We met in Iten, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, where the sky is a brilliant blue yawning in all directions and everything feels possible. I had just arrived for a project; Timothy had already been working for justice and accountability here for years. He was an exuberant activist, texting me at all hours with ideas for his community and commentary on the in’s and out’s of local legislative processes. In the Rift Valley, it was impossible to imagine civil society organizing without him. His voice was clear, commanding, optimistic—he knew what his people deserved, and how, through the channels available to them, to try to get it.

Years later, as I was preparing to leave the sector, we spoke again. He sounded different. Tired. He told me he was stepping back. When I said I was leaving entirely, he said he probably would as well.

He was renovating an apartment to rent out on Airbnb. Something tangible, something that would not take so much from him. After more than a decade in this work, the last effort we worked on together had broken something in him.

“The stories we were told are not real. We believed them, but we’ve been disappointed in so many ways. [These initiatives] run on hope—they tell us that tomorrow is coming. So we wait. But tomorrow doesn’t come, so they say it’s the next tomorrow, but that tomorrow doesn’t come either; then they say it’s the next. This is the worst kind of prison: To forever be waiting for a tomorrow that never comes.”

By then, I had spent over a decade inside the “development” and “democracy” sectors. I had entered with the belief that it could be changed from within. Over time, I came to see how its timelines stretch endlessly forward: how failure is absorbed and labeled “lessons learned”. Who is made to wait? Who gets to move on? For some, this is their lives; for others, simply a career.

I am often struck by how much mass mobilization is possible in response to overt violence, but how little energy is sustained in dismantling the systems that make such violence predictable—and that manage their aftermaths. Institutions like USAID, the World Bank, and the contractors around them are easy to dismiss. But they continue to set the terms of survival for billions, defining what counts as “enough” and “progress”, what can be demanded and how far those demands can go.

The conversation with Timothy stays with me. I think about it each time I rip off a page from my 黃曆.