remember when i bought a tractor for my tribe? here are updates! captioned video and transcript below

you die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a video essayist.

transcript:

amsterdam (00:00.622)

We'll start with this tidbit you posted on your social media. "I'm here to talk about how good it feels to be alive, because I'm 25 and I never thought I would live this long". This is a letter to myself, ismatu, which serves two purposes. To chronicle the time you flew to Amsterdam to buy your tribe a tractor and to remind you, me, retroactively, that it is okay to be alive. Let's begin. You grow used to this shock folks display when they inquire why you were trapped into Amsterdam. The first person that asks you that question is John.

who taxes you to your stay on your overnight Dublin layover and is so kind to you. He tours you around the city, pointing out the landmarks and the life experience he's passed through as you roll on. And you become so enthralled with your weird travel story, he volunteers to take you to the airport at four in the morning so you don't miss your flight to Amsterdam. John even defends the taxi from a gaggle of drunk Dubliners who try and condesire it for their own life. What a

level of trust this was. You had no idea if he'd show you didn't even have his number. You just had to wait to see if he'd turn up and you were kind of screwed if he didn't. John is the first history of benevolent strangers you meet. Do you want to be in the video? You can say no. Yeah. Say hi to TikTok John. It's really lovely to talk about the macro politics of his country and the way those play out on the micro scale of his lives. Even when you don't agree.

You learn so much. You are about to meet so many kind strangers that change your perception of human -ness with their fingerprints. In this curve of time, you are 24, doing something ostensibly odd. And it's the first time in your life that you felt okay to wake up every day, excited even. Many months later, a new friend will say to you, I don't think the sun rises with any sense of obligation.

There's the sun rising over Amsterdam. Look alive, ismatu You land way too early to check into your hotel, so you, on a February Sunday, jet -lagged and giddy, walk around an entirely new city, which leads you to a museum that keeps the nautical history of the Netherlands. Here you learn that sailors were really, really gay and very genderbendy, and for the first so many times on this trip, you contemplate the privileges of structural archival.

amsterdam (02:20.27)

How colonization affords nation time to archive their different iterations of infrastructure, time to build that infrastructure, the privilege of wandering around a new city on any given Sunday and just bumping into some place where you can learn the history of a people. You see a ship in the distance and because Zora O Neale Hurston knit your fashcia together with that damn book, you do indeed find your way on board. There is kind of a grit, like a spite involved with you staying alive.

You keep gazing at trains which manage to float effortless through this city as if you're in some iridescent glittery snow globe Hey, get yourself something to eat. there we go, spite just gnaws at the bones, don't it? Anyways, tonight you'll do schoolwork since you're still working on your thesis, isn't like grand, and you're still very sleepy, having skipped forward in time nine hours or so, so you begin to meander your way back to your home.

thinking it must be okay to get a room by now. And as fate would have it, you pass by an art exhibit showcasing a Dutch -Line artist on its last day of showing, and you meet the artist. You speak no Dutch, but lucky for you, she speaks English. More on this later. You don't sleep a lot that evening before you post your next video. Also, how does one explain to your professors, like, I know I'm really behind on assignments, but it's because I had to travel internationally and in order to buy heavy machinery on behalf of my whole tribe. oh, ismatu. Life continues to be more than you bargained for.

Anyways, you attend a workshop about cannabis in the Netherlands. This is when you finally figure out that coffee shops in Amsterdam actually mostly sell weed. Who knew? Certainly not you. An Englishman called Tom teaches you a whole lot about the illicit trade of cannabis in the Netherlands and that it's mostly illegal at every point in time until the consumer sale. So the government is able to make money hand over fist, prosecuting the drug trade at the same time, taxing each consumer sale over 30%.

Sounds a lot like the US. You then go to dinner with this man called Oscar, an experience that would later become the podcast essay, Dinner with a Capitalist in Amsterdam, 115K, and other things that changed my life. Once again, you manage to meander home. You accidentally wander through the red light district, which is a trippy experience for you as a sex worker and certainly while (allegedly) high. You don't sleep that night at all. So you spend a long time getting ready the next morning.

amsterdam (04:39.534)

Watching you do this, I'm remembering the reason we love skincare so much. It's one of the only points in the day where everything slows down to a halt. For a couple of seconds, moments, it's just us and the body that breathes and we, all tenses of ourself, can think long ways about the curls of time and how quickly life moves and about what's happening to you in February, 2023. Last night, you did your first live on Instagram and someone said, much love from Finland.

And it helps you realize your position is on the world stage by virtue of being an English speaker born in the United States using social media. You're engaging with folks on levels personal and political quite literally all over the world. And that is precarious. And it's also quite precious. What's beginning to occur to you the heights and depths of how banana nuts it is to be facilitating the purchase of heavy machinery with the power of tens of thousands of strangers helping you and.

holding you in their hearts and cheering you on. These moments where you touch your face and look at yourself plainly creates this small pocket of time space where you can allow the fear to really bloom because most days you don't feel the fear. Most times you feel like you can't really afford to, you can't slow down. And also this is kind of thrilling because you are feeling things which hasn't happened in a long time. You've been like depressed for a really long time.

Or I mean, I would I would more so say repress. somewhat intentionally. It felt dangerous and superfluous to have hope in the world. So you got used to just like not feeling things ever at all. Today, you watched the sun come up in your window and you waited to see how you felt looking at the summation of your hard work. You did not sleep. Today is the day you figured out that peace is an emotional sensation as well as a determined pace of being. Wow. what a life this is.

This is very exciting.

amsterdam (06:39.95)

Uncle Umaru: Yeah, another one?

This is the magic of still being alive. The next morning you go to the other side of town for a weird vegan breakfast and a quiet moment where your first manifesto manages to fall out of your pen. And then you go and see your artist friend, Edith!! remember when I said more on this later? Here we are, it's more, it's later!!! Edith: My English is not so good. ismatu: Your English is far better than my Dutch. Edith: It's important that you understand me, not that I...

