I am putting the final touches on this reflection on a bus in London, on my way to my first classes for a graduate program in social innovation at the London School of Economics. However, the first iteration of this reflection started back in May on a plane to Detroit for my sister’s high school graduation.

That flight represented a crossroads in my and my family’s life. My sister graduated from the same high school from which I had graduated a decade prior, which meant we were saying goodbye to teachers I had loosely kept up with through events and whenever I would pick Aleesa up from school, teachers whom I have known for 12 years now. We were saying goodbye to the elementary-turned-high school, with the gym/cafeteria/rec space where I directed my first full length play, the classrooms where we studied for IB exams, and the walls that hold the names and memories of all our high school friends.

With my sister starting college in Arkansas, my family will be moving our homebase to the South, where my dad has already been working (and waiting patiently) for the last three years. On my last visit to Michigan for Aleesa’s graduation, I said goodbye to the home that had sheltered us, had kept us warm and safe through the Midwest winters, had hosted our loved ones, had given us a gorgeous garden and fresh veggies to enjoy, and had filled our hearts with peace and possibility. I feel I am grieving what it represented for me as a home base, somewhere I constantly returned to. The familiar marble of the foyer, the layout of the kitchen. For 8 years, it also carried the scamper of my dog Snowy’s footsteps and the jingle of her collar as she would rush down the stairs every time I opened the front door -- the same joyous greeting that awaited me whether I’d been running errands for a few hours or had been away at university for a few weeks or had been on a project abroad for several months. Snowy passed away in 2022, and this house in Michigan is the last house (of five, across three countries) that holds memories of her.

After that weekend in Michigan, more goodbyes were in store. The second iteration of this reflection was one I started writing in early June, right after Nauman and I packed our lives into yet another storage unit, attended our closest friends’ graduations from their programs, and prepared to move to Chicago for Nauman’s 6-month internship.

On a Saturday in late May, we celebrated our loved ones with our final, very dramatic “Goodbye Chai” party, and on the Sunday, we packed up the whole apartment in 9 hours with the help of our incredible friends and family.

That week, I said farewell to standing chai routines, Tuesday night majlises, Friday mosque + dinner routines, weekly pottery classes, and all the people, routines, and rituals that made Boston feel like home over the previous 9 months. I said goodbye to the dogs I walked, the community advocacy groups that had welcomed me with open arms, friendships forged in Saturday morning practicums at EMT school, and friends who had become family over countless cups of chai and Parle-G cookies. Boston gifted me an audition space, a rehearsal room for a life I might hope to live one day. In the short time that Boston hosted me, I learned to think beyond community as something inherited, something stable that people grew up within. Rather, I experienced firsthand how community can also be assembled, improvised, and built lovingly through repetition and presence.

The most recent iteration of this reflection has been in the works since I arrived in London, where I have been thinking more deeply about impermanence. I wanted roots -- in Detroit, in Boston. I wanted spices that lived on racks instead of cardboard boxes, and bookcases that were attached to walls, and friends that know where the extra blankets live when they walk into my home like it’s theirs. Instead, all my belongings are living indefinitely in a storage unit, save for the 2 suitcases that accompanied me on my flight to London. Amid disenchanting viewings for flats across London during the day, and crashing on my dear friend Cathy’s couch at night, I have been finding the rootedness I hoped to feel by this point in my life quite elusive. But the longer I sit with my experiences over the last year, the more I think I still misunderstand what roots can look like.

Some of the deepest-rooted communities and relationships I encountered this year were formed under conditions of impermanence, and this is coming from someone who used to believe community was proven by permanence: the childhood friends who still know your parents, the neighbors who have watched you grow up, the house whose spare keys your trusted loved ones carry. But this year, so many meaningful encounters occurred with an ending already written into them. I always knew someone would graduate, an EMT course would end, a lease would expire, summer camp participants would disperse, a flight would be booked. And precisely because of that, I showed up more deliberately while I could. I am learning that temporary community is not inferior to “real” community just because it isn’t permanent.

This week, I am starting a graduate program with a fixed time-frame, with no inkling of where I may end up next: a path where the only thing guaranteed is uncertainty and impermanence. A lot of people have written about how hard it is to start over when you have hit rock bottom, but I haven’t come across many who write about how to start over when you already love the life you have lived and are filled with gratitude for the choices you have been fortunate to have, and yet you still wonder what else you are capable of building. I am so privileged in that I wasn’t forced to leave any version of my life. I could have chosen to stay in Boston with our loved ones to wait out Nauman’s internship, or chosen to stay in Chicago with him for the duration of his internship, or chosen to move to Arkansas with my parents and sister. Any of these versions of my life would have been beautiful, would have held me in a loving, semi-permanent community, would have given me a sense of rootedness, and would have made me happy. And yet, loving one life does not obligate you to stop being curious about the others you could build. I trust that the life waiting for me to build in London is just as beautiful, filled with connection, possibility, and opportunity I can’t even imagine yet. I am filled with gratitude for the lives I have lived, and all the lives I still have yet to try on for size.

Maybe the roots I am chasing are not intended for me in this phase of my life, or maybe I have been thinking about roots too literally. If that is the case, I am excited and determined to fully apply the lessons I’ve learned over the past year in building community where I am. Maybe what I am really looking for is the infrastructure of belonging: rituals sturdy enough to make a place feel inhabited, relationships practiced often enough to become dependable, and doors that open easily in both directions. Over the past year, I have learned that these things do not necessarily require permanence. They can start to be built over a semester in Boston, over a few weeks in a place far from home, or on a friend’s couch in London while you are still figuring out where you will live.

Perhaps this is also why I keep returning to questions of hosting in my work. So much of my life has depended on other people’s willingness to make room: a spare bed, a seat at a table, an invitation into a village, a cup of tea, a translator, a friend saying, “stay here until you figure it out.” I have been so lucky to have been welcomed into homes, communities, routines, and places near and far. The future I keep imagining is, in some ways, an attempt to build that generosity into a place, and to think more carefully about what it means to enter someone else’s home, neighborhood, or community without treating their hospitality as something I am entitled to consume.

I still see a future where I can build on everything my hosts have taught me and eventually become a host myself: a village or farm or eco-hostel where my loved ones are a stone’s throw away. I see weekly chai nights, guitars around a campfire, horses running free, corn planted alongside beans and rice, a makerspace for woodworking and pottery and metalsmithing, a library, sooo many dogs. I hear the voices of people I have met across different chapters of my life yapping away in English and Arabic and Spanish and Russian and Shugni and Urdu and Kyrgyz and Gujarati and Swahili and French and Hmong and Kichwa. I imagine people floating in and out, or rooting themselves indefinitely, as it suits them. All the things that have made the places I have loved feel like home -- relationship, ritual, curiosity, hospitality, making things together, showing up again and again -- all made into concrete infrastructure, if never permanence.

So, off I go to my first classes of the year, grateful for every place that has hosted me, every person who has made room for me, and every farewell that has taught me something about how to welcome others wherever I am.

With love and longing,

Zoha

P.S: please enjoy a video of some very special memories of the home we got to make in Boston <3

This Substack has become a paper trail of my life since leaving management consulting, so it is only fit that I share exciting life updates here! This summer, I wrote the Statement of Academic Purpose below to apply for the MSc in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. I just received the final documents I needed for my student visa, so if all goes smoothly, I will be starting in two weeks! London / Europe friends, I can’t wait to see you and spend the next year with you!

For posterity, I am including my essay below, but the TL;DR is that I applied to this programme because of its methodology of learning from an existing social enterprise through a year-long group project placement. I hope to use this programme to build a career that supports community-led tourism and authentic exchange where value is not extracted away by corporations, but rather, remains with the people who build these experiences.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and am so grateful for all your support <3

With love and new beginnings,

Z

Statement of Academic Purpose

Part 1: Why do you want to do this programme? This might cover, for example, what you’ll bring to the cohort, and what your particular strengths are.

I grew up as a guest. Although that articulation may conjure images of a child running through a hotel hallway, I mean to say that I grew up across four countries, hosted by generous communities who shared their hearts and homes with me. Through their warmth, I was privileged to become fluent in practices, languages, and cultures that were not my own. My upbringing in North America, South Asia, and the Middle East allowed me to experience cross-cultural exchange in a way I could never have from a classroom, book, or video alone. At the same time, I learned that mobility and access were not equally distributed. The countries in which I grew up made that legible in who was called an expat and who was called a migrant worker, who lived in what conditions, and whose labour allowed a place to entertain guests. From an early age, I became sensitive to who benefits from an encounter with a new locale, and whose efforts are abstracted into its infrastructure.

As an adult, I began my career at McKinsey & Company to pursue this thread of encounter. I learned to operate within the machinery of mobility, understanding how to move people from place to place to foster exchange across borders. For four years, I advised airlines on revenue management, tourism authorities on destination strategy, and economic development engines on attracting capital. I learned to diagnose complex organisational problems, build strategic frameworks, and translate ambiguity into concrete decisions. I built lasting relationships with senior commercial and government leaders across Southeast Asia, North America, and the Middle East.

The more fluent I became in global travel systems, the more clearly I could see who they were designed for and who was being optimised around. Local communities, our hosts, appeared in our frameworks as inputs, constraints, or markets… but rarely as the point. Somewhere in a hotel room in Saudi Arabia, I recognized how I was replicating the extraction I had witnessed in my youth, helping institutions make profitable decisions about places without being accountable to the people whose knowledge, practices, and labour made those places valuable.

Thus, I spent the last year pursuing independent social-sector projects with the operators and communities I had been advising about from a distance. I was a guest at refugee-led organisations, indigenous-led hostels, and community-led tourism programmes across Kenya, Ecuador, and Vietnam. In exchange, I offered what I had learned in strategy consulting to make my hosts’ work legible to participants, donors, partners, and institutions without flattening complexity or shifting authorship away from those who know their communities best. This year confirmed what I understood implicitly in childhood: I want to spend my career designing systems of exchange where people of varied backgrounds can encounter one another in ways that centre hosts’ economic dignity, protect local agency, prioritize environmental stewardship, and empower the communities that create the experience. Authentic exchange where value remains with the communities that build these experiences.

I am applying to the LSE MSc in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship because I want to strengthen my fluency as a builder of bridges between people, systems, and worlds. I hope to turn these emerging experiences in community-led social innovation into a coherent and viable practice with rigour, structure, and accountability. I am especially drawn to the year-long collaboration with host-led organisations in Nairobi and Cape Town, where I hope to practice co-designing alongside local hosts in real time, with peers asking versions of the same question from their own contexts.

What I bring to this cohort is a bridge: the analytical fluency of someone trained inside global mobility systems, and the relational practice of someone learning from the communities those systems were not designed to serve. I bring the capacity to move between a strategy deck and a community field note, between an institutional funder’s framework and a refugee-led organisation’s reality, and to translate across those distances without discounting what makes each one true. This is the work I plan to deepen at LSE, and the skillset I hope to offer to peers and partner organisations: someone who can see across the distance between institutional power and community knowledge and can build something useful in the space between.

Part 2: Tell us about an experience you had with social innovation/entrepreneurship/a project with high social impact. What role did you play and what did you learn about yourself?

The experience that has most shaped my understanding of social innovation was leading a strategy refresh over the past five months for a tourism programme offering immersive, faculty-led experiences in destinations often oversimplified by conventional travel narratives (e.g., North Africa, East Africa, South Asia). The programme’s value was clear: participants were visiting historic sites while engaging in a thoughtfully curated experience of place, identity, knowledge, history, and exchange. The programme offers access to scholars, cultural institutions, local communities, and intergenerational dialogue in ways that few conventional travel or educational programmes could replicate.

The challenge was equally distinctive: how could this tourism programme scale and reach more participants while preserving the depth, trust, and relationships that make it meaningful? More than a growth strategy question, this was a social innovation question. To expand its impact responsibly, the programme had to balance access and affordability, financial sustainability, participant diversity, host community capacity, alumni engagement, and the risk of diluting the relationships and pedagogical quality that create impact.

