During that time, we felt quite stuck - unable to make decisions. Our daily conversations became centred around anxious what-if calculations. At one point we had reduced our budget for catering to a total of 5 USD per person per day, for breakfast, lunch and refreshments - even in Zanzibar, this is an unfeasibly low figure. We jettisoned one item after another from our budget

We started a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe to help cover the cost of financial assistance. It was a comfort to know that members of the international Python/Django community would stand up to support us, but the pleasure and gratitude we felt about that was overlaid with a feeling of humiliation that once again, a major African open-source software event had been obliged to publicly extend a begging-bowl.

Eventually, we received the grant funding we had applied for, though even this seemed to come with a humiliation: it happened after a white European spoke up publicly on behalf of the African Python community.