Edith is a brilliant, like beyond brilliant, line artist based in Amsterdam who makes the most beautiful prints. She is kind enough to invite you to her studio when you said that you wanted one at her [gallery showing] and she didn't have it anymore, but she had more there and then you just got to talking. So she invited you back to teach you how to make said prints and she actually ends up shipping you some in the United States. Here, she is showing you the different kinds of carving utensils one uses to make the...

print stencils and the different kinds of shapes line artists produce. You and her talk for hours, especially about politics. You had come by yesterday to hear about the protests that have been going on with the agricultural district. Farmers blocking traffic with their beef about... beef. Sorry. Apparently Holland has placed emission restrictions on the.

beef trade and conservative farmers are protesting by blocking traffic with their tractors. Things you would have never known had you not had the opportunity to be near someone from a world entirely new to you and hold on to their circumstance. You manage to find so much joy in understanding how similar people across seas are and how much we tend to want the same things, how scary it is seeing resurgences of white supremacy across all these worlds. She tells you about some repression that authors are facing talking about.

amsterdam (08:55.374)

queerness and gender queerness and sexual assault. It's just like, it's the same things in different fonts.. How all this time, most people just want good food, clean work and time with their family. All this time, you've been considering your place on the world stage with fear and trepidation and-- I will ruin it for you. Honestly, this is not the trip where you learn to find like peace. In fact, this is the trip that highlights for you just how bright your star is and how far your reaches and how

you're just getting started and it absolutely terrifies you. Just hold on. Somewhere in between trepidation and fear, you manage to enjoy the moments where you make a new friend, new line art, and plant some seeds of hope. When you get back to your place for the night, you read your manifesto for your corner of the world. I believe I will see a worldwide end to apartheid and colonization. Palestine will be free in our lifetimes. On your last day in Amsterdam,

you walk around and by chance find a whole flea market. The sounds, the smells, the people. Absolutely engrossing. You live for a good flea market. Every kind of person is there! And there's all these things, beautiful fur coats and artwork and great vegan food and families and tourists and businessmen and the most beautiful tea shops you can keep up with in your life, as in all of your days of living. And ismatu honestly, it's me from the future. Yeah, like you could have and should have bought more tea.

Absolutely heavenly. You watch the trains and you get some dinner and you take a call from Freetown reflecting on how much visibility is changing your life. And you understand, or are at least beginning to understand, that you are signing up for a life that you cannot see yet. This whole adventure feels like one prolonged what's behind door number three, but instead of a new car, it's the consequences of decisions you made before you knew to be wary of the social media public. Maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe there's power in thinking that people, even strangers, maybe especially strangers, are good and are kind. Most people want to help each other. I mean, like, what do I know? I'm also in the middle of the story. I can just, all I can say to you is that you barely make your flight leaving this new city that you now kind of love, and you land in a metropolis that you actually cannot stand, New York City. The rats here are the size of possums.

amsterdam (11:20.334)

You're getting ready to shoot a video and talking about one of the most exciting DMs you have ever received. ismatu from the past: It's like a miracle that Instagram led me to them or rather led them to me because I got a DM and they were like, hey, would your tribe be interested in universal based income? And I said, my gosh, actually not necessarily my tribe. I don't know what kinds of Sierra Leoneans you work with, but.

I do know a couple different people that would be very, very interested in something like this. So I feel like I went too hard :(. And then there you are in Manhattan. Hilariously, you don't ever grow out of detesting Manhattan specifically, but it's a cute place to film a video. "Poverty is a policy choice. It is not an inevitable circumstance of humanity." Yeah, viral bait bitch, you ate that shit and you know it, exactly. Then here you are writing a letter to yourself in six months when you are 25, literally praying for more resolution.

It reminds me of you 10 years ago when you were 15 and contemplating ending your life. "Please do not forget me. Like come back when you get to the other side of whatever this is. There's light at the end of the tunnel that everybody keeps talking about. Like don't forget me. Come back and tell me how it ends." I am still in the middle of the story, but I haven't forgotten about you.

So, how did it end? Hello, this is editing ismatu looking like YouTube 2008. I look like Wade from Kim Possible LOL let me get the light, hold on. There we go. This is better. This is better. YouTube 2015. Hi. First of all, I'm sorry about the audio quality of this. ismatu was a silly goose. My cord packet, I left it at home so I couldn't use my microphone. My bad. Secondly, I filmed the B -roll of going to Amsterdam to get this tractor for my tribe.

Which means that the A role is in the life that I was living that I'm telling you all about is not on camera because when good life is happening, my phone is away. So again, sorry about all the shots of walking to and fro like K*mala H*rris. And thirdly there's a whole separate essay in here-- this is just a stuff I was thinking about while this was happening because like I know that my

amsterdam (13:37.614)

online like persona, I don't mean to call it persona... It's just like there are many facets to my personhood and the one that shows up online the most is the one that I think is most helpful, as like a... as like... a Like, a publicly funded English high school teacher that like, you know deviates from the syllabus quite a lot. I feel like that's the most accurate way to describe my job description. It is most

useful to me to be helpful and hopeful because I know that I'm talking to a lot of people that are young people. I am a young person. I don't want to spread like desolation and hopelessness. And also I personally struggle with a lot of desolation and hopelessness. This is the first time in my life, not the first time, but the first time in many years where I was like, right. There's more to life than being just like numb and sticky all the time. I feel like I was like,

I feel like my soul was covered in molasses that I had just let sit there for a couple of days because I was too depressed to clean it off. I don't know if anybody watching has ever been so depressed that you spill something in your apartment and you're like, I will clean that up on Thursday. And it's like Tuesday? That's what I felt like on my inside self. So there's an entirely separate essay here about how leftism and actually acting on the world that I wish to see.

pulled me out of like passive suicidality that I do not get into in the rest of the video because I'm busy telling you about like the logistics of what happened with this fundraiser. So my bad, we're going to put a pin in that. We will come back to it. Otherwise, you know, enjoy conversations about budgets. Have a good day. I have no tea, but I have my editing LaCroix off screen. You either die a hero or you live long enough to see what your sister means about the limoncello.

LaCroix because that's crazy. I aight. have a good one. I'm sorry, this is like a year later than what I would have liked to publish this one. There were a lot of life events that just hadn't happened yet, like that were relevant to updates. We had to wait on that. And two, by the time I was even ready to talk about what happened next steps, by the time I had like a firm conception of what was happening next, the genocide began in Palestine and there was just no way that I could pivot my attention

amsterdam (16:01.742)

to like talking about my silly frivolous life in comparison. So like, thank you for waiting. All right. And then one last thing, I should have been wearing a mask in Amsterdam. I foolishly thought that the United States was, you know, doing terribly in COVID and we are, it's bad by a lot. So I was like, but Amsterdam will surely be safer than that. So when I saw no one wearing a mask, I was like, yeah, word. And it wasn't until I asked Edith and also the bartenders slash friends.

