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?

Shop the new line here.

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).

I loved Tory Johnson‘s recent tweet on picking her career as a female entrepreneur. It was both gut level honest and powerful – a combo I’ve come to expect from successful female entrepreneurs.

She said that she couldn’t have felt confident in her career if she didn’t work as her own boss.

As in,

“The only way I’d ever feel confident and comfortable in my career is to be my own boss.”

I was sending out late night invites for an event, killing a bottle of pinot, making dinner after 10 PM and feeling particularly excited about a new designer I have lined up for 2014.

Johnson made me pause. She was blowing something wide open that I hadn’t really admitted to myself yet.

I picked me for me.

I’ve been hung up on it ever since: trying, for a few days now, to figure out why I did that, at 21 – hungover on tequila shots outside of Long Beach with a new business license, more than my fair share of ignorance and a cancelled ticket to Washington DC.

After careful consideration, I’m convinced that I picked me, partly, because I had no idea what the fuck was up. I was idealistic, a little cocky and definitely felt that a few trips through Dubai made me the shit. I probably also picked me because I had no damn clue that I was picking up arms for John Mayer might aptly describe as the, “war of my life” – a battle to explain me for me to everyone I knew, including myself. I had no idea how lonely that would feel, or how insecure I could get without a boss.

I had to shake my head at myself a little, the more I thought about it. If Shanley 1.5 had been any less cocky, idealistically emotional and/or blissfully ignorant she may not have picked me.

But I’m sure as hell glad she did.

A little over two years later, I’ve learned that you don’t pick yourself once. I had to pick me all over again at 22, when I almost walked out on me for a journalism job. Me and me went at it again at 23, when I almost quit on me to go back to business school. At 24, my secret fantasy is joining a hidden hippie commune somewhere in Nevada City, CA where nobody can give me any responsibility (or force me to wear pants) again in my life.

Yes, that’s still a thing.

I’ve learned, in these times, that I picked me for me at 21 because I knew I wouldn’t let me quit.

I knew I’d push until I cried, and hurt, felt totally out on a limb insecure and wanted to walk away because I was in over my head. Then, I’d push me just a little further. I picked me because I knew I’d demand that I would fix my mistakes, answer my phone on weekends, get up early and stay up late, do the work and show up, over and over and over again before I’d ever get paid. I picked me because I knew I would push myself to learn and do things that no one else would hire me for just yet.

At 22, I picked me again because I knew I was too deep in to quit – that I was learning things I couldn’t learn as quickly any other way. And, I had some crazy sense that I was born to be in charge. I would learn leadership because I was choosing to lead. I’d get the business education I was lacking because I was jumping into business. I would meet and network with incredible people that would help me because, well, I’ve worked with me before. And I know that networking is one of my strengths.

23 was the year I picked me because I needed a win, and I knew I was the only person that could get one for me. I picked me that year because I knew that if I didn’t, nobody else would. I called on my own raised hand, packed my own bags, got myself out of my own rut and pushed past my own self doubt.

At 24, I picked me for me because I loved my work too much not to.

At the end of a long day, when the new line comes together, the event space is full, the quality control problems are fixed or the impossible hurdle is finally knocked down, I’m aware that what I knew, when I picked me for me, was that I needed to know that I was good enough for myself.

Like Johnson, I knew, at 21, that that was the only way I’d be confident – was the only way I’d be comfortable. And, when I say comfortable, I mean in a deep (sometimes dark and barely reachable) place in my soul and my psyche. Because my job is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done.

I picked me because I had no idea how excruciatingly difficult it would be to pick me. I didn’t know I’d pay in 60 hour weeks and part time jobs, weeks with beans and rice and tight, tight budgets and mornings wrestling with self doubt.

But, I’d pick me again, without blinking. I know, now, that all that difficulty is part of building a story.

Any entrepreneur worth her shit will tell you that, after she’s picked her for her for a while.

Now, let’s be honest, I have to admit, at long last, that I picked me because I was all I had.

I picked me because I thought I could.

But I pick me again when I wake up each day because I’ve proved I can.

I’ve been approached several times over the course of early 2013 in regards to setting up local management on the ground for nonprofits and social enterprises in Sub Saharan Africa.

The questions have often been the same:

• how does one make connections?
• what does relationship with local professionals look like?
• and, my favorite question by far (because it means people are being challenged to think more broadly about Africa): why does it bother me so much when folks send American interns or volunteers to run their operations on the ground, rather than hiring locally?

