Postcard From Kenya

Florence

Hopelessness and hope
Nicholas the driver and I left Nairobi in a white Toyota troop carrier at 7.30am. It negotiates the Nairobi traffic like a whale but soon we are out of rush hour and hurtling down Waiaki Way towards Naivasha in the Rift Valley. Occasionally we swerve to miss a policeman who is standing in the middle of the road trying to wave vehicles over. “They just want breakfast money,” Nicholas tells me. No helicopter pursuit here, Nikolas doesn’t even check the rear view mirror, just turns up the gospel music CD, holy rolling in the Rift.
It is 9am and we meet the Project Manager, Shinina, at the local governments Child Protection Office.
Shinina is wearing a suit that I am guessing came from a synthetic zebra and she looks like a million dollars. I haven’t seen her for two years and we kiss cheeks in a happy greeting.
“Why are we picking you here?” I ask.
“One of our sponsored children has been abused.”
“What kind of abuse?”
“Buggary.”
I know if I keep asking questions it will be like watching a whipping. I wince.
“How old was the child?”
“Seven.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Boy.”
“Was it a person known to the family?”
“Yes ......it was the boy’s father.”
And I am wondering whether to keep looking or walk away.
“How long had it gone on?”
“Probably some years.”
“How was it discovered?”
“The boy’s aunt sent him to a home and it came out there after three months.... behind he is very damaged.”

“Oh.....

and now?”

Shinina looks into the tree beside us. “His father will be arrested today. And his mother also because she knew all the time it was going on. And we had to act now because there are two other children at home and we can’t let anything more happen to them. “

Shinina went on: “I haven’t slept all night, actually I am very traumatised.” And she gave a sad smile a half shrug and with that we climbed in to the big white whale with the orange swoosh on the doors and hurtled off down the road to the project.

But I don’t see the road ahead yet, I am lost in reflections on the priceless importance of our work and of all the Shininas in World Vision. We put child protection and the welfare of children ahead of everything and I know that Shinina’s sleepless night is one of many for her and I know that her intervention has been critical for this child and his siblings. That this is just the beginning of her new journey with this family. And where the law is weak, as it is here, Shinina’s interventions are essential even though at times they put her in very real danger of retribution. But for Shinina this is not a job, this is her vocation and she will do whatever it takes for every child who needs her help.

I have been coming to the Ndabibi ADP[1] for four years and it was almost exactly four years ago that I met Florence who is the Chairwoman of the Chemi Chemi [2]women’s water tank group. She is waiting at the project office when we arrive.
Florence is 55 and wears a brown barbie wig. She has lost most of her front teeth, but her eyes are bright. She is on fire and we hug like lovers so glad to see each other, and she won’t let go of my hand and I am trying to manhandle my bag and my book and my coat and thermos and Florence and we kind of dance into the office as you do if you are trying to hold on to me and my stuff and my limp and stay on your feet. A kind of collapsing in to place shuffle that I have turned into a philosophy.
Three hours later and we are standing in Florence’s shamba[3] amongst her rich green tomato plants. Under an immense Kenyan sky in a part of the country which without rain is almost violently harsh, where I have seen people farming dust and wondering how anything lives and yet here, now, the smell of the tomato plants is strong you can almost feast on it. And I say to Florence that I think the miracle of the thing is that the water from this new dam is not just watering the tomatoes, it is watering the hope in people’s hearts. And she nods and smiles and looks at me kindly like I am from another planet.
Florence started the group about seven years ago. When I met her she had a group of 100 women and had begged her way into a 2300 litre tank for each member so that for seven month s of the year they wouldn’t have to spend three or four hours each day carrying water.
Then over the last few years I was able to challenge the group in ways of thinking and find donors to pay for more water tanks and Florence was able to build and strengthen the group so that the leadership is now diverse tribally. Florence is a Kikuyu who, as land owners and fencers, are often bitterly at odds with the Masai who like to roam their cattle on traditional pastures. The group’s treasurer is now a Masai. The secretary is a Muslim Borana from the North of Kenya, When Florence first introduced her to me, she said bluntly “She is Muslim” and then shrugged and giggled in seeming disbelief that there could be people in Kenya whose tribe did not believe that Jesus was the only way.
The Chemi Chemi group grew and matured and over the years we were able to come up with 328 additional 2300 litre water tanks, work together on building a store, introduce some commercial concepts so that the group is self-sustaining.
According to Florence I taught her the concept of “thinking outside the square” and she has now found a way to fit this into all sorts of sentences and it seems to be her validation for big ideas. And with a bit of luck, some connections we facilitated and a lot of work from Florence and her committee, Chemi Chemi , started working with World Wide Fund for Nature. WWF agreed to fund one neoprene liner for a pilot dam. So Florence and the womens’ group, now numbering 428 women, dug five massive three meter deep dams of around 250,000 litres each with hoes and buckets. WWF was so dumbfounded and left footed that they altered the proposal and donated liners for five dams at a cost of USD$25,000. And now those dams are all full of water.
My continual mantra here has been that strength attracts strength and action attracts investment, and I have sometimes hung to this like a life raft and wondered if it is really true; and it is true here and my belief is nourished as well as theirs.
The Chemi Chemi women are currently constructing a sixth dam and the local government has committed to funding the tank liner, a drip irrigation system and a green house. The groups intention is to dig a further 200 dams. Each of the members who has a dam dug on their property has an obligation to allow the group to use 1/2 acres of their land to grow one crop to provide seeds to the members for five years. Irrigated from the dams this cultivation is the beginning of a seed bank and currently each of these five plots been sown with Amaranth, tomatoes, beans, peas and potatoes to loan seeds to members. The group has been able to purchase 10 half acre drip irrigation kits through our last grant and these are feed from the dams. The kits are being rented to members for 20% of the cost to be repaid from after each harvest. The income from these kits (costing $340 each) is being used to buy more kits for members. The contributions they receive from members against the 2300 litre tanks is not only buying more tanks but they have just purchased 2.5 acres of land and are erecting a hothouse and store on it.