I met at Kauffman, like, so how is COVID here? What's going on with that? Like, no one's wearing a mask, but I, and I can't find much data on how much COVID is here. They were like, it's still definitely here and you hear people getting sick with it. We just like, don't do shit anymore. I was like, word. After that, I wore a mask. It's never too late to put back on a mask. If you had a information or a lack of information and you were misinformed, you just don't see that on my person because I'm filming my feet walking from place to place and flipping around my silk press.

So I am sorry about that. And then from then on, all of my travels were masked up. for real this time. my mom is somewhere feeling a disturbance in the force for me being on camera without earrings. ...she'll be all right. Good morning or whatever time of day you're listening to this. Grab your tea. I'm having a peppermint. You see this bag? That's how you know I'm traveling because I don't got my tea set. So what happened with the Feed My Family Fundraiser? A couple of things.

I have a couple of sections we're going to get through. Let me pull up my notes. So I want to cover here what I learned, where I failed, how I am course correcting those failures, and what my next steps are. Because this fundraiser changed the course of my life, and I cannot overstate that. The first thing that we're going to do is put a little bit of context on the table for who I am and how I got to this point.

Just in case you're new here or also even if you're not new here, there's a high chance that you don't know any of this. I actually, so I made a bullet point list of everything I wanted to talk about in this video. And the context bit is a lot because I don't tell you all about my life. I grew up in an era of the internet-- Like this was the dot com era, the era of time in which you had to type in www dot before you entered into the name, the website domain, or else the internet would not work. It would not take you where you wanted to go. That was an era of time in which we were not

amsterdam (18:15.918)

encouraged to share personal tidbits about yourself, your life or your circumstance to internet strangers. How times have changed. So I went through what I wanted to say and called my bestie and talked through everything I was going to say in the video. I was like, is this too much information for the internet? She was like, yeah, I don't even know all this about you. Very on my mysterious African dad shit. So the start of this story happens when I am 20 years old.

Because I studied global health in my undergraduate career, you have a study abroad requirement, and I chose to fulfill mine by doing independent research in my country of origin, Sierra Leone. This was because I was sincerely interested in Ebola and the narrative of Ebola in the Sierra Leonean context, and also because I had no money as a young, poor undergraduate student, and it was a very good way for my university to pay my way home, because I had never been to Sierra Leone previous to, 2018 was the first time I went, I was 19, seeing my...

my parents' country of origin for the first time. So this is trip two, right? On this trip, this second trip, I am, you know, minding my business, chatting with, I'm staying at my uncle's hotel. And so I'm chatting with some of his staff, they're asking me where I'm from. So I'm like, my mom's from town. She's, you know, up on Pademba Road. And my dad, he's from the Numea village. And they're like, where? I'm like, I don't know. At the time, I didn't really have, you know, like that many details. I'm like, I know that it's in like the Northwest, one of the provinces.

They were like, well, who's your father's father? I'm like, his name is Alhaji Bombolai And they were like,

...Chief Elijah Bombolai? and I was like.

amsterdam (19:51.886)

I called that man immediately and was like, do you have anything you want to tell me about our family lineage? On that trip, 20 years old, I found out that, my father is descended of like the last really great paramount chief of Limba tribe, Chief Alhaji Bombolai who is so ubiquitous in Sierra Leonean culture that he is like a saying, someone calls you Chief Bombolai, they're talking about that you have like a lot of women. Anyway-- this is a shell shock

to me at 20 because previous to that, I had spent my first two decades of life thinking that my parents were from the same tribe, the Krio tribe, which is a tribe that is entirely made up of people that were formerly enslaved. But it turns out that my father is from the Limba tribe, who is the only tribe indigenous to the region of Sierra Leone. Remember Sierra Leone is a made up nation state. It was created by the British Empire as a place to dump people that were formerly enslaved who are now newly illegal in Britain who has outlawed slavery.

So everybody's from everywhere. Like most people that live in Sierra Leone are not Sierra Leonean. That is a, it's a made up identity. It's a made up nation state with the exception of Limba people who were there in the region of Sierra Leone before it ever became a nation. This means that I have a mother tongue, scores of extended family members, a geographical region, all this stuff about my identity that I had no idea about. And it alsooooo does technically make me a princess. I don't know if y'all 'all have heard.

of the Princess Diaries, I know much of my English speaking Western worlders absolutely have. Many of us have seen the movie and it's fun. Like, Disney did a cute job. Anne Hathaway did her big one-- other than the Devil Wears Prada. That's the homie. But the book by Meg Cabot is so much better, particularly because it takes a young Mia Thermopolis, who is like 14, she's a Jewish,

baby leftist who wants to graduate from high school and join Greenpeace to save the whales and puts her in a predicament where she has a new socio -political identity given to her that rubs up against the other political and social identities that she had either assumed or had put upon her because of her life circumstance. When you think about it that way, like the book really contends with the question, so what happens when you are thrust into like a political public identity that you have ideological hangups about?

amsterdam (22:08.462)

I loved this book when I was a teenager and in this book, Mia really goes through like the five stages of grief in watching her previous life iterations just kind of evaporate in front of her. She has a really strong stint in denial. And I feel that. I feel that. When I learned this, all I was like, I had a small panic. And then I said to myself, "ismatu, this doesn't matter. Nobody knows about Sierra Leone. Nobody cares. How could this possibly matter outside of your teenage village in Sierra Leone? Which I you haven't even been yet.

Everything is fine." We're gonna come back to this. Anyways, we're skipping forward. It's the end of 2019. I've done my summer of research with Ebola survivors. I'm working on my senior thesis, synthesizing these interviews, and then boom, the pandemic happens. So these interviews really forced me to pivot away from going to medical school directly after my undergraduate career, which is the life that I had planned for myself, because I see how much...

psychological and social damage was dealt to Ebola survivors, people that contracted the Ebola disease when it was an epidemic in Sierra Leone and survived, tell the tale. When we think about the casualties of an epidemic or a pandemic, we think of the people that died, but we don't often think about the people that survived and had something taken from them or something changed from them. They too were also thrust into a brand new political identity that...

rubbed up against their previously held values. Many of them were rejected by their families and their core communities. Like it was...