I’ve been pondering for several weeks on how to best present the answers to these questions here on my blog, and I keep coming back to the work of my friend Teddy Ruge, who co-founded Project Diaspora, an online platform for mobilizing, engaging and motivating members of Africa Diaspora to engage in matters important to the continent’s development.

Ruge writes and speaks extensively on Africa’s current renaissance driven by technology, youth and the Diaspora. He is a frequent contributor to several online publications including CNN, New York Times, PopTech, The Globe and Mail, and The Guardian. In January 2012, he was awarded a ‘Champion of Change’ award by the White House for his community development work in East Africa.

Teddy’s was the voice that first challenged my perspective on building a business in Africa. Much of my model at Nakate has been created around his advice and the advice of his colleagues, both on the ground in Uganda and in diaspora communities in Washington DC and New York City. I thought it most appropriate to directly share his perspective on management in Social Enterprises working in Sub Saharan Africa, in particular. Below is an email conversation we had last week. I hope his perspective challenges you, and proves as helpful for your endeavors as it has for mine.

SK: What is your stance on companies sending their US based interns or volunteers over to run quality control in SSA?

TR: For starters, here’s my view on volun-tourism.

We still have this perception of sending interns to “oversee things.” This is an issue we had to deal with with Women of Kireka before realizing that it was creating an unhealthy dependent work environment. With today’s technology, there’s almost no need for a volunteer class of workers.

….Who by the way, despite paying their way to go to Africa to intern…could have done a better job, employing 5-10 people to better manage the project. But I digress.

I think of it this way: if Apple doesn’t send volunteers to China to oversee their quality control over their #1 rated products, what makes you think you need to send interns to do the same thing in Africa? Sending interns is an injurious short cut to your mission of economic development. Most people don’t want to be patient or do the hard work of demanding quality.

But then again, when your go-to-market strategy is sympathy marketing, why worry about quality when your ultimate aim is to get donations?

TR: Check out http://oliberte.com out of Ethiopia. Great products, great marketing. Great social programs.

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.

I was 10 minutes to late for my part time job when I asked U, a half Nigerian manager of something I wasn’t sure about in the entertainment industry, if my hair looked greasy.

He cocked his head and said, “don’t your people like that look?”

I stopped. He didn’t notice my “go die” face, so I spoke my incredulity to be clear – “MY people?”

He nodded. “Don’t get shitty Charlotte.”

He’d called me  ”Charlotte” when I picked up the night before. Like he forgot who he was talking to. I’d ignored it.

I’d been Charlotte for 14 hours after that.

“Don’t act like race doesn’t exist here,” he said. “Your people. White. Black. My people. Your people. It’s ok, I still like you even though you’re white.

Charlotte.”

U was last up in a round of tour de round the world dating I started with a Ugandan tour guide and continued into with a Pakistani journalist and a half Japanese executive who liked to call me by my middle name. We talked about cultural issues and intercultural issues and women’s issues. We talked about white, blue collared men. And, we talked about my story as a white woman twenty something who wanted to set up a story in East Africa.

We took to a proverbial boxing ring over dinner and facets of my business – the Pakistani writer let me know flirtaciously, subtly – not subtly enough – to quit my bitching, since I was a white, California girl who never experienced the things he’d seen women endure in Dubai. The exec turned my business model on its head, over champagne. U laughed at my choice to take a salary in year one.

“Damn girl, just admit it was a mistake.”

Over and over and over again we came back to skin – silently, out loud, over drinks, after reading Jezebel articles and in the middle of the night – back to the reminder that I’m white when you strip me down, and I’ve only got things to talk about because 1. I’m a pro choice feminist in a country brimming with adamant male pro lifers 2. I’d been kicked out of a bar for kissing a girl and 3. I worked in an area of East Africa highly populated by sexist men. I’m not a Ugandan designer, and so my story is a half breed – stuck somewhere between roots in the Yuba river, trunk shows at my favorite East Village wine bar and a Ugandan village where I learned the art of shaving my legs in a bucket shower, and peed in a bucket when they bar the hut door closed at night.

We had things to talk about because the melting pot has been my salvation – the breaking out of a tightly closed background, and the speaking out of every part of what I want to do with my life. Just like all of them.

