Andela Gives Passion a Home
As I watched the auditions for America’s Got Talent 2019, I was touched by the story and performance of Tyler Butler-Figueroa, an 11-year-old cancer survivor that fell in love with the violin as an escape from all the bullying at school where kids claimed his cancer was contagious.
When Simon Cowell gave him the golden buzzer, I watched him drown in joy. All the years of street performances had led him to one of the biggest stages in the world where what he loved doing was celebrated.
While I can’t play the violin like him, we have something in common — the desire to do what we love. I discovered my love for computers — in particular, computer programming — way back in high school. Despite the fact that computer studies weren’t part of my examined subjects, I could often be found reading programming books at the amusement of my peers.
Our society doesn’t celebrate the passion, but instead celebrates individuals that can pay the bills. In the end, you find individuals pushing themselves to go to work every day because they lack intrinsic motivation. On the other end, you find those pursuing passion struggling to make ends meet.
The struggles of passion are the kind I’m most familiar with. I know the emotional, social, financial and spiritual strains they can exert on an individual. I can only imagine the pain my father felt day after day watching his son locked up in the bedroom writing software. Born from a different generation, the opportunity of programming was way outside the bounds of his imagination.
Whereas I’d worked with ThoughtWorks four years before joining Andela, it wasn’t until I joined Andela that I experienced my golden buzzer moment. For the first time ever, my father got to understand what I was up to. A reality I came to understand when he told my brother about me saying, “all along, he was up to something good.”
Today I find myself at a place called Ikigai — a place the Japanese refer to as the intersection of what one loves, what they are good at, what they can be paid for and what the world needs. In short, a place where passion can pay the bills. Before, I had searched for opportunities in the local economy and kept hitting walls, but when I joined Andela, I was awakened to the abundant opportunities in the global economy.
Throughout our lives, we find ourselves choosing between passion and our present needs. But often times, the present needs triumph over passion. A reality manifest in the people we choose to walk life with, and the work we choose to do. For a passionate software engineer in Uganda today, Andela offers a home — as passion finds agreement with the present needs.
If I was to think about Andela’s gift to Uganda, I would say, it gave passion a home. I honestly don’t know of any other place in Uganda, where one can find close to 200 software engineers pursuing their passion.