It fundamentally changed everything I thought I knew about the world. I said, if I'm going to be a doctor worth their salt, I need to make sure that I'm trained in systems so I understand the ways that things work, the systems that people wade through on their micro, meso, macro levels that define who they are. And I also need to be trained in mental health because these people have so much psychological damage from being outcasts and pariahs and they just keep

amsterdam (23:57.87)

being prescribed pain medicine that they don't actually have the infrastructure to attain. I don't want to be a doctor that sees patients as a constellation of physical symptoms and divorces them from their lived experiences, both in their mental scape and the lived experiences of the systems that they wade through every day. So I decided to take another degree in social work that for medical school is superfluous. Like nobody really cares, but I care. I thought it was really important. And this was the first like time that my being radicalized into a different life--

pivoted the way that the rest of my life worked out. This is the end of '19. 2020, COVID hits in the United States and everything that I watched happen in Sierra Leone happens in the United States in real time and it's horrifying. It happens without fanfare. Like I am a graduate student at this time, studying global health administration and policy, watching us fumble every chance we possibly had at ensuring that COVID did not become endemic, meaning that we just live with it and live with the discourse of disease, live with the people that have died.

I watched us fumble every opportunity that we had to avoid that reality and it like I Really lose my ability to sleep at night I also in this time become a sex worker to survive the economic toll of grad school, blasé blasé Anyways cut to the end of graduate school. I start posting on Tik Tok because I'm bored And because I thought I would be good at it and because I am not doing well off -screen Like I am lightly dying and I don't really tell y 'all that it was just really nice to have a place where I was like

hopeful and happy and I don't know, alive in circumstances where I otherwise felt very, very dead, very dead, especially risking my life at work, you know, working without a mask because you're not making, I'm certainly not making any money if I have to wear a mask at work. So I'm immediately viral. I stay that way. And TBH, it takes me a very long time to take TikTok seriously because it was pitched to me as a dancing kids app. Like I was not.

I already didn't have social media before this. I was already someone who divested from that pretty early. So the fact that I'm here on this, you know, dancing kids app and people care does not immediately make me care. I'm gonna be honest. It felt like a cute little fun game, but I didn't feel like I was ever gonna have any real life consequences.

amsterdam (26:12.494)

I take an extra year to finish graduate school due to housing insecurity, aforementioned dying, et cetera. Blasé blasé right? So the winter before I graduate, this is 2022. My dad calls me and is like, hey, does your school have any grants for agriculture? Because we like really need a tractor. I'm like, how much you need? He's like, 50K. I'm like, okay, sure. African parents like, they think that you go to graduate school and find where they keep the money trees. I'm like, this is a ridiculous ask, but.

I'm like, well, maybe I can see. I don't really love grants. I really didn't love my current academic institution or the act to the institution I was at that time. so I was like, you know, I do not want to deal with the strings attached that tend to come from grants from big academic institutions. However, I can see if I can crowdsource the money, maybe like, how much did you say? He was like, actually 50 ,000 was just for the tractor. We also need to combination rice harvesters. So it was looking more like somewhere about a hundred K I'm like, cool.

Yeah, of course, no problem. Well, now you're caught up. Raising money for this initiative was really when I began to realize how powerful I am and how rare my positionality is. We're going to start with where I failed. I was successful in raising actually a little more than $115 ,000. I raised about $120 ,000, but with transaction fees and stuff, everybody takes their cut. So to us, we got about $115 ,000. And my first failure was that I treated this money like business expenses rather than like the people's money.

There's a really big difference between a nonprofit coordinator and an elected leader. And I am more of the second one, right? I was moving like I was going to be able to write off this money on like an expense report or get it back in taxes. and that's not at all what this fundraiser was. This fundraiser was many thousands of people across the world sending in micro donations, right? Like the average donation was $5 and we got to $115 ,000.

from a bunch of people across the world sending in really nominal amounts of money, $1, $2, $3. That's the vast majority of the money that was raised. You all have equipped me with capital, right? Like the capital of the attention that you give me by repeatedly engaging with my videos as the attention economy. You equipped me with literal monetary capital to be able to exact the will that I said that I had in the world.

amsterdam (28:35.982)

and I convinced you to join me in these endeavors because you believed in what I said I would do. That means that I'm less of a nonprofit director, like I was spending this money like I was, and more of an elected official, as in a constituency of people have decided to make me powerful enough to act upon our collective will. And we decided as a constituency that it was important for one of my tribes in Sierra Leone to have the ability to engage in mechanized farming. That's a really big deal.

I consider myself responsible to you all and responsible for you all. I call you my constituency for a reason because I have taken it upon myself to engage in sustained political education to make sure that we can contend with the world around us well. I consider myself responsible to you and that I need to keep my word. I need to do the things that I say that I would do. This budget is public. And looking back, I'm honestly surprised that I didn't get any angry emails.

By about March of 2023, I knew that the majority of the things that I spent this on, I was going to refund out of my own money. Starting with this line item right here, this budget is public. Okay. You can find it in on my website or in the ink-lay in io-bay. This right here, this housing cost. It happened because I was homeless at the time of running the fundraiser. I couldn't open a new bank account to make sure that fundraiser people's money was not intermingling with my own personal funds.

I didn't have a permanent address to be able to provide like proof of residency or utility bills or nothing like that. I would never recommend this. I would never, ever, ever recommend trying to organize to help anybody if you are in a situation where you are under such economic stress that you don't have like a consistent place to sleep at night. That was the case for me. That's why I used some of the money to be able to buy temporary housing because it was the only way that I could continue to work. And there are a lot of charges like this charges for

supplies, tech, I needed resources to be able to complete the work like I said that I would. But what happens is that the more I was using this money to just like feel the obstacles that came up in trying to procure and move heavy machinery for my tribe, also because we're not based in like the capital FreeTown Not only do we have to ship things, you also have to ship things in country and those roads are not easy. Like this was...

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harder than I could have imagined when I first started. I was using the money to field the obstacles that came my way that I didn't expect. But the more that I was doing that, the more that the money was going towards things that I did not campaign on. I campaigned on a tractor and two combination rice harvesters. And now I've bought things like technical equipment and flights and stuff like that, that I didn't know to factor in the first cost in the first place.

And I also, I was in personal and significant economic stress attempting to help other people that were in personal and significant economic stress. And that...