We had things to talk about because I have learned, over and over, that this story became way more fucking nuanced when I left a nonprofit position where Ugandan women thanked me for “loving them and being there,” and moved into a business where I threw in my risk and unknown together with a group of women I respect the shit out of, and we started the story of our shared experience of  Uganda.

Social media week is taking over New York City, and I’m playing my part. But what I really want to know about is Social Media Week Lagos. That’s where my head’s at – the location that’s got me buzzing. In New York, we’re talking about social solutions to the things happening in places like Nigeria, but I’m glued to gchat because it’s happening right in front of us, without us – in spite of us, and alongside us, in partnership with us, if we let it. I’m listening to these African designers telling the story of their sourcing issues, the artisans they’re working with, the quality issues and control issues and cultural nuances. I’m tweeting, and I’m taking furious notes, and then I’m circling and putting Loza Maléombho phrases in caps when she says she wishes that nonprofits would stop selling African goods for fundraisers that aren’t supporting sustainable growth.

That’s where I started, you know – selling African goods for fundraisers I’m still not sure were supporting sustainable growth.

I remember the first time I doubted my direction.

My mouth was stuffed full of a chille rellano that Lehigh new media professor Jeremy Littau had offered to buy me for lunch, and I was checking my watch to make sure I made it back for an afternoon chapel meeting at the evangelical university I was attending.

Jeremy didn’t say a lot. He said enough.

“You don’t know it yet, but you’ve got it,” he said. I had too much chille rellano in my mouth to do anything but raise my eyebrow. I gulped down a beer we both knew I wasn’t supposed to be having, at my conservative evangelical school. We both knew I didn’t care anymore.

“I do?”

I’d recently returned from Uganda and I was pissed. I was pissed at how my university was sending students to Uganda for “life changing experiences” on the ground without any kind of plan for sustainable growth for the folks that were turning them into do-good fanatics. I was pissed about AIDS. I was pissed about ideology – the kind that shared sad stories, and the kind that sent a person like me to collect them. “How has ____ helped you?” that’s Christian-eze for turning wretches into hallelujah singers, with a nonprofit thrown in where Jesus used to fit.

“You know how to get your people to feel bad for us and write a check.” That was the line I couldn’t shake. And, I had written about being bothered, about being caught in an in between place selling sympathy on the marketplace and expecting to sleep well at night.

I was scared that I was wrong. I was scared I was supposed to clean it up – to write in clean, white lines about poverty, and about solutions to poverty. That was it. That’s what they were telling me.

But, that’s not what Jeremy was saying. He was telling me to write out the doubt and the feeling in the dark where I was fighting hard between a traditional aid model, and the ideas about my experience in Uganda. And it was Jeremy who told me to pursue the kind of raw, fucked up feeling kind of writing I was getting barely any hits on in the blogosphere. I was struggling with the way the evangelical church was dealing with Africa. I was struggling with my own experience writing on AIDS. I was struggling with how to pull it all together. And, he told me to write that. That that, in itself, was a story.

What did it feel like? What was the struggle?  He told me it was the next wave of new journalism – the beginning of something that was just starting, but would have everything to do with social enterprise. Feeling your way in the dark could feel like one big fuck up, but it sure as hell was a better story than the white horsed white savior complex. Everybody outside the evangelical church was about to get real tired of that, and Jeremy told me to keep hitting hard at something else until it started to make sense.

“It’s making sense from here,” he said. “You just can’t feel it from where you’re sitting yet. Keep doing it until it comes together. It will be rough. That’s ok.”

It took me three years to realize he was talking about building a brand out of my experience of social enterprise in Uganda, before I’d even started a social enterprise. Something about having your hand in something and writing about it being offensive in the past, but did we think that psychedelics were the only experiential drug? Write the experience, Jeremy told me. Life is the drug. Experience is the drug. Not knowing, and doing it anyways – that’s the Gen Y drug, in New York City. Write about the experience of being wrong, about the experience of what you did after that, and after that – and what you learned along the way. And, then write about how you turned a profit. That’s what we’re doing now.

Hunter Thompson had Playboy, cocaine and a Cadillac and I was about to use a business model and a severe bout of disaster induced depression and a blog I wasn’t sure anyone but Jeremy was going to read. But I started anyways.

