’re trying so damn hard to do this thing and do it right…and I just didn’t care.
I ended the day with the feeling that I owed white girls across the continent a big, fat apology for being a great big asshole.
That’s not true, I ended the day by canceling a two month trip to Africa that was supposed to begin in two weeks, and I ended up being short of funding for.
…yet another reminder that I’ve not learned. I’m learning. And, just when I think I’ve taken the bull by the horns and done it all right, Africa throws me off sideways on my ass, and reminds me that I’m just another person that, on an off day? Might just wear a missionary skirt. Because, turns out, shaving your legs during a bucket shower can be quite the task…especially for a white girl.
Reflections on being 22 – the year of the hot mess
January 15, 2012 § 8 Comments
Last night my mom started dancing with me to Stevie Nicks.
“You know Stevie Nicks wrote landslide at 23?” I said. “She said it was the first year she started feeling like she was getting older.”
Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
and I’m getting older too.
My mom stopped, “whoa, this really is your song now isn’t it?”
I cried.
“This year’s going to be much, much better,” she said.
Judging by the way it started, right then and there, she was right. I’m 23 today. Twenty three and thankful, mostly, for how the way this year has changed my life. 12 months ago I was sneaking out the front door of someone’s apartment – hungover, barefoot. I carried my high heels in a sequined shirt and a pair of gym shorts I’d shoved in my bag. I started to climb a fence just as my best friend drove up, and it started opening.
She opened her car door.
“Hi hot mess.”
“Just drive.”
She did. She brought me flip flops and, out of the kindness of her heart, I’m sure, forced me to walk into Starbucks with her. A venti water and americano later, we sat in the parking lot and discussed my birthday party. “That was horrific. I can’t even talk about it.” She nodded. “I know.”
Something shifted in me that hot January day in a La Mirada parking lot. I suppose it was the beginning of forward thinking. Or maybe, just exhaustion from a long line of one night stands, ruined friendships, and not remembering the last time I woke up on a Sunday without a pounding headache. It was the beginning of the realization that men that didn’t love me weren’t worth spending the night with. It was the beginning of realizing that time spent with family wasn’t time wasted. And, that a few less margaritas and perhaps some candles on a real cake – and my little sister’s voice in the morning – could and would make for a better day.
But beginnings are just that – beginnings. And I carried my hot mess through the spring. Best friends are made for these times and it was a text message, instead of an americano, that woke me up three months later.
“I think you’re a train wreck,” she wrote.
I didn’t even cry.
22 carried on, and I re-met my ex, and started my life over. I lost a family member. A few weeks later, I lost a friend. Then, I lost myself somewhere around Shasta mountain moving up to Portland in my white Miata for a man I spent months sleeping beside, only to find out he didn’t love me either.
I grew up in church, but people there didn’t seem to like honest questioning, and they, very clearly, didn’t like it when I wore leather. After that, they took to me like the frogs must have taken to Pharoah’s palace, and I couldn’t find a quiet space to get away from their judgment.
I took off like a bat out of hell – for LA, for Washington DC, for Haiti and Dubai, Uganda, London, Virginia, Long Beach and, finally, Portland. And, there, much closer to home than I’d been in years, the quiet began to settle in, and I licked my wounds living with a trans couple in Northeast who, quite quickly, became some of my very best friends.
Alone in Portland, I started sitting in the back of a church off Burnside in NE Portland. I doodled quotes on bulletins – things like: “Just when others look and think you’re a person to be pitied is when you – as a person God loves – can know that He is beginning to move for you.”
Somewhere in between handling death, and feeling like I was dying, I called my mom on the way to a tattoo parlor in Gresham. “Mom, God’s moving for me.”
The man who inked my spine discussed the way church can damage a person, and what it looks like to start over. I became particularly addicted to one cafe and, each day, the same barista asked me if things were getting better yet. It was my one honest moment of the morning in a sea of people who didn’t know much about me – “Nope. My almost fiance dumped me this week.” And, each day after that he’d raise an eye brow – “better yet?” I’d shake my head and then say “better now!” and hold up my americano.
He’d wave.
I became the prophet of all things Jesus, because I was pretty sure most people hadn’t met Him like I did. The Jesus I was told about didn’t like cigarettes, and He didn’t talk about sex. He didn’t like stilettos, and it was for damn sure that He didn’t like me. But, in my corner of Portland, He did. Suddenly, He had saved me from an oppressive situation I couldn’t even see myself. Suddenly, it mattered to Him that a mother in law didn’t take over my life, that the whims of an emotionally abusive partner didn’t throw me off course – and it mattered to Him that I went back to Africa. This time, not running.
I started an anthem – “God sees me. And, He hears me.” Over beers, halfway through a cigarette, on the porch in my sweats trying to sift through my broken pieces – “I know this is crazy. But I think God sees me. And, I think He likes me. I have this feeling that there’s something bigger going on than everything falling apart.”
Somewhere near the California border I remembered my insurance agent telling me, months before, that if I moved to Portland and found that the love I thought I had wasn’t all I’d been looking for, I should come home with my head high.