I understand that in some ways that couldn't really be avoided. It's just that this also, this fundraiser was happening before I knew that you all cared about me personally enough to want me to not be homeless. I thought that you all liked me because I was useful. I did not realize that you had like a stake in my, in my personhood. I didn't find that out until later down the year when I let my accounts overdraw rent because I refused to charge my clients money for therapy and you all paid my rent.

and continue to do so because everything I do now for the internet and in like in the work that I do offline all of it's free. I didn't know that then. I didn't know that you cared about me. If I had known that I would have been explicit about the fact that this fundraiser is like keeping me alive,

and keeping me safe, buying the tools I need to continue to work sustainably. I would have publicly factored that into the purported cause of what it takes to start mechanized farming in Sierra Leone. I would have factored all that in, I would have been explicit about it from jump. I think that would have been the most realistic and the most transparent way to get something like that done. And I did not do that because I didn't know that I would need to. So I think that's my bad. I don't feel good about this. So we're going to

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circle back on this in course correction, what I'm doing to correct my mistakes. Secondly, the other really big mistake that I made is that I worked with the wrong people on this initiative. I had partnered with my father on this, pulling one of my uncles, whom I trusted because of who he is to me and also who he is to our lineage. He's the son that was supposed to take the chieftaincy over from my grandfather, who's his father. And he did not do that for multiple reasons, many legitimate ones. I mean, the biggest one is that my grandfather died when he was a teenager.

And paramount chief, meaning chief of chiefs, is not a job for a 15 year old. Like that's not, you would be in a position of utmost authority over grown men, men that are 30, 40, men that have been ruling over their region for longer than you've been alive. It's really a recipe to get killed. Like I understand why he didn't take it. But I trusted him. I trusted him because he's my dad. I trusted him because everyone where I'm from, from his village believes in him. And that was foolish.

just point blank, trust people by their proven results, not by who they are to you. You gotta trust people, especially in fundraisers like this or in any sort of economic initiatives, not just money, power, circumstance, labor allotment, trust people by their resume, not by who they are to you. I'm not gonna say don't work with family, because I'm in a situation where I literally have to work with my family, but the parent -child relationship specifically is...

really complex. Like it's very difficult to navigate the power dynamics of that. Like to be frank, I'm just far more radical than my dad is. So even when I said upfront, you know, I have specific desires about financial transparency. I want our receipts published. And he agreed to all that. When it came time for me to get him to produce receipts, he didn't. And then what am I going to do? Beat his ass? Like he's my dad. He like, we had a hard time dealing with the fact that

the normal roles of power dynamics were reversed. And I would not recommend working with parents. It's just complicated. You have a lot of history with your parents that you don't necessarily need coming up in business endeavors. And I found it pretty damn near impossible to be a savvy business person and a kind child. Like I found that I had to choose. So it led to me cleaving away from him for any future-- All the next steps that I'm talking about,

amsterdam (35:18.478)

I have decided to do sans his input. Every time I entrusted him with a sum of money to buy one thing, he would spend it on something else. I should have moved away from him a lot sooner, so I take full responsibility for what I'm about to say next. The beautiful tractor that I scouted, flew to see to make sure we weren't being scammed, sat down with the businessman of, et cetera. That tractor never made it to Sierra Leone. And that's my bad.

I trusted someone with many thousands of dollars who had not proven themselves trustworthy and that's at the end of the day, no one's fault but my own. My fundraiser, my name, my constituency, my initiatives, my bad.

I take full responsibility for this. It has not deterred my outcomes. It has not deterred my resolution for mechanized farming in the Limba land. It has only delayed me. I have more notes about this in course correction. Finally, I failed to realize how much authority that I have, not just on the internet and internet land space, but also specifically in my tribal settings and communities. We're going to expand on this point and what I learned. So I just need us to pin this for a second because I want to jump straight into course corrections after talking about the ways that I learned. I learned.

I failed. In about October, in early October of 2023, I quietly stopped taking money from Threadings. Threadings is my newsletter podcast that is hosted on Substack and it is the primary way that I make money from the internet other than direct donations via Cash App and Venmo and also the Patreon; Substack is the lion's share of the thing that pays my bills. I'm entirely donation -based as I said so I don't charge for anything, ain't no paywalls, like whatever people choose to give me they do it solely because they rockin' with me which I need stronger words than I appreciate. It is

amsterdam (37:05.966)

It's something that has further radicalized me. Much of the money that I was already given was already going directly back out to mutual aid requests, which I have a policy that I don't share because I have so many that there's no way for me to choose equitably who I platform over someone else. But I do always donate or straight up fulfill if funds allow. I decided to forego taking money from Threadings. for my personal expenses because I'm serious about reconciling this budget. If I feel like I did not treat this money well,

I spent it on things that now that I know more I would have spent it on something different. I think it's my job to correct it. I did not really know what I was doing the first time around. Honestly, I was more so following orders and following the lead of other people who, like I said, are less radical than me. So once I gained competency to realize that I think I could be doing this better, I want to give myself the opportunity to do it better and to actually keep my word. I also just don't...

I don't want to waste the people's money. This is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night. Like you know how angry I am just at like purchasing food that's bad. I'm like, man, Katie from Tennessee sent me $15 so I could buy this burrito and it's bad. That already ruins my day. But the idea that I took the people's money and like squandered it or, or, or use it on things that I said that I did not explicitly state.

It actually keeps me up at night. I consider it my responsibility. So as of today, the day of filming, which is Sunday, May 26, I have this amount.

available in the fundraiser bank account. Now I actually never got through spending all this money by the time I had spent almost all of it. I had about $45 ,000 left. That was the point in time in which I began to suspect that things were fishy. So I just froze it. I froze all of our transactions. And I was like, let me slow down, figure out what's going on and figure out what I need to do next. And then I have just silently been replenishing this money. So now we're up a little bit more and I believe that we should be all the way paid back $115 ,000. I would also like to pay

amsterdam (39:01.52)

back those fees so maybe we can get to 120 should God will it by the beginning of next year. My target date for being fully refunded is in February of 2025 which is perfect because that will be when we are gearing up for the next coming rice harvesting season.

I would also like to recognize that I understand that cutting my income by like 65, 70 % is kind of buck wild. I do not care. I want to keep my word and I will. Now I have a, one of my advisors who I'm about to like fundamentally shout out in this like little next coming section, was like,

You know, you getting like taken advantage of by your dad, not really your fault, you could, you know, ask for more money to correct these things. I don't feel that way. I think that it's my responsibility. And if I failed in my initial responsibilities, it is up to me to make sure that I correct my mistakes. And I don't think raising more money would correct my mistakes. I think that my making sure that I am diligent with the money that you have already given me

is me correcting my mistakes. So yeah, it's on me. And I'm not going to sleep well until this is settled. So I'm going to settle it. In addition to just refunding the initial fundraiser, I also do not caution you against working with adults. You just need to work with adults that are trustworthy, again, by their resume and not by their relationship to you. So I have a couple of people to shout out.