The foundation of all this activity is that we have been able to free up hundreds of thousands of hours a year for members who instead of walking miles to collect heavy loads of water on their backs can now take better care of their kids, engage in activities that increase family nutrition, provide increased incomes, build community and nourish a solid sense of purpose for the future.

The weather here in the Rift Valley is wetter and warmer than usual and a few of the Jacaranda trees are fooled and have begun to flower early.

My favourite time of year here is October, which is when these Jacarandas, the height of six story buildings, flower heavy mauve among bright green foliage, and the earth is rich chocolate brown from soaking rains, and the little flower bells felled by heavy rains scatter the ground at the base of the tree, and the contrast of mauve and chocolate in the strange yellow light as the sun tries to shine through dirty rain filled clouds takes your breath away and just then your taxi rounds the corner and there is a flame tree with tail light red blossoms that hits you like a bat. Here is a purity that you know is a lie but you want to believe in it anyway. A stream of people walk over the fallen blossoms; men on their away to labouring jobs and women on their way to house help. It is likely at best most only had sugar tea for breakfast.


[1] Area Development Project
[2] “water spring” in Swahili
[3] “farm” in Swahili

All is not as it seems, again.

Postcard from Flores

We have flown into the Indonesian island of Flores on the local airline Merpati. The plane is delayed. As a colleague said “It’s mer party and I fly if I want to”. Arriving at Maumere, we made the three hour road trip to Larentuka arriving in the dark. Next morning at 6am we took sweet black local coffee at the hotel which tastes vaguely of mothballs and now in the Toyota on route, one of our staff passes out sweet bread rolls the centres are filled with chocolate and grated cheese mixed together and they have a kerosene after taste.
We follow a road through the heart of the Larentuka Township.

The town is just waking and most of the store fronts are still shuttered and everywhere people are carrying things; on their backs, on their heads and on motorcycles stacked with bags of produce, bunches of bananas or three or four people. A motorcycle travels towards us sandwiched between two gaudy plastic wrapped mattresses. On the other side of town the road hugs the coast. The sun has just risen above the volcanic peaks of an adjacent island several kilometres away and a pastel pink tail of soft molten light makes a line towards us across the pal-blue silky water of the strait. It is a ‘since the world began’ scene only humanised by two fishing boats. We pass grey sand beaches, outrigger canoes moored just offshore, little villages of palm leaf rooved huts, ornate front yard family graves tiled turquoise and white, pigs tethered to wooden house stumps and goats, chickens, dogs, and kids with runny noses. The road begins to climb away from the coast and into the rocky hills. Straight out the ocean and increasingly far below, small villages among coconut palms in picturesque sandy coves. The view now is picture postcard perfect. But in no time the sun has become an unforgiving yellow white, bleaching the soft details from the day, parching the land and baking the stunted crops. The rain has come late this year and was too short and the corn has failed and I am told that this time which the villagers call “the hungry months” will be longer this year; malnutrition and stunting is a fact of life for many children here.