Sitting with Jeremy, I remembered the first time I’d dialed out to a contact in Kenya – pressing two on the special international line we had on a  headset at UPI on an empty desk three rows down from mine. A year later, I remembered the first time I wrote about a man I’d sat with under a banana tree. And, two years after that, I remembered writing about discovering that the way I’d told his story had been a load of shit – I hadn’t captured the real story at all. I’d reduced his story – hadn’t set it on its axis. Human stories are like diamonds. Facets. Angles. All kinds of places for light to come through, unless you box them in.

Poverty, on its own, always boxes a story in.

I had to step out of the box – to start over completely with listening. And there was Adiat Disu and Lisa Folawiyo and Loza Maleombho ready to talk about how to do it – doing it – if I would just sit and pay attention.

That’s when people started paying attention to my story – when I broke all the rules I’d learned about selling the story of a poor African women so people would buy a product – when I admitted that I didn’t like much of anything I’d done so far, and how I walked out of it, often one defensive and misguided step at a time.

I admitted that I didn’t have neat categories or tidy faith for my experience, and that I was pissed off.

Jeremy had told me they would listen when I was authentic. And, they did. That’s when people started caring about my work.

It started when I gave up on the security of telling the story of the impoverished African woman for the purchase of their goods, and started telling writing about how she and I had come up with a design that a stylist in Los Angeles was able to market as an accessories line fitting into a high end Italian shoe boutique’s aesthetic. That was a story. That was a story she and I were living out together, and it was my job to tell it. It became my job to tell it. But, not just that. It became my job to write it with all the mistakes in there – all the life stories in there, all the imperfect moments that she and I lived out together while we got there. And, the feeling that we deserved to be where we were, more than anyone had ever deserved it before.

People wanted to know that side of the story – not the part where she and I rode in, beaming, and handed a new life to her children.

They wanted to know about the time I fucked up a whole line of new jewelry, wasted 5k, and figured out a way to start over. And that woman with the five children she was feeding on two bucks a day? She still believed in me. She still worked with me. She was the hero, then. And, that was a story.

I guess I had just thought life was supposed to be much tidier than that.

But that’s not what U said, when I talked about my life – when I bitched that I was on a tighter budget than I wanted to be, and cried because I’d only gotten one new account that morning, and fuck all this trying when it all goes so slow and I’m so bad at it sometimes.

“I’m crazy,” I told him on a bar stool in my ripped up faux leather pants. “It feels like a mess sometimes.”

“Course its messy,” he said.

He stuck his finger in the hole in my knee.

“You’re human.”

Then he told me he respected me.

I thought of Jeremy, sitting there – and the way he’d told me people would read the authenticity, and they would find strength in it, even when I didn’t.

Part of giving up on the story of the impoverished African woman had been buying into the truth that my story could stand on its own – that people would want to partner with a girl fighting for partnership in a place she had traveled fallen in love with at nineteen.

I didn’t have to tug on their heartstrings with AIDS and school sponsorships to get them to buy in. I could be real. I didn’t have to fix it. I could just play my part.

And, I could do it because I wanted to.

An old friend of Hunter’s took me to Pepolino for my birthday, and explained that the next wave of writing and building together is all in the doing – something Hunter showed us with Cocaine, and we’d have to live out in enterprise.

“Thompson didn’t say shit, he did shit. He didn’t talk about being smart. He acted it out. All actions. Not a lot of talk.”

He pulled out his napkin and wrote in the air with his hand. “He’d have turned this napkin into a check to prove he fucking could. But he wouldn’t have told you how much he knew about the legalities of the American financial system.”

I thought about Hunter writing on the napkin when I began to refuse to do interviews on the aids medication our artisans were buying, and I started focusing on African fashion weeks across the continent, the colors that inspire my team.

I stopped tweeting about poverty, and started tweeting about the way Abel Tesfaye sings sex like a smooth, smooth dance, and Warsan Shire writes about men in a way that makes me want to turn on the bath, and tell my body sorry, over and over again, for the things I’d made it do that it hadn’t wanted just yet. Because that’s Africa, for me. That’s Africa in and around and inside me.

I don’t report so much on the women that I work with anymore – not the gruesome parts of the stories – the sickness and the death and the Luwero war stories belong to them. Instead, I write about the way we celebrate the things their cultural customs and rhythms and colors have taught me. I write about the way a white California girl, stuck in a “my people, your people” world, has learned about my body and my heart and my head from a place that no one in my family has traveled to before.

