Exactly a year ago, at this time, I was offered a job to become a full time web developer at Quatrohaus. Back at the time, I was still finding my feet in web development, a process that is still ongoing, and I felt truly honored that such an opportunity had come my way.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to stop many of the habits I had taken up in the past two, three years. That meant a lot of coding, consuming entreporn and talking a lot about opportunities we should be exploiting. What triggered this was not that I was feeling burned out, unmotivated or discouraged but I decided to find out what it felt like to live in an inhibited world once again.
This little letter was written by my niece, Ruva when she was over for the holiday last year. She’s 7 years old and learns at Phoenix Primary School in Malawi. After bugging me to write something to her parents, I decided to let her write a letter I promised to post on my blog.
Copied below is what she had to say:
I have recently become an avid podcast collector over the past month or so and I’m clearly enjoying it. Long before downloading podcasts was even considered normal consumption of internet bandwidth, many of my mates were onto downloading a ton of them, daily. I remember just how odd that struck me and I couldn’t figure their line of thinking whether they thought the internet would be shut down one day and they’d regret missed opportunities or they were seriously putting them to good use. To this day, i’m more clueless than I was then, having downloaded a few now, I can tell you, consuming them is the hardest part.
It’s a few days after the two week Culture Shift ideation and hackathon hosted by the British Council, Jumpstart and Culture Code (UK) and for most of us, we are still basking in the afterglow. It was a wonderful event hosted to help local artists mingle with the techies and try to hack together some real solutions to their problems.