Our destination is the village of Duntana, a collection of around 30 huts at the end of a steep gravel track. We are maybe 10 kilometres inland from the coast now. There is no electricity here. Each house is surrounded by a fence of stick or wood planks; the earth around each house is swept bare and sprinkled with a smattering of animals and kids with guileless faces, white teeth and big brown eyes. Some houses have palm leaf rooves others are corrugated iron, the walls are mostly made from bamboo slats and woven palm leaf matting. In the doorways of every second or third house a women is standing with a kid on her hip and I look past them into the semi darkness of living rooms; a few cabinets, maybe an old couch, some chairs, a Mary or Jesus print with a red radiating heart and maybe a couple of family photos.

A kid with a Che Guevara tee shirt comes closer to inspect me. I shake his hand and he lights up and points to the heroic face and beret - “Bob Marley” he says proudly.

The farmers in Duntana have worked out a system where they pool their harvested cashews and hold an informal auction with a number of middle men and then sell collectively to the highest bidder. We have learned in Surabaya that if the producers made a small investment in a hand powered machine to crack the outside of the cashew nuts, then they can potentially get two to three times their current price. But the middle men, who are the farmer’s windows to the world of trade, haven’t told them about this and perhaps they don’t know.
Middle men are true entrepreneurs but are often labelled as “the” problem, standing between farmers and the higher prices the bigger buyers pay. Through our interviews and discussions we learn that each middle man provides some vital services. He gives the farmers upfront cash, he provides transportation and he takes care of all the risk. But there is more to it that this. In Flores, like most of the islands in the east of Indonesia, a families standing is largely determined by the “gifts” they make during celebrations that occur for baptisms, marriages and deaths. If someone provides a pig at your daughter’s wedding you are obliged to provide a pig when their daughter marries and if you provide a bigger pig then so much the better. Because of the regularity of these celebrations and that villagers become obligated to one another they are part of a cycle from which they cannot escape. If you have already provided, then you want to stay in the system until it is your turn, if someone has provided to you, tradition and obligation keeps you bound. I sit with three men. One of them lights a kretek cigarette which crackles into life, a puff of smoke, smell of cloves little sparklets of salt peter and he is ready to talk. “Yes, we must have costly celebrations no more again, but it will take time”. The three men all agreed the system needed to change because it uses up most of the excess assets that could be used to improve businesses or to provide emergency resources so that they are in a better position to take business risks. But they also agreed this would take time and no one had a plan. And this is where the middle men come in. He provides needed credit; sometimes cash but generally in the form of livestock, medication for sick children, tin for roofing or household items. In return he obligates the farmers to pay him back in cashews or other produce. So when harvest comes, the farmer’s cashews are often presold and the middle man determines the price. This system of pre-selling is called ijong, but the story doesn’t end here. The village buyers borrow money from other collectors who intern take advances from the buyers in centres like Surabaya, each locked into a system that in a way suits them yet all ends up making it difficult for producers to escape poverty.

Our task is to find ways in which the market can work better for producers through them adding value to what they produce, finding ways in which they can better understand the way the market works and have more freedom from ijong to sell at market prices. The collective they have formed is a great start and we believe that the information and support our Market Facilitator is offering will help them to take the next steps and to influence others to begin similar groups. And in our conversations we begin to formulate a future plan to take some farmers on an exposure tour that will include a visit to Surabaya so that they can better understand the value chain they are a part of.

We will have lunch with about 15 men from the village. Casey who is travelling with us grew up in Malaysia so speaks passable Bahasa Indonesian. He said they had given us a choice of fish, poultry or dog, and he has requested fish. But Casey got it wrong; the village leader was apparently telling him we were having fish poultry AND dog. And as the plates of food arrive one was filled with small greasy clumps dark brown meat on chopped bones and little ribs. And as we leave the other village dogs look us in the eye, heads lowered eyes upwards they slink away knowingly. One less bark around the village tonight.

