I love working for the non-profit sector because it gives me a sense of purpose—the work I’m doing is necessary and meaningful and I actually have skills I can contribute to a cause I believe in.

But tedious work for a cause is still tedious work, if only more painful due to the lack of resources. I have neither the patience nor skill to deal with ten year old computers that crash when attempting to install anti-virus software and take anywhere between 30 seconds and five minutes to open a blank document. The hard drives are overloaded with work from volunteers who left years ago and colonies of ants seem to enjoy living in the keyboards. A task that should take fifteen minutes can easily eat up two hours. Fortunately, American hyper-efficiency has yet to make its way to Kenya. The people here live a slow-paced lifestyle. In fact, they even have a phrase, “Pole pole,” which translates to “slowly, slowly,” to describe just about everything here. In between bouts of cussing at the computer, I’m becoming very Zen.

In addition to teaching English, math, and computer classes, I am working on transitioning the EAC Sewing Club into an independent cooperative run by the women themselves. The executive director of the EAC described it as a graduate level project in sustainable development. I am in no way educated or experienced in the field, though I was looking into development for my master’s work, so this, like so many other things, will be an interesting test run.

So far, though, my work in sustainable development has consisted of typing up price lists of all the products, converting the prices into U.S. dollars and euros, and taking pretty pictures of purses, skirts, and tablecloths. And somehow it all seems even less meaningful when sitting in front of a 90s Dell for eight hours a day.