My role was to help translate those tensions into a strategic framework. As an independent consultant, I could not start with a pre-built answer from McKinsey’s extensive knowledge directory, or the prolific industry experiences of our managing partners. Instead, I was learning alongside the organisation, trying to understand what made its work irreplaceable before suggesting how it might grow. We examined how the programme could expand impact across different time horizons: strengthening a few flagship journeys in the near term, introducing more tiered offerings over time, and eventually creating a broader ecosystem of accessible hybrid learning and alumni engagement. We also explored how solidarity pricing and partner subsidy models could support both financial sustainability and participant diversity.

This became a live case study for me: how can travel-based exchange create genuine local benefit without overwhelming the relationships and resources that make it meaningful? Surveying alumni of the programme was particularly revealing; participants most valued interacting with local communities and scholars but worried their large group sizes had strained the logistics and security teams. I learned then that the operating model could not be separated from the social impact: who has decision-making power, how resources flow, and whose knowledge is treated as primary determine whether cultural exchange remains reciprocal or becomes a product.

This learning has shaped how I see my own role. I am strongest at the intersection of vision and execution: helping community innovators and operators clarify what makes their work distinct, identify what systems are needed to sustain it, and make decisions without losing sight of their values. That lesson has been reinforced across my independent projects with communities over the last year, confirming for me that my best contribution is in building structures that protect, translate, and scale the solutions already being developed by people living the reality.

Part 3: How will your past experience, combined with this LSE master’s, help you to achieve your goals?

My goal is to develop a venture-building and advisory model for community-rooted tourism that empowers local hosts by strengthening strategy, operations, storytelling, and routes to market while protecting what makes their work meaningful. Near term, I hope to deepen my impact by advising community operators and host-governed hospitality ventures that advance narrative reclamation, cultural stewardship, and local economic development.

The MSc in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship will give me concrete frameworks to design systems of ethical exchange that grow benefits for community operators. My work has given me fluency in the supply-side systems of grassroots projects and large organisations alike. Management consulting provided technical fluency in scale – revenue management, pricing, stakeholder alignment, and executive decision-making – while independent social-sector projects taught me to build trust and articulate unique value to stakeholders.

At LSE, I hope to deepen the complementary skill set I need: identifying demographics most likely to engage reciprocally, positioning community-led experiences in markets dominated by extractive intermediaries, and sequencing growth so visibility builds host capacity without exploitation. In classes taught by Dr. Salcedo and Dr. Kappes, I expect to develop this directly; segmentation, positioning, product adoption, and organisational culture are the precise tools I need to move from advising individual operators toward building something replicable. I am eager to learn from faculty like Dr. Krige, whose work challenges dominant assumptions about scale and foregrounds micro, trust-led social enterprises, making the programme especially relevant to my ambitions: infrastructure that strengthens community-led work rather than abstracts from it.

The year-long group project is where I want to practice that framework. Recent SIE cohorts have worked with organisations like TooMuchWiFi in Cape Town and DPAK Sacco in Nairobi, exactly the environment where frameworks meet realities of innovators and community members already building change. I am interested both in what these enterprises are building, and in how we as external collaborators can enter those contexts with preparation, listen before recommending, and co-develop analyses that are genuinely useful to operators.

I am eager to apply my learnings from the programme in the capstone. Whether by designing a new social enterprise model or through consulting for an existing organisation, I look forward to examining models with the rigour of faculty scrutiny and field experience, bringing a perspective shaped by very different worlds: revenue models for national airlines, strategy decks for think tanks, and evening campfires with Otavaleño families amid the Andean mountains.

Ultimately, I see this MSc as a bridge between what I know how to do and the work I want to be trusted to do. I know how to structure ambiguity, build models, align stakeholders, and move from vision to execution. LSE will help me deepen the theory, ethics, measurement, and organisational behaviour practices to apply those skills in social innovation contexts. I will leave better equipped to guide community-led tourism ventures in expanding local benefits: driving strategic scale, safeguarding what matters most, and ensuring host communities retain true ownership of the value they create in these encounters.

We welcomed 39 participants between the ages of 16 and 20 from Central Asia, Syria, Pakistan, India, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Another 20 young people from Naryn joined us for the social innovation curriculum, working with our international participants to explore local challenges, identify community assets, and develop ideas grounded in the realities of the place.

Over two short weeks, our participants experienced a whole world built intentionally for them. They built portfolios, learned to approach technology as people capable of questioning its power and consequences, worked alongside local youth, practiced listening before proposing solutions, and learned to design with a place rather than simply for it.

They also learned about one another. They shared music, family histories, cultural dinners, dances, prayers, and stories about where they came from. They played sports, hiked mountains, swam in lakes, slept in yurts, missed home, grieved, argued, laughed, and learned to love people whose lives and beliefs differed drastically from their own.

Our culture does not equip us particularly well to handle the dissolution of temporary communities that change the course of our lives. I have spent the last year trying to understand how to build community, but I have yet to grasp how to hold the loss of a community that briefly becomes family and then disperses.

As someone raised on the magic of theatre, temporary community feels familiar—a group of people with a shared vision comes together for a fixed amount of time and steps outside reality to build a world of possibility.

This month in Kyrgyzstan helped me distill some of the conditions that make certain temporary communities magical: preparing a culture of care, existing in close proximity, stepping outside ordinary life, and knowing from the beginning that time is limited.

Preparing and building a culture of care

Temporary community often looks spontaneous from the outside, but as we learned this month, underneath the magic is preparation, attention, and the repeated choice to notice.

The community our participants entered began forming long before they arrived. After months of virtual planning, our facilitator and staff team spent 4 days on-site at UCA. Led by our visionary director, Nadim, our associate director and operations champion, Safiyya, with leadership training from Sabrina, we prepared for the practical and emotional demands of the program: schedules, locations, responsibilities, session content, safeguarding, and how to react if things went awry.

Additionally, we developed the emotional culture we wanted participants to enter. We shared parts of our lives with one another. We discussed leadership, grief, faith, vulnerability, conflict, and the responsibility of caring for young people far from home. We learned to access our own sense of possibility and our love for one another, for participants we had not yet met, and for the world we hoped to create together. We knew we could not ask participants to be vulnerable, curious, generous, and loving with one another unless we modeled those things first.

During formation week, we developed rituals that became part of how our team operated. There were chai debriefs at the end of long days, deep breaths, feelings distilled into one-word offerings, rooftop stargazing, fits of laughter, and regular rounds of holding hands while reciting our team charter with the sincerity of some unusually affectionate cult.

Our rituals were rather woo-woo, and they worked. They gave us familiar ways to return to one another when we were tired or overwhelmed, and they made care an expectation of our time and work together, rather than something offered only after a crisis.

That care depended on the competent structure holding us. When our bus broke down on the way to Bishkek, the team could treat the delay as a joyous experience because we trusted the staff and logistics team to handle it. Throughout the program, the operations team did an enormous amount of work that most people would never see: rerouting transport, handling medical needs, managing rooms and meals, translating, adjusting schedules, and responding whenever reality ignored the plan. Because we as facilitators trusted the competence and structure holding us, we could stay present and find joy in the adventure, and we are forever grateful to Safiyya and the ops team for that gift.

The preparation and structure also continued each evening after the participants returned to their rooms. Facilitators gathered in Safiyya’s campus apartment, made chai, crowded onto couches and floor mattresses, and reviewed what needed attention before the next day. Anything unresolved was picked up again at breakfast the next morning.

Which participant had gone quiet? Who was homesick? Which conflict needed follow-up? Who was carrying grief? Which participant needed encouragement, and who needed space? Which facilitator was reaching their limit and needed support?

Existing in proximity

Living steps away from people who feel like family changes how care happens.

When Egypt (unfairly) lost to Argentina, a few of us were devastated by everything that game represented on the world stage. After noticing we were both online and interacting with the same grieving Instagram reels, I asked my dear friend and co-facilitator, Ali, if he wanted to be sad together.

It was both a ridiculous and entirely sincere question: do you want to be sad together? Proximity made that question possible. I did not have to schedule care weeks in advance or wonder whether our sadness was serious enough to warrant asking for time together. Ali and I grabbed our hoodies, walked downstairs, hung on the monkey bars, and imagined a more just and hopeful world.

When they arrived to UCA, participants had the same access to one another. The people who would become their closest friends were across the hall, beside them at breakfast, or waiting to play with them in the field. They shared bedrooms, meals, sessions, buses, hikes, and the spaces between planned activities.

That proximity created hundreds of encounters that we as facilitators could never have designed. Throughout camp, a group of participants spent nearly every short break and sports period playing Spikeball together. At the end, they gifted the Spikeball net to one participant from Pakistan. They turned the handover into a full ceremony, complete with handshakes and the kind of seriousness young people bring to a joke that has also become an expression of love. The gift came to represent the repeated decision to find one another and play together whenever a few minutes opened up.

Proximity did not guarantee intimacy. It sometimes created irritation, misunderstanding, and conflict. Participants could not retreat easily from differences in language, faith, living habits, or communication styles. But this is part of the value of proximity: inconvenience is not an excuse to isolate oneself from community, and encounter became impossible to avoid.

After one leadership session, a participant took me aside to address culture and inclusion. He raised his observation of how participants who did not speak English as a first language were fighting to be heard in fast-moving group activities, and that their opinions were often disregarded by those who did speak English as a first language. This brought up a discussion of privilege and responsibility, and it shaped how we conducted activities in future sessions. This participant’s willingness to initiate this conversation showed that the community was strong enough to question itself.

Belonging is not only about feeling comfortable; it is also about feeling empowered to name what is not working in a community without immediately losing your place, and proximity serves as a physical reminder of your place within the community.

Stepping outside ordinary life

One of the fascinating double-edged swords of temporary communities is that people enter them without the usual evidence of who they have been.

At home, other versions of us already exist: my family remembers my childhood, my friends know my habits, my employer has assigned me a role. People that know us have some expectation of us, whether it is that we are responsible, shy, difficult, funny, smart, calm, or anything else.

At camp, participants arrived without these old versions following them into the room, granting them permission and room to experiment. The “quiet” person could speak freely. The “responsible” one could ask for care. Someone afraid of appearing imperfect could try something publicly before they felt ready.

During the social innovation challenge, many participants presented in English for the first time, explaining ideas they had developed in teams with young people from Naryn. It was not lost on me that the participants trusted their group enough to risk being visibly imperfect.

A participant who had only ever sung in front of her family performed for the entire camp. Another confronted her fear of heights and scrambled up the mountain we looked at through our windows each morning. Another had a panic response on horseback, regulated herself, and chose to continue, smiling the rest of the way. These participants all discovered that their fears could exist alongside action and perseverance.

The unfamiliar setting made these discoveries easier to access. Participants woke up to mountains and heard Russian and Kyrgyz spoken around them. They ate fruit directly from trees in the yard. Many were travelling abroad for the first time and encountering unfamiliar people, food, customs, landscapes, and relationships all at once.

At Issyk-Kul, participants swam and kayaked with mountains around them, then returned to yurts and looked up at a night sky darker than many of them had seen before. Access to this nature interrupted ordinary life and led many participants to venture out of their comfort zones. They led songs around the campfire, stargazed during a power outage, and danced with the Kyrgyz guests at the facility.

The social innovation challenge also asked participants to step outside familiar ways of interpreting place. International visitors often enter unfamiliar communities, notice what they think is missing, and start proposing solutions. The social innovation challenge turned this process on its head. Naryn community members came to UCA, shared stories of growing up in the city, challenged participants’ assumptions on what Naryn had and what it needed, and built assets for the local community together. They also connected over music, home-made drinks, and the universal woes and joys of being young, leading many of our international participants to realize how much they had in common with youth from the hosting locale.

Stepping outside ordinary life creates room to question both who we think we are and what we think we know about other people.

Knowing the end

From the beginning, we knew our time was limited. Two short weeks all together, then flights, buses, families, schools, and the rest of our lives were waiting.