We are late, it is already 2pm and we are only now finishing lunch after the morning’s interviews with community groups. We go over the details, when we planned the day we were told it would take an hour to get to the next producer group. We are now told it will take 2 hours each way. I wonder out loud whether it is worth the time as we have already gathered a lot of information. “No” we are told, “it is actually one and a half hours”. I ask why last night it was one hour. I am told that it is one hour if we take the good road and one and a half hours if we take the bad road. I ask why we can’t take the good road and I am told we can. “So it is an hour right”. “Yes” everyone says. My colleague Olivia and I pass a knowing look. An hour and a half later we arrive at the village.

While we are there we also take some video footage for a short movie. We are not filming a success story but taking footage which describes some of the challenges we are grappling with in our efforts to assist impoverished farmers on Flores to sell their products more profitably. In Development, this area of economics is known as “Access to Markets”.
Pak Johnson Tobing is our camera man from the Jakarta office and he has an expensive professional Sony camera that is slightly smaller than a rocket launcher. He is very experienced and uses all the film terms. When it came my time to give a short interview there was a bit of confusion as he assumed that I like he, was a professional. The dialogue went something like
“Rolling”
“My name is Jock Noble and I am World Vision Australia’s Manager for ...”
“Action”
“Did you get the first bit?”
“Cut”
“Rolling”
“Shall I continue?”
“Cut”
“Are we ready?”
“Rolling”
“My name is....”
“Cut”
“Pak do you start at Rolling or Action?”
“Rolling Action”......

But now I am doubled up in laughter so that my stomach hurts and I can’t breathe and tears are streaming down my cheeks and I can’t say another word.

Later we arrive at “Sea World Club”, a group of beach bungalows and a small dive centre and will stay here for the next 5 nights. Karyn at reception has the clear face, smoky eyes and willowy body depicted in one of those paintings of beautiful island women. She smells of soap and sundried clothes and is wearing a Rolling Stones tee shirt with a huge red tongue on the front. She is facing a computer screen and I see the Vatican website is open and she looks up under a fringe of thick black hair and her face lights up with a smile.

The founder of Sea World is a German missionary named Father Bollen , a big man, now in his eighties, he still fills a doorway. I met him one morning as he walked bare-barrel chested among the coconut palms on the beach with his white monkey ‘Hanoman’ on a long lead. “Don’t come to close” he said, looking lovingly at Hanoman, “dis vicked moonkey bites”.
It is very dark and I am walking back from the restaurant to my bungalow and the warm evening breeze has picked up a faint smell of beach, of coconut oil and cooking fires. I pass a middle aged East European couple sitting outside on their veranda, a bottle of Bintang beer between them, Bintang means star. The thick set woman has a tattoo the size of a hamburger on her thigh and he wears a tight green Harley Davidson tee shirt stretched across an immense belly like a balloon. A computer is on the table and playing Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ a tinny attempt to add something to the moment.

The sky here, so much bigger than the land and sea, is covered in a crazy scattering of star lights, mystical patterns, lines, crosses and dips. I suddenly feel more than see, a sense of order in the chaos and I wonder how I have not seen this map for ancient seafarers so clearly before now. And I am thinking how the situation at Duntana village also seems so filled with complexity. But our journey, like the ancient navigators has started with the destination in mind and we at least have that to guide us for now.

Don’t forget me. .

