StraitOuttaVillage: And The Long Way Back

There is a tempting way to begin this story with everything Kolong did not have. Running water and modern technology were not part of daily life. Electricity arrived much later. I did not grow up surrounded by computers or people who could explain a career in software.

The distance between that childhood and my work today is real, but absence is not the most important thing the village gave me.

Kolong gave me my first teachers. It taught me to pay attention, to respect knowledge that did not arrive with titles, and to see resourcefulness as a form of intelligence. Work was connected to family and community. Very little worth doing was done alone.

My appetite for learning was already strong. I read books from cover to cover, wondered how watches and radios worked, and kept returning to questions long after others had moved on. I did not yet know to call that instinct engineering, but I was drawn to systems, practical problems, and the satisfaction of understanding how the parts fit together.

I graduated first in my high school class. The achievement showed that I could learn, but it did not give me a clear map from Kolong to a life in technology.

Those early habits taught me to value systems that worked in real life and knowledge that became stronger when people shared it.

The village was not an empty beginning. It gave first.

There is an old joke that all Kenyans are runners. It is not true, of course. I just happened to be one.

Running opened the first road beyond what I knew.

A track scholarship carried me from Nandi County to Tulane University in New Orleans. It was an extraordinary opportunity, but opportunity did not remove disorientation. I arrived in a new country, a new academic system, and a social world that read my identity differently from the one I had left.

In Kenya, I had not experienced my Blackness as a category with the same force. In America, my skin, my accent, and the fact that I was an athlete could enter a room before the rest of me. I had thought of myself as intelligent and capable. Now I had to learn how to hold onto that understanding while other people placed me inside assumptions I had not created.

Ability opened some doors. Citizenship and security clearance requirements closed others. I could be recruited for an opportunity, reach the interview, and then discover that I was not allowed into the room. The experience taught me that talent matters, but institutions still decide where talent is permitted to travel.

It also made building my own road feel less optional.

I had never used a computer before college. When an adviser asked which programming classes I had taken in high school, the honest answer was none.

For a long time, I could not afford a computer of my own. The engineering school lab stayed open later than the others, and its machines ran Unix and Solaris. So those became the systems I learned. Later, Linux and open source felt natural because they continued an education shaped by access, curiosity, and the freedom to inspect how things worked.

What began as a constraint became part of my technical foundation.

In 2003, that foundation helped me build the first version of osTicket. It began as a small, useful response to a practical problem. Open source allowed the project to travel farther than I could carry it. People installed it, questioned it, improved it, translated it, and depended on it.

Small software found a large life.

New Orleans gave me an education and a city I loved. Hurricane Katrina changed the direction of everything that followed.

The storm displaced me, pushed me out of my job, and brought me to Alexandria, Louisiana. Consulting became a bridge from employment into entrepreneurship. For a time I lived in a trailer home while continuing to work on osTicket. We even gave one release an internal nickname inspired by those conditions.

There is humor in that memory now, but the uncertainty was real. Entrepreneurship did not arrive as a polished vision. It grew from the need to keep moving after the expected path disappeared.

Alexandria became the place where the work matured. osTicket became part of a company. Enhancesoft became a team. An accidental destination became an intentional foundation.

Years abroad created opportunities I will always value. They also accumulated a cost that was harder to see on a résumé.

My parents were getting older. Time together could not be postponed forever. The distance between visits began to feel larger than the distance between airports.

My father has dementia. Watching the disease change his relationship with memory has sharpened my understanding of time and what deserves it. It is one reason returning matters, and one reason I am sharing this journey now. Memory cannot be treated as an archive that will always be waiting when I finally make time for it.

I also kept returning to a question that had followed me since college: why should talented people have to leave home before their ambition is taken seriously?

The world of work is flatter than the one I entered decades ago. The internet, open source, and remote collaboration now allow meaningful work to cross borders in ways that once required relocation. I can work from nearly anywhere. More importantly, a team in Eldoret can build for the world without treating departure as the price of participation.

Eldoret gave that question a practical form. Enhancesoft could grow meaningful technology work in Kenya while remaining connected to our team in Alexandria. Knowledge could move in both directions. Globally useful products could be built from places the usual technology map overlooks.

Returning was not rescue. Kenya was not waiting for me to bring it technology. In mobile money and the use of financial technology in daily life, it was already ahead of many Western countries, including the United States. The work was to recognize, trust, and help widen the opportunity already present.

“We shall not cease from exploration,<br> and the end of all our exploring<br> will be to arrive where we started<br> and know the place for the first time.”

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Today, I can sit in Kolong and write code.

That sentence still amazes me.

The child whose daily life was mostly untouched by modern technology and the engineer working through it are not opposites. One made the other possible. The village taught me to observe, improvise, persist, and care whether something actually worked. Engineering gave those instincts another medium.

The connection now runs in every direction. Kolong, Eldoret, Alexandria, and New Orleans can exist inside the same working day. I did not return carrying the world to the village. I returned to find that the village was already participating in the world on its own terms.

That is the turn inside StraitOuttaVillage. It begins as a story about leaving a village and becomes a story about understanding the village differently after the long way back.

I am publishing it one chapter at a time because memory does not arrive as a finished manuscript. Each chapter needs room for photographs, details, corrections, and the voices of people who remember parts I may have forgotten. The story should be allowed to deepen as I do.

This is not a claim that I made myself from nothing. No one does. It is an account of the people, places, chances, disciplines, disruptions, and acts of trust that made the road possible.

I once had to travel a very long way to encounter the tools I use today.

Now those tools can travel home with me.

The journey is not complete. It has simply reached a place meaningful enough to begin telling it.

Begin StraitOuttaVillage