I wake up to the wind rustling through the banana trees in my yard. Each morning looks alike here - the seasons in Rwanda seem like minor variations on a theme (sometimes rainy, sometimes not). I brush aside the mosquitoes that have settled inside my net, quaff a liter of coffee while admiring the view of the Congo across Lake Kivu, then return to my home office to plug in for the day. Occasionally I'm interrupted by a fresh avocado falling, an avocado-hungry mongoose scurrying between the slats of my white picket fence (incongruously constructed by a previous resident) or a fist-sized spider scurrying out from beneath a hidden surface in my home office. The days pass in a blur of slack communication, production deployments, occasional outages and other work virtually indistinguishable from what I'd be doing in an American office building. After work I leave the familiarity of the white picket fence to walk through the farming villages that surround us in every direction, practicing my (terrible) Kinyarwanda and making mental notes of what I'm seeing (One Acre Fund-branded T-Shirts, good or bad agriculture practices, the types of cellphones people are using, which houses have electricity and running water).
My name is Louis Racette; I'm 28 years old and for the last 9 months I've been the sole person capable of making changes to a database that coordinates $100 million dollars worth of microloans across 10 countries in East Africa. This blog is part technical (how this system actually works) and part philosophy (what we're doing here).
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