Mark and Thando met as teenagers at the United World College of the Adriatic, on a cliffside campus in Italy; a kid from Eswatini (Thando) and an island boy from the Cayman Islands, born and raised in Jamaica (Mark), thrown into the same tiny college town and somehow becoming close friends. Neither of them chose this, not really. They graduated from UWC in 2021, and both landed in the US: Thando in Virginia, Mark in North Carolina. I, on the other hand, touched US soil a little earlier. Through the same UWC cohort, I arrived at Montezuma, New Mexico, in August 2018 and graduated in the midst of the pandemic. After a gap year, I met Thando at the University of Richmond. And after my college graduation, I met Mark.
Growing up, we all develop goals for our lives, aspirations rooted in our backgrounds, and so they carry an emotional weight for us. These goals transpire because the unfiltered creativity and innocent freedom of a child is too strong not to inspire one. But it comes in simpler installments. For instance, printing your first "Hello World!" And then the joy of learning about the for-loop, because now you dream of printing the same "Hello World!" a hundred times.
As we grow older, these dreams get tested against the vicissitudes of the world and, depending on the struggle, our dreams morph into something a little more pragmatic for the realities of life. Why are you printing "Hello World!" a hundred times? What problem is it solving? Who is your target audience?
