July-August 2021

I start my day with a steaming cup of tea in my favorite mug. I went to grad school in Boston and I miss being there.

Greetings from New Delhi, India! I’ve been working as a Community Development Fellow with the Foundation for Community Development and Empowerment (FCDE), an international non-governmental organization that builds the local capacity of grassroots organizations in rural East Africa. I work remotely with FCDE’s offices in Kasese and Rukungiri, Uganda. For nearly 11 months, I’ve built communication strategies for our local partner organizations, conducted workshops for the FCDE staff on topics such as storytelling for social media, report writing, and public speaking, designed quarterly newsletters, and provided editing support to internal and external communication and marketing materials.

As a former journalist, I spent considerable time in the field, gathering stories that mirror the on-ground reality. So as a Fellow, I expected to incorporate my journalism experience in my community development work. However, given the circumstances, I had to pivot my working style and rely on my colleagues in Uganda to be my eyes and ears. I provide detailed information on what sort of video, photo, or piece of content I’m looking for, they either source it or grab their cameras and go out in the field. This is one of the many instances of how the staff has stepped up to support my work — I’m grateful to be a part of this collaborative team!

At Amer Fort in Jaipur, India. This is from my last trip in January 2020 (right before the pandemic).

A major perk of the fellowship has been the opportunity to work on a variety of projects. For example, I was actively involved with FCDE’s Cultural Connections Program, which placed American and Ugandan students in service-learning internships with our local partner organizations in rural Uganda. Apart from program coordination, I developed and led two sessions at the orientation and conducted exit interviews with the interns. Through projects like these, I have become a better communicator, writer, team member, and leader.

FCDE’s virtual retreat in December 2020.

Outside of work hours, I read, attend Zumba classes (virtually at the moment!), and listen to podcasts while baking. Thanks to WhatsApp and Zoom, I have stayed connected with my co-Fellows, the FCDE team, and a few alumni. The PiAf community including my cohort is full of incredibly talented and kind people who are generous with their time and advice. It’s such a privilege to be a part of this group.

As the fellowship comes to an end, I remain optimistic that one day I’ll visit Uganda and meet the FCDE team as well as our grassroots partners. I also hope that someday our cohort can meet up in person. Wishing the cohort of 2021-22 the very best. I’m rooting for you!

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Armed with 2 monitors for thorny budgeting days, workdays are fuelled by my trusty tea mug, which is almost never empty.

Hello from Ibadan, Nigeria! I hope you are all safe and healthy as you read this. 

I have spent the past year working from my home city in southwest Nigeria as a Grants Fellow with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) for Somalia. Frankly, it is a bit alarming that the year has flown by so quickly and I have only a few weeks left before my fellowship ends. 

Last week’s dinner!

My job revolves around the fundraising and grant cycle management process for IRC Somalia’s health, nutrition, women’s protection and economic recovery programs. I spend much of my time developing budgets for multisectoral proposals and working with colleagues to craft technical proposals. I also work with my team to track the performance of ongoing programs and create comprehensive donor reports for a variety of portfolios. 

I have some past experience with these processes, but working at IRC Somalia further amplified my role in and my understanding of each aspect, especially fundraising. 11 months in and I feel more confident about my abilities and skills than before I began.

I have also had the opportunity to do some things I did not expect to. During the second half of my fellowship, I got to work on articles on topics ranging from pandemic-era cash assistance for displaced persons to reproductive healthcare in Somalia for IRC’s internal site (RescueNet). I am fairly new to communications work, so doing it remotely was a bit intimidating. I am very grateful for the support of my colleagues in the field in finding and crafting these stories. This work solidified for me the importance of human-centered storytelling and gave me a deeper look into IRC’s work beyond beneficiary numbers and budgets. 

I also value the opportunity I had at IRC Somalia to be involved in strategic decision-making processes. Through conducting context research, writing and editing key portions of strategy documents and coordinating decision workshops, I developed a deeper understanding and appreciation for the challenges and potential of working in the Somali context.

I think a nature photography hobby is budding..

Outside of work, I took up casual gardening. Soon after my move back home, I started growing a few nightshades on a tiny patch of land in my backyard. Though my tomatoes died a quick death – I admit I am an amateur, I’ll try again someday! – I am happy to report that my aubergines/eggplants are growing bountifully in the tropical weather and that I also got quite a lot of chili and scotch bonnet peppers for my efforts. In my free time, now that planting season has started in Nigeria, I occasionally help out on a farm in the mountains a few hours away from the city.

