The Refugees’ Dilemma and other games with inhuman calculus you really don’t want to play
This is a super personal story about why Kommerce means so much to me.
At the end 2015, my husband Dustin and I welcomed this little being into the world after a really traumatic birth — placental abruption, emergency C section, code reds blaring. She passed her Apgar, 10/10, I believe — not bad for her first test.
About 24 hours after that, when we had time to breathe, he found me wailing out loud and holding our baby too tightly as I inconsolably sobbed out “What kind of fucked up world have we brought her into”.
Her sleeping position was exactly the same as the sleeping toddler, Aylan Kurdi who had washed up on the beach 2 months ago.
I remember my heart breaking like it was yesterday. When I write this again, my heart breaks afresh.
I know this as a lived truth: The only difference between us and the Abdullah Kurdi, the lone parent who survived were that we won the birth lottery and were born in stable democracies. That’s it.
There is literally no reason why you or I should not be in Abdullah Kurdi’s shoes. With the medical issues surrounding the birth of my child, there’s also a more than good chance that in other countries with less advanced medical care, either me or my child would be dead.
This profile on Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, captures the exact issue with why we started Kommerce — the math that you never want to do as a parent.
“You literally put your children on a boat, say goodbye, and hope to meet them on the other side,” says Chan, who was raised speaking Cantonese. “There are horror stories of families putting all their kids on one boat and it sinks, they lose their children. Both sets of my grandparents, who were in the same community, paired their kids, so if a given boat sank they’d only lose a kid each, which is a crazy calculus. My mom and my aunt were paired together and became best friends. And that’s how my mom got to know my dad. They got married later on.”
It’s happening now in Ethiopa: the deadly refugees dilemma— stay and die or leave and starve and maybe die. There is only a choice of very bad games:
“They raped our women and our girls, they burned our farms and our homes,” said Genet Asefa, 25, a mother of six, referring to the gangs of armed men that her and other Gedeos say chased them from West Guji last year.
Six months ago, Genet tried returning, only to find that her home had been destroyed — “there was nothing, only burnt ash” — and violent threats and harassment persisted. Not long after, she fled again.
“They are killing people,” she said. “The government wants us to return home — but we won’t go back until it is safe.”
Some of you guys know the story of how Harveen rocked up to me with call sometime in May 2017 with the question “how would you like to fix hunger in Africa by facilitating food imports in larger quantities, higher quality and cheaper prices”
I was up for it.
I’m a Quaker. We take up our cross, our cause and carry it. Different Quakers in the past 350 years have worked on abolition, prison reform, sufferage, segregation, women’s rights, apartheid, palestine, human rights, environmental justice, LGBTQ rights and climate change.
I promised my daughter that I would make the world a better place with what I could, and this is it, Kommerce. This is a hill that I’m willing to die on.
The fundamental issue that causes migration and conflict is scarcity — scarcity of food, incomes, opportunity — the scarcity of factors you need for human flourishing. As people start fighting over these, you add conflict and insecurity and you destroy communities and countries.
The Syrian Civil war that has killed hundred of thousands of people was a result of climate change that drove 1.5 million farmers and their families off their land into cities. Add the Iraq war, high unemployment and an unresponsive goverment…. and the rest as they say is history.
There is a lot more climate change in our future.
There is also an age old developmental economics problem related to scarcity— why do markets not exist in 3rd world countries/emerging markets? Markets are key to trading and productivity — where there are less markets, less activities happen. When food and job markets fail, societies fail.
These are all moving parts of complex economic problems — or as I prefer to call it, complexity economics problems, which is an emerging field of study and a rabbit hole that I’m down, most days, trying to understand what it takes to create, fix and manage markets.
Fast foward — it’s been a maniac 2 years — we built the amazing team, explored the economics, wrote the white paper, set up the culture keys, then wrote the technical white paper, released the protoype smart contract, looked at more of the economics, started operations, set up the pilot ecosystem.
Then yesterday, I read a tweet from Nadine Chemali:
The unholy calculus of war, where money cannot buy neither food nor safety came back to me.
Kommerce is about creating markets for food, credit and economic opportunity so parents don’t have to flee with their children to distant shores just to live. It’s about making a world where these awful trade offs become less and less common — and a world that resembles what everyone wants: jobs, food to eat, education and healthcare for children.
Harveen says it best: Trade Finance is a matter of life and death.
Some weeks, like this week, I am reminded about why I do what I do. I came home at 3 am to see this. Fallen sound asleep with her Chinese flashcard in the corner.
Many, if not all of us, reading this have children that fall asleep like this, as they do, tired after a long day of play.
We are so, so lucky that we will never know what it is to see your child dead on a beach, not sleeping.
I want to tell Abdullah Kurdi — I am so sorry for your loss. I cannot bring them back, I cannot heal your pain — but know this your sons are the butterfly's wings that created a breeze that might change the world.
I cannot save them, but I hope to create a system where no child is hungry — and where no parents have to ever make the same choices you did.
Your sons have not been forgotten, they have not died in vain. I carry them in my heart and they inspire me daily.
