Honoring the Failures and Following the Signs

Getting used to things not going how I thought they would

I arrived to Colombia in the early morning hours of July 17th. Officially halfway done with the fellowship, I'm in a place that I couldn't have predicted when I arrived 5 months ago.

Whereas 5 months ago I locked myself up in hostal room dreading my loneliness in a new country, I now have meaningful friendships with locals and foreigners.

Whereas 5 months ago I would celebrate small wins like talking to a stranger and going out alone at night to a bar, I now am integrated into local life, from sports clubs to the local bar scene. As we go into the new year, I think it’s important to celebrate these small wins.

The expectations of achievement

My time in college has shaped me to atomize time in 4-5 month periods, or college semesters. This was a life in which a billion events ran through my Google Calendar demarcated between the joys of being young and stupid at 2 am in local bars and dingy apartments, and constantly chasing the tail of my ambition until the day I graduated.

I have based much of my life around achievement, whether it be the "satisfaction" of being the top of my class, matriculating into a good university, or getting a prestigious fellowship. And, it feels like much my upbringing has affirmed my life decisions with positive reinforcement. Get an award, keep going. I didn't really learn how to fail, only how to keep succeeding.

Of course, there have been some small failures that come to mind in high school and college.

• Trying to start a recycling initiative in my neighborhood with my brother without having any idea what we were doing or any success in convincing conservative neighbors to pay to do something better

• Creating a food donation program at my high school without really figuring out where the food was supposed to go after (I definitely should have seen this one coming instead of waiting for 20 bananas to go brown in my teacher's fridge)

• Advocating for a million different sustainability or justice-related initiatives at Duke to little reception

However, all my failures felt "packageable," low stakes, a consequence of being privileged enough to try new things without having the wisdom to know what the hell I was really doing. And my lessons learned made some excellent scholarship prompt responses.

In this fellowship, I've finally arrived at the point where achievement and failure simultaneously matter so much less and more at the same time. On the one hand, I am starting to figure out how non-linear life is: the expectation of achievement and positive reinforcement has made me forget that I don't have to keep climbing an ambitious ladder to nowhere. If I fall down a few steps, I learn that there are more paths to be climbed, more routes to be explored.

On the other hand, by finally being able to do work for a living that feels meaningful to me, I see how important the consequences of all our actions are. Everything that we do, to help or hurt the world, ripples across the cosmos as the arc of justice is bent and broke and carved and chipped. If I can effectively do what I’m trying to do, I can help people defend their territories and lives. If I fail, then I accept that my identity as an American has done great harm to so many people in Latin America and that I was just another gringo who came to collect research information.

Failure. A lot of it.

After 5 months, I can confidently say that my fellowship has been full of failure.

1) AS A PROJECT MANAGER AND MENTOR

I've mentored a research group, taught political theory, and yet the fact that my students can't answer basic questions about the theory suggests that my teaching hasn't been that great, nor that I can inspire them to read the texts. This doesn't even include the supposed community-based project my professor said we would get done by this past November (we are currently on step 0, profe).

One of my teaching sessions for my tutoring.

2) AS A RESEARCHER

I've spent countless hours researching topics for a community I work with, but it appears that they have not wanted to use a single tidbit of the information I put together for them.

3) AS A COMUNICATOR

As I have shared in previous posts, in both public and private spaces, there have been a flurry of times in which my incomplete grasp of the Spanish language has led to accented, somewhat incomprehensible explanations of phenomenons that are better explained my local people.

The achievement-chasing side of me has internalized my failure as a sign that the Hart Fellowship should not have invested in me. After all, if people keep ghosting me when I want to collaborate, then maybe I'm not the right person to be doing this type of work. I see poverty all around me, people's stories being untold, the reasons I came to La Guajira being unaddressed, and myself in the mirror consuming resources from a place that doesn't even have water.

My self-criticism has taken a toll on my mental health. There have been days where I could barely get out of bed for fear that I was a fraud, or that I had literally nothing planned for the day, or that I would continue to fail. Ultimately, I have suffered from a fear of persistently failing, signifying that my commitment to justice is performative (woo social justice warrior) rather than substantive (actually doing on-the-ground work).

Of course there’s a silver lining.

Only with time have I seen these failures reshape my thoughts, strategies, and attitude towards failure.

1. Learning how to teach in Spanish and get along with university students has taught me humor and much needed patience.

2. Creating research products for different people has taught me the importance of trust in collaboration. Work is not always valued for its objective findings, but rather for the trust you have in the person doing it. My most valuable contributions have come from helping friends and colleagues co-create knowledge through dialogue and a slurry of WhatsApp voice messages.

3. The failure to communicate has made me think more creatively about the space I occupy. I now have the insight to recommend local people for research, lectures, or discussions to share their first-hand experiences rather than my thoughts. By building friendships over the months, I have been able to connect people through me as a facilitator, fostering relationships that can last beyond my reach.

4. And ultimately, failing so much has forced me to look at different "research products" to contribute to the fight for indigenous energy and environmental justice.

Following the Signs

In the face of failure, the last few weeks have brought me much needed inspiration. A few months ago, my Duke mentor called me in my frustration and suggested that I film a social campaign video to bring awareness to the problems facing the Wayuu people in La Guajira.

And I was like,

Ya, that sounds super cool! (but no way I can do that, I'm not an art guy, I'm a researcher and I don't know shit about production)

And then I couldn't get the idea out of my mind. YouTube investigative videos and op-docs kept sticking in my head as humanizing, complex works of art that show the realities facing people in crisis.

Sidenote: I highly recommend Dulce from the NYTimes, a 10 minute masterpiece, or El Darién, a 14 minute journalistic piece from Vice.

Almost as a joke, I talked to one of my friends here about doing a short documentary film. His eyes lit up. And then we talked for hours about the possibilities.

A few days after, I spoke with one of my professor collaborators, only for him to say that he had tried to do a documentary a year ago and wanted to help out on this project.

My friend introduced me to a Wayuu film production studio--they were interested and starting asking for details.

I talked to my Duke mentor again--he was invested in seeing this come to fruition.

I met another friend that day, a young Wayuu filmmaker who brought a friend that works in cultural audiovisual storytelling. As I started to describe the potential scenes of the documentary, their eyes stayed with mine, their curiosity hung onto my vision, and we ended with a plan of action for 2025. And on my way out of that meeting in that small cafe, I met a Wayuu leader who I had met a few days earlier at an event, only to find out that he knew all the people I was talking about and had worked as an actor and cultural producer of knowledge his whole life. And he was in on the project.

I didn't create relationships with any of these people to make a documentary. But 5 months into a fellowship, a beautiful series of events made a far-flung idea emerge into a potential reality.

We're currently writing the script. We're talking to funding sources. We're creating a production team. It looks like it can happen.

And I don't think it would have ever been possible had I not failed so many times that I thought, “Why not a short film?”.

Then again, there's a good chance this project never takes off and it fails like many others. Only time will tell. Until then, hope prevails.

One day, in between a pair of trees I saw a perfect V of flamencos flying across the Riohacha sky in the bright morning. I'd never seen them fly before. And it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I took out my phone to take a picture, and they were gone. Vanished. Beauty that a camera couldn't capture. And that’s this experience. Magical coincidences, omens from the sky, and a reminder that everything is fleeting, whether it a failure or a shooting star of hope.

A sunset in Riohacha. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Happy holidays,

Rishab