I hesitated a lot before writing this, because I’d like to let bygones be bygones, but then I received a message from a friend of mine (RS) who’s been stuck in his parents’ place waiting for his visa from the UAE, totally frustrated because he had no job, and didn’t know what to do with his life…so I decided to write this in hopes that my experience would help him and people like him. It’s a long read on purpose – you’ll only read it completely if this is relevant to you.
It’s hard to put into words the feelings you have when someone suddenly decides you’ll no longer be living in the place you called home for 30 years. After I received that fateful email from my advisor on June 18, 2017, I practically went through all the 5 stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
But not in that order.
Because I had to pack 3 decades of my life in 3 weeks, at first, I was so caught up in the flurry of activities that needed to be done so the whole thing took a while to process.
But then…
A month later…
I was in my parents’ house in Malindi, chatting with a friend of mine who was still there when it finally hit me…Wow…this is it…I’m not going to be living in the UAE again…and I burst into tears.
You will also lose a piece of your identity.For as long as I remembered, I was a student. I was an expat in the UAE. We thought differently from our family back in Kenya. Our lifestyle was totally different. Suddenly, I was none of that and I was just a Kenyan with an Arab accent, living out of a suitcase between Nairobi and the Coast.
And that was depressing as hell.
But there is a strange subtle upside to losing pieces of your identity, and it’s this: suddenly, you realize you can become anyone you want to be.
You’ve totally changed environments so you are not caught up by your old habits or routines. You can actually start working from the future rather than the past. You can build your life from the person you want to be rather than the person you used to be.
In other words, you are faced with a vista of possibilities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted to have said,“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”
My private chart in this country was empty…
And that was pretty cool because I could fill it with whatever I wanted.
I suddenly became the person who would wake up at 4.30 a.m. (Nairobi is not safe at night especially for women, so I knew from the beginning I had to make the best use of the day during daylight hours). I suddenly became the person who does a 5 km run before having breakfast.
Another interesting happens when you wake up one day without anything familiar around. You become very comfortable with uncertainty and more risk tolerant.
And that’s the perfect place where growth happens.
Generalize your skills
Professionally, it didn’t take long to realize that my natural next step wouldn’t be a good move in Kenya. After a PhD, the natural next step is to apply to a university as a lecturer and start an academic career. But then there was too much bureaucracy in getting my paperwork in order, I knew building an entire career within a bureaucratic institution would be limiting.
So I joined the tech startup world.
Because nobody outside of academia really cares about my PhD topic, I shifted from a person who did an interdisciplinary doctorate in Digital Rock Physics to become a researcher, data analyst and writer. I found a way to package my skills to solve problems startups were having.
How to find the problems startups were having?
Ask them.
When I first came, I had a target to meet 100 people in the first 6 months. I did this mainly by going to meetup groups of my interests, attend talks in co-working spaces, meet with people and follow up with another coffee chat where I would ask lots and lots of questions.
Alternatively, you can cold-email people via Linkedin but that’s not very effective as a strategy (you might get 1 positive response out of 10). To make the cold emailing move more efficient, you might want to find a way to provide value to the person from the beginning. For e.g. let’s say you want to meet the CEO of a tech company, try their tech product, come up with a list of 5 ways to make it better, and send that when you’re trying to connect with them on Linkedin or set up a coffee chat.
The good thing about being in Africa is it’s a blue ocean market.
It’s a goldmine of opportunities because it’s chock-full with problems.
One in 7 Billion
A lot of times I feel like my journey in engineering, in the UAE, in Kenya has never been about the degrees or the languages, or the experiences, but rather about the people I met along the way.
The current world population is 7.2 billion, so the odds of meeting any one person are 1 to 7.2 billion.
How mind-boggling is that?
I would like to end this post with something that RS told me during our last meeting in Papparoti just before I left. At the specific time I was leaving, the Qataris were also leaving the country and I was just reading on the news about how they were having difficulty selling their properties.
So I brought it up in conversation, and said, “Well, at least I don’t have big assets to sell like property.”
He said, “But you’re taking your biggest asset with you.”
“Which is?”
“Your mind.”
Sometimes it’s hard to remember this but there’s this quote by Viktor E. Frankl that says, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
The moment you lose the victim story and take more control of your life is very empowering. The moment you realize that the world owes you nothing really, nobody is coming to save you, and nobody really cares about your story but you. Some things work out, and some things don’t, but nothing will work unless you do.
This piece is inspiring. No victim mentality anymore.