My 2019 in Review
It’s probably too late to churn out this piece, but I want to believe that time is nothing but just a construct. In all my adulthood years, 2019 turned out to a roller-coaster, a mish-mash of high highs and low lows. Life was it in extreme ends, both in the good and the bad, and now as I reflect all that happened, I could not have wished it any other way. I know that each moment that I laughed or cried wove a new thread into the fabric of my overall story, like tiny rivulets streaming into the main river and forever flowing forward despite what it encounters.
January;
The first day of the year found me at a restaurant where I was working as temporary waiter, dish washer, toilet cleaner, books keeper, sometimes a cook and errands girl. The main reason why I took the job while all my classmates and friends enjoying their holidays was to be able to facilitate my moving out of the hostels. I had wanted to move out in early 2018 but life does not always give us what we want, and that is okay too. However, I badly wanted to make the move in the New Year and I had to do what I thought I had to do. What I failed to anticipate though is how the job would come to affect me both physically and mentally. I would get in around 6.30a.m and leave around 7.00p.m in the evening. On bad days, I would clock to 8.30p.m. During this period, I had hoped to still work on my programming and writing skills but this was not to be as at the end of each day I would be extremely exhausted that I would just shower, eat and go to bed.
I remember I would tell myself almost every day that I would quit the job only for me to turn up the next day. My self-esteem was really low and failing to complete my contract would have worsened the depression and turmoil that I was already going through, so every day I held on. Anyways, at the end of the month I got done and it was now time to begin my 2019, lol!
While January held some of my most heartbreaking moments, it also gave me two blessings that truly shaped the rest of my year. On 2nd January, I received my acceptance email into the KamiLimu Mentorship Program Cohort 4.0 that is led by one phenomenal woman, Dr. Chao Mbogo. I was on an illegal break where I had sneaked to check my phone for any missed calls or new emails when I came across the congratulations message and I just stood there dumbfounded, wanting to scream, cry and tell someone but all of which I couldn’t because I would scare away the customers. I kept rereading the email and never making it to the end of it because I could not believe that I had made it into the rigorous and competitive program that had a 36% acceptance rate! I felt so many emotions, but the one that stayed with me is the feeling of hope and redemption that was bound to happen rather sooner than later. I have shared in detail my experience at KamiLimu and you can read it here: https://medium.com/@gracekahinga99/no-kidding-kamilimu-mentorship-program-truly-changed-my-life-a962b4488651
The next best news was that on 5th January, I was officially listed as a Women Techmakers Ambassador. The Women Techmakers is a community program initiated by Google that focuses on women in technology, and seeks to help them in acquisition of coding skills, providing them with resources, mentorship and a platform that gives visibility not just to their developer talent but also to they themselves as women.
My journey with the program began when I joined as a member the Women Techmakers Nyeri chapter, under the leadership of Valentine Rutto who was the lead then. I later became interested in organizing events and giving trainings and in my second year at university, Valentine groomed and mentored me on how to lead such a community. Now two years after becoming a member, I was officially going to lead the amazing community of women in STEM in the Mt. Kenya region. Damn! This was more than the validation that I had previously imagined!
Despite this, January still had me dealing with a number of major rejections that would reset me into hopelessness and big-time loser mood which would mess up with my mental health in a lot of ways. I had thought that after surviving the restaurant job, I had developed the tenacity and the resistance needed to stomach bad news, but every time the dreaded emails came in, I would turn into a giant ugly muddle of tears and self-criticism. However, I never stopped making the applications. Even though the rejections steadily continued to come throughout the year, I would bounce right back. I became a warrior, wiping my own tears and stamping my heart for risk after risk.
March;
In March, I received my first check for doing work that related to one of my core skills; writing. In late February, somebody asked in one of the many WhatsApp groups that I’m in that he needed a writer for a short-term project. Anyone who was interested was to DM him.
I was very hesitant at first as I was fighting to stay afloat in the drowning imposter syndrome but later in the evening, I shot my shot. I was hoping by then that he would have already found someone else so I wouldn’t really have to go ahead with the insane idea, but the guy instead asked for samples of my writings. I was shook. I did not have any technical samples to present to him, so I forwarded him two unpublished pieces of non-tech content and the following morning he had asked how much I would charge him. I was on cloud nine! Two days later, I signed an NDA and the following week I met with him to discuss the assignment. The project lasted a month and I knew that I had done really well because he took me to dinner where he settled my fee. Part of the money I used to apply for a passport which I was to finally hold in my hands in June and the rest I have no idea what I did with, I was just so excited to finally get paid to do something that I would want to do as a career. After, I did several other gigs for him and two other clients and while at times it was challenging, I lived for the feeling of catering for some of my bills! (To note, one of the major rejections that I suffered from was not being accepted into the Google Season of Docs and lol, later in the year I got to meet the lady who got into the company that I had applied to. Life is weird! This year I will try again still.
Also, on March 16th I finally turned 20 years. I was no longer a teenager and could now be referred as among the 20-somethings. Yay!
April;
It was in April that my life was destined to change greatly for the rest of the year. Early in the month, I received an email that I had been recommended to become a Program Assistant for the Andela Learning Community and they would love to interview me for the role should I accept the invitation. My head was literally spinning. However, I almost sabotaged the interview because I had been conditioned somehow that the only projects I could discuss about as a woman in tech are the ones I had coded. When I discovered that the projects in question here was my work in community for the past two years, I just completed the call knowing I had aced it. The following week I received a congratulations email, was on-boarded and tasked with the job of working with other Program Assistants in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania to oversee of preparation and the journey of 30,000 learners who were awarded with the Google Africa Development Scholarships.
