I threw my bags in the back of a van as the usual growls of the guard dogs that paraded the compound at this hour were hiding in the dark quiet of my last night in Mumias, Kenya. I scanned the field tucked between the glass shard-lined walls of what had been my home for the summer, remembering the impromptu soccer matches, passing a frisbee on a sunny day, and watching the rainy season from the balcony. The patchy grass bearing scars of the many other roommates of chickens, geese, cows, ducks, and goats I shared the compound with, whose usual bustle and buzz of movement was nowhere to be found.
With a firm handshake, the van door closed, and my time in Mumias, Kenya, had officially come to an end. Within a minute, the van had driven outside the bounds of the small town nestled in rural Kakamega county, which took 5 minutes to walk across, and where my presence walking through town would arouse the word “Mzungu,” often used to describe a “white person,” from all directions. As the sun crept over the horizon, the jagged tips of sugarcane fields stretching as far as the eye could see waved one final goodbye.
I couldn’t ignore a feeling deep inside my chest that my time here was incomplete. Just as I had tuned myself to its rhythms, it was time to start my next chapter. Chicken poultry rearing projects begged for additional funding and support. Vegetable crops would soon sprout in the kitchen garden. In the office, an M&E framework I designed would be implemented to better measure impact among beneficiaries. I had started to form my community and earn their trust, and just as I felt that momentum in my projects was growing, it all came to an end.
A similar feeling crept over me as I drove farther and farther away from Kotdwar, the place I called home for the past 8 months. My time in Kotdwar was cut abruptly short by two months due to an project closure. Just two weeks before, I had conducted facilitator workshops for the beginning stages of a pilot program I was managing to integrate an updated curriculum into government schools across Uttarakhand. I had finally received approval after months of research and planning to work with beneficiaries to create a social media marketing course to equip women artisans with the skills to increase their income. It felt like everything was coming together.
When I think about my work in Kotdwar, it feels like a complicated trail, filled with beautiful views of how far I had come, but also steep climbs, times I felt lost, and so many moments when I fell. Having to turn back at the moment when the summit finally felt within reach, after every steep climb and wrong turn that had gotten me there, was a difficult moment in my Fellowship.
More than that, Kotdwar was home, and I wasn’t ready to leave the laughter of the kids in my colony as I missed every bowl in cricket, the honking from my coworker Divya announcing his arrival to go get dinner at our favorite chicken stall, my landlord Aunty cooking me food and staring at me as I ate it until I said “bahut swaadisht,” and my daily handshake with the trainer at the local gym as he bid farewell after each afternoon workout. Kotdwar, with its good and bad, its rolling green hills, its singular bustling Jhanda Chowk, and the loudest office I had ever worked in, was now a memory.
Challenges arose on my project daily, and I learned to adapt. To focus on what I could do rather than what I couldn’t. I figured out how to work without a readily available supervisor, with strained resources, as the only foreigner in the city, in a place where every little thing took twice as much effort. I learned to ask three times to get the simplest task moving, and confirm four times to make sure I had been understood. I created my own project from scratch after arriving and realizing no one had one waiting for me. I navigated leadership changes, wild animals on my way to work, and eventually, a project closure.
Despite these challenges, I was able to create a project that served my professional growth and supported the organization. I facilitated workshops, implemented activities at events across 26 government schools, developed success stories, and updated two curricula to teach students workplace English and digital literacy.
As I approached Delhi, ready for the next chapter of the Fellowship, I passed a temple I distinctly remembered driving by 7 months earlier on my way to Kotdwar. The person I was then was nervous, uncertain, staring into the eyes of the unknown, questioning my ability to be independent in a foreign place. Looking back at this younger version of myself, who couldn’t even pronounce the name of his host location, I smiled. The summit I had set out to reach was still behind me, unfinished. But the mountain had changed me in ways I was only beginning to understand. And that, I decided, was enough.
