As the fellowship moves towards its closure, something strange has been happening to me. Slowly, quietly, without any announcement , I have started seeing things differently. Not just the work. The way I look at what is right and what is wrong has genuinely shifted, and I am still in the middle of figuring out what that means.
Let me be honest about something first. When I started this journey, I had a certain clarity. Or at least I thought it was clarity. I knew what good work looked like. I knew what the right thing to do was. And somewhere in that certainty, I think I was a little rigid – not out of arrogance, but out of the kind of idealism that comes with a fresh start, when the mission is still clean and the ground hasn’t complicated it yet.
Then the ground complicated it.
Here is a real example, the kind that doesn’t make it into reports but lives rent-free in your head for weeks. We were working with a group of women – they had been putting in real effort, showing up despite everything else pulling at them, fitting this work into lives that were already full to the edge. And the question came up: what price do we demand from the buyer? We pushed for a higher price. We made a commitment – you pay us more, and we will give you pure, clean, organic product. No shortcuts. Better quality than anything else in the market.
Now on paper, someone could say – wait, is that entirely fair? You’re asking the buyer to spend more. That extra cost doesn’t vanish, it just gets absorbed somewhere. That’s a valid point. I am not dismissing it. But here is the other side, the side that the spreadsheet doesn’t capture: these women are already stretched thin. They are managing households, raising children, doing agricultural work, and then on top of all of that they carved out extra time to be part of this. Extra time they didn’t technically have. They didn’t complain about it. They just did it. So when we say they deserve a better price for a better product, that is not manipulation. That is an affirmative action – a deliberate, conscious correction that puts people who started five steps behind at least closer to the same starting line as everyone else. Your 6 is not the same as my 9, even if they look like the same number from a distance.
And that is the thing I keep coming back to as this fellowship winds down. There is no pure black and white on the ground. There never was. I think I knew this intellectually before, but I know it in my bones now. The field does that to you – it takes your theories and holds them up against actual people and actual situations and asks, quietly but firmly, does this still hold?
What I have seen is that a lot of good work stops happening not because people lack intention or skill, but because they get stuck in a loop. The right decision versus the wrong decision. The correct approach versus the incorrect one. And while they are going around and around that loop, the moment passes, the opportunity closes, the community moves on. The absoluteness that felt like integrity starts functioning like paralysis.
I am not saying values don’t matter. They do. Mine have not changed. Community interest first. Honesty with the people I work with. Transparency about what I can and cannot do. Those are non-negotiable – not because someone told me to hold them but because they are the reason I am here in the first place. But within those fixed points, there is enormous space. Space to be flexible. Space to read the situation as it actually is, not as the framework says it should be. Space to make a call based on what is available right now, with the people who are here right now, under the conditions that actually exist , not the ideal conditions we planned for.
What I have also had to learn and this one took longer , is that even after all the reflection, even with the right values and the flexible thinking and the honest intentions, you will sometimes still get it wrong. A decision that seemed right at the time will turn out to have a cost you didn’t see. And the response to that cannot be self-punishment or the same loop dressed in new clothes. It has to be something simpler and harder at the same time: accept it, understand what happened, and move. Not move on in the sense of forgetting it, but move in the sense of doing the next thing better because of it.
What I am realising as I approach the end of this fellowship is that the journey was never really about finding the perfectly right answers. It was about developing the judgment to navigate the space between the answers and the honesty to keep checking whether my compass was still pointing in the right direction. We get so caught up in being right that we forget to look back at where we started and ask: why did we start this at all? The women I work with didn’t need a perfect programme. They needed someone who would show up, think clearly, stay honest, and keep moving. That was always the real work. And most days, I think we did it.
Most days is enough. Most days is, in fact, a lot.
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