This year was definitely a change of pace from what I expected before the pandemic began, but I hope to be able to meet some of my colleagues and co-Fellows in-person one day. In the meantime, I will continue to value and build upon the relationships and opportunities I have gained thus far. Thank you for reading!

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Greetings from Bemidji, Minnesota! I can’t believe it’s been a month since wrapping up my fellowship. This past year, I served as the Grants and Reporting Fellow at IRC Kenya with my incredible co-Fellow Kat. In this role, I oversaw reporting for Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps and urban programs in Lodwar and Nairobi, Kenya. This reporting ranged from innovative cash transfer programs in urban areas to women’s centers in various refugee camps. Alongside my amazing team in the grants unit in the Kenya country program, I supported proposals and partnership management to expand IRC programming in Kenya. Stepping into these responsibilities, the dedication of my colleagues constantly amazed me but I also grappled with the structural challenges of sustainability and the ongoing need for decolonization in the development space. 

Throughout this year, I am most grateful for the moments shared with my other Fellows. From our weekly zoom calls to occasional happy hours and work sessions processing our days, weeks, and experiences, sharing this virtual experience with you has been a highlight of this complicated and difficult year. Not many people can relate to the dual challenges of drastically different time zones and navigating virtual work, but I’m incredibly appreciative of the spaces we created to reflect on and process the year. Thank you for the conversations on work on the African continent, positionality, identity, antiracism, and decolonization. Thank you for the hours spent discussing changing life priorities and engaging with the ways this pandemic has changed our worldviews. Thank you for your kindness, guidance, and support. Hearing about all your next steps, I’m incredibly excited for all that is to come and I’m grateful to call you all dear friends.

Signing off from the woods of Minnesota! Kwa heri ya kuonana!

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Interview with Desiree Bailey

Desiree is a 2011-2012 Princeton in Africa Fellow, where she worked with Equal Education in South Africa. She holds a BA from Georgetown University, an MFA in Fiction from Brown University, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in various places such as Best American Poetry, Best New Poets,  and American Short Fiction.

Read more about Desiree. 

What elements of your Trinidadian roots inspired your writing in ‘What Noise Against the Cane’?

“We all carry our homes within us; we praise and wrestle with and find new ways of relating to our homes. What Noise Against the Cane has the obvious references to Trinidad: the linguistic cadences of the Sea Voice that runs along the bottom margins of the book, the mention of certain foods and flora, of carnival. However, because I am Trinidadian, I imagine that there are Trinidadian elements that manifest in ways that I have not even considered, or may never know, and I find this exciting.”

Did your PiAf fellowship in South Africa prepare you in any way or give you inspiration for your written works?

“During my fellowship in Cape Town, I became close to so many brilliant and daring thinkers, people whose work are forged in the resistance of political and societal pressures, people who claim their joys and possibilities, who use their work in service of ancestral memory and to map a way forward to liberation. They all influence how I see myself as a writer, a poet, a person moving through the world. ”

You have Caribbean roots, visited Africa, and grew up in the States. How has your experience with different aspects of the African diaspora shaped your outlook on race relations, the nuances between members of the African diaspora, and how this is translated through written mediums?

“My movements between Trinidad and Tobago, New York, and Cape Town constantly challenge the fixed ideas that I’ve learned about race, borders, and belonging. Blackness, for instance, is vast, deep, and diverse, rich in its many iterations in spite of the ways in which it is often portrayed. I’ve also seen the pervasive and global reach of white supremacist structures and institutions, of Western imperialism, which are recognizable in each of these places. If we are to resist these structures, I believe we must move with an awareness of the connections between the local and global; we must hold space for our nuances and shared experiences. ”

What kind of impact are you hoping your writing will leave in the literary community as well as the Black diaspora /immigrant community?

“I imagine that my hopes will evolve as my writing and thinking evolves, or perhaps depending on the needs and desires of a particular day. Today I hope that my work can join the work of many others who celebrate our multitudes. ”

What does the future for Desiree Bailey look like?

“The future looks like staying open to the wonders of the universe, like freedom from colonial and capitalist notions of time, value, and productivity. The future is abundant in ways that I cannot yet imagine.”

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