03/06/2026
When the World Reroutes You:
Lessons from Kenya That Are Coming Home to Indiana
by Janice Agarwal
A Detour That Became a Reflection
I’m writing this from an airport, just not the one I had planned to be in. I just completed a transformative 10 days in Kenya with 27 classmates in the Indiana AgriInstitute's Leadership Program (ALP21), and I was supposed to meet my husband in Morocco for two weeks of vacation. But when I arrived at the terminal in Nairobi, the news was clear: airlines across Northern Africa and the Middle East had suspended flights due to a war. My vacation was over before it began.
My husband, ever the problem-solver, was already at work finding us a new destination. It won't be Morocco, but it will be beautiful, and it will be with him, so it will be ours in a different way.
Sitting here in the quiet of this terminal, I find myself thinking about how many times life has done exactly this to me. In 1999, my husband and I had beautiful dreams for a son we were expecting. Alex arrived, beautiful, perfect, and with a disability that changed everything we thought we knew about our path. Our plans became something entirely different. And you should realize, I would not trade what has been our life for anything, even our original plans.
Plans change. Beauty remains. That’s the truth I keep learning.
Kenya: The Start of this Story
Long before my classmates and I walked the red soil of the Rift Valley, Kenya had already claimed a piece of my heart.
For years, IU School of Medicine has supported a teaching hospital in Eldoret, Kenya, the Moi Teaching and Referral Center, a place where students, residents, fellows, and attending physicians travel to teach and to learn, all while strengthening a medical system far from home. My husband, an interventional radiologist, and I had the privilege of being part of that work in 2010, and our young boys came with us. The boys spent their time playing with Kenyan children, inside the hospital and out. Alex, our son who was born with a disability, loved to feed babies in the rehabilitation section affectionately termed “Riley South.” Sam taught children his age to play games while they were in the hospital for lifesaving medical care. We traveled. We explored. We learned. We shared. We came to love the people and the country.
This Kenya trip is the next part of this story.
This time, I went not as a medical husband and wife team with skills to share but with agricultural leaders, farmers, agribusiness professionals, extension educators, and rural advocates who had been selected for the Indiana AgriInstitute's Leadership Program. Together, we met with agricultural university faculty, government researchers, processing facilities, commercial and family farms, US Embassy representatives, and conservation officials. We exchanged ideas about sustainable farming, global markets, food systems, and what it truly means to feed a community.
Back in Eldoret, we had supported the health of families. In the fields of Kenya, we explored how those same families are fed. Food and health, they are not separate systems. They are two sides of the same story.
Sam and Alex with a friend at Hospital Cynthia in 2010.
Joyce Kiara and the Farm That Changes Everything
Of all the remarkable people our class encountered, one woman will always stay with me.
Her name is Joyce Kiara. She owns Charis Farm in Naivasha, a diverse, thriving operation growing food and raising livestock in what many would dismiss as a small 1.2-acre space in the middle of a busy town. But Joyce has turned that constraint into a curriculum. She now teaches hundreds of local farmers how to do what she does - coaxing abundance from modest land, blending livestock and crops, making every square meter matter.
When we gathered around her, someone asked how she approaches her days. Her answer stopped every one of us.
"Instead of waking up and asking what I need to do today, I ask: what can I do today?"
There is an entire philosophy in that single shift of language. “Need” implies obligation, burden, a list to be conquered. “Can" suggests possibility, a gift. Joyce Kiara wakes up every morning and greets the day as an invitation rather than a demand.
I want that attitude. I watched my classmates hear those words, and I could see it in their faces; they want it too. We are all carrying too many “needs.” What would change if we started counting our “cans”?
Farmers Everywhere Share the Same Heart
One of the most surprising and grounding realizations of our trip was how familiar our Kenyan counterparts' concerns sounded. The vocabulary was different. The crops were different. The landscape was spectacularly, breathtakingly different. But the questions, the deep questions, were the same. How do we maintain amazing farms while feeding our community, our country, and our world? How do we honor sustainability without sacrificing viability? How do we protect the soil for the generation that comes after us? How do we blend into global markets without losing what makes local food systems precious?
In Kenya’s Mara, a large national game reserve bordering Tanzania’s Serengeti, we learned about the delicate choreography between conservation and commercial farming, how wildlife corridors and crop fields must coexist, how the ecosystem and the economy are not opponents but partners who must be carefully introduced to each other. It was a masterclass in the kind of thinking Watch Us Farm tries to bring to every acre of our campus.
Bringing It Home: What Kenya Means for Watch Us Farm
I‘m coming home, or I'm trying to come home, with something I didn't expect to carry: a renewed, deepened conviction that what we are building in Zionsville, Indiana is part of something much larger than one nonprofit on 25 acres. Watch Us Farm exists at the intersection of food, vocation, health, and community. We believe that adults with intellectual disabilities deserve meaningful work. We believe their mothers deserve to return to careers. We believe that a farm can be a classroom, a therapy space, a place of dignity, and a source of real food for real neighbors, all at once.
Kenya showed me that version of integration working at scale. Joyce Kiara's small urban farm feeding hundreds. University researchers blending traditional knowledge with modern agronomy. Conservation rangers and cattle farmers negotiating shared futures. These are not distant models. They are mirrors.
The Campus We’re Building
Our 25-acre campus is designed with exactly this integrated vision. Eight greenhouses with hydroponics. Orchards and botanical gardens. Sensory gardens intertwining healing and beauty. Athletic fields. A Hub Building for vocational training and community events. Supportive housing so that the people who train here can also live here with dignity and support.
We’re not just teaching job skills. We’re building an ecosystem, one where adults with intellectual disabilities are essential contributors, where their families are supported, where the surrounding community can come to learn, eat, and belong. And Kenya reminded me: small acres, tended with intention and love, can teach the world.
A Model That Can Travel
The Indiana AgriInstitute sent 27 of us to Kenya to stretch our thinking beyond our own borders. What came back with us, I believe, is more than insight, it's urgency. We saw what happens when leaders invest in one another's capacity. We saw what happens when farmers share knowledge across continents. We saw what happens when a woman with a small plot and a clear philosophy transforms her community.
Watch Us Farm is designed to be replicated. The dual-generation impact model, where adults with intellectual disabilities gain employment, and their mothers return to the workforce, is not just a Zionsville story. It is a national story. A human story. And like Joyce Kiara's farm in Naivasha, it’s a story that can spread.
A Note of Gratitude
To my 27 classmates in ALP21 - you are each extraordinary. You showed up fully in every conversation, every farm visit, every early morning game drive at the Mara. You asked hard questions and sat with difficult answers. You brought Indiana agriculture to Kenya and brought Kenya back to Indiana.
To the Indiana AgrIInstitute - thank you for creating this program. Thank you for believing that agricultural leaders need to see the world, and that seeing the world makes us better stewards of the land we already tend.
And to my husband, who is somewhere right now poring over maps and flight options, looking for our next beautiful adventure - thank you. For 1999 and every year since. For Alex. For Sam. For this.
Plans change. Beauty remains. And sometimes the detour is exactly where you were supposed to go.