Postcard from an Archipelago
I arrived in Jakarta last night. It is midday Saturday and I am in a chair with a woman at my feet. Rogers, with its white marble polished floors and large central tank with colourful corals and exotic fish, is bustling like the lobby of a five star hotel. Young women in Rogers uniforms are purposely carrying trays with tall glasses of iced tea for customers. In chairs all around me, wealthy Indonesian and Chinese women are on Blackberrys; talking or tapping out messages. The Blackberrys are in colourful or jewel studded cases and have silver initials, little dolls or plastic dogs dangling from them. The women mostly come in looking gorgeous, and then they get ugly in the chairs - hair wet like rat’s tails, blotchy pale bare shoulders, puffy faces, and then they leave gorgeous again. It is a sort of butterfly – caterpillar - butterfly thing. The only discernable difference I can see is, as they leave, the women walk with more accentuated movements and purpose. I guess a lot of feeling beautiful is the fleeting lifebuoy in the storm moment, that how you feel you look and how you actually look, are more or less aligned.
‘Kalokagatia’ is a Greek word which means “beauty - good” a fusion between goodness and beauty. It occurs to me that a beautiful person may not necessarily be good, but a good person almost always tends to be perceived as beautiful. For me, the latter is lovely image; of saints and goddesses. Maybe I should start a beauty salon for goodness.
A middle aged woman with a kind face is working on my feet, using a variety of implements to sand off the calluses, scraping out the cuticles, cutting off bits of skin and nail. Abdul, my regular hair stylist, wanders up half way through the pedicure and removes the blue towel that has been draped across my freshly shampooed head. I have been looking like a cross between an aged Middle Eastern matriarch and Hitler to this point. Abdul starts cutting my hair, and I have complete confidence that he knows what to do. And anyway, he speaks no English and I have learned in the past I may as well talk with a parrot as Abdul just repeats whatever I say, and nods and smiles and then does his own thing. He is very skilled and it always seems to turn out fine. I am not facing the mirror as my feet are having things done to them that I could never do, and I just acknowledge his presence with a thumbs-up.
It is the wet season and facing the outside windows, I watch the rain falling in sheets. The road is now around 10cm deep in water, moving on its own past stationary vehicles, scurrying pedestrians with newspapers covering their heads making exaggerated leaps, upright cyclists covered in makeshift clear plastic ponchos leaving snake like wakes. And through the darkened glass, from the comfort of my chair, I secretly observe the freshly beautiful women waiting for their chauffer driven cars from under the covered entrance way, trying not to end up looking like wet animals again.
Finally the work on me is completed. I look down at my shining toe nails and then sideways to myself in the mirror. It seems that Abdul has become creative and I am now an aging white man with a teen idol Mohawk. I tip my mechanics, pay at reception and walk out into the chaotic, humid, mid-afternoon Jakarta streetscape. I have no concerns about the rain, this hairstyle may not get better but it may get different. There is a certain freedom in letting go any pretention to beauty; maybe I can just be good.
I meet up with a friend and we go to a coffee shop that harks back to the Dutch colonial era. There is a sign on the wall that says “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love” which when I think about it doesn’t make any sense at all and I find myself playing with the words, in different orders like love, hell and death, a weird kind of ink blot association thing.
Three days later and I am in Surabaya, an hour’s flight east of Jakarta and Java’s second largest city. I am here to conduct a 3 day workshop for our Business Facilitators and today I ran a workshop on ‘How to Negotiate’ for 20 Indonesian staff. My haircut has settled and I think I now resemble a US Marine General.
I am staying at the Bisanta hotel. At breakfast this morning I read the table place mat which encourages guests to use the full range of hotel services. One of the sections reads:
“We’ll make sure all your wedding just more Romantic and Perfect it will be the Unforgettable and Beautiful moment”
And
“Hotel Bisanta.....feel the new luxurious”
It is now 7.30 in the evening and I leave the “new luxurious”, wave to the young woman named Risky at reception and step out into the night. The air is heavy, so humid I feel like I am breathing through straws. I am on my way to a Chinese restaurant opposite the hotel. It is where I go when I get sick of the Club Sandwiches with cold french fries at the Bisanta.
The Flying Duck, a name you don’t want to say too quickly, is a strange place that caters primarily to Surabaya’s Indonesian born Chinese population. Inside is the size of a town hall, there are twenty five, twenty seat round tables, each table covered with a burgundy cloth and expectantly set with many bowls and chopsticks. There are huge Chinese golden motifs around the walls and abundant curtains; the cheap lavishness of a theatre set. The waitresses mill about and have skirts the same colour and fabric as the table cloths. As always, I sit at the back, because there is a live five piece Karaoke band on stage and the music is loud. The way it works is that the band plays and sings requests from the audience and between songs they invite and cajole members of the audience on stage to sing. Sometimes they help the singer along, other times the guest does a solo, generally in Mandarin.
The MC is a Chinese man named Eric who I guess is around sixty and has a lovely silky singing voice. Eric typically wears a colourful harlequin shirt and reminds me of an aging Jockey; his polyester black pants fastened high, successfully restraining in his paunch. His hair is dyed black but there is grey around his crown and some reddish bits that I don’t understand. I think he is a little drunk most of the time. He remembers me and comes to my table with a beaming smile of greeting, “Hello Mr. Jo, so good to see you again”. I am wary, the last time I was here he invited himself and over time a variety of others, to come to my table and to share my wine. Wine here is expensive and I had been hoping to make the bottle last a number of nights.
The woman on stage is Ari. She is singing something that sounds vaguely familiar but I can’t make out if she is singing in Bahasa or Mandarin. I am the only person in the restaurant, sitting solo at a table for 10 and Ari is singing to me, looking in my direction and nodding appreciatively. She finishes and says something that ends up with “Mr Jo”, and I smile and nod my head acknowledging her. Ari begins a new song; it is the Elvis song, “Vize maan sey .... And the refrain “I can hel falling in love vid you....” and she is casting me long meaningful looks. Ari has remembered that six or eight months ago, under pressure from Eric, I requested this old Elvis favourite. I am still the only person in the restaurant. I do some more appreciative nodding and return to my book “In Patagonia“ by the enigmatic Bruce Chatwin and resolve someday to write travel as well as he does.
I remember the last time I was here another singer, Aline, who is not here tonight, came a sat with me for a while. She was visibly upset and told me one of the Chinese man from a centre table tried to grope her... who did he think she was... just a thing... that he could touch her? Tears welled up in her eyes, she told me she was a single mum, that she supported herself through her singing. I listened and nodded, and she invited me to come to the restaurant she was singing after this one. I made an excuse, and we said “maybe next time”. Aline is probably around thirty, but up close, she has lines on her face from a tough life, dark under eye rings of weariness, sad eyes and the poor skin of a bad diet; her beauty is fading. I didn’t know whether I am just a sympathetic ear or being manipulated. Aline went back to the band table, shoulders bowed, her stage confidence gone. There was a real sadness about her situation and I felt the least I could do was to feel her sadness deeply.
Ari sings another song. She is moving like a MTV star, hips swaying and she is beautiful again. Another large round table has now filled with seven or eight Chinese men; Ari has finished her song and leaves the stage to greet each of them individually. A special look here, a nod there, a touch of the shoulder, as though with each she shares a special secret. Then she comes to my table and sits down. I don’t mind, I know it is her job to keep the customers happy, to make us all good friends.
Like Aline, up close Ari also looks much older. She has lost most of her teeth on one side so that just the front teeth are intact; I think she knows that her time as a stage diva will be coming to an end in a few short years, and there is no social security here for karaoke singers past their prime.
I hear my name mentioned again. Eric is on stage, “would Mr Jo like to sing?” Of course I would, but I can’t sing to save myself and so decline. I think I might one day but not tonight and I pour myself another half glass of the ‘Two Oceans’ wine from South Africa that cost me $30 for the bottle and is only slightly better than vinegar. I am celebrating; my workshop went well, very well. I have long recognised how little Indonesian staff seem to know about negotiation and today was my first chance to share some of my knowledge and the participants loved it, hungry for new skills.
It is only 8.45pm but it is time for me to retreat. The Chinese man from the audience is now on this third song, every note seeming flat and out of tune, I can no longer concentrate on my book and can wait to get back to the quiet of my room.
Ari is at the door, as I leave she gives me her best conspiratorial smile, I think she is hoping that at this moment she looks as beautiful as she wants to be and deep into my eyes she says “Mr Jo, don’t forget me”.

