Mama, how did you build a world without a phone?

My children ask me now. They hold sleek devices in their palms. They swipe, tap, and connect instantly to anyone anywhere. They ask with genuine curiosity, a little bewilderment. Mama, how did you communicate without phones, without social media, without WhatsApp?

I tell them the truth. We actually talked to each other. Face to face. We sought each other out. We visited each other. We celebrated together. The absence of a device did not mean the absence of connection. It meant connection required intention. You had to move your body to another place. You had to sit in someone's presence. You had to listen without the option of glancing at a screen.

This conversation always leads me back to a particular story. A story they have heard fragments of, but never the full texture.

A simple, monumental task landed in 1999. I was to lead the organisation of the 8th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women—Women's Worlds 2002. It was to be the first held in the Global South. The host was the Department of Women's Studies at Makerere University, Uganda. I was its lead architect. This meant one thing: translating a global academic ambition into a local, physical reality without a digital scaffold.

The context defines the effort. Thousands of abstracts arrived from every continent. They came in envelopes, by post. They came on curling paper, by fax. A few arrived by email. Not email as you know it. The department had one computer. One email address. Privacy was a public announcement. Someone would shout across the room, "Nite, you have an email!" Everyone nearby would hear. This was the nerve centre.

My solution was to split my day. Mornings at home with my personal computer, afternoons at the department. At home, I had exclusive access. I could write, review, and draft comments in peace. But I could not send anything. The official departmental email lived only on the single computer in the office. So I worked offline. I composed responses to abstracts from scholars in Manila, São Paulo, and Cairo. I typed comments: Clarify your methodology. Strengthen this conclusion. Your argument is compelling, please develop this section. Then, I printed every single response. I stacked the pages, carried them to the department in the afternoon, sat at the shared computer, and manually typed each comment back into an email. There was no track changes, no forward. There was the physical act of carrying the digital message on paper from one point to another.

Data lived on fragile objects. You saved work on a diskette. It could hold so little. Then came zip drives, then CDs. They promised more space but brought new fears. They could corrupt. You could save a day's work, carry it to the university, and find the file unreadable. Quality was uneven. These tools were not always accessible on the local market. You guarded each disk like a physical piece of the congress itself.

Communication was a series of delays. A few of us had pagers. A small gadget that received numeric messages. Someone would send a phone number. You would find a landline to call them back. It was not real time. It was an alert to start the process of having a conversation. Most people had no landline at all. Coordination required planning, not instant reaction.

But the intellectual work was only one layer. There was the entire bodily machinery of the congress. Thousands of delegates from fifty-six countries needed to be housed, fed, and moved.

We secured accommodation across the city. We coordinated airport transfers, arrivals and departures, often delayed, often changed. We arranged daily shuttle runs between dozens of hotels and multiple university venues. We planned meals for thousands, accounting for dietary needs we had no database to track. We prepared for emergencies without the ability to send a mass notification. Every piece of this logistics puzzle was managed with landlines, paper lists, printed schedules, and physical movement. We used runners to deliver messages between venues. We stood at hotel lobbies with clipboards, manually ticking names, waiting for delegates who might have been delayed by traffic we could not track.

I worked eighteen-hour days. For years. The work was singular and vast. I reviewed thousands of abstracts, organised them into seventeen themes, prepared a book of abstracts. When full papers arrived, I read them all. I built the session schedules manually, ensuring parallel sessions did not clash, using pens, paper, and wall charts. There was no software. The map was in my head, on paper, and on disks that might or might not work tomorrow.

The congress happened. Over nineteen hundred delegates. Fifty-six countries. It was a success, built from paper, patience, recovered data, and the physical movement of people who had no choice but to be present.

But an event must become knowledge. We asked for full papers. By 2002, technology had inched forward. Papers came by email. I reviewed them again, categorised them into seven themes, formed editorial teams. I edited three of the resulting volumes. We produced a vast book of proceedings. Every sentence was checked by human eyes. There was no AI to correct grammar. Precision was a conscious, collective act.

The gain was never just mine. It was for the department that got a new building, new furniture, a computer lab. For the university that elevated its standing. For the thousands of scholars who found a platform. For the field of knowledge expanded by those seven volumes. The gain accrued to ten, a hundred, a thousand times more people than the one who did the work. Your labour is not the end product. It is the catalyst.

My children ask how we communicated. I tell them we talked. We visited. We stood in rooms together and solved problems with our voices and our presence. We wrote letters. We typed comments, printed them, carried them across town, and typed them again. We saved our work on fragile disks and prayed they would not corrupt. We coordinated the movement of thousands of people with paper lists and landline phones.

The world today is seamless. Data is weightless. Communication is instant. Connection is constant. But I wonder sometimes. What is lost when we no longer need to seek each other out? When we do not have to move our bodies to another place to have a conversation? When we do not hold the physical evidence of our work in our hands?

The tools have changed. The need for foundational work has not. What are you building that is bigger than your tools? Where is your labour acting as a catalyst? And when your children ask, what story will you tell them about how you built it?