The scarcity of time made us bolder and more direct in the language and memories we wanted to leave behind. We stayed up to count shooting stars, watched the World Cup games at 1 am, and waited for sunrise over the lake. We shared stories we had never told anyone else aloud. We wrote letters, exchanged gifts, and tried to fit meaning into final conversations.

In ordinary life, we delay affection because we assume another opportunity will appear. We tell ourselves we will ask the real question next week or express gratitude at the next opportunity. At camp, everyone knew how many nights remained. We became quicker to say what we felt. We crossed the hall to check on each other, chose another conversation over sleep, and wrote letters while there was still time to place them in each other’s hands.

The same time limit also made people braver. Participants climbed, spoke, sang, swam, apologized, challenged the group, and allowed themselves to be known. There was no time to wait for the ideal version of courage.

The culture we had tried to model during facilitator formation week eventually belonged to the participants as much as it belonged to us. They held one another through homesickness, grief, physical fear, conflict, and the emotional intensity of travel to a new place.

Returning to permanence

As suddenly as it began, the program ended. The participants left. Facilitators and staff departed in waves. People who had lived only steps away from one another returned to different countries, schools, families, and time zones.

The community still exists, but no longer in the form that made it possible. It survives in group chats, photographs, voice notes, letters, inside jokes, and plans to reunite that will always battle with distance and logistics.

This program affirmed the life I am trying to build: one organized around shared work, cultural encounter, practical care, nature, and the way we cultivate more humanness in the presence of other people.

I am still learning how to accept the end of temporary communities like this one while honoring and appreciating their impermanence. Maybe embracing them does not require enjoying every ending. It may simply mean acknowledging how much they matter in our lives and understanding that some of the intensity was possible precisely because the community was temporary. We were removed from our normal roles, living close to each other, sharing meaningful work, spending time in nature, and surrounded by rituals that made care visible. And of course, we knew there was a deadline.

We cannot reproduce programs like this in everyday life, and I am not sure we should try. However, we can carry some of the conditions forward, and I think that is a meaningful effort.

For me, that means taking proximity seriously: choosing, where I can, to live within walking distance of people I love, dropping in instead of scheduling every interaction weeks in advance, and building places where friends can linger long enough for conversations to move beyond updates.

It means developing rituals: recurring dinners, chai nights, walks, celebrations, community projects, and gatherings predictable enough that people know they have somewhere to return to.

It means having something to do together. Some of the strongest relationships I have experienced this year have formed through shared work: building programs, solving challenges, hosting people, fundraising, making things, taking care of a place. I have witnessed firsthand how community deepens when we need one another for something beyond company.

It means continuing to create spaces where people can encounter different versions of themselves. Mixing friends from different parts of life, inviting people across generations and backgrounds into the same room. Making it possible for people to arrive without expecting them to perform a certain role.

It also means practicing care as infrastructure, like how we did as facilitators. Someone has to invite people. Someone has to make the chai, notice who has gone quiet, introduce the person standing alone, ask what happened after the difficult conversation, and create the next reason for everyone to gather. From what I’ve seen, that work is what turns a collection of people into a community.

And finally, I want to carry forward the urgency created by knowing our time was limited. Camp made the deadline obvious. Ordinary life makes us think we have more time than we do. I want to write the letter now. Play on the monkey bars. Ask the harder question. Stay for one more conversation. Tell people when I love them. Treat the time I have with people as finite, because it is.

I am still chasing rootedness. But perhaps rootedness is less about finding one permanent community and more about learning how to build the conditions for belonging wherever I am, and then doing the repeated work required to keep those conditions alive.

Kyrgyzstan gave me a concentrated version of that lesson, but my task now is to practice it at home, wherever that may be.

With love and impermanence,

Z

Nauman’s cousins spent the day at Costco with me, helping me figure out everything we’d need. And then after that, I didn’t prepare a single thing. My friends in Boston, who have only known me for a few short months, came early to set up. They worked alongside the friends I’ve known since college like they had always been part of the same story. Together, they arranged everything: platters of vegetables, cheese boards, waffle stations, all of it coming together through an unexpected but not unsurprising quiet coordination. The food was carried into the loft. The furniture was rearranged. Guests were picked up and brought to the venue from airports and train stations. The collective mural was hung, paints were laid out, collage tables and materials set, drinks arranged, pizzas heated. The projections fixed from weirdo cats to cool abstract visuals. The music was chosen to fit every vibe, from the set up and early hours of the event to the dance party vibes and clean up time. Every detail was noticed. Every small thing was handled. Everything I could have worried about, already taken care of before I had the thought.

I spent the night in a space that had been built for me by people I love. People making art, trying things, laughing, moving between conversations with those they’ve known for a few minutes or for years. Music filling the rooms. Creativity that wasn’t reserved for a select “artsy” few, but a language everyone was speaking, on the dance floor or in the food arrangements or at the collage tables or in the collective murals.

Throughout the whole celebration in a city I had only recently started calling home, my sister was by my side, and I never felt my family was far from me. Aleesa has only missed one day of school this year, and it was so that she could celebrate this weekend with me. My parents were in Toronto that night, but they called the venue to surprise me right in the middle of the party in Boston, calling at exactly the moment I was missing them the most and wishing they could be there with us.

And then, the party just kept going. Nauman, mid-semester in two Masters programs, still planned another, second celebration in New York. Two vans full of our cherished friends and family carted from Boston to NYC to keep celebrating, and even more loved ones joining us there -- both those who call NYC home and those who came in from far away. Bowling, momos (my favorite), adeni chai, exactly how I love it. Another space where I felt deeply seen and cherished.

To top it all off, I headed home to Michigan later in the week to celebrate even more. My mom and I have birthdays 2 days apart, and we got to celebrate her milestone birthday together at brunch with our whole family. My dad flew in after consecutive weeks of travel and showered us with flowers, gifts, and love. Remembrance and gratitude for how blessed I am to be surrounded and loved by such incredible souls have permeated my every waking moment since.

So this is a thank you to:

• The ones that made me feel loved and held, that weekend and every day, near and far

• The ones who flew in from across the world, across the country, across the coast, and the ones who opened their homes to host everyone coming in

• The ones from every chapter of my life: high school, college, work, Boston, random shuttle bus encounters in Costa Rica

• The ones who thought of things I didn’t even have a chance to think of, and who took care of details I’ll probably never even know about

• The ones who went out of their comfort zone and joined me on the dance floor, at the bowling alley, or at the art stations

• The ones who boldly expressed themselves and found ways to relate through collaging, painting, dancing, and playing

• The ones who met someone new, the ones I recently came to know, the ones I’ve known forever

• The ones who made something incredibly beautiful feel so easy

• The ones who made this birthday feel like joy and love in their most undeniable forms, a beacon in the midst all the turmoil in the world today

This is a thank you, and it’s also a promise: To show you all the love I can, to show up for you, to pay attention to making you feel cherished, to make things softer, lighter, more joyful where I can. And to help create spaces that feel like this, again and again, to hold one another in both the best and the most trying times.

This birthday weekend meant more to me than I can fully put into words, and I will spend a long time trying to live up to it.

With love and eternal gratitude,

Z

The majority of the population in Otavalo are Indigenous Otavaleño. I had the immense privilege of being welcomed to an Otavaleño eco-hostel built and led by my host, José.

I arrived to El Tío Hostal as a stranger, but the first Kichwa words José taught me were that tío / tía means dear friend (yes, I know it’s uncle/aunt in Spanish). This immediate inclusion of me as a dear friend, instead of a visiting stranger, would echo throughout my time in Otavalo.

I sought out the experience with José because I have felt disconnected from the land and have yearned to learn what it means to live in reciprocity with it: to steward it, tend to it, to benefit from it, and to live closer to it.

I came to find El Tío Hostal through Worldpackers, a platform that connects travelers with local hosts offering accommodations and sometimes meals in exchange for a few hours of work per day. At its best, the work exchange model offers an alternative to extractive tourism. Instead of passing through a place as a consumer, I am a participant, helping my hosts however I can.

I was drawn to this model because it meant I could travel more intentionally, to places I was invited. I hoped I could move in a way where less of my travel experience was shaped by extraction, and more was shaped by my contribution to and relationship with my hosts, both people and place. It seemed an intriguing exchange, and in addition to ad hoc tasks around the hostel and farm, I offered José support with social media and tourism strategy.

But what I found at El Tío was not what I expected.

Because it was winter, there wasn’t much to do on the land. I helped with small projects, building shelving units and paving walking paths, but above all, José encouraged me to rest.

“Descanse, tía, descanse. Hoy, no trabajo.”

I resisted at first. I felt like I owed him my time and effort. That was our agreement, I thought. I work, and in exchange, I stay.

But over the course of many days, outings, shared meals, and long tea breaks, I began to understand something I hadn’t expected: Presence was the part of the agreement that wasn’t stated aloud.

Beyond the work exchange, José and I became dear friends: tíos, if you will. Someone with whom to joke, swap music recommendations, and share stories. Someone with whom to walk three kilometers to a neighboring village to get honey from a friend’s bees. Someone with whom to explore markets and cities three bus changes away. Someone with whom to sit and make sense of the world, drawing connections across Ecuador, Venezuela, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, and beyond.

Throughout my time at El Tío Hostal, I stayed in a log cabin built from surrounding trees in the principle of minga (collective labor for community infrastructure) by José and his friends and family. I ate fruits and berries grown on the hostel grounds, drank tea from leaves I picked from the lemon verbena (cedrón) tree behind the kitchen, and shared queso fresco I picked up from the animal market in town.

In the evenings, José and his mother, whom I also began lovingly calling Abuelita at her insistence, would pop corn kernels and roast small potatoes on an open fire. We would slice fresh avocados, cheese, and fruit to share. Sometimes Abuelita or I would bring fried fish or empanadas from the market. Sometimes José would cook peas with garlic and onions and rice. I made mushroom pasta a few nights, and chai on my last evening.

Every time food or tea was made, I was invited.

I was encouraged to practice Spanish, to learn some Kichwa, and to observe and absorb the rituals of the days: fresh tea, walks in the mountains, work on the hostel, work in town, making shoes to sell in the market, time with Jose’s wife, his children when they came back from school, his mother, his siblings, and the hostel guests.

As my time in Otavalo came to a close, I realized I had more questions than answers about what it means to show up as a guest in Indigenous spaces. What José shared with me was not a way of farming, but a way of relating to the world I was being welcomed into.

On the farms surrounding El Tío Hostal, crops are not grown in isolation but as families. Maize, beans, and fava support one another: holding moisture, nourishing the soil, and eventually returning to it. Nothing is wasted. Even the smallest insects are part of the cycle, not something to be eliminated.

This way of life, passed down across generations, is grounded in an ethic of care for Pachamama. To live well, sumak kawsay, is not about accumulation, but about sharing harvests, being with family and dear friends, and maintaining balance with the land.

And yet, this way of life is not untouched.

José spoke of younger generations leaving Ecuador in search of opportunity. He spoke of minga becoming less frequent, less feasible, and of traditions increasingly carried by elders like Abuelita, while economic systems and failing institutions make it harder for young people to stay, work, and practice the knowledge they receive from their elders. Continuity of Otavaleño ways of life are living practices, not guaranteed.

To arrive in Otavalo, to Ecuador, to any place where Indigenous communities are resisting systemic erasure, is not a neutral act. I felt myself constantly asking: What do I owe my hosts? I feel it’s more than a few hours of my labor, or my admiration. More than documentation for the hostel’s social media.

I found myself returning to writing by Indigenous authors on what it means to be a guest on Indigenous land, particularly this piece by Haida writer Nangghaahlaangstangs (Damen Bell-Holter) and this article by Tlingit writer Kate Nelson. Though tailored for visiting different indigenous lands, both articles echo what I experienced in Otavalo. They emphasize that being a respectful visitor is less about compliance with a checklist and more about orientation to place, history, and relationship -- and how it changes your practices at home.