First of all, the current paramount chief of my tribe has been really, really helpful. More on him later. My uncle Sema also been really helpful, my auntie, Mabinty as well as Martin. He is my German adoptive dad who has been working in finance and food sovereignty for...?

amsterdam (40:46.926)

Honestly, the majority of my life. He is at finance at FIAN international and he's been massively helpful in like providing me resources, readings, conversations, reality checks on like the scope of the work and what it takes how much time and effort it takes, especially resources around who else is organizing around food sovereignty across the colonized world, who's tried what before and the long -term effects of mechanized farming versus more indigenous methods; we call this permaculture in the United States in which you are

like building food forests, you don't use tractors to till the land, for example, because those are good for short -term gains in industrialized farming, but difficult for the long -term health of your soil. I didn't know all that at the beginning of running this campaign. And my primary goals are sustainability, to have sovereignty for multiple generations, for seven generations at minimum, and not to cash in on cash crops. I don't actually want to exhaust or deplete our land.

So I just like, thank you Martin. You've been massively helpful. Word to Sandra.

Give a hug to Janaina for me. I just like, I appreciate that in the work that I've also found family. Just massively helpful in multiple ways. I appreciate you so much. I am also the, for the campaign that I'm currently running for Ebola survivors, which is an entire separate of the videos, but the, the fundraiser from last year, like this, I got the most exciting DM of my life that I like teased during the B -roll footage. That DM was from an organization called Social Income. I think Kerrin if was the first person that reached out to me.

and social income is an entirely volunteer organization. It's a non -governmental organization that's based in Switzerland. They focus on universal basic income initiatives and they were already working with Sierra Leone. So the fact that the Instagram algorithm brought us together?

amsterdam (42:35.47)

Shout out to Zuckerberg, you did one thing right. The reason that I wanted to partner with them is because their financial infrastructure is stunning. Like it's absolutely beautiful. Every time that you give a dollar, Sierra Leonean gets a dollar because they take no overhead fees. And the grants that they write to make sure that their organization stays running does not go to paying people or covering their personal expenses. It goes to making sure that they take care of the bank transfer so that you don't have 20 cents or 15 cents or whatever taken out of the dollar that you give. You give a

dollar, a Sierra Leone gets the equivalent of one US dollar, which is about 22 leones. And that's significant buying power But 22 leones is a taxi ride, a bag of water and a mango. It's very far from nothing. More on this later. But I love the team at Social Income and I'm elated to be working with them. Additionally, I promise people perks for donating a certain amount. I have not forgotten. This has just been one of the most tumultuous years of my life on record. Again, I don't share a lot about my personal life with you.

But zoowee mama, it has been rough. I think this might be tied for my third year of high school when our house caught on fire and I was homeless. That was ass. It's been rough. I promised a personalized thank you video for donations over a hundred dollars and a personalized handwritten note for donations over $500. And I am pivoting. One, cause the videos that I was making felt robotic.

And that like, I just ended up saying the same script over and over again, but injecting people's names in them. And I was like, no, I want this to be like heartfelt because, I really, it's, it's, I need a stronger word than appreciation. The fact that you all believe in me with your dollars is, is a huge deal to me. This has fundamentally re structured my understanding of self in this communal space. So I wanted to do something more heartfelt than me just like reading off a script and babbling to all the same nonsense over and over. So.

If you donated over a hundred dollars, I am writing you a thank you note. I'm just, I'm better with my pen. It will be delivered to you electronically so you don't have to worry about providing your address. And then the people that donated over $500. I actually do have the prints that I teased in the B -roll. Edith was kind enough to send me the prints that we worked on together when she was teaching me how to make lion art. So I will be sending you one of those. I'm so excited. I was waiting until I had a permanent address so that I could receive mail back or at least a PO box.

amsterdam (45:00.43)

And that has taken a lot of time. I lost my apartment in 2022, really doing no fault of my own. And still to this day, I'm having trouble signing a lease, but I'm finally together enough such that I can get myself a PO box. So expect that shortly. Now coming into the, what I have learned on the first one, which is a one off. We actually have farm equipment available for sale in Sierra Leone. So it would be a million times easier to buy things domestically as I'm starting out. Now they're not like....

the brandest newest, shiniest, readiest tractors, not the newest models, but they are functional for what I need them to be for. And as a beginner, I don't feel like I need to buy the newest fanciest bells and whistles, expensive tractors. I just need what's going to get the stuff done. You understand what I'm saying? So it's going to be a million times easier to not have to worry about international shipping, cargo, customs, making sure all of those things reach the checkpoints safely without getting stolen somewhere because there's a lot of corruption happening from like point A to point K,

Points F, D, I, C, and J all have difficult, difficult, lemon difficulties. So it's just going to be a million times easier to just get that locally and have that taken upline which is about like a five hour drive anyways. That's not risk free. Then number two, I want to bring this back to the, the Mia Thermopolis Convo. We left her in stubborn denial about her new socio -political status as a princess. That's in the exposition of the book, right?

She's like, just because I'm the princess of some teeny country that no one's ever heard about does not mean it needs to change my life personally. Everything can be fine. No one literally has to know. Mia is ripped out of that level of denial unceremoniously by like chapter eight, [redacted] Ooh, that's a spoiler. I edited out a spoiler. You should read the book, but like it is pretty tragic how that happened. I was living in that sweet, sweet space of delusion for four solid years. Like it was a, it was a friend's new, you know, it was a funny.

ha ha kiki thing to say at a party. But ultimately it was something that I shoved into the back of my mind. I kept that in the mental recesses right in the vault. I never really wanted to get on the internet and admit to this identity publicly because it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing being other. My editor, Saffana, says that I already look like an AI rendering of like we was kangz new age African royalty. And she's right. And I'm embarrassed!! "I'm a princess" fundamentally feels like I'm doing too much or like... it did.

amsterdam (47:23.15)

It did. Several things have happened since the December of 2022 when I started this fundraiser. The first is that someone asked how I'm in the position to run a campaign like this. Relatively early on, by like week three, someone made a comment like, so why are you able to just do this? Because this is a big deal, you know, mechanized farming for your whole tribe. Limba Land is like 50 ,000 people. That's not a small thing. I was like, mm, word, legitimate question.

