 grandfather's grandfather was an enslaved African. My grandfather was a pastor and my grandmother was a seamstress. On my mother's side, my grandfather picked up bottles for a living and would sell it to supermarkets or anybody that would accept the bottles and that was his means of income as a single father to raise my mother and her three brothers. The income you would earn from that would be way beyond a minimum wage. So for me it's a miracle that he was able to do what he did and that's about mid-teenage years my mother moved with my grandmother and she sold fruits in Jamaica's very rough downtown district. So those are the shoulders upon which I stood and still stand and their objective in their time was to ensure that my parents and their siblings survived and I promise you that was a most ambitious goal at the time in which they found themselves. So we fast forward I come into the picture and as I was growing up I always wanted to be an astronaut. It was through my veins it was all I could think about and my parents made me feel it was absolutely possible. Bless them. It reminds me of inspirational stories I hear about people who are disabled whose parents never told them they were disabled whose parents never told them they wouldn't be able to do X or Y or Z because of whatever it was they were facing what ends up happening in those situations they do everything we do they drive they cut tomatoes with their toes they do whatever needs to happen for them to accomplish their goals and so given that my parents made me feel this was absolutely possible as I grew I continued to grasp and hold on to this desire. My parents whenever they heard about astronauts would tell me about it and MIT kept on coming up and I thought to myself oh my gosh this is excellent one of my personal traits is that I feel nothing is worth doing if it's not done well and so MIT was coming up as the world's number one engineering university and I said okay that's exactly where I want to go. The only thing is MIT accepts 2.3 percent of non-north American citizens who apply and there was an unwritten rule back in 1997 when I applied that only one person per year gets into MIT from Jamaica no pressure right and so I threw my hat in the ring but I want to share with you a big part of why I did so I had so many people who encouraged me but they never went to MIT they never went to um they never even applied but I remember when I was in grade 10 I had a teacher who was in his gap year and he applied to MIT and bless him but he could not spell to save his life and when he was going through the process he lifted as he climbed and when he got in it hit me oh so you don't have to be perfect he's Jamaican just like me and he got in so that really really inspired me to apply at the time I was applying there was a pair of twins who also applied and that made me so stressed out because I mean admit it how cute is it to be a twin like you can just say that and that should really carry you a far away right but as life would have it I was successful and I was also successful as the only person to get into Princeton University at the time I applied and I share this because I feel that when my grandfather's grandfather was cutting cane along with possible other ancestors in the cane fields of Jamaica and the back breaking son was upon him he would look up into the sun and dream of me and he persevered because of me and I feel like I am his hopes and dreams personified and that is why I continued to push if he could have accomplished what he did then I feel there's nothing I can't do and so those are some of the things that make me take one of the most pivotal inflection points I've had in my life was the opportunity to travel to Ghana when I was 17 and we traveled to the Cape Coast Fort and I'm not sure has anyone here ever been to the Cape Coast Fort okay I have one person to my right and we entered this fort where they would hold enslaved Africans for up to maybe four months or so before they would leave on the ships of no return to countries like Jamaica the room is about the size of this auditorium with two windows I remember no bigger than six inches by six inches and they once I stepped into the room there was still a line on the wall maybe about let's say a meter a meter and a half horizontally where excrement came to and I just want to keep it real with you right there was still a scent I could smell nearly 200 years after my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather would have been in the room and I said to myself what tragedy must it have been for someone to have to stand there remain there for four months amidst excrement you don't get a seat you don't get a bed and so when I reflect on things like that I'm so inspired to be not only the best I can be but to lift everybody else up as they seek to climb to fully self-actualize so with experiences like that in my knapsack once I got to MIT for the first time I was tested I come from a country that already has had someone looking like me as a prime minister but no I was a whole different face I was the only black person in the aerospace class of 2002 for undergrad and for grad school and I will remember it was august 1699 to 8 bright eyed bushy tailed heading off to school I didn't own any sweaters so I stopped in New York first to buy my first sweater because Boston is a little colder than Jamaica and the customs officer held back or bags as Jamaicans my mother and I were traveling if you're a Jamaican you're more than likely a drug dealer that was the story then that's a stereotype then and it's still a stereotype now so he was going through our bags looking very excited like he knew he was going to find the cocaine and then he'd be able to retire and perhaps live in Jamaica for the rest of his life in looking through my bag of course no cocaine was found but he found my orientation booklet for MIT I promise you all the blood shifted from his face he looked like he had seen a ghost and he said you apply to MIT you're gonna go you know it's really hard you know why didn't you apply to state school in New York it wasn't a rhetorical question it was as if DNA tests had been done which confirmed that the black brain could not hold up to any standard that MIT would hold and he wanted to save me the embarrassment before going off up north to Boston and in that moment I I was very thankful that I grew up in the setting I grew up in but I also made a personal commitment to myself to ensure that I succeeded because as the only Jamaican in my year going I felt like an ambassador not only for Jamaicans right now but for people like my grandfather's grandfather and so getting there things of that nature would continue I'll give you one more example six years into my tenure I was walking one day along the corridor and a member of the janitorial staff thanked me for picking up the bag yesterday and I said to her I'm I'm not so sure what you're talking about she said you're the new janitor right and you picked up the garbage bag from the room thank you and I said no I'm a student here I I go to school here and she looked at me like oh my gosh she only started working one day now and she's already hallucinating that she's a student and so you know those things really serve to drive me and as I continued with my tenure I learned that astronauts have their area of expertise and they contribute that expertise to missions and so I committed to finding my area of expertise which for me was how aerospace technology like satellite communication technologies can exist in a symbiotic relationship with other ICTs to bring access to basic human rights for those who suffer the most and I have a consulting practice where I do that now and I have continued to seek to reach the unreachable I think that or reach must always exceed or grasp so that we have to come out of our comfort zone to achieve that which we want along those lines even in coming to with this I was so inspired about being able to come last year that I wanted to come back I know that this is a mecca for anyone interested in ICT for development and the budget would have been about four thousand five hundred U.S. dollars to come here from Jamaica I didn't have five dollars of that but I set about to crowdfund my being here did I get many more no's and yeses did I hinge on the line of not having enough time to apply for my shingan visa did I apply for it in faith before getting all the money absolutely yes but thankfully worked out because I think about the things that my ancestors went through and that this pales in comparison similarly you'd have learned I learned to swim at 36 I decided I was going to be a triathlete and the Lord swam with me in open water as I did my first triathlete in 2017 but it happened and it's just an example of being your best self I'll leave you with a quote or an understanding of how the lobster grows the lobster as you know has a very hard shell and when he's growing he gets to a point where the size of his shell becomes very very very uncomfortable he then goes under maybe a larger sea creature or anything he can find and he releases that shell and then he gets a bigger shell in order for us to grow ladies and gentlemen we must exist on their fringes and outside our comfort zones but we must also encourage others to do so that man who taught me when I was in grade 10 didn't spend 50 cents in his inspiration of me but he made me dare to dream the in my mind inconceivable 2.3 percent and so I want us to encourage ourselves to always be that lobster always be willing to be uncomfortable if you're trying for something and it doesn't seem unachievable when you first start you're not dreaming big enough make sure that your dreams scare you and reach for them and encourage others to always do the same I thank you as we all enrich our inner lobsters cheers