If there is anything I am beginning to understand from my time in Otavalo, it is that being welcomed as a guest, or even as a dear friend, to a place that is not mine means recognizing that I am arriving into relationships that existed long before me and will continue after I leave. It means showing humility and asking permission to participate, adapting when participation looks different than what I expected, listening more than I speak, and moving at the pace of community rather than at the pace of my own itinerary.

It means giving what is asked, not what I think I “should” give. And it means supporting local economies without distorting them, learning the histories that are often deliberately obscured, and accepting that access is not owed to me.

Perhaps most of all, it means understanding that respect and solidarity are continuous practices that extend beyond my time in a place, into how I remember it, speak about it, and remain in relationship with it, accountable to it even after I’ve left.

With love and presence,

Z

P.S: Please enjoy a video I shared to the Global Local TikTok on spending a day with José and his family at the hostel:

Like many of you, I have been overwhelmed by the state of the world. I hope you are holding your loved ones tight, as I have been holding mine.

Last month, I had the privilege of being invited to stay at an eco-hostel in the Ecuadorian Andes. I think I was seeking out an experience that would allow me to learn about living close to the land and gaining survival skills that I believe will be more and more necessary in the coming years. While I came to Ecuador with very little context (it was my first time in South America!), I left with another family, close friends, and a lesson I want to share with you for the moment we are all experiencing: on persistence.

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Quito and the surrounding regions in Ecuador have been inhabited for at least 8,000 years. Before the Spanish arrived, the Andean region was home to Indigenous groups like the Cañari, the Quitu, and the Cara. When the Incas expanded northward from Peru in the 15th century, they met fierce resistance from the groups already in the regions we know as Ecuador.

The Spanish colonizers came in the early 16th century. They allied with several indigenous resistance movements, especially the Cañari, and helped drive out the Inca forces (obviously to replace them with their own rule). In 1533, the Inca general Ruminahui famously set fire to the entire city of Quito to prevent the Spanish from taking it.

In 1534, the Spanish established the city of San Francisco de Quito on the ruins of the Inca capital, building it on top of what was already here.

Churches were erected where temples once stood. Gold was melted and reshaped into Catholic altars. The Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús glows with baroque excess, gold leaf everywhere, and much of that artistry was done by Indigenous hands.

As the Spanish tried to impose language and religious beliefs in the Andes, the indigenous artisans they relied on practiced persistence through architecture and art. They carved Catholic saints with Andean cheekbones, and painted European Madonnas against Andean landscapes in church frescos. Syncretism was survival, and resistance was often joyous through art and humor. A building in the historical district of Quito features a cherub with a… rather inappropriate body part pointed at the church directly across from it. It couldn’t be removed due to the superstitions of the Spanish family that had commissioned the façade from indigenous artisans.

In 1809, Quito declared independence from Spain in the “First Cry of Independence.” It failed, the revolutionaries were killed, and it would take 11 more years before Spanish rule of Quito and Ecuador formally ended. When it did, power did not pass to Indigenous communities. It shifted to Creoles, locally born Spaniards, who had revolted against Spanish tax policies and replaced peninsular Spaniards at the top of the hierarchy. Independence from Spain did not mean liberation for everyone, and indigenous communities remained marginalized within the “new republic”.

Today, Ecuador is still negotiating who gets to define the nation. Indigenous movements remain central political actors in Ecuador. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), founded in 1986, has led nationwide mobilizations over land rights, fuel subsidies, austerity, and extractive industries, most recently organizing nationwide strikes in September and October 2025. The 2008 Constitution of Ecuador was the first in the world to formally recognize the Rights of Nature, influenced heavily by Indigenous worldviews and activism. However, extractive economics in oil, mining, and export of natural resources still structure much of the political and economic climate, and the government’s responses to widespread protests are violent and repressive.

As I reflect on the events unfolding across the world today, I find it difficult to write about hope. It feels dishonest to reach for comforting words while watching bombardments, sanctions, starvation, and the slow suffocation of entire societies in real time. I constantly marvel at the strength of people I know and people I don’t: families in Lebanon caring for their household animals while themselves navigating displacement and dispossession, journalists in Palestine picking up the press vests of their martyred colleagues and continuing to film to refuse erasure, Iranian organizers resisting under immense repression and despite internet shutdowns, Cuban bartenders serving cocktails in the face of complete blackouts, communities across the world holding onto language, music, and daily rituals even as the ground shifts beneath them at the hands of imperialism.

It can feel, in moments like this, as if the story is only one of struggle, but walking through Quito reminded me that history rarely moves as cleanly as empires imagine it will.

The Spanish arrived with overwhelming force. They burned, rebuilt, baptized, taxed, renamed. From their perspective, the project was total. The city they built was meant to mark a permanent victory: a new religious order, new elites, a new language, a new political hierarchy, and a new cultural center of gravity. But permanence is not something power can actually manufacture; five hundred years later, the Andean world has not disappeared. It changed, adapted, and grew out of the imposed structures around it. I do not know what the next years or even the next days will bring. But if Quito teaches anything, it is that the forces trying to flatten cultures and peoples and civilizations will not get the final word.

Across the Andes, Latin America, Southwest Asia, and everywhere colonization has tried to root, people have learned to carry their worlds in ways that cannot be confiscated. In recipes, in embroidery, in songs, in dialects whispered to children, and in movements that rise again and again and again and again in the face of the most brutal repression.

While I pray for the resounding victory of the movements resisting occupation and empire, and while I hope to see a world liberated from colonialism in my lifetime, I take the smallest iota of comfort in the idea that, at the very, very least, maybe persistence looks different from clear victory in a given moment. Sometimes, persistence looks like adaptation. Sometimes it looks like quiet refusal. Sometimes, like simply continuing to live. And sometimes, it looks like a cherub carved by an Indigenous artisan centuries ago, still pointing its irreverent defiance across the street at the empire that commissioned it.

With love and persistence,
Zoha

P.S: Quito taught me how cultures persist inside the structures meant to replace them, with this history often preserved in museums or carved in architecture. What also interests me is what persistence looks like in ordinary life: in kitchens, in fields, in the rhythms of collective work and rest.

To understand that, I left the capital and traveled north into the highlands, to a small village outside Otavalo where I was invited to live with José and his family at El Tio Hostal.

If Quito tells the story of empire and resistance, Otavalo tells the story of what comes after: how cultures continue, quietly and stubbornly, in the everyday.

Part II on Otavalo coming next week :)

P.P.S: Enjoy a short video of my walking tour around Quito below! You can also see more video content on the Global Local on Instagram and TikTok!

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Happy new year <3 And thank you for sticking around for six+ months of Z Tries. I want to take a moment to reflect on what this of exploration season has given me, as well as where it’s pointing me next.

The last 6 months:

Since last June, I’ve had the privilege of:

• Serving as a camp counselor at Camp HEAL Palestine

• Spending time in northern Kenya with USEC, a refugee-led organization serving Kakuma Refugee Camp

• Facilitating a summer camp in Kenya for youth from around the world to connect with each other

• Shadowing a historian in Bosnia & Herzegovina

• Becoming a nationally-certified EMT (I’m currently completing ride-alongs on ambulances and med-evac flights—more reflections on this soon)

• Helping refresh the strategy for a program conducting intergenerational travel programs to geographies with profound Islamic heritage (e.g., East Africa and South Asia)

• Starting Rooted Routes, LLC as a home for my ongoing consulting and community work (entirely pro bono so far, but built with intention to expand into serving small businesses and community movers & shakers)

• Most recently, living and working on an Indigenous hostel and farm in Ecuador, learning about plants, techniques, traditions, and more — reflection on this experience coming soon!

On paper, these experiences may look fragmented. To me, however, these experiences have helped reinforce the same lessons.

What I’ve learned

Despite my best attempts to be “settled”, to root myself in Boston, to build a stable and legible life, I feel most like myself when I’m moving. Not as an escape, and not just for the sake of novelty, but rather, moving as a way of learning how people care, live, organize, and thrive, and what patterns exist across artificial state borders.

I believe it feels most familiar because I grew up this way, living in four countries on two continents before I turned fifteen. And while I’ve absolutely traveled in the past to run away from things (or maybe myself?), this chapter feels different. Since stepping off the career ladder, I feel called to specific communities to learn skills, histories, and ways of being that were notably absent from my daily life in corporate America. I feel a longing for the sensation that was so often present in my childhood — the nervousness and excitement of approaching a new classmate at a new school, the curiosity and desire to understand how they navigated the environment we shared, that they knew so much more deeply than I.

What I’ve also found the words to express, uncomfortably, is how extractive my former version of “traveling for work” was. I always felt the cognitive dissonance, but I lacked the time and the space to reflect on the harm I was bringing to a world I love so deeply.

When I worked in travel and tourism consulting:

• My long-term lodging options were dictated by negotiated corporate hotel rates (often with chains profiting from ecological destruction)

• My meals were room service or delivery of American food chains through Uber Eats (a company deeply entangled with militarization and imperialism)

• I could spend months in a city without ever knowing about the people hosting me, or whose land I was visiting

I was moving constantly, taking what I wanted, yet learning and sharing very little with my local hosting communities. What I did give in skills, time, and knowledge was reserved for the corporate and government institutions that were my clients.

Travel is political

All of the time I have spent moving, and the time I spent helping commercial airlines move people from place to place, has made one thing abundantly clear to me: travel is extremely political.

Who gets to move freely is determined by an arbitrary birth lottery. Where tourism flows is shaped by centuries of propaganda, colonialism, and economic disenfranchisement. And where our money goes, hotels, airlines, food systems, platforms, either reinforces or resists extractive power.

Why is Western Europe seen by so many as the default destination to understand modern history, while Iraq, home to Babylon, the cradle of modern civilization, is deemed unknowable and unsafe?

In a world with so much entrenched power, being intentional about where and how we move is one of the few forms of agency many of us still have.

So in this next phase of my life, I’ve been prioritizing slow, intentional travel, only to places where I’m invited: to learn, to serve others, or to build relationships.

And just as importantly, places where I am invited to ask myself hard questions.

• What can I give to a place, not just take from it?

• What do I leave behind in terms of relationships, resources, skills, memory?

• Where does my money go, and who or what does it support?

• What is my environmental footprint on the land hosting me?

• And what do I carry forward in terms of stories, lessons, and practices, to share with others I consider my community?

What’s next: The Global Local

Despite all its harms, the internet is still one of the most powerful tools we have to democratize knowledge and center individual stories over institutional narratives. This belief is what brings me to The Global Local.

The Global Local is my humble offer to a world that is, by design, increasingly polarized, isolated, and consumeristic, due to weaponized disinformation and hollow incentives.

Through this platform, I’ll be sharing field notes from my journey in seeking out people and communities who build what they need to care for one another, often outside of corporate, governmental, and bureaucratic institutions.

You can expect reflections on slower, more intentional travel, skills exchange, mutual aid, indigenous knowledge and land-based wisdom, and what it means to be in relationship with the places we are, at home and abroad.

I will still be publishing longer, more personal reflections about once a month here on Z Tries. The Global Local, however, will host shorter, more frequent notes: learnings, questions, interviews with my hosts, and stories in motion. It will begin as a Substack, Instagram, and TikTok. My hope is that it grows into something self-sustaining: a platform for community building, skill exchange, and story sharing across borders — and outside of corporate and institutional interests.

Why this matters to me (and hopefully to you)

This project fulfills something I’ve been circling for years: a way to be in relationship with the world without consuming it.

To learn how to be in community with a place, not just pass through it. To move with humility and intention to listen. To share what I have to offer, not for incentives, but in reciprocity.

As always, thank you for being my community, for reading, and for coming along as I continue to figure this out in public. If you’re interested in engaging more:

• Subscribe The Global Local on Substack

• Follow The Global Local on Instagram and TikTok

• Leave a comment here to share your thoughts and advice on this new chapter!