I’ve learned that writing about a woman’s battle with AIDS isn’t my job anymore. It has facets, and it has its angles – but not the way I was telling it. Not when I took it from her. Not when she wasn’t the one speaking it out.

I’ve learned I can write about how the old woman who assists my manager and I battled to find commonality the week I needed orders rushed, and she called for a week of mourning for her son. I can write about the way I fell for my Ugandan guide like a lovesick teenager, hot and worried on a sticky night in a clinic. He was sick and seizing on the floor. And, we learned, in a series of battles with village leaders, that he wasn’t coming to the US for an education without a fight.

I’ve learned that I could never have read about the simultaneous using of a white girl’s pockets and anger at her entrance into a personal relationship in a book. I’ve learned that I would never have been told the first was the fault of american missionaries if I hadn’t seen it myself. But I did. I lived it out the night I broke out in hives and my bank account went negative and the internet wouldn’t connect.

I’ve learned I can write about the lights in the marketplace, and the little girl that laughed with me telling the story of a lion and a monkey in the dark the night that a boy climbed to steal electricity and the lights went out after he was shocked to death. I can write about what I’ve seen and experienced – the triumph, the story telling, the chasing of chickens in the morning and the smell of coffee strong and brewing before meetings with artisans at the local school.

I can write about all the things I didn’t know the day I gave out clothing, instead of being willing to disappoint a group of women by not bringing gifts to prove that a white girl was there because she believed they were worth doing business with, instead of handing out clothes to.

And, I could and I can write about what I learned about myself, all those days, and the days following – the reminder that race exists, and I find it in my heart and my bed and my job and my life – that my roots run deep in my mother’s place in Northern California, and her mother’s before her.

I can write about growing up near the American river confluence where we jumped off rocks screaming every summer of my childhood, and my cousin’s ashes were scattered when he died the Spring my family’s hearts turned cold on a rainy night in Roseville. And, I can write about the way Kakooge and Wobulenzi taught me to believe in myself, to take off from the place I started from, to begin a life in New York City and kicked me out the door and into homes and lives and beds of people that came from places nothing like me.

I’ve learned that my story has angles like a diamond. They have given me a life to run around in, like a person set free from the girl who lived like, “the jerk at the intersection who doesn’t know East from West.“

I’ve learned I have a hell of a lot to choose from, telling my story building a business in Africa – so much so that sometimes I’m not sure where to begin.

But I know one thing for sure.

I will never again tell the story of the impoverished African woman.

I gave it back to the Ugandan women I work with – for them to tell, looking back at where they’ve come from, their childhoods – the places their mothers came from, and their mothers before them…the years that their families struggled because their hearts turned cold.

Maybe some of them will even have others in their own life to remind them that it was their imperfection – their courage to be authentic in the face of loss and discouragement – that was most worthy of respect, after all.

I’ve been keeping a notebook of my life as an entrepreneur, beginning with the new year. Its red leather, with big white pages.

It’s my adaptation of a Robin Sharma assignment. The goal is to more productive by through consciousness – the choice to actively pinpoint the thinking and the actions that take you off course from the kind of life you’re looking to have.

I had just finished writing in it as I stepped off the train at 2:43 on Thursday afternoon.

That was when the scene started.

I heard her before I saw her. She was mad.

“Evitar que se! evitar que se!’

When I got off the escalator I saw her swinging blows. She was all caught up beating the shit out of someone nobody else could see.

She cried out again. This time, in pain.

People watching in Manhattan works well one of two ways.

You can do it while you’re on the hustle, taking in your surroundings while you get to where you’re going.

You catch a lot that way in New York.

Or, you can do it when the folks you’re watching are doing something god awful, and you can’t bear to look away.

That kind works well because they’re too caught up in god awful doing to notice you.

I did both, that day – hustling and rubber necking together at Lex and 53rd.

I felt a lump in my throat.

There are lots of invisible someones crowding up train stations in New York. But, damn. This one was causing an unusual stir. Punching, twirling, grabbing, grappling, groping – this woman had her hands around an invisible neck! Then it was around hers! Back again!

I’ve read that schizophrenia rests in confusion about consciousness. John Campbell calls it a brain signal read as a someone you never consciously ceded power to, but took over anyway.

The real trick is that you thought you made a choice to go along.

I’ve been noticing trends as I write in my notebook. There’s people, and there’s shenpa – the Tibetan word for “getting hooked.” That’s when the going along happens. It starts in with something that didn’t matter much at all – a conflict, exchange, a tension. When I let it grow, it gets bigger. It gets too big.

