1 Million Reasons Why I’m Going to Africa

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” - Henry David Thoreau


In a week, I’m packing up and leaving for Africa until the summer.

Cameroon, to be exact. I’ve joined Jola Venture to help launch a new product that can help thousands of farmers preserve their food and bring it all to market. Right now, they lose about half of it because there’s no effective and affordable technology to preserve fruits, vegetables, and meats. The two guys that convinced me to go, Roland and Mike, are ambitiously leading this project and have been absolutely killing it lately.

It’s a project that I’m really proud to be a part of, and I’m beyond grateful that I have this opportunity. This is an industry and a country where I have absolutely no idea of what to expect, and I do admit, there’s some nervousness in that. But strangely, I find myself craving it. As soon as I heard about this opportunity, my gut knew that I had to take it. It became an itch that I needed to scratch.

The itch definitely didn’t just appear there one day though. People I deeply admire, like Chris Robertson, a former professor of mine, world traveler, and now a great friend, have really led me to believe that I’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding why people travel. I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t draw a ton of ideas from a blog - Chris Guillebeau’s.

But beyond that…

I’ve also realized that I talk about solving real problems with technology and business a lot. Yet I have worked on my fair share of fluffy projects - things that never solved any real problem at all.

There’s bit of a contradiction there.

One thing I strive for most is to live a life free of contradictions. Seriously - I want you to call me out on it. When I’m not walking as I speak, please, make a fool out of me.

When I talk about what a good business is - how it solves a specific need with a great product - I want to know what real market problems are on a deep, intimate level. There are places in the world where A & C are just begging to be connected with a B, but nobody is. From what I’ve heard, you can develop that intangible sense of an untapped market much more quickly in the developing world than in the United States.

When I talk about my aspirations to see the world, I don’t want them to be aspirations. I’d much rather take advantage of this unprecedented 21st century mobility and make it reality.

When I talk about boldly living the way I claim to, I don’t want to hide that little caveat of settling for what felt safer and more comfortable at the time.

A couple of years ago, I expect that I would have said, “Where? Never in a million years.” Now, whether this trip turns out to be successful or a miserable failure, I realize that those would have been a million years of gnawing curiosity about the adventure I could have had. That’s a lot scarier to me than malaria, homesickness, or missing out on a few more thousand dollars I could have made.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” - Henry David Thoreau
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  1. drewdagostino posted this