When Sherika arrived in my life, she found a young engineer with his thoughts in a hundred directions. Renewable energy, robotics, teaching, community service, software, wind turbines, digital publishing: I could see an interesting future in all of them. Sher could see the structure that would connect them. I like to say she zoomed out far enough to view the whole planet as a village and then returned to the smallest decision we needed to make that morning.

She obtained financing for a 3D printer so I could give more of my robotics ideas a physical body. She drew plans for turning one engineer’s work into an organization capable of growing beyond his two hands. She understood that a fine invention might become useful to very few people if its production, teaching, public communication and wider organization were neglected. I brought her energy problems; she answered with family-sized and world-sized operating systems.

We expanded renewable robotics summer programmes into multiple workshops, grew our teaching relationships, secured work with the Jamaica Social Investment Fund and participated in the IGNITE enterprise-support programme. At Knox Community College’s Cobla campus we developed a renewable robotics research and teaching laboratory, where work such as Rasta Robot and Bailey Bionics could be explored with students and visitors. We dealt with real institutions, classrooms, components and children who wanted to touch the machines. Sher moved through it with the confidence of someone who had always expected big things to fit together.

Some people mistake stewardship for administration. Sher’s stewardship is authorship. She sees what resources could become when their parts are connected, the people are supplied and the goal is large enough to make the effort worthwhile. Our work at Knox, our camps, our teaching platforms, our media, our future orchard networks and our family compounds all bear that way of thinking. She had already begun authoring a civilization before either of us called it that.

I also saw her as my wife. Watching the woman you love secure a contract, solve an operating problem, plan a laboratory and then turn her attention to your shared future is an excellent way to fall in love all over again. She was magnificent at it. I had no intention of getting in her way.