That’s the deal with shenpa. You’re stuck on a thing, like a woman throwing punches on Lex and 53rd, and never boarding a train.

I get all clogged up that way, and the hours go places I don’t want them to. They go to things like confrontation and defense, explanation and argument, frustration and gossip. They go to intense emotion.

That’s the thing about social entrepreneurship – you don’t get to just go along. You have to be mindful of your work, and you have to be mindful of your life. After all, social entrepreneurship is just that – mindfulness, put together with a life committed to work that creates social good.

And, I’ve learned you can’t create any kind of good without beginning with yourself.

I’ve learned that getting wrapped up in personal conflict, petty conflict – gossip, and other things like it, isn’t innovative. It’s not smart. And, I’ve learned you can’t be innovative or smart if you’re doing those things. If you’re living small, you’re working small. That’s what I’ve seen.

I’ve also seen that learning to let of things – situations that catch you, in particular, is both. It’s innovative. It’s smart. And, it changes both the way you life, and the way you work.

In meditation we call this “dropping a story line.”

Dropping a story line begins with catching yourself – recognizing that we, as people, create stories all day long: about people, about ourselves – about interactions and future plans. Dropping the story means to stop mulling, stop trying to figure it out. It’s the art of bringing oneself back to the present moment, and the task at hand.

I believe its the secret to productivity, innovation and expansion of the heart and mind.

I believe it’s the key to the beauty that consciousness affords us. We can teach ourselves to let things go once we know the difference between what is in front of us, and what we’re imagining might be there.

We can stop getting caught.

On Friday, I sat by a woman with a gold and leather shoulder bag on the train. We exchanged compliments before a student – a girl with a certain oddness about her – sat down.

“I heard this story today,” she opened. “You wouldn’t believe how great it was.”

There was no stopping the outpouring of Snow White, and my train friend didn’t try. She smiled at the girl instead, and moved closer to listen.

Watching them, I felt the colliding of two worlds – stories, and conscious reality.

It lasted for a single stop, when the woman with the bag smiled, and shifted her weight to stand.

“What a wonderful story!” she exclaimed. “But I have to get off here.”

She winked at me, and stepped off the train.

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.

Christine Caldwell writes that happiness lies in the ability to experience life directly and, “to the hilt.”

This experience, she explains, comes from accurately knowing ourselves.

“Knowing who we are gives us all sorts of ideas or stories to tell,” she writes. “I am a woman, a mother a teacher a psychotherapist. While these are all accurate labels, do they really encompass me? Like a compass, do they locate me for myself and others? Ideas may or may not be accurate; they are certainly shaped by what we have been told about ourselves and by our needs for approval and attention. Knowing who we are provides a view that can dictate how we see the world and how we act in it. If gives us a box to live in.”

A friend of mine drove a camper across the country this past summer. She wrote that a group of folks outside Alexandria, Virginia had shown surprise at her choice to go it alone – “don’t you get lonely?”

“What a sad thing it must be not to like being alone with yourself,” she wrote later that day.

I printed it out and put it beside my mirror.

That was back when Ben and I were talking every day. I’d just moved to New York, and he was planning to come meet me after he finished his art history degree in San Francisco. I’d cry sometimes about how often I was alone, and how little I liked it.

He’d tell me it was a season. “By the time I come out, you’ll see it all differently. You’ll be on the other side, man.”

It’s been six months since that season, now – and just long enough to forget how it felt, sometimes, but still be relieved its over. We had brunch in East Village on Saturday. He showed me to the apartment he’s applied for, and grabbed me on the street afterward. “You are doing it man! We are doing it man!”

We parted ways off the L at 14th, and I caught the 6 downtown. I thought about my fighting months in New York – all those times I felt so empty and alone I wanted to run home, just for one desperate weekend to see my family.

I thought about the books I read by the Hudson and the bars I went to by myself, the museum exhibits I found – the walks I took from uptown to Lower East when there was no one to call for a cup of coffee and conversation.

There was no man’s land in there for a while – all this empty feeling in not being sure what to put where inside my identity.

I thought about the shift that started taking place when I stopped resisting – about how I slowly let go of how I used to think I liked to date and liked to live and liked to work and liked to interact – the unnatural feeling process of throwing it all off, getting rid of the ideas I’d formed because I thought they were true. I thought about how surprised I was when I started getting to know myself.