Postcard from Melbourne - Coming Home to Now

By the time I boarded the train in Prahran I was fairly certain that there was something seriously wrong with me physically. I felt exhausted. The month of December, leading up to my move back from World Vision in Jakarta had been stressful and busy, and since returning to Melbourne, work, family and returning to my apartment after two years had given me no time to rest. Ongoing neck and back problems and aching joints had all exacerbated my general feeling of dis-ease.

I had planned my annual medical check up in Melbourne a couple of months ago while still in Jakarta and had all the blood, urine and other tests done in the lead up to Christmas. It is nearly two weeks later, and my Doctor always insists that we go through the results together, in person. So today, I am on the train going back to get the results. I am wondering how he will tell me “I am sorry, the news is not good, we need to do more tests”.

I sit across from a young man with milky complexion. He is bald except for a few clumps of soft fluffy hair; I am guessing he has had cancer and radiotherapy. I wonder if this could be me in a month or two. I picture myself alone in my St.Kilda apartment retching into the toilet, the after effects of my chemotherapy. I think of my friend now in recovery from Hodgekinson’s lymphoma and the pain and discomfort he endured over the last 12 months, or another friend who had prostrate cancer, then surgery and now needs to use a little air pump to get an erection. They are both a few years younger than me. Every day leading to now, I have found myself thinking about various scenarios of sickness and how I will deal with them. Over the washing up, painting my apartment, showering, going off to sleep, a stealthy fear, attaching itself to my psyche like a leach, and when I become conscious of it, this leach is feeding on me, hard to be free of and each time leaves a wound. And now today, results day, has come the more I intuitively know that my life as I have known it is going to change forever and not for the better.