With love and new beginnings,

Z

Happy November! I hope you are all finding joy and ways to take care of yourself as the season changes. For my part, I’ve taken up dog-walking and dog-sitting these past weeks as a way to get my steps in and avoid becoming a Winter-induced house goblin.

For years, I’ve joked with Nauman that my ultimate ambition in life is to become a stay-at-home dog mom. After my childhood canine companion passed away in 2022, I never got another furry friend, largely because my life was never rooted anywhere. I started traveling extensively for work a few months after Snowy passed away, and until this past month, I haven’t had the chance to re-experience the unique love that canine companionship provides.

Beyond love, the pups I’ve been entrusted with in the last month are teaching me about the world I want to live in and help create. Take, for example, my thrice-weekly walk around Brookline with two large dogs. Everywhere: signs of private ownership, manicured yards trimmed into submission, invasive grasses that look neat and tidy from the street, sprinkler systems and anti-dandelion warfare, wrought iron fences guarding lawns like they’re bank accounts.

Where I see declarations of ownership in boundaries, property taxes, and mortgages, the dogs I walk see the land as she is, a living, breathing thing. The dogs I walk can’t read the “KEEP OFF GRASS” signs pointed at them: they pee where they please, make holes where they want, and joyfully roll in the scent of everything they unearth. They smell the history of everything on the land before the foundations were poured, and before a bank decided no one else could belong to this dirt. Dogs behave like the land is living kin, a playground to be shared, appreciated, and belonged to. Ground as relationship, not ownership.

So this month, I’d like to share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned from the pups I’ve been spending time with. And don’t worry, plenty of dog tax included!

Love is a way of life
Dogs don’t audition for affection. They give love freely and unconditionally as an infinite resource, the way the sun offers us light. If a person they love ends up feeding them, all the better! But dogs love without expecting treats. They embody love that does away with all performance of emotional restraint; they love joyfully and unapologetically, without “logic” or fear of loss. Dogs don’t play games or act coy about their love for you: loving for the sake of loving is enough.

Tenderness does not need to be earned
You exist, thus, you deserve care. Dogs show us that we don’t need to “do” anything to be worthy of love, tenderness, and loyalty. This is an exercise in the reciprocity of being alive, because surviving and thriving are communal efforts.

Essentials are enough
Dogs are proof that a simple life can be the happiest life when you prioritize rest, food, bathroom breaks, kisses, walks, cuddles, sunlight, playtime. Suffering is not proof of someone’s worth. If you have the privilege of having your basic needs being met, contentment is not elusive, it’s neglected.

Clocks are human hallucinations
Nature calls us differently. Dogs eat when they’re hungry, stop eating when they’re full, stretch when their muscles ask, poop when they need to, and nap unapologetically. Nature never agreed to our 9-5 work-day.

Joy is direct action
To delight in a new smell, in the rustle of a falling leaf, in the wagging tail of a new playmate, that is refusal to participate in the despair economy. Dogs practice joy because they are alive; they don’t treat joy as a reward for something they did, thus no one profits from their hopelessness. Joy shared is joy multiplied -- no one has fun when one dog hoards the stick.

Ask for the treat
Dogs know that they lose out on 100% of the snacks they don’t request. Dogs are vocal about the things they want, but especially about the things they need. Sometimes, they need to yell to be heard over the noise and distractions, but they are not deterred. Dogs know that closed mouths don’t get biscuits or justice.

Prioritize presence
Life is too short to be separated from your people without a plan to get home. Dogs often wait at the door until you return, and they understand urgency better than we do. They don’t care what you “do for a living”, and they don’t care about your productivity; they only hope for your presence.

Obedience is a myth, only loyalty is real
Even if someone has been “trained” well, you can never force anyone to do anything they don’t want to do, you can only hope for their cooperation. Humans and non-humans alike act out of love, loyalty, and reciprocity, not out of obedience.

Stand your ground, no matter your size
A 10-pound terrier will saunter up to a husky because dignity and courage are not measured the same way as mass. To gain the respect of their peers, no matter how different they seem, dogs will be mighty, proud, and loud.

I think sometimes I forget how to be a human being: not productive, performative, or impressive, just human. In those instances, I seek out beings that have never forgotten how to be alive. Dogs remind us that before capitalism, before borders, before credit scores, we too were animals who knew how to belong to the world rather than own it. We loved without ambition and we rested without guilt and we treated land as kin -- something we were loyal to and something that fed us in return. Every time I watch a dog roll in the grass like it’s the most natural thing in the universe, I remember that aliveness is not measured in money, fences, or manicured lawns. The world is not made meaningful by ownership, it’s made beautiful by companionship and the dignity to choose to share soil, sticks, and snacks.

With love and loyalty,

Zoha

P.S: Please enjoy a short video compilation of some of my favorite moments with my canine companions below!

Earlier this month, Nauman and I moved to an apartment on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fun fact, this is a bit of a homecoming for me, because my parents met in Boston 30 years ago, and I was born while they were living in Mansfield, Massachusetts.

The first month in Boston has been incredibly good to me, and while Nauman is the one starting a graduate degree program at MIT, I am also constantly learning, applying, building, growing, and reflecting during this new phase of my journey:

• I am one month into Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) classes, and I can now conduct patient assessments, administer CPR, ventilate patients, and splint extremities

• I have developed a consistent exercise schedule to work towards comfortably lifting and carrying 170lbs with the hopes of becoming a stronger and safer healthcare provider for my communities in times of emergencies

• I’m building giant canvas frames, side tables, and benches from reclaimed wood that I received from a woman I met in a storage unit

• I have joined the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid and am learning from a community rooted in collective liberation and mutual aid

• I’m volunteering with libraries and after-school programs to practice language and mathematics skills with recent immigrants

• I’m currently reading “On Anarchism” by Noam Chomsky, which feels like an especially fitting activity considering he is a professor emeritus here at MIT

• Besides the pieces I’ve made myself, I’ve furnished our entire apartment from thrift stores, vintage markets, second-hand furniture exchanges, and Facebook marketplace, attempting to live out the values of sustainability, community interdependence, and circular economies

• I’m learning how to wheel-throw pottery and finally making use of the wheel Nauman got for my birthday two years ago (four weeks is the longest I have been in any home since 2022!)

• I am growing hydroponic vegetables at home and attempting to create a sustainable food source for myself and my neighbors, without reliance on pesticides and industrial agriculture

• I am spending time with friends from various periods of my life and I have made some incredible new ones. For the first time in a long while, I have the time and capacity to give my full attention to and learn from every person I meet, whether they be my neighbors whose dogs I walk, the elderly folks I meet in the park, the baristas at the cafes I frequent, or Nauman’s classmates and their significant others

All of this has been incredibly nourishing and feels aligned with the intentions I set out when I shared why I was leaving consulting. However, in this new city, I am constantly meeting new people and introducing myself, and no question makes me stumble more than the ubiquitous, “So what are you doing in Boston?”

Maybe I’m reading into it because I’ve been hearing it so much, but the question often feels shorthand for “What institution can I slot you into?” Or “Where do you fit in our hierarchy?” People here are quick to identify themselves by programs, companies, and buildings that give them keycard access. Institutional logos become identity, a social currency that lets us be quickly legible to one another: Harvard, MIT, Mass Gen, Bain, BCG, Pfizer, Moderna…

Nauman has the clean, respectable answer. He’s studying at MIT: instant credibility and social currency, albeit at the risk of flattening him to one dimension and doing away with any nuance of what he hopes to gain here. The problem is also when you don’t have a clean, institutional answer. When your days feel full and meaningful, but don’t fit into the usual shorthand of “consultant,” “student,” “doctor,” “founder”… Boston magnifies the discomfort because institutional power saturates everything here: the skyline, the small talk, the traffic patterns, the way strangers measure your worth in short, singular exchanges.

My institutional identity used to be legible: McKinsey, Engagement Manager, Detroit office, commercial airline clients… Even now, it would be so easy to tell people I’m on a career break, taking a gap year for personal reasons before returning to consulting: convenient, efficient, socially satisfying, but also? Reductive, constraining, mechanizing.

I want to be genuine about who I am, what I value, and where I am at in life with the new people I meet, but that usually requires a lot more context and time than the average introductory encounter affords. This means I lack a feasible, concise response to the perpetual question of what I’m doing in Boston. Thus, I’m workshopping some answers! Some are flippant, some are sincere, and some make no sense, but the point is, we’re trying! Trying to resist the urge to collapse my human identity into institutional affiliation, and trying to use the question as an avenue to share something real, even if it is not instantly legible.

So, without further ado, if you ask me what I’m doing in Boston, I might say…

• “My partner started school at MIT, so I’m here with him”

  • Pros: Truthful, shows my dedication as a lover girl, people assume I’m smart by proxy

  • Cons: side character energy :(

• “What am I not doing?”

  • Pros: Mysterious, somehow also truthful, like IYKYK

  • Cons: Requires a lot of follow-up explanation, or at least a laundry list of daily activities (e.g., building furniture, making art, growing plants, taking classes, reading books, etc.)

• “I’m retired”

  • Pros: Very few follow-up questions, most people assume I sold a multi-million dollar startup to a tech giant and they kinda go with it

  • Cons: Conversation generally moves toward aforementioned laundry list, or towards financial advice that I’m very unqualified to give

• “I’m vibing!”

  • Pros: Completely truthful

  • Cons: Invites a lot of follow-up questions, see above laundry list

• “I’m an aspiring socialite”

  • Pros: More fun than saying I’m researching the building blocks of community and trying to learn about roots

  • Cons: Being a socialite is a lost art, and people may get the wrong impression :/

• “I’m a professional dog-walker”

  • Pros: No follow-up questions

  • Cons: Not really truthful since I don’t make any money doing it, but I am very professional :)

• “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  • Pros: Mysterious and intriguing

  • Cons: They probably would like to know, that’s why they asked…

• “I was waiting to meet you”

  • Pros: Flirty ;)

  • Cons: Flirty :/

• “Honestly, I followed you here”

  • Pros: Bold

  • Cons: Terrifying

• “I’m sorry, I have an NDA”

  • Pros: No follow-up questions, full of intrigue

  • Cons: Duplicitous, unless I convince myself NDA means “No Desire to Answer”

• “I’m in witness protection”

  • Pros: Explains why they’ve never seen me here before

  • Cons: Compromises the whole program, probably

• “I’m finding myself”

  • Pros: Technically truthful

  • Cons: A little too Eat, Pray, Love for my taste

• “I’m an aspiring ceramics artist”

  • Pros: Whimsical and interesting, people assume I’m talented

  • Cons: I’ve never actually made any pottery that can stand on its own, but I’m watching a lot of YouTube videos on wheel-throwing, so hopefully I will soon!

• “I’m preparing for the collapse of an empire”

  • Pros: Probably the most truthful response, considering the time I’m spending on EMT classes, community organizing, and growing vegetables at home

  • Cons: Uhhh scary?? Very polarizing: people will either be totally understanding because they are also prepping, or they will never speak to me again

• “I’m doing fieldwork for my memoir”

  • Pros: Makes me sound important and mysterious

  • Cons: The only things I’ve field-tested are the neighborhood matcha cafes

• “I’m training for the Boston Tea Party re-enactment”

  • Pros: Very historically on-brand, very localized, very Boston

  • Cons: May get me blacklisted at the aforementioned matcha cafes

• “I’m a startup founder”

  • Pros: People generally nod in fear and change the subject

  • Cons: Everyone and their mom is a startup founder in Cambridge, and if they happen to be a chatty startup founder, I have to invent an app idea on the spot (“It’s like ClassPass, but for matcha”)

• “I’m just here for the clam chowder”

  • Pros: Easily defensible, chowder is good, and New England chowder is elite

  • Cons: Reduces my whole existence to a soup agenda

• “People don’t believe I was born here, so I’m back to work on my accent”

  • Pros: Gives people an excuse to test theirs too

  • Cons: Everyone suddenly starts shouting “pahk the cah” and “Haahvad yahd” at me

  • Bonus pro: Now no one remembers what they were asking to begin with, this might be a winner!