The location of self was key in all of this. I remembered that vividly – asking questions of myself, instead of who I’d made myself out to be based on a bottle collection of experiences and opinions.

Imran Garda writes to his daughter Lamees that, “You will find humility will scurry towards and wash over you when circumstances require it. You don’t need to look for it or project it. Seek it, and the menacing trappings that lie beneath it will be your true motive.”

I found I’d collective negative perceptions like trinkets – like something valuable. The menacing trappings below the search for humility looked like inaccuracy, not properly knowing who I was, just knowing how I tended to act when provoked, or sad – or how I felt when I was first alone in a new city.

I remember asking myself if I had good ideas, if I was creative and smart – if I was “difficult,” like some people had said, or perhaps just passionate. Passionate was something I eased into. Difficult was something I slowly left behind.

When my entrepreneur coach and I met in December, it had been five months since I first began to search for myself. We were drinking coffee and talking over Skype, and she told me that the Mayan calendar, read properly, showed the end of 2012 as a cosmic shift into feminine power.

“Imagine!” she laughed. “All the world exclaiming that disaster is upon us when, in fact, it’s just the global uprising of feminine strength.”

Her laugh and my coffee and the Mayan prediction all felt warm around me, that morning. Like the first time I really knew that I was creative, and a talented entrepreneur. This was a moment of definition of self – one of those building blocks for the box I live in.

Maybe she gave me a placebo, that day – the promise of a year of power serving as a self fulfilling prophecy in the belief that followed.  But, on the 6 to Bleeker I realized that all those months spent with the tiniest bit of courage, pushed through to action, were finally showing themselves. All this fearful, apologetic living gone toppling, tumbling down, one day at a time.

I know now that life is built on expectation, instead of dread.

Expectation can be confusing. I haven’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I believe the kind that leads to wholeness has much more to do with belief in the life that grows out of time well spent, instead of the fear that leads to self protection. Opportunity, for me, comes with an opening of self to experiences that lead to expansion. At 23, it meant moving to New York by myself. Then, it meant waking up each morning and doing it, over and over and over again despite fear. It meant emailing shops I did not think would accept my line, pitching to fashion weeks I was surprised accepted, and asking for accounts I didn’t know we’d get so quickly. It meant putting money into a future I didn’t always believe in, and talking with strength about something I felt weak about. That was the hard part – all those months after the big leap across the country. That’s where all the blood and sweat and dying occurred.

I learned, in those months, that there’s the temptation to shrink after moves of big boldness. You finish out the biggest obstacle brimming with bravery and belief and then – what? – all this terror comes up, like left over corruption from the old regime you threw over.

But I know, now, that the insistence to take one more step is all that matters – just enough courage to again and again and again choose to live and speak out of who we are, instead of who we thought we might be. This is the secret to expansion, to entrepreneurship that ends up paying the bills – to life lived directly and to the hilt.

Now, if you’ll excuse me – I have a play to go see by myself, and a 24th birthday to prepare for.

It’s funny – I’m headed out with a group of friends I was surprised accepted an invitation so quickly.

J laughs like he’s been taken over. He grabs his stomach and opens his mouth and out comes the joy. I hold it in for a minute, and then I laugh too. I can’t stop. Grabbing my sides, HA! HA! HA! the big sounds come out. My face hurts. My stomach tightens. There’s the rush – all that stuff I was holding in my gut. I catch my breath. He does too.

He slaps my leg.

“Oh, god, that was funny.”

I start to warm up again.

J and I laughed until 2 am, when I curled up on the couch and fell asleep without thinking. I woke up to quiet in his Sacramento first floor apartment the next morning, and watched the light come in through the slanted shades. His boyfriend came out and smiled at me, shirtless and sculpted and beautiful – his boyfriends always are like that.

The boyfriend made coffee, and handed me a mug. We smiled the way people do who have love for a person in common.

Love is easy sometimes – waking up in the quiet by a person who knows what you’re thinking when you don’t say anything at all.

They bought me brunch, this man who has supported me ceaselessly and a partner who wants to talk about Uganda and mobile applications and keeps saying “send me that piece you wrote, yeah?” and “hey, send me that article, don’t forget.” When he was out of earshot J whispered about our congruities – this man and I. There’s Uganda, and there’s this itch to move and this involvement in the start up industry. I smile like a little kid, then, because I know the similarities between myself and his partner mean this man loves me the way I love him.