I wonder whether perhaps I would have been better not having the check up and just carrying on until I drop and die and friends and work colleagues saying “I saw him just weeks ago and he didn’t say anything, but I thought he didn’t look well, I can’t believe he is gone.” Another friend Kim, was diagnosed with stomach cancer, rather than have chemo, embarked on a regime of natural juices and he was dead in 6 weeks. The images of my future are so real and I am almost moved to tears of emotional self pity. I wonder at the courage of the man opposite me, and how much I really want to keep living and about what I can still do in the time I have left and how much I am prepared to endure for that. At least if I am well enough to make my next trip to Kenya then maybe that will be enough.

Returning to Australia after Jakarta involved much more than just hopping on a plane, there is a lot of reconnecting, renewing acquaintances and becoming a resident again particularly with my family. Even getting on this train, with an impatient queue behind me, figuring out which zone I am in, what kind of ticket I need, searching for the right money, adn do I need to validate my ticket or not. In this transition back from two years in Jakarta I have lost all my routines, everything seems complex and uncertain.

Working in the Burwood office. It takes me a while to get used to all the white faces and that I understand what everyone is saying. In Jakarta it was understandable that I didn’t really connect deeply with the challenges and changes in the lives of those around me as I couldn’t catch the peripheral conversations. Here I can and yet I realise how little I know about my friends and their particular struggles. How little they know of mine. One of my friends takes me aside and very politely tells me I am speaking too loudly on the phone and making it hard for others to work. I am grateful to him. I am learning to be part of the World Vision hush.

I make email connections with friends:

“Hi John, wonderful to hear from you, I hope you are doing well. Last Thursday I arrived back after my two year stint in Jakarta. I will now be based in Melbourne again. So please when you are down, give me a call, I would love to catch-up, buy you a meal and swap stories.
Very best Christmas wishes to you, Alice (JB’s wife) and Talooka (their oversized Afghan cross dog). “

John: “Mate, Glad to hear you are back and for sure would love to catch up.
Just so you know, Alice and I are not together now........ Talooka is with Alice. “

“Oh John, I am so sorry to hear that. And it is so hard to find a good dog.”

And reconnecting with family. One of my daughters has just broken up with her boyfriend of eighteen months. She loves him but is still young and couldn’t see a future at the moment that involved them both. He is still holding out the possibility that they can get back together. We talk, I give some fatherly advice. And get a text message at midnight that says “We talked and I followed your advice, and the crap hit the fan, oh Dad, what I mess, I blame you..........you owe me a trip to Africa”

My eighty-two year old Mother seems to have aged since I saw her 9 months ago, we sit and drink tea and eat Christmas cake and talk about how unseasonably hot the weather has been, how it has damaged her garden and scorched the Christmas lilies, we go and look and I see how the once perfect trumpet like petals have been burned by the nearly 40 degree pre-Christmas heat wave and now look forlorn and are dying prematurely and won’t make it until Christmas. My mother takes the heat personally as a betrayal, ‘it is just too hot” she says, as though personally wounded. I eat more Christmas cake guilty about the 3 kilos I have added over the last year; my mother is a wonderful baker with a lifetime of experience. She tells me how her friends are aging. How one has just decided that she can’t drive anymore and tried to sell her old car and couldn’t find a buyer. She took it to a scrap-metal dealer and they gave her $150 and then, as my mother says, before her eyes it was flattened into biscuit!! I am thinking that at this point Mum and I probably have different ideas about what this biscuit looks like. But our conversation is about aging and things passing not about biscuit facts and we both laugh at whatever we are thinking and move on to talking about whether on Christmas day we should go to church at Mums retirement village or at her former church in the suburbs. We decide on the church service at her retirement home.

