Rishab Jagetia
La Guajira, Colombia
March 10th, 2025
My Hart Fellowship has been a crash course in sitting with the discomfort of contradictions. There are moments when I am surrounded by inexplicable beauty–jagged cliffs hugging the shores of pillowy sand the color of a warm kaleidoscope, sunsets brushing breezy skies with cotton candy streaks. Other times, I am filled with surprise and awe at the ingenuity and creativity of the territory’s inhabitants–makeshift pulley systems for small transactions between vendors and the old ladies on the second floor of their building; the early morning boat docking where fathers and their sons glide fishing nets across still waters to collect life and feed city people. However, grotesquely nestled between picturesque landscapes and Caribbean normalities are stark reminders that no place should be romanticized and that all beauty also holds viciousness. I see it as barefoot beggars pick trash before burning their bodies on the pavement of cracked side streets from the 100-degree weather. Or when I talk to university students and they express their inability to find employment if they don’t have any political connections. Or in my research, the reason I am here, where contradictions bloom and neatness is thrown to the side.
I am in La Guajira, Colombia, the northeasternmost province of Colombia, a territory defined by its unforgiving desert landscapes and as the home of the largest Indigenous group in Colombia, the Wayuu. As an Environmental Sciences and Policy major at Duke, I was always driven by the necessity to address climate change through big, transformative solutions like giant wind and solar farms, electric vehicles, and technological widgets to replace a fossil-fuel world. Yet, as a Hart Leadership Program participant (in SOL), my Duke education instilled in me the need to prioritize justice and the voices of the neglected. While I saw the merits of the buzzwords of innovation, of scaling solutions, and of the narrative at Duke that we are born to be investors and startup founders, I couldn’t help but see a national and global decay of empathy, of intercultural understanding, and of prioritizing equity alongside innovation.
La Guajira, Colombia, is the essence of these contradictions. It has some of the largest renewable energy potential in Latin America, mostly through its strong winds, but also some of the highest social resistance to renewable energy projects from the Wayuu people. It’s a place that foreigners and wealthy Colombians increasingly flock to for speculating on energy projects and enjoying beach vacations, while also holding the reputation of being a lawless, forgotten place with closer ties to Venezuela than Colombia. My work, in partnership with the Universidad de La Guajira, seeks to understand how energy companies, the government, and Wayuu communities can have better dialogue around energy projects to ensure that the energy transition does not neglect the needs of the Wayuu people. Or at least, that’s what I say.
The enriching (and as a Duke student, frustrating) certainty about the Hart Fellowship is that you cannot predict what will happen or what you will do. When I arrived, my chosen research mentor didn’t respond to my calls for the first two weeks. My supposed “résumé” is largely a series of project failures—a failed research seminar in which I unsuccessfully tried to mentor other undergraduate students in understanding political theory and how it applies to La Guajira; multiple unsuccessful NGOs that my friends tried to start with my help before quickly dissolving because they decided it was too much work; leveraging my “expertise” to assist a community in an energy negotiation project, which in reality became manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet that no one would ever read. Now, I am working on a short fiction film with some Wayuu collaborators, although we have been in the “planning phase” for an uncomfortably long time.
Yet, as I write this in March, I sit much more peacefully with my failures than in my early months in which my personal formation as an “over-achieving,” “success-oriented” Duke student tortured my conscience and bruised my self-worth. One of the essential contradictions that Hart has taught me is that the 1) Expectation of linear, predictable progress and growth must be held alongside the realities of changing circumstances. Trying to use work to “improve the world” is a series of frustrating group projects, people getting busy with doctors’ appointments and their kids, and times where you feel utterly captivated one day and then utterly dejected the next.
Yet, for all the failures, I’ve had to learn to 2) Recognize that I have value, even if work outcomes don’t fit inside the neat boxes I’ve drawn. Much of my personal development has not come from my “research” but rather from the spontaneous string of experiences I’ve had from living in an entirely new cultural context. It means accompanying friends of friends I connect with on WhatsApp on their work trips to working with communities on topics ranging from electricity to sexual health. I’ve been given the freedom to stray from the 9-5, meaning that I’ve had time to say yes to random events that force me to meet new people. It also means I’ve had to set boundaries on who I’ve wanted to engage with.
3) Humility, not intellect, is what truly matters. The Hart Fellowship is ultimately an exercise in humility. No one knows what Duke is and no one cares about my accolades. As a foreigner, I’m here to show up as people need me and listen, not impose myself. My first field trip was to a community where they were installing a water filtration system. With my four years of an elite education and the prestigious title of a Hart Fellow, my task was to take attendance and write down people’s names. Easy. But, as community members began to pronounce their names in a dizzyingly fast manner with syllables and last names I’d never heard, I gingerly realized that I needed help. I swallowed my pride and asked for it.
4) Learning is changing
Unfortunately, I will not leave La Guajira in May with an extensive report of my productivity or how I solved the climate crisis. In its place, I have a series of relationships, anecdotes, and warm fuzzy memories reminding me that I’m only 22 years old and have much to learn. My childhood upbringing and desire for over-achievement have been principled in ‘“taking action.” See a problem, do something. Innovate. But, the fellowship has forced me to sit in discomfort and realize that some things cannot be “fixed”, and that experiencing the pains and triumphs of daily life alongside people may be the most valuable “result” for myself and local communities.
5) Life is difficult and beautiful
One of my favorite activities has become beach volleyball, where three days a week, I train alongside locals as the sun sets and the moon begins to shine. Yet, on my walk home, I need to be wary of the flurry of motorcycles that pass by, being ready at any moment to run, hide, or surrender my belongings to a desperate robber. I thoroughly enjoy community visits, not because I “contribute” anything to their needs but because I enjoy listening to late-night discussions over a fire whilst the sea breeze and burning wood smoke fill my lungs. Yet, I must be aware that this region has the highest childhood malnutrition rate in the country, worsened by extractive industries that pollute water and climate-change-induced desertification that makes life unlivable for some. I love cooking in the kitchen as my host mom sings her favorite songs on the radio, even though I know that the next day, I might feel overwhelmed with sadness as I see kids glued to TikTok, adults without access to formal employment, and a territory slowly being swallowed by American and European corporate interests.
My experience in the Hart Fellowship so far has resembled La Guajira itself: beautiful warmth found in Caribbean cultures, frustration and powerlessness as circumstances change, and the realization that community–plant, animal, and human–is the only thing that truly matters in rough seas and unforgiving violence.
Rishab Jagetia is a 2024-2025 Hart Fellow based in La Guajira, Colombia, researching how the environmental climate crisis and the subsequent energy transition are impacting rural, indigenous populations. You can read more from him on his substack, The Winds of Change.