I made this video. My name is Ismatu Gwendolyn. I am a Sierra Leonean Black American and I am also the granddaughter of Paramount Chief Ahaji Bombolai. And then I literally never brought up again. I was like, right, word. This is a good point. The reality is I'm a princess. Okay, moving on! I just kind of hoped, I kind of hoped it would like fade out of everybody's collective memory. But I do want to zoom in on this because many.,

many people have asked me along the way to document heavily what I am doing, to take a detailed account of my methodology so that it can be replicated in other settings. And I am, I am doing that. It's just that I don't actually, I don't know how much of my experience is replicable. I am not a grassroots community organizer. I'm not rallying my people around an outcome that I otherwise have to convince them to. I am a princess. My ancestral lands were just sitting,

waiting for someone in my lineage to use them. When I wanted to go up to the Kambia district to see my family and to see these lands, I called my uncle Sema, who took me to the current Paramount Chief and we formulated a game plan. We left the next day and we went together. We didn't call my village to tell them that we were coming up. It was just like a surprise visit with the chief. So he gets there. Everybody, all the adults in my village, this is the Numea village, all the adults in my village

come out and we're sitting under a mango tree. And I'm sitting at the right of the Paramount Chief. It was a short conversation. It boiled down to, hey, this is ismatu. This is Abu Sali's kid. This is Chief Bombolai's grandchild. And they're going to be doing mechanized farming for the Limba tribe. We're going to start our rice cultivation back. And everybody said, word. We're behind you.

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That's it. I said in this fundraiser that I had wanted to make my people sing because when you bring good news, there's the elders, particularly the women of the community come out and they sing and dance. And they did for me.

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Let's go, let's go, let's [singing in Limba] let's go.

They sang and they danced for my coming and for the news for the two the fact that I came back in the first place because I was born in the United States, so this is also my first time meeting them, the fact that I came back and the fact that I came back with the news that we were going to be growing our own rice.

amsterdam (51:14.286)

That was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I'm in that video trying not to cry. I will never, you will never hear me downplaying this princess stuff ever again, ever. I really wish that I had reread Dean Spade's Mutual Aid and also the Care Manifesto by the Care Collective at the start of running this fundraiser. It's-- the former Mutual Aid I had already read before in graduate school, but it was far from my mind at the time that I read the fundraiser. I really liked that book.

And I think that it's really phenomenal for Western context. And there's also some of it that just, I would like to heed that advice, but it cannot apply to me. There's this note about avoiding too much authority concentrated in one person. We don't want one sole charismatic leader to have way more economic and cultural capital than everybody else in the group. And we want to do our best to disseminate power.

And I'm not really in a position where I can just disseminate power. This whole like avoid one charismatic leader in a position of authority thing, it's just really not something I can really get away from. My power and authority are fundamentally above me in this context. This is why I said it was a mistake for me to not understand how much power I wield in this circumstance.

Many things are easier and many systems are already set up and into place because of the position I am inheriting. I am inheriting, like I said, it's ancestral land. And if you see from the B -roll footage, it's plowed, it's ready to go. Like really all it needs is something to work the soil to the point where it's soft and nutritious enough to be able to harbor rice. But it's ready to, and it's just sitting there.

It hasn't been farmed in decades. And it's just sitting there waiting for somebody with my last name to come use it. Many of you all who are engaging in food sovereignty initiatives across the world are doing so in a grassroots manner, in a ground up way. And I'm going to be explicit in the fact that I really do not know what that's, that's not, that's not the situation I'm in. I cannot advise on that. I don't got to buy land. I don't have to organize. Like I, this, this was already set out for me. All I did was show up, honestly. And watching my elders sing for me has truly erased any qualms or doubts that I have on.

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naming and talking about my title. also final quick note on mistakes I made. Take global geopolitics into account whenever you are doing something on a national or an international level. Sierra Leone was having an election year the same year I was trying to ship heavy farm equipment. Huh. HUH. aight. this is number three. There's one more reason I wanted to say all this publicly, so you'll have to indulge me in like a an anecdote really quick. so last year

it's like the, it was winter, right? This was two weeks before I was in New York. I was sitting outside journaling, moderately cold, eating a croissant, otherwise minding my business. And there's a couple people, some tables down, it's an adorable little black girl with glasses telling her bald -headed black daddy, telling him all of the costumes, the princess costumes that she requires that he buy for her. I know that's right. The kids are more than all right, as is your birthright, yes child.

She's going down the list. She like, "you're going to buy me Cinderella and you're going to buy me Jasmine. You're going to buy me Rapunzel." He's like, "I am?" She's like, "You are. :) And you're going to buy me Moana. Actually, wait, no, Moana not a princess. And then you're going to--" and I, my mouth agape, right? Moana is tied for my favorite princess along with Tiana. I feel like both reasons should be immediately obvious. So I say "Moana is too a princess!!" And I said that out loud to a little girl that I did not know.

And the family, they were packing up, getting ready to leave. So she turns to me, she's like, no, she not. I was like, she is-- no, she is. She's the daughter of a chief. She's a princess. And her dad is trying to kindly shuffle them away. He like, "yeah, she's a real firecracker," moving his child away from this random stranger that's decided to debate his kid. And she's not having it. She fully ignores him. She fully turns to me. She's like, she is not a princess. I am like, she IS a princess.

She's the daughter of a chief; that makes her a princess. And she like, yeah, but she don't want to be a princess. I'm like, I mean, just because you don't want to be a princess doesn't mean that you aren't a princess. And she's like, but she don't want to be.

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And I said nothing after that. I was just gagged. What do you say to that? So they leave. Her dad picks her up and she waves goodbye over her dad's head. And I wave back and I'm like, I sat there in silence for a good three minutes because this little girl just emptied the clip in my chest and don't even know. Damn. let me tell you why this matters. So also last year in February when I was running this

initiative, I got a message from someone called Alex, who is the mother of someone called Layla. And Layla is a, ooh, I actually can't even call her a teen about her because I'm actually quite certain that this person is under the age of 12. Layla is a member of our constituency who had to make, you know, one of the trifolds for Black History Month. And she decided to make it on me.

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Do you know how much I cried when I saw this? I don't think I even told anybody in my personal life because it just like, it floored me. I think about this currently at least twice a week. Like this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I want to say, Layla, and I'll be emailing this to your mom to make sure you don't miss it. This really humbled me. It has really helped me re -understand how many eyes are on me and how many of those eyes are children. I am fundamentally motivated

in my radicalism by the fact that you exist, by the fact that children exist because I refuse to hand you a world that I'm not proud of.