• “I’m lost, actually”

  • Pros: Technically never untrue

  • Cons: They may give me directions, which ruins the bit

• “I’m touring university campuses”

  • Pros: Explains what I’m doing in an MIT residence hall

  • Cons: Gives Harvard students an opening to tell me that they go to Harvard

• “I’m mapping escape routes”

  • Pros: Sounds competent and proactive

  • Cons: Ominous, invites follow-ups on what I know that they don’t…

• “I’m stockpiling knowledge for the post-electricity era”

  • Pros: Makes me sound like a sage

  • Cons: I only know how to quote TikToks and grow plants using automated LED lights

• “I’m waiting for the signal”

  • Pros: Raises eyebrows, creates suspense, kind of sexy and important

  • Cons: No feasible way for the conversation to end without me disappearing mysteriously into the night

Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian author, talks a lot about humor and irreverence as a tool used by the oppressed to combat dehumanization. In a recent article, he wrote: “Laughter is dignifying—it is an act of refusal; it is almost akin to faith in its ability to build an alternative reality… irreverence can shatter taboos and help others raise their ceiling. It expands the boundaries of what is permissible.”

While I’m obviously not comparing the dehumanization of Palestinians to the experience of getting asked what I’m doing in Boston, I feel this quote helps illustrate how answers like “I’m vibing” assert, in the smallest possible ways, that life and human identity are bigger, messier, richer, stranger, more interesting, and more irreverent than Boston’s badge-centric shorthand allows. I’m finding that the most fun and subversive way to answer an attempt to put you in a nice institutional box is to simply laugh, to refuse, and to live outside the lines.

Laughter and refusal are small acts, but in a city obsessed with authority and entrenched power, they feel like radical little insistences on humanity. A small insistence on remembering and reminding others that our value comes from what we do, who we learn from, what we stand for, who we care for, how we connect to others, and how we show up in the world.

So I’d love to hear from you: how do you introduce yourself in ways that feel authentic? What do you say when you want to explain who you are and what you care about, not just what institution claims you? And what advice do you have for me to authentically introduce who I am / what I value without tying myself to an institution or a corporation? If you think it’s just not that deep, feel free to let me know that too!

With love and irreverence,

Zoha

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P.S: Please enjoy a short video of me spending the last week building, stretching, and painting a canvas from reclaimed wood and cotton!

Before Sarajevo, my partner Nauman and I stopped in Mostar, a city in southern Bosnia & Herzegovina, which gave us a first introduction to the history, trauma, and resilience of the land we were traversing. We were greeted by the stunning and imposing Stari Most, a bridge built by the Ottomans in the 16th century. Stari Most was fully reconstructed in its original style in 2004 following its destruction in 1993 by Croatian forces during the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995.

We crossed the bridge and made our way to the Museum of War and Genocide Victims, a public museum dedicated to preserving and presenting accounts of the armed conflicts in former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995. There, we learned a brief history of the Yugoslav wars and the causes of conflict, but the majority of the museum’s exhibits showcased the experiences of the civilian survivors of the war and the Bosnian genocide.

The exhibits were raw and unflinching in their descriptions of the torture civilians endured and the incredible resilience they showed in the face of the abject atrocities. Clandestine newspaper distribution networks were established to share tips on surviving a siege, ranging from how to create and cook with candles to finding humor in the darkest days. One exhibit shared the story of a Croat couple who repurposed their photography studio to forge guarantee letters to release Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) detainees from a Croat-run concentration camp.

Another exhibit was a charcoal drawing by Benina Dedic in tribute to the Bosniak survivors of the same camp, highlighting the prisoners’ hopes that the world was bearing witness to the injustices being wrought on them. The entire museum, and the culture of Bosnia & Herzegovina at large, seems to invite visitors to bear witness and remember the wounds caused by the ability and willingness of people to inflict harm on one another.

The final interactive exhibit invited museum guests to leave notes as they reflected on a video of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) investigation and rulings. The video featured the ICTY officially declaring Srebrenica a genocide, ruling that the actions of Serbs were an attempt to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of its Muslim population. I was struck to my core as I read the notes penned by museum visitors, who unanimously connected the atrocities in Bosnia to the genocides we are currently witnessing in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan. The genocidal playbook is always the same: divide, dehumanize the other, and wield unfathomable cruelty. Yet the notes were a salient reminder of how collective memory transcends perceived isolation and can become a powerful counterforce to the colonial tactic of dividing and conquering. This museum situates the experiences of survivors of the Bosnian genocide within the global struggle against oppression, allowing collective memory to become a source of connection and a call for liberation.

We arrived in Sarajevo on a Friday night and found a city alive with illuminated facades of Ottoman and neo-Moorish architecture, bustling trains, and the smell of cevapis (Balkan sausages) grilling. The sounds of live DJs and open-air film screenings reverberated through walls constructed as early as the 13th century -- walls riddled with bullets and shrapnel from shelling during a siege lifted only 30 years ago. We were due to meet Adem*, a part-time tour-guide, part-time history teacher, and full-time master’s student of history at the University of Sarajevo. We met outside the city hall just as the adhaan (Muslim call to prayer) announced the last prayer of the day. With that, Adem formally welcomed us to Sarajevo, a city that was historically home to Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians living together harmoniously, once earning the city the nickname of "the Jerusalem of the West".

As we wandered through the streets with Adem, we left no historical stones unturned. Adem offered us the nuance missing from our high-school history curricula. For example, we came upon the corner where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip and his Bosnian Serb co-conspirators. I had previously only heard the perspective that this assassination was conducted by terrorists and triggered the deadliest world conflict of the time. However, for many Serbs, the event is much more layered: for some, Princip and his co-conspirators were liberators who finally ended the decades-long foreign occupation and paved the way for a free, united, autonomous region for all southern Slavs, i.e., Yugoslavia, with an influential presence on the world's stage.

In the former Yugoslavia, truth is held in splinters. Despite the official documentation of genocide and war crimes by the ICTY, many communities in Bosnia with larger Bosnian Croat or Bosnian Serb populations hold on to denial and minimization. Croatia and Serbia themselves have not distanced their national politics from the ideologies of the leaders responsible for the war crimes against Bosniaks. According to Adem, one of the reasons for Bosnia's current turbulent political situation is ineffective collective remembrance: community leaders have not explicitly acknowledged the harm caused by the perpetrators or the humanity of the victims. Often, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb politicians will assume contrarian political positions to those of Bosniaks to preserve a sense of national connection with Croatia and Serbia, respectively, leading to additional fracturing within Bosnia & Herzegovina.

For Adem, this fracturing is not inevitable, and he would like to see Bosnia & Herzegovina return to a state where its diversity is a cherished virtue rather than a source of conflict. He notes the deep empathy that Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat, and Bosniak citizens alike all feel for the Palestinian people, because of the empathy fostered by their co-existence in the aftermath of a traumatic ethno-national conflict. This is echoed in the way every alley was brightened with Palestine flags and graffiti messages, "Free Palestine" and "Don’t forget".

Living in a post-genocide society is complicated, and the violence and trauma that accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia run deep, but the healing needs to begin somewhere. Adem believes that education is the primary tool for shaping a future of reparations and reconciliation. The ICTY criminal prosecutions were a step in the right direction, internationally validating and memorializing the narrative that the war was an intentional attempt at extermination of Bosniaks. Unfortunately, outside of Sarajevo, students are often taught different versions of history, each shaped by the dominant ethnic group in their community. Without mechanisms to enforce the established truth in education and politics, the ICTY judgments often stay in archives rather than help to reshape collective narratives. For a history teacher like Adem, his aspiration to foster critical thought, pattern recognition, and collective truth-telling in students throughout rural Bosnia & Herzegovina comes with a significant economic tradeoff and leaving Sarajevo.

Over the next several days, I wandered the storied streets of Sarajevo and witnessed narratives brought to life through screenings at the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF). The festival started in 1995, during the siege of Sarajevo, when organizers sought to carve out a space for joy, resistance, and art. Since then, it has grown to global prominence and is celebrated as a platform that remembers the legacies of violence and colonialism, while drawing ties to ongoing genocides and human rights violations. This year, the SFF showcased more than 250 films from 65 countries and remains a testament to how storytelling can become an act of defiance against erasure and a commitment to justice across borders.

Several featured films were by Palestinian filmmakers from Gaza. I had the opportunity to view With Hasan in Gaza by Kamal AlJafari, created from three miniDV tapes of life in Gaza in 2001, as a man searches for his prison-mate from the time he was held in an Israeli jail as a child in 1989. Featuring this film in Sarajevo, where a community continues to wrestle with its own scars of war and siege, was a deliberate act of solidarity: memory across geographies binds people together in recognition of shared suffering and shared hope.

I also attended a viewing of I Only Rest in the Storm, Pedro Pinho’s 3.5-hour exploration of neocolonialism in the relationships between Europe and Africa. The film follows the experience of a Portuguese environmental engineer hired by a humanitarian aid organization to evaluate the feasibility of building a road across Guinea-Bissau. The film raised difficult questions about who bears the costs of “development,” and how colonial logics persist in contemporary forms of aid and infrastructure. Remembrance in SFF was not confined to Bosnia & Herzegovina, but extended outward: to Africa, to Palestine, and everywhere power preys on violence and erasure.

On my last evening in Bosnia & Herzegovina, I attended a Naqshabandi Sufi "zikr", meaning remembrance. A tradition that has persisted since Ottoman times, the zikr is a rhythmic chanting ritual of devotion to bear witness to collective power far beyond that of any individual. The calls I heard within that 15th-century mosque evoked remembrance of the history of the land I was visiting, reiterated the continuity and resilience of its people, and reaffirmed my commitment to a more just future.

What Bosnia & Herzegovina taught me is that remembrance is not passive. It is not only about looking back at what was lost, but about actively shaping the conditions of the present and future. In museums, on bridges, in films, in the streets, and in mosques, Bosnians insist on narrating their own survival and resilience, despite attempts at denial or revision. Collective memory is a refusal to allow silence to become complicity, a refusal to allow trauma to dissolve into invisibility.

In Bosnia & Herzegovina, I learned that memory is not a static archive but a living practice. It is art, it is graffiti, it is prayer, it is film, it is testimony, it is walking through a city scarred by shrapnel and alive with music. Visitors and locals alike are invited to see the connections between Sarajevo and the West Bank, between Srebrenica and Gaza, between siege and occupation, between genocide denial and neocolonialism. This insistence on connection, on understanding that oppression anywhere implicates us everywhere, is what transforms memory into a tool. To remember together is to resist fragmentation and insist on a future of collective liberation.

With love and remembrance,
Zoha

* Name changed for security

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Over the past six weeks, I’ve been roaming across Kenya, from the soft sands of Diani Beach on the southeast coast to the vibrant streets of Mombasa, the rolling savannahs of Voi, the unyielding energy of Nairobi, and most recently, to the stark, sun-drenched desert in the northwest, a short drive from the South Sudan border.

As you may remember from my first post, I had come to support United Safe Environment Creators (USEC), a refugee-led organization (RLO) in Kakuma refugee camp, to define its organizational strategy, and to learn how it’s leading transformative initiatives in health, education, safety, and dignified livelihoods. But what I received here was far greater: life lessons in brilliance, resilience, solidarity, and the urgent need to center refugee voices in decision-making at every level.

First, some background. Kakuma refugee camp was established by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1992 to receive thousands of people fleeing violence in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Over the years, it has grown into one of the largest refugee camps in the world, currently hosting more than 220,000 community members across four camps in Kakuma. An additional 80,000 live in the nearby Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, a more permanent community, and a departure from Kenya's general "encampment" policies towards refugees, which typically limit their freedom of work, integration, and movement. Refugees in Kakuma and Kalobeyei now come from over a dozen countries including the DRC, South Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Eritrea, and beyond, creating a complex quilt of cultures, languages, and lived experiences. This diversity has helped many residents adapt more easily when resettling abroad, forming communities based on solidarity rather than nationality alone.

