Where I’ve been
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, California, on originally Tongva land, just below the foothills of what we now call the San Gabriel Mountains. After studying functional linguistics in Oregon, I moved to West Africa for most of my twenties. There, I taught secondary English in northern Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps and first grade at an international school at the edge of the Sahara in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
The title of this blog is the translated Loko toponym of my host village in Sierra Leone. It’s also apt in Galicia.
Where I am
Home is in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra e Serras do Oribio e Courel Biosphere Reserve in Galicia, a small, historical nation and autonomous community in northwestern Spain. I work remotely for Castos, a podcast hosting and analytics platform, doing support and content.
Outside of work, I spend time with friends and neighbors, practice Spanish and Galician, host a language exchange at a local café, and volunteer with an NGO called Provivienda that supports asylum seekers. Every so often I get to explore the area in my camper van with my dog Alqo.
I’m drawn to language in all its forms, from the mechanics of grammar to broader questions about literacy, translation, and culture. My spiritual life orbits around ‘heterodox’ Islam, whatever that means, with adjacent interests in meditation, perennialism, and the transcendentalist and Sufi poets. Politically, I’m pulled toward any post-capitalist thought and the question of how those ideas intersect with faith. The rest is journaling, photography, woodcarving, maps, D&D, and falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes.
Where I’m going
I’m fixing up a house, working toward my DELE C1 in Spanish and CELGA 2 in Galician, and have a few other projects in various states of progress.
Creatively, I’ve been worldbuilding for a series mixing fantasy and the western genre in an alternate West Africa. It’s very early days, but I’ll share bits of the process here sometimes: maps, inspirations, research threads, and eventually shorter pieces.
This site is where all of it lives.