And I want to say that in addition to these great things that you decided to highlight about me, you know, feminist and therapist and things like that, Princess should be on here. And that's my bad for not letting you know. It's my bad for not letting you know. But I want to say this publicly and in full view of the constituency. I will be dead in my grave. I will be cold and decomposing.

before I get de -qualified from my titles because I don't want them. Because I act like I don't want them. I will never downplay this again.

All right. Finally, in final notes about things I learned, you really cannot act out of urgency if you are striving for long -term goals. Urgency and moving from a place of urgency is your enemy if you are acting for long -term goals. And that's a really, that's quite a mental game to consider. That's actually really difficult because the thing that was motivating me was that my people are starving. I'm not talking about people like in a big esoteric, like.

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many ancestors removed sense. I'm talking about my direct family members. Aunts, uncles, cousins are starving. upline like, you know, the way I feel it, right? Kids are walking around with those big, big famine bellies.

amsterdam (58:31.566)

It was one of the most radical experiences of my life. My motivator every day in raising this money was kids starve if I don't, adults starve if I don't, my family starves if I don't. We're starving every day until we reach a point where we are producing enough food to feed everybody. We're starving. Remember this fundraiser was initially called the Feed My Family fundraiser and that was not like a marketing tactic. That is literal. I'm talking about my family, my family in rural settings

is literally starving because of how difficult it is to do large scale farming without any equipment. The land is there, but it is so difficult to hoe and sow by hand for tens or hundreds of thousands of people that you starve. The only reason that we were able to pull it off. This is a whole separate video, but like the Limba were specifically targeted in the slave trade for their adeptness at rice farming. So we ended up across the world, particularly concentrated the North and South Carolinas.

Shout out to the Gulla Geechee folks, y 'all my cousins and the Caribbean. So the fact that we who are ancestrally good at rice farming cannot rice farm today because of how the legacy of slavery, the lived experience of having your adults snatched away from you has decimated the community leftover such that we have to have imported rice. We're starving on our own lands.

That'll wake you up in the morning. It'll get you out of bed. But the thing is, using this as a motivator meant that I was literally falling asleep at my desk upright every night. I was also not just running this fundraiser. I was doing at the same time, navigating chronic homelessness and writing my master's thesis. I was doing fundamentally too much. You cannot make big, giant cascading life decisions that affect more than you, but like, a people, you can't make those from a decision--

and from a place of urgency. You will end up taking the fastest route possible to get the outcome you want. And the fastest route is often not the best way to go about things. People are starving and I still need to keep a cool head and focus on my long -term outcomes. And that's difficult, but it's also like, that's what the title costs. Urgency can also justify you moving unilaterally because there isn't time, there isn't time to make cohesive decisions.

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Again, I really wish that I had reread mutual aid by Dean Spade while I was doing this fundraiser. I do. Both these texts have really phenomenal points about what sustainable care looks like. And not only do they stress that you must avoid burnout, which I did not do, I ran myself until I crashed and burned. I like crashed hard, face planted sometime in like mid March of 2023 and couldn't really get myself back up until about July or so. Not only did I do a terrible job at avoiding burnout.

I also was moving like I could make all these decisions by myself. And I suppose I could, but you know what made my life a lot easier? Waiting until I actually got to Sierra Leone to sit down with the people that I was trying to serve in the first place so that we could have conversations about timelines, feasibility, what my real next steps are. There was no reason for you to move unilaterally other than you think that it needs to get done tomorrow.

Because if it needs to get done tomorrow, yes, you do, you yourself need to make a quick decision. But moving out of urgency for chronic problems doesn't solve the chronicness of the problem. It gives you a shiny, marketable output to parade around and say that you did it. And that's not actually what I'm interested in. I'm interested in solving a problem long -term. Also, I know you have not heard of a hurried farmer. Farming is a slow business. You have to leave your desires for instant gratification at the door. Okay, speaking of next steps, what is up next?

I'm so glad you asked. Okay. the first big next step has already happened. I did so quietly because again, I don't tell y 'all about my life. but in December of 2023, I quietly packed all of my bags and moved to Sierra Leone. That is where I am based full time. Now this is a pretty obvious next step. I feel like once I began to realize how badly I had allowed myself to be taken advantage of, by having middlemen between me and the population that I'm trying to serve, the only clear solution is to be where the action is happening. Like I just need to be there.

So I moved, moved, packed five suitcases and I live in Sierra Leone now. I live there full time. This is not as clean of a transition as I had initially imagined. Like right now I'm filming this in the United States because my mom received a cancer diagnosis. So I do have to be around. Like I don't necessarily have to be here full time, but I do need to be around and available to see to my family and make sure that I can be a support and provide for them in the ways that are necessary. But.

amsterdam (01:03:13.774)

The fact is I live in Sierra Leone as my primary place of residence. And also in the coming fall of 2024, I will be attending Njala University, the one that's specifically in Freetown, the capital city, to get my certificate in agriculture because tools are useless if you don't know what to do with them. I do still think that mechanized farming is the way to go in the short term. And I need to make sure that I have mechanized farming understandings. Like I actually need to know what I'm doing. In addition to my formal training, like in my certificate program for agriculture,

I am also bolstering this training by being in and shadowing family farms that are in colonized context, specifically in the Caribbean and in the Southern District of Africa. I'm very excited about this. I was supposed to have already gone to these places, but again, mom has cancer, so that just kind of, you know, that made all of my plans a moot point. Either way, there's no real way for me to engage with this work.

if I don't personally know what I'm doing. I don't feel like I gotta do everything, but even the work of delegation requires me to know enough to delegate well to other farmers. I gotta learn to speak farmer. I'm about to learn a hell of a lot about soil, so I'm really excited about that. And also in terms of other next steps, it's a lot of unsexy princess shit. I gotta take a census, it goes in my constituency, I gotta draw up the legal documents that finalize me using my family land.

I have to register businesses in Sierra Leone, begin seed keeping, irrigation, all of that is paperwork. I got a lot of paperwork to do. And then my final next step in terms of repping my constituency, it is not just my direct tribe or my nucleic tribal connections. I also have a relationship with the Ebola survivors of Sierra Leone, SLAES, who have organized themselves into a nonprofit

that has chapters across the country. And I made some promises to them and I intend to keep those promises. Again, that's for another video, but in case you're already caught up, the link to donate to their Universal Basic Income program is in the bio as per usual. God, that's so exciting. Wow. Love this. That's really all I got. Have a good day. What a time of day you're listening to this. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.