Getting to Kakuma wasn’t easy. My options were a 13-hour drive (on the left side of the road!) from Nairobi, or a 2-hour flight on a 35-seater plane with only one functional propeller followed by a 2-hour drive north with two men I had never met before. I can barely drive well on the right side of the road when at home, so I resorted to the second option. For the first time in a long while, I felt my safety was completely out of my hands. As we neared Kakuma town, a police officer with a gun strapped across his chest looked at my passport and looked back at me. He asked me if I'd brought anything for him, and I understood he was asking me point-blank for a bribe. I would come to learn that this was standard practice, that every police officer between Kakuma camp and Kakuma town would stop motorcycles passing through to ask for money. If you didn't pay, he could seize your motorcycle and take it to the police station, where you'd have to pay 50 times more to get it back. Unfortunately for this officer, I was in a car, and I wasn't traveling with any cash. Frustrated, he waved us on.

When I arrived at my lodging, one of the first things I noticed as I waited to check in was that every TV played Al Jazeera, around the clock, and people were watching closely: Israel's forced starvation of Gaza was on everyone's mind. It was an immediate reaffirmation to me that struggles are not isolated. Systems of oppression are the same, interconnected, repeating themselves across geographies and histories. It felt a bit like it was foreshadowing what I would encounter repeatedly in the coming days: the generosity of people from whom everything has been forcibly taken. They are often the ones who continue giving -- their time, energy, love, resources -- not just for their own survival, but for the protection and liberation of all others, near and far.

My guide, mentor, and caretaker throughout my time in Kakuma was Abedi, USEC’s visionary director, who arrived at the camp from the DRC in 2010 and quickly became a deeply respected leader in the community. Every person I met in the community or at various organizations would mention how grateful they were for his advocacy, or how consistently he stood up to safeguard refugees, or how they had received a significant opportunity due to his work or connections. It seemed like every day I was with him, someone was calling him, hoping he could help an Eritrean family get to Nairobi, or get someone's brother out of prison, or reverse the World Food Programme's (WFP) "Differentiated Assistance" decision - more on that later.

On my first day, Abedi took me to a monthly coordination meeting of 17 RLOs working across Kakuma camp, Kalobeyei settlement, and their host, Turkana County. All of them, from small community groups to established youth programs, were focused on improving the social and emotional learning (SEL) of children in their communities. It was the best primer I could have hoped for to get a basic understanding of the landscape of RLOs operating in Kakuma and their relationship to institutions and international organizations like UNHCR, USAID, and WFP. The focus of the meeting was on aligned curriculum development for positive parenting education to combat the neglect and abuse to which refugee children are especially susceptible.

The meeting was run with structure, rigor, and clarity that I have seldom seen in my work with NGOs and non-profits in the US. The two main agenda items were addressed, responsible persons were assigned, and the next working session was scheduled before moving on to "Any Other Business", or AOB. That day's AOB was addressing the exploitation RLOs faced when larger institutions withheld resources and recognition from RLOs but still expected the RLOs to be the grassroots implementation partners for the institutions' programs.

At this meeting, I also met several people who would become my friends in a short time. Asuna is a soft-spoken and bright young woman from Sudan who works with Farming and Health Education (FHE) and plans to study international relations in university. Tiba is a sharp educator and administrator with USEC from the DRC, who is preparing for her future studies in computer science and digital marketing. We talked about their plans to study in Nairobi, their hopes to travel the world, and their questions on why I don't have a husband even though I'm 27! When the meeting adjourned, we all shared a home-cooked meal with rice, ugali, chapati, stew, vegetables, meat, and soda. I wish I had taken a picture, as it was easily one of the best meals I’ve had in Kenya!

Following the meeting, we rode across 3 miles of desert rock to reach the USEC office and center for education. I got to meet Robert, USEC's program manager and finance officer. I also got to meet the young learners and watch them learn songs, play sports, and socialize with one another. Play-based learning is one of several ways in which USEC is helping children in Kakuma access quality early childhood education, offering a supplement (and sometimes, alternative) to the overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms provided for forcibly displaced children in the camp. USEC focuses on social and emotional learning (SEL) to help build self-awareness and resilience in children to help them heal trauma and thrive despite their circumstances.

In addition, noting how gender-based violence and early pregnancies were hindering young girls' ability to pursue their education, USEC has been administering awareness campaigns and educational programs for youth of all genders to help strengthen protective systems and prevent these grave violations.

Moreover, because many children were dropping out of primary and secondary schools because their families could not afford school supplies, USEC has been running livelihood programs to help parents, especially young or single mothers otherwise dependent on aid, learn digital and vocational skills like tailoring, textile work, hairdressing, and graphic design to help them build self-reliant, stable incomes and support their children through continued education.

It is this holistic, empowering, and community-based approach to children's education that truly moved me about USEC and Abedi's vision for a safer, healthier, and more dignified world for refugees in Kakuma and beyond.

Over the next several days, I visited several refugee-led organizations (RLOs) that left a lasting impact on me. First, I had the chance to meet Marcelin, the ingenious founder and director of Farming and Health Education (FHE). After coming to Kakuma from DRC in 2015, Marcelin was determined to find a way to protect himself against the unpredictable WFP aid situation, and he started a small kitchen farm on his plot in Kakuma to ensure his own food security. He started FHE with two others when he realized how many people were interested in doing the same, seeking his guidance on starting their own gardens.

FHE began in 2018 with a focus on building food security and health literacy in Kakuma. Since then, more than 3,000 community members have benefitted from FHE's programs in permaculture and climate-resilient agriculture, or health awareness programs encompassing nutrition, food processing, sanitation, and reproductive health.

Moreover, because grants and donations are increasingly difficult to secure, Marcelin is spearheading a green enterprise under FHE's umbrella. This enterprise will serve to generate sustainable revenue for FHE's initiatives through innovative practices like growing and selling oyster mushrooms, growing and selling hydroponic crops, building and servicing Tree Bog composting toilets, and packaging their by-product bio-gases for sustainable bio-fuels. You can follow Marcelin Munga and FHE on LinkedIn to stay up to date with their progress.

Most recently, Abedi and I visited Action for Refugee Life (AREL). AREL is working on fostering digital skills in Kakuma youth through classes in digital marketing, cybersecurity, data science, and full-stack development. They will also be launching courses in software development and cloud computing in the near future. AREL started in 2023 with one classroom, 10 laptops, and 20 students. Through their incredible perseverance, generous partnerships, and growing community demand, they have now scaled to a full center, around 500 students per year, and 76 laptops available for students and graduates to use for learning and working.

AREL helps graduates build their portfolios after they complete their capstone projects in their chosen courses. Many of their graduates have secured jobs as web developers or freelancers for businesses abroad, but many face challenges in gaining employment due to biases against refugees and heavy competition from the digital talent pools in India, China, and Pakistan.

AREL is also launching an enterprise under their umbrella, hoping to secure sustainable revenue to fund their program operations through innovative hardware they are building in-house, including power banks and portable electric stoves made from scrap and recycled materials. Follow their journey at AREL - Action for Refugee Life.

The resilience of all these RLOs is made even more clear when noting the incredibly tense backdrop of my visit to Kakuma. In mid-July, the WFP began rolling out its new “Differentiated Assistance” model, in partnership with UNHCR. This policy classifies refugees into four categories based on perceived vulnerability to determine who receives food aid and who doesn’t. In theory, it’s a cost-saving measure, but in practice, it’s life-threatening. Despite WFP's claims to the contrary, refugees were not consulted about this policy change or the conditions for categorization, and appeals to reconsider individuals' categorizations have been ignored. Coupled with the dismantling of USAID-funded operations, a visible scaling back of UNHCR involvement, and several other nations announcing intent to end aid, desperation has surged. Robberies and suicides spiked in the weeks before I arrived. Many of the community leaders administering physical and mental health support are themselves hungry, uncertain, and scared for their families. During my visit, shops and schools in Kakuma closed for strikes, and a WFP distribution center in Kalobeyei was set ablaze in protest. Police intervened violently, killing at least three people in two days. The situation is projected to worsen as aid distribution for the few people deemed "vulnerable enough" continues through the end of the month.

In the midst of it all, USEC continues to organize, teach, and plan. They are adapting their programming to center community-based trauma and mental health support, child resilience, educational programs, and sustainable livelihoods. Together with other RLOs, they are mapping out operations that move power away from top-down institutional aid structures and into grassroots ingenuity and global solidarity. I spent hours seeing USEC teachers lead children in song, storytelling, and reading lessons, putting aside any concern for their own well-being to foster resilience and hope in their students. I heard Abedi spend days on the phone listening to grievances, and I watched him strategize to advocate for his community to the institutions currently calling the shots. Together, we co-developed a strategic plan, a five-year operating budget, organizational charts, and a governance model based on best practices from global RLOs to position USEC for sustainable, long-term, grassroots impact in its work in Kakuma and beyond.

If you're in a position to help support USEC's work, please reach out to Abedi, or visit USEC CBO - Donate. If you prefer, you can also Venmo me @zoha98 and I will send you a receipt of the donation. The donor brief we developed together details specific aspirations and their estimated associated costs. For example, it takes $2,000 to construct a classroom that can provide a shaded learning environment for 100 learners, or $500 to employ an additional facilitator for the year. RLOs like USEC know what their communities need, and we must share our resources to help make their visions happen.

As I look back on my time in Kakuma, the moments most deeply ingrained in my memory are the conversations in the in-betweens. The motorbike rides with Robert and Abedi where they would joke with one another and teach me about Kakuma community politics. Trying to find shade with Tiba, hearing about her dreams to go back to the DRC and improve access to healthcare and life-saving medications. Conversations before the workday started about geopolitics, settler colonialism, Western hypocrisy, police brutality, racism, and the grief of watching the world ignore mass hunger, suffering, and death. The in-between moments are the times that I got to see Abedi, Robert, and Tiba as they are when no one is watching: not just community leaders, but deeply compassionate, curious, grounded individuals. Not just in their roles at USEC, but in who they are as human beings. In a place the world is withdrawing from, I met people whose hearts beat loudly with integrity and justice. Deep and unshakable solidarity, born from the knowledge that our liberation is bound up together. What happens in Gaza or Congo or Sudan or Kenya or the US isn’t far away, it’s here. It’s them and it’s us.

With love and resilience,

Zoha

P.S: A short compilation of my daily commute through Kakuma and Kalobeyei on Robert’s boda-boda (motorbike) is below!

P.P.S: Mandazi and chai from Burundi Market in Kakuma 3, with Tiba and Robert posing for a candid:

On Saturday afternoon, fifty-some counselors and staff from all across North America gathered for training in anticipation. We didn't know each other, but we knew one thing: we loved the kids even before we met them. That was more than enough. It aligned our hearts, our intentions, and our voices. Over coffee served in paper cups with the Starbucks logos crossed out, we began to connect with one another. We were strangers who would become family over the span of a few short days.

Later that night, the kids and their caretakers began to arrive to the hotel. At first, I was a little cautious about my place. Nearly all the counselors were Arab, and I am not. I grew up in the UAE, surrounded by Arab friends, language, food, music, and raised in the rhythm of a culture that has always felt deeply familiar. That familiarity gave me some ease, in the way I greeted the mothers, in the cadence of the kids’ jokes… but it didn’t give me any claim to the identity, the history, the complexity, or the grief of being Arab today. There’s a particular kind of pain in seeing people who look like you, who speak the language your mother spoke to you in the womb, who dance and laugh like your siblings and cousins, who have survived being targeted for exactly that. It’s a grief to which I bear witness, but do not carry in my bones. It’s a weight I can hold for a moment, but will never fully understand. As the families were arriving, I fought the urge to keep to myself that night. I didn't want the counselors or the families to feel they had to explain themselves to a stranger.

