The Stormy Road

Hurricane season in New Orleans had a way of becoming background noise.

Storms came. Most brought rain, wind, and a little inconvenience. There were hurricane drinking parties, followed by stories that grew larger after the danger had passed. Once in a while, a bad one arrived. Still, nothing in my experience had prepared me for Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina did not arrive feeling historic. At first, it was another storm to watch closely. I almost stayed behind. Then its direction changed, and its intensity held. The familiar calculation no longer felt familiar. My internal GPS rerouted: it was time to leave.

I packed my passport and visa. Immigrants always do.

My wife at the time was from Alexandria, Louisiana, so that became our destination. The drive from New Orleans normally took about three hours. That day it took almost eight. Traffic barely moved. Along the road, cars stalled or ran out of gas. Everyone was trying to put distance between a storm and the people they loved, but the road could only carry so many of us at once.

When Katrina hit, I watched the images in disbelief. I was certain New Orleans was gone. The scenes at the Superdome were surreal. Some friends back in Kenya even asked whether I lived in Haiti. What they were watching looked nothing like the America they knew from movies.

Communication broke down. Friends could not reach me and alerted the Kenyan embassy. Somewhere in that confusion, Kenya's Nation newspaper listed me among the Kenyans who were missing. By the time my parents saw the report, I believe I had managed to reach them. They knew I was safe, but seeing their son's name among the missing still caused grave concern. A storm in Louisiana had crossed an ocean and arrived in my childhood home.

I was safe. But safety and normalcy are not the same thing.

We stayed in Alexandria for about a month, then returned to New Orleans. Our home was on the West Bank of New Orleans, which had escaped much of the damage suffered elsewhere. The house was still there, but the life around it had changed. People we knew had scattered. Familiar streets felt emptied of familiar lives. You could return to an address without returning to the place you had left.

The company I worked for decided to relocate to Florida, an odd answer to hurricane risk. With a young family, I could not follow. We sold our house and moved back to Alexandria, expecting the arrangement to be temporary.

Decades later, I am still partly in Alexandria, Louisiana.

That move sits at the center of the story people often flatten into entrepreneurship. The cleaner version says Katrina pushed me out of a job, I began consulting, and necessity opened the road toward building a company. All of that is true. It is also incomplete.

There is no useful way to make that period sound heroic. For a time, I lived in a trailer home because apartments were scarce after Katrina. I was raising a family, trying to earn a living, melting in the Louisiana heat, and learning how quietly a person can lose his sense of direction. Consulting was not the result of a polished business plan. It was one of the few routes I could still see.

After Katrina, I was not the same. I fell into depression. I resented Alexandria, not because the city had caused the storm, but because it became the address of everything I had lost and a life I had not chosen. Starting over as an employee did not feel possible. The city was, and still is, small. The kind of technology work I knew was not waiting for me there.

I imagined moving to Austin. My wife at the time considered Atlanta. In the end, being close to her family mattered. We remained in Alexandria. We bought a house. We tried to be normal. Those years became difficult for both of us. My depression deepened, and the marriage eventually ended.

Through all of this, osTicket already existed. Software is strangely portable. Buildings can close, roads can become impassable, employers can leave, and plans can scatter. Code can still reach a server, and a useful solution can travel to people its creator may never meet.

That portability changed the scale of the question. If Alexandria did not have the market for the work I wanted to do, the work did not have to stop there.

As the work found a path outward, I slowly made peace with the place from which I was sending it. Alexandria reminded me of village life in complicated ways. Small places can be intimate and exclusionary at once. There was gossip, loyalties that behaved like tribes, and a certain weight attached to the right last name. If no one recognized yours, you could feel invisible.

So I stopped waiting for local permission.

I decided to build for customers around the world. At the time I write this, Enhancesoft still does not have a single customer in Alexandria. I even received a local entrepreneur-of-the-year award without changing that fact. The irony no longer bothers me. The company could be rooted in a small Louisiana city without thinking like a small local business.

The lesson was not to abandon the local. It was to refuse to let geography define the size of the problem I could solve.

Today, when I am invited to speak with young innovators, the message I carry is simple: think globally. The world is flatter now than when I first arrived in America. Talent can travel through code, customers can find you across borders, and a useful idea can reach places its maker has never seen. Your address does not have to determine the reach of your ambition. You can begin in Alexandria, Eldoret, or a village like Kolong and build useful work that reaches people almost anywhere.

What I now offer as encouragement is a conviction I first learned by necessity in Alexandria: start where you are, then let the work travel farther than you can.

I do not romanticize disruption. A storm is not valuable because it forces resilience. Loss does not need to prove its usefulness. But after the map changes, we still have to decide what to do next.

I kept building.