“I’m not saying you’re out to fail,” she said. “But you know, I’m friends with your grandma. And, I just want you to know – if it happens? We’ve all been there.” And so, I hung on – hung on through quitting my job nannying for a little boy with a sensory disorder just so I could keep a bedroom I never slept in, hung on through the drive home to Northern California with my dad. “Hey, Dad? Do you think I’ll come back to Oregon? Am I a failure coming home? Did I fail?”
I hung on through months of silence from someone who I thought I’d make a life with. I hung on through having no idea what it was I was doing. I brought home the gospel of God’s love for the hot mess because I believed it. I figure Jesus loves a good porter just as much as I do, and that He doesn’t so much mind if I smoke while I’m sitting beside Him on my parent’s porch steps.
I figure if He loved me that day, sneaking out of an apartment, barefoot, on the way to discuss my birthday disaster, surely He loves me now. But, I don’t even think it works that way – I think He felt the same way about me then as He does now because it was then, just when I was about to become the train wreck of the century, that God gave me Nakate.
And, just when I wasn’t sure who I was again, He moved me home to a town I thought was dead, and doubled the success of a project I’d almost abandoned in Portland. After that, He took me back to Africa, feeling like an unloved woman, and he set me in a plastic chair in front of 40 women who call me their life partner, even though most of them had never met me before.
They clapped for me – prostitutes and co-wives and abandoned women, all starting businesses – all sure that, for the first time, someone really loved them. All JUST.LIKE.ME. And, all bawling almost as hard as I was.
Exactly one month from now, I’ll be back in Africa – back with those women who have no idea how many times they’ve saved me from disaster.
And, last night? I went to church in leather leggings.
I’m not sure if anyone noticed.
I was too busy thinking about how Jesus loves me.
Happy 23rd world – it’s really good to be here.
Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older and I’m getting older too
Nakate, a Year in Review
December 12, 2011 § 3 Comments
This weekend, we celebrated Nakate‘s one year anniversary. For a girl who started a transnational project with the words, “I am going to try this for a year, and, if it fails, I will cut my losses and move on” – this night was huge. It was huge, not only because I had stuck with a hard thing for a year, but because it worked. I’m not cutting losses. I’m not moving on. And, I have high hopes for year number two.
In honor of one year at Nakate, I’d like to live a little bit of background on what Nakate does, and who we are -
Nakate is an initiative working on the ground in a rural area of Uganda called the Nakasangola district. Nakasangola is known for its poverty, it’s problem with AIDS, malaria and TB, witchcraft, drinking problems, polygamy, prostitution, and for its abuse of women and children.
Because of it’s rural placement, there is a lack of aid in the district, and thus a lack of tourists. So, the women in our district are less developed skill-wise than women in more populated areas of the country because they haven’t had a market to sell to. At the same time, they also have less opportunity business wise, and have been more marginalized than women in more developed areas of the Uganda.
I launched Nakate in Nakasangola on purpose, because I felt that these women, in particular, needed to be noticed and empowered. So, for a year now, we’ve been working to bring in women from other parts of the country to train them to make necklaces, and now, bags, shoes and other jewelry and accessories. Along the way, we’ve been focusing on helping them to re-construct how they view themselves as women. Instead of poor, diseased, left behind, we want them to see themselves as artisans, designers, business women, and as women that have the power to make choices – choices about where they live, about whether they send their children to school, about where they want to open a bank account, and what they’d like to do with their money.
When I launched our project last December, I really didn’t know where it would take me, or what the results would look like. In a very real sense, I entered into it with open hands. Within a very short period of time, Antonio Esteban, our wardrobe director, found me and told me he felt that our product was something the high fashion market hadn’t seen yet, but would be thrilled to incorporate. He told me that they could bring us the kind of exposure we needed, and that we could bring a sense of depth to an industry that has really been looking to focus more on global causes. He was right. I have been stunned by the reception we’ve been given from stylists, photographers, magazine editors and other designers on the runway. And, I have become more and more convinced that the kind of handmade, carefully crafted products coming out of rural Uganda belong in high fashion with couture designs. They should be celebrated with the best of the best.
Each month, when I receive stories of how they invest their salaries or improve their lives, I feel conscious that the women I work with are, in fact, more dignified than I am. They are the strongest most dignified women I know. And, I am lucky to be the person who gets to stand in the gap and enable them to begin living as such. Because that is what we are doing, through buying goods from a group of women that have never been seen as anything but poor, or as a way to create babies, or for a man to promote himself in the community. Through seeing them as artisans, designers, and equal partners, we are helping to present these women with a fresh perspectives of themselves that is, in fact, the perspective that they should have been able to see all along.
I returned from Uganda a week ago, and, while there, I was able to see the result of our work on the ground. I saw women that had cried through their stories of poverty and abandonment when they spoke with me a year ago. They were telling me about the houses they were building, the cattle they had bought, or the child they were able to send to school. They were describing themselves like I hoped they would – as business women, artisans, jewelry makers or designers. And, while they were doing it, they were laughing, and they were talking about fashion.
That, in itself, makes this year a miracle.
HUGE thanks to Abe at Article Consignment Boutique for not only carrying our product, but hosting a fabulous event for us!
