I am Korean-American. I grew up in California. I went to UCLA. I spoke English as my first language and Korean as my second, and I had never set foot in Africa before my late twenties.
None of that should have worked in Kigali. And yet here I am, twelve years later, more rooted in this city than in any place I've ever lived.
What nobody tells you about starting over in a country that isn't yours — that was never supposed to be yours — is how clarifying it is. When every single thing is new, you find out very quickly what you actually are, underneath the cultural programming of wherever you grew up.
"You cannot perform belonging in a country where you are visibly, undeniably an outsider. You either earn it — slowly, genuinely, through presence and commitment and respect — or you don't. There is no middle path."
The First Question Everyone Asked
In the early days, the first question anyone in Kigali asked me wasn't "What are you doing here?" It was a version of "How long are you staying?" The assumption — fair, based on experience — was that I was an NGO worker, a consultant, a development professional passing through on an 18-month contract before returning to wherever home was.
The conversation shifted the moment I could answer: "I don't know. I'm building something." And shifted again, months later, when I was still there. And again a year later. Each season I didn't leave was a small deposit in an account that takes years to fill.
I don't think I fully understood how much my presence — my continuous, committed, season-after-season presence — mattered to the partnerships we were building until I saw what happened to farming communities abandoned by short-term investors. The contrast was stark. Communities that had been through that before were watching carefully to see if I was different. I had to show them, not tell them.
What I Had to Unlearn
American business culture moves fast. Decide, execute, iterate. Speed is a virtue. Efficiency is the goal. Relationships are instrumental — means to ends.
Rwanda runs on a different logic. Not slower, exactly — Kigali is one of the most dynamic, fast-developing cities I've ever been in. But the relational layer is primary, not secondary. You do not skip the relationship to get to the deal. The relationship is the deal. Without trust, there is no transaction worth having.
I had to unlearn a decade of American professional conditioning that said the most important thing to establish in a new relationship is your competence. In Rwanda, the first thing you need to establish is your character. Your intentions. Whether you see people as partners or as resources. Competence matters enormously, but it comes second.
The Identity Question I'm Still Answering
What am I, exactly? A Korean-American woman who has spent her adult life in East Africa. An outsider who has built something that couldn't exist without deep community roots. A foreigner who is, in some genuine sense, home.
I don't have a clean answer. I'm not Rwandan — I will never be Rwandan, and I wouldn't pretend to claim that identity. But I'm not the same person who stepped off a plane in Kigali twelve years ago with two bags and a dream either. Rwanda has shaped me in ways that California and UCLA and Korean-American culture didn't and couldn't.
What I've found is that the identity question matters less than the commitment question. Are you here? Are you staying? Are you building something that serves this community — not just yourself? Those are the questions that matter. The answers to those, I know clearly.
What Starting Over Actually Gives You
The thing nobody tells you about starting over in an unfamiliar place is this: you become enormously good at beginning. At not knowing and asking. At being the least knowledgeable person in the room and being okay with that. At finding your footing without the social scripts that usually do that work for you.
Those skills are the foundation of everything LetSequoia has become. Every new partnership, every new origin, every new market — they all require the same willingness to begin without a roadmap. Rwanda taught me how to do that. I'm still grateful every day.