And yet, as the participants trickled in and were welcomed one by one, not once did I feel unwelcome. Not by the kids. Not by the mothers. Not by the other counselors. My broken Arabic, my identity, none of it mattered. Actually, it was appreciated. My differences revealed my intentions, and I was loved in the same language they offered each other: generously, fully, without hesitation.

In fact, one of the counselors had grown up in Israel before moving to North America for his education. However anyone else felt about that didn't matter, because the kids rushed to him. They didn’t question his intentions or treat him with any suspicion. They trusted him, they laughed with him, they tried to play his saxophone. Not because they didn’t understand; they understood all too well. But their hearts were bigger than fear. In a world that has tried to erase them, these kids choose again and again to love without condition.

Many of the kids have lost limbs. All have lost homes, loved ones, and pieces of their childhood. But from the moment they arrived, they overflowed with life. It was apparent from the minute we greeted them at the airport, to the bus rides over to the campsite, and throughout the week that would become one of the most cherished weeks of our lives.

That Sunday morning, we were transported from the Columbus hotel to a beautiful facility in the heart of a state forest, with rolling greens, full forests, and a small pond for fishing and canoeing.

Before each day started, there were bird calls, cricket chirps, and the crackle of embers from the previous day's campfire. And once the day began, there was singing. Spontaneous, loud, soul-filling song rising from wherever a group gathered. Someone would always find a tableh and the rhythm would take over, drawing the clapping and swaying out from deep within every onlooker. In those moments, you could feel something ancient and unbreakable being summoned collectively.

The mothers and aunts could only follow the scheduled respite programming for a day or two before creating their own. They gathered around open grills, making fresh khubz, working in unison as they reminisced and shared stories of grief, of love, and of stubborn, sacred hope. The warmth of the bread they placed in our hands and their very presence were grounding forces, reminding us that this camp wasn’t an escape. It was a bridge, between what was lost, and what was yet to be created.

At night, in the haven of their mothers' dorms, the littlest ones would invent wild, joyful games. I remember watching them race: kids with two legs hopping on one foot to compete against the one-legged stride of their friends. There was no pity. Just play, pride, and giggles echoing into the trees.

One of the older boys, self-assured and steady, taught participants and counselors alike how to fish. He turned it into a ritual, something gentle and inclusive. Even those who felt left out elsewhere found themselves drawn to the edge of the pond, rod in hand and heart at ease.

In the middle of the week, we took everyone on a field trip to a nearby lake. We prepared a cookout on the beach. Children of all abilities canoed, swam, splashed, floated, and screamed with laughter in the lake. There was no holding back. Just bodies in motion, free and alive.

I was a counselor for four incredible teenage girls. On Thursday, we took the girls horseback riding. A few were scared at first, clinging to the fence and hesitant to approach the horses. By the end of the day, they didn’t want to leave. Through their steady encouragement of one another and the reassuring patience of the facility staff, the girls found a new kind of courage in the rhythm of the rides.

On Friday, the last day, we had a carnival for all the kids. They swung on giant swings, splashed in the dunk tank, and shared the sweetest carnival treats. When the weather cut the time short, the party simply moved indoors, with the dining hall tables filling up and the walls echoing with yells of "Uno!"

That final evening of the camp, we gathered everyone in a short awards ceremony. Each participant received a certificate, and the counselors shared their favorite traits and memories about each participant. By the end, there were no dry eyes. For me, seeing my girls' chins quivering at the thought of leaving, my heart hurt so much I felt physically ill. We clung to each other with a kind of desperation for which I have no comparison.

Many of these kids will continue their treatment in various parts of the country before returning to Cairo, and under the current occupation, cannot return to Palestine. These kids shouldn’t have to be as resilient as they are. They shouldn’t have to be this far from their homes after facing death and displacement, continuing their medical treatment in a country supplying the bombs that stole their limbs, wondering about the safety of the loved ones they've left behind in Gaza. They shouldn’t be carrying prosthetic legs instead of backpacks. They shouldn’t have to wonder if they’ll ever see their siblings or friends again, or know for certain that they won't. They shouldn’t have to prove their humanity to be allowed to heal. And yet, every day, the kids and their guardians reminded us of what is possible when we choose love over fear, play over pain, and community over despair.

These kids deserve the world - not more goodbyes. They deserve to grow and thrive with their loved ones in a Free Palestine. Instead, we held each other, and they held one another, not knowing where or when we would meet next.

So, what now? What can I possibly say about this grief? The kind of grief that doesn’t want to be soothed, but rather, honored, witnessed, transformed into something larger and more purposeful than sorrow. As much as I want to say this camp had all the answers, there are simply too many questions. One of the ones that repeats like the refrain of an Amr Diab song in my head is, "What does it mean to heal?"

What does it take to heal these kids, these families? To heal the ones who bear witness? To heal those who didn’t witness or could not understand what we saw?

It takes justice. Not charity or pity or photo ops or short-term aid. Justice as in safety, held over years, over generations, not days. Dignity. A guaranteed future. A world that chooses not to look away, and that chooses to end the conditions that wounded in the first place: ending the occupation, the settler violence, the bombs, the sieges, the blockades, the displacement, the silence.

And it takes joy. Healing isn't just the absence of violence. It's the presence of freedom, laughter, dancing, learning, rest, and belonging. At camp, joy was in the tableh at a campfire, khubz made by mothers who reminisce about home, girls on horseback telling themselves, "I have nothing to be afraid of". Joy is also the freedom to walk along the Mediterranean Sea, hand in hand with your loved ones, walking home to land your ancestors have stewarded for centuries.

Healing takes love that is consistent and unconditional. It takes holding onto the truth we saw and honoring our grief by letting it move us. We heal by remembering and responding. We heal by becoming worthy of what these families showed us.

Healing doesn’t come from one place, one person, one program. It comes from all of us choosing, over and over, to honor lived experiences, to refuse erasure, to question narratives, and to create a world where this kind of camp is not a miracle. A world where children don’t need prosthetics and mothers don’t need to remake homes. Where love like this doesn’t need to exist in a bubble of days, stolen from in between hospital visits and surgeries, but can live out its full lifespan in a Free Palestine.

It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of horror at this scale. But the answer is not to shrink. Rather, we must make room for grief and action. For tenderness and rage. For heartbreak and hope.

So here’s what I ask of you:

1. Listen to Palestinian voices.

Follow journalists, artists, and organizers on the ground. Center their stories in your worldview. A few suggestions to get started:

• Bisan Owda

• Mariam Barghouti

• Ibrahim Mohareb

• Anas Sherif

2. Support organizations making this possible.

Whether it’s medical evacuation efforts, trauma-informed therapy, or camps like the one I was part of, HEAL Palestine is on the frontlines. Other organizations to follow and support include:

• Medical Aid for Palestine, supporting mental and physical healthcare needs on the frontlines

• Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, providing urgent aid and long-term recovery for over 35 years

• Gaza Mutual Aid, supporting sustainable, community-led Palestinian liberation

• Jaber Thabet, providing psychological support and art therapy to kids in Gaza

3. Keep talking about Palestine.

Even when it’s hard. Actually, especially when it’s hard. Let your discomfort be a door, not a wall. Welcome others to follow you through that door. If you're in the US, call your representatives in Congress every day and tell them to end weapons sales and aid to Israel. Tell the stories you've heard, the ones we've shared with you.

Your money, your platform, and your time all matter. Nothing is too small when it comes from love.

These children gave me more than I could ever repay. This piece is one small offering in return as a way to say I see you. I remember you. I carry you forward.

And I hope you will do so with me.

With love and fire,

Zoha

P.S: A short video of some of my favorite memories is below; I hope it helps better illustrate the magic of Camp HEAL.

Consulting has been incredibly good to me. It's given me more than I could have imagined in the way of rigorous training in discipline, communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking, but more than anything, it has given me people that I will cherish for life.

We used to joke that the 2021 starting class of Business Analysts in the Detroit office were just five versions of the same person in different fonts: myself and four other women of color who clicked instantly. Through skiing misadventures, a shared house in Miami, 12+ hour car rides, late-night FaceTimes for gossip, mid-day Zooms to improve ugly page layouts, literal (and emotional) rollercoasters, workout classes, movie nights, and countless cups of (lightly-sweetened) Adeni chai, they have become my closest friends.

Beyond my analyst class, through the broader Detroit office and through airline and tourism-related projects all over the world, I've met teammates that mentored me, challenged me, and shaped my sense of self. We traveled together, worked side-by-side or stayed up talking until the wee hours of the morning, and shared moments that turned us from coworkers to family. I've gotten to learn from people I deeply respected and have now come to love.

And then there were my clients. I entered consulting thinking my job was to solve their problems. But many of them became my most powerful teachers: people who showed me how to lead with integrity, how to care deeply, how to hold space for complexity, and how to build some of the most beautiful financial models known to mankind. These clients became some of my greatest mentors and advocates, and a few even became close friends.

So why, four years into basically being a poster child for McKinsey recruiting, and only a few short months after being promoted to manager, have I decided to leave, and what's next?

I’ve moved around my whole life: four countries, ten cities before high school, and then a career that kept me in constant motion: airports, hotels, new client teams every few months. I embraced the cosmopolitan pace because I’ve long believed my purpose is to build global bridges between people, philosophies, and systems, towards the end of uplifting and improving the quality of life for those most marginalized. But if you know anything about bridges, you know they rely on strong foundations, rooted deep into the solid ground on which they stand. This year, with my partner moving to the East Coast for school and my parents moving South, shifting their home base once again, a familiar feeling has made its presence known. I've realized that I don't feel rooted anywhere, and without roots, it’s hard to grow. It's hard to build anything that lasts.

If I want to build bridges that support real positive change, I need to start with roots. I need to understand what it means to belong and serve locally, what it means to truly hear from people and communities, not just companies or organizations. I want to learn from people already doing the work, navigating the realities of today's political, environmental, and economic climate. And I want to follow my curiosity by trying things I’ve long been drawn to but have not yet had the space to explore.

Here’s what that looks like in practice for me over the next 6 months:

• Volunteering as a camp counselor with Camp HEAL Palestine: supporting families re-rooting in the US after being evacuated from Gaza for medical treatment, and learning from respite care camp facilitators and trauma-informed healers

• Supporting United Safe Environment Creators in defining their org strategy: learning the ways in which this refugee-led organization has led initiatives in health, education, environment, safety, and livelihood for Kenya's largest refugee camps, and co-creating a path to overcoming their challenges and creating sustainable, long-term impact

• Spending time on a farm in Ecuador: learning how members of the Kichua tribe practice food sovereignty and environmental justice, and helping to build an environmentally-conscientious guesthouse to promote tourism and cultural exchange

• Documenting grassroots environmental and social entrepreneurship in coastal Southeast Asia: learning how the Da Loc Commune in Vietnam is building resilience to climate catastrophes through community-based mangrove reforestation and management

• Shadowing friends in arts, healthcare, and education to see how they sustain themselves and their communities in NYC, LA, Boston, London, and Dubai

• Starting EMT/Paramedic school in the fall, while working at a trauma clinic in Boston, with the longer-term goal of contributing to relief efforts in conflict areas

None of this is indicative of a perfect plan or a straight path, but the point is that I’m trying. Trying until I better understand what kind of work is needed and what kind of work I can do well. Trying until I find the ways I can sustain myself and others through my work. Trying because curiosity and care can be strategies too.

That’s why I’m calling this newsletter Z Tries. It’s a space for experiments: in community, in service, in sustainability, in living a life aligned with what matters to me. I’ll be sharing the things I’m seeing, learning, and struggling through. Not as answers, but as attempts.

If you’re in your own season of trying, or thinking about starting one, I hope you’ll follow along and share your learnings with me too.

Thanks for being here.

With love and solidarity,

Z

P.S: Please enjoy a speed-run of my last 3 years in consulting - destinations were a mix of work-related and personal travel. I was limited to 100 destinations, so I removed as many repeats and round trips as possible!

Bonus! Baby-faced Zoha on month 1 of consulting:

And 4 years later:

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