J brought me home to my parents home after we ate. We drove past the three bedroom off Stevens street where I learned to ride a bike, and turned right on Hwy 49, where you can turn left and find the house where I had my first dog and my first crush and I met a goofy girl in overalls who is still my best friend.

He hugged me tight. “Okay?” he said.

“Okay.”

He drove away, and I got ready to go inside.

Love is a game of tetris sometimes – all this bouncing up against boundaries you put there on purpose so it wouldn’t die out.

Seeing the people you’ve loved the longest kicks up dust in the empty spaces inside you that you haven’t decided about yet. There’s resolve, the new self. There’s the old self you’re trying to hug and kick out the door all at once, and then there’s no-man’s land, all this brain and heart mass that hasn’t been decided on. And, there’s where the melancholy – the lonely – pours in.

Family’s a dust devil – kicking all kinds of things into my undecided spaces.

I can hear my mom talking about me up the stairs. “She flies out Friday. Came in last week. Yep…Yep.” She I do best when we’re playing tetris right, with all these boundaries going up in the right places to keep us from banging into spots that hurt.

Sometimes the want to kick the lonely takes over. Lonely is not having a sure place, and lonely is stilling the noise and lonely is not being sure exactly what to do in a place except for wait. Lonely is a lost paradigm.

Lonely is a sit and a cigarette. Breathe in. Breathe out. Lonely is still learning how to stay with yourself.

I smell cigarettes and oak trees when I close my eyes. There’s a different kind of smoke. It must be a burn day in Northern California.

My grandfather called me an infidel last week. “How can you have Muslim friends if you’re an infidel?” We were drinking wine at the kitchen table I’ve ate at since I was a little girl. I had decided not to fight.

“My friends don’t talk like that, Gramps.”

“They don’t?”

“They don’t.”

I felt heat rising in me. I felt it again on New Years Eve, sitting in front of a fire with a man who educated me on the way men think – that in life, for men like his son, for men that are real men, a woman who says no is the only kind of woman worth having. That any, “broad who spread her legs” isn’t worth much. By spread her legs he said meant consensual sex. He was specific: a woman who says no ten times is always better than a woman who says yes once.

“No,” he shook his head. “Women like that aren’t anything at all.”

I breathed.

He’d told me his ancestors came from Côte d’Ivoire, so I asked him if he’d been to the Ivory Coast. We were laughing after that – him, and a woman he was calling “smart,” after unknowingly calling her nothing. 

Not anything at all.

Mom and I played tetris later that night in the kitchen. I played a song on the ihome, and she told me it made her sad. I nodded, “me too.” She asked me about my night. I said, “good.” And, there was silence, right then. I let it be, like I let Gramps be, like I let the man be in front of the fire on New Years. And, I knew that was enough. Just that. The quiet. The knowledge of friction. And, inside it, all the love that keeps a person coming back to a place where they kick up dust with the people they love. Without anybody trying to do it, you know – just like a real desert storm.

I thought of the time she and I danced to Stevie Nicks before I moved to New York City. I remembered that love is like that sometimes – crying and dancing in the kitchen with a person who gets you, even when you don’t say why you’ve got all those tears.

That’s real love for you – desert storms and understanding, all wrapped up together in a sucker punch to the gut.

Love looks a lot like quiet instead of fighting, like an understanding of total misunderstanding, and the choice not to poke the elephant in the corner again. Love looks like not talking politics, and love is knowing nobody taught somebody better when they should have. Love is offering an alternative, without fighting. Sometimes, love is quiet. Sometimes, love is laughing so hard you can’t talk with people you don’t understand at all that year.

Love is the aunts who pinch your ass on their way past you and say “you’re ok?” after you’ve blown up over politics again, just like you knew you shouldn’t.

Love is tetris. Love is a bouncing ball, boundaries and love is smiling when you know nobody’s going to “get it.” Love is melancholy and lonely and a cigarette on the porch when its kicking up dust in the empty spaces.

Love is getting on a place to go back to a life that works better than the one that did here.

Love is the people who beg you to come around, even when they know its going to be difficult.

Love is knowing you’ll be back again – another tetris game, another holiday, another year. And that you’ll come back again after that.

Love is knowing that the dust kicking won’t kill you, after all.