This turned out to be a life-altering journey that saw my project management and leadership skills improve tremendously, along with my confidence and how I felt about myself. On top of that, I was to receive a monthly stipend that really helped me to establish a little more financial independence from my parents who were sacrificing so much to support my two sisters in high school and me through university. I never minded the added responsibilities and my schedule which turned chaotic overnight. I worked hard, learnt how to balance my studies, the intense mentorship program, community work and the ALC tasks, as well as time management through it all.
May, June, July…most of this period was pure insanity
The next few months from May consisted of planning, organizing and hosting regular ALC meetups across 4 regions in Central Kenya, while at the same time organizing Google Developer Groups events such as the Google I/O Extended Nyeri in my capacity as the Ambassador for WTM Nyeri. It was also during this period that my school, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, and as well as Women Techmakers, ran a feature on me as an exemplary student and community organizer respectively. Everything was happening so fast and sometimes I would wish if only things were to slow down. I needed a breather.
August;
In August, I was lucky to have been accepted and attend the Deep Learning Indaba 2019 that was held at Kenyatta University of Technology for an entire week. How I can only describe the time I spent in the conference is simply, fantastic! I am not a Machine Learning or Deep Learning expert, but my curiosity runs deep for the emerging technologies which are evolving how we interact with machines and the environment. Furthermore, being surrounded with 500+ like-minded persons from many of the African countries and some from beyond is no small event. My favorite session was a keynote given by Ruha Benjamin titled, “Beyond Buzzwords: Innovation, Imagination, and Inequity in the 21st Century”, where she went on to illustrate for us how we humans have already started feeding our own biases into the intelligent machines such as recognition devices failing to “see” black people. There were fascinating sessions that were like a breath of fresh air especially to someone like me who had not been exposed to this kind of space before. I met students pursuing master degrees and PhDs in affluent universities such as Oxford, Carnegie Mellon of Africa, AIMS and many more from around the world. We even had a session with Andrew Ng and life has never become any more unreal that it did then. I also met a lady friend of mine from Rwanda who was my roommate at the SSA GDG and WTM Summit 2018 and I can’t tell who was more surprised between the two of us! I don’t know about everyone else, but I am hoping to attend 2020 conference in Tunisia, and perhaps get a chance someday to be part of the organizing committee which will organize the subsequent conferences around Africa!
October;
October finally saw me graduating from the eight-month long KamiLimu Mentorship journey. On this day I joined 41 other mentees who were dressed to kill in beautiful orange and grey attires. This day was really special to me and one that I was proud of and that is why I went to some extra length to find the dress that I wore. I rarely wear heels preferring flats but on this day, I clinked across the floor like I owned it.
Because come to think of it, I sort of did. I deserved each and every inch of that space as in one way or another, I had made it. It was not easy to go through the program month after month. I had reached a point where I had almost given up, was not completing assignments and refused to apply for some opportunities because I had reached the end of the tether and felt like I had no more tears to cry. There were times I walked to the sessions feeling ashamed of myself for giving up on myself. But somehow, I had found a way to make it to the very end. On the day of graduation, I could barely help myself from being all over the place. I was even given an award of commitment! This day will always be one of my best days here on earth.
On 26th October, I also got an opportunity to go to Uganda. Frankly, it was my first time outside Kenya and finally my new passport had at least one stamp. I accompanied a friend, Chris Barsolai, who was scheduled to deliver a Tensorflow workshop at DevFest Kampala the following day. We travelled by bus which took us about 15 hours to get to Kampala, a hilly capital city. I do not know where I got this notion from that all capital cities are like Nairobi, that is flat, but Kampala ups and downs was not exactly what I had in mind. We spent three days in Uganda, and I finally understood what it feels like to lose a sense of navigation in a new city, the confusion of using new currency and the taste of new cultural delicacies. One thing I can say about Kampala is that the people there know how to party, and they have excellent and plenty of places to throw all caution to the night and just live in the moment. Hopefully without any permanent damage or regrets, lol.
November;
9th November saw me host the largest one-day community event that I have ever organized in my three years of service: DevFest Nyeri 2019 which had an attendance of 284 participants, not only from the Mt. Kenya region but also as far as from Kisumu, Eldoret, Nairobi and Nakuru. I had led the organizing team for the last three months in getting all the preparations ready and this day culminated all our efforts into one huge ball of success! Was it easy? No. Planning the entire event shredded my confidence in pulling it through several times, filled the volunteers with numerous doubts not once or twice, and tested our patience a million times as everything that could go wrong went wrong. However, through it all we stuck it out.
There were times that I had to be the lone strength of the team but I am glad that I never gave up. DevFest Nyeri 2019, as many shared, was the ultimate highlight of all the events we had organized or attended in the whole year. The organization was meticulous and top-notch since our volunteers were super reliable and dedicated, the content from the speakers just what suited each and every attendee at whatever level, and the networking session was lit, literally. If before I had any doubts of my skills as a project manager, this entire event cleared it up. Yes, I may have a long way to go still, but whatever validation that I felt I needed, I got it!
Later that month, in the company of amazing developers and community builders, I travelled to Kisumu for the second time for DevFest Western Kenya. This time I was going as an attendee instead as a speaker as I had done earlier in the year, 26th January 2019. Personally, this is was more of a vacation and a road trip both of which were well deserved after going through one hell of a year, and before I began the final examinations of my third year in university as a Computer Science student.
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