On Christmas day, and with my sister, her husband and kids, we stroll together down to the events room at the retirement village where the service will be. It is confronting to be surrounded by so many elderly people in one place. They are a collection of unsettling vulnerability; frail walking, talking, sitting and especially the transitioning movements between are all filled with uncertainty, bodies only lightly anchored to the earth, autumn, dry leaves at winds mercy. Around half the congregation have walking frames. Mum tells me that they are supposed to leave them neatly parked outside the room but increasingly people can’t get from where they are supposed to leave their frames to their seats, and though this a place of many rules, many written in large letters, polite but firm on the surrounding walls, people turn a blind eye to those who drive to their seats. A drive in church. There is an oversize lighted NO EXIT sign above a door at the back which seems a bit incongruous to me at this moment. In each corner of the room there are also neatly parked four wheeled walkers interlocking like shopping trolleys. Most have been personalised with bits of ribbon and cottage industry knick-knacks. Several have teddy bears strapped onto the front. I am thinking that like the drivers of Kenworth trucks and old sailing ships there must be something in the DNA of humans that we like to put a mascot on the front of our vehicles as we navigate the uncertainties of the way ahead. I look at my sisters boys, eight and eleven and think that they too may one day need walking frames, and throughout our whole lives, how death is always more certain than tomorrow and when is a good time to leave our body and move on.

I am now on the train again on my way back to Prahran. I have been to the Doctor and all my tests have come back fine, Cholesterol up a little but otherwise a clean bill of health. I feel light and healthy and very ready for the year ahead. I try to put myself back into the frame of mind I had on the journey in, but it is illusive. It is as though my present reality has erased my past projections. Like a magicians slight of hand, my updated reality has replaced what was there before. And I reflect on how I seldom stop to consider the error between the “anticipated” and the “actual”. My present version overwrites and saves the last version, and that is all have on my hard drive, and mostly without me noticing. This amnesia like tendency is a very strange thing and I seem to keep repeating this, as though experience has taught me that it was effective, which seems not to be the case. While I see that I do need to organise and plan my futures, I don’t need to try and live in them as well. Not only could I have avoided my recent “near death experience” but I could have been more engaged at times over the last 3 weeks as well. I am wondering how much this kind of projecting is hindering my “attention” when I am in the field and working alongside people who need and deserve my total mindfulness and how listening with everything is sometimes the best thing any of us can bring.

T.S. Elliot’s line comes to mind “a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything” and I have resolved to make increasing my capacity to pay attention, to mindfulness, my New Year’s Resolution.
So much for mindfulness, lost in thought and unfamiliar with the Sandringham line, I miss my stop and have to navigate my way back, but never mind, apparently I am not dying as fast as I thought and probably have time.

Postcard from Qatar -

All Aboard
The tall man in his 30s, sitting on the aisle seat immediately in front of me, raises his voice belligerently toward the young Indonesian flight attendant. Apparently he doesn’t think his drink was served on time. The flight attendant kneels on the cabin floor and her hands together in front of her as though in prayer. I can see she is upset, she is trying to apologise, but he just keeps talking over her, her eyes now brimming with tears. She starts to move away and I touch her elbow and tell her “tidat apa apa”, don’t worry, you tried to serve, you can’t take responsibility for every bad tempered Bule[i]. Now she is crouching in the aisle beside me, says how she feels she has delivered bad service, her tears begin flowing and making dark spots on her bright red skirt. She is new to this work, she just can’t understand this man’s rudeness, she is trying to adjust to a new set of norms. The French man behind me hands her a tissue as she straightens and returns to the rear of the plane.
I chat with the attractive Indonesian women next to me. She is probably in her late twenties and has just been to visit a man in a small town in Wisconsin for 6 months. He is a machinist in a large factory. She met him on the internet, she hopes they will marry.
Next to her in the window seat of my row, there is another Indonesian woman, probably in her early thirties. She is using kerundung (the Muslim headscarf) and I am guessing she is one of several hundred “migrant workers” on this flight returning from “Arab Saudi”. The issue of migrant or “remittance” workers is something that interests and concerns me and I am trying to get time to figure out how I can engage with migrant workers in our ADPs so that some of the money they earn can help them to set up small businesses to provide ongoing support for themselves and their families after they return.
Through the woman next to me, I explain that I am involved in economic development work and would like to ask her some questions. She graciously agrees.
Her story is as follows. She went to Saudi Arabia as a migrant worker for two years but is returning after only four months. She explains she had to leave because her employer kept trying to rape her. She comes from a poor village in central Java and has three children. Her husband left her and now two of her children stay with her ex-husbands family and the third with her parents. She decided to find work overseas to earn money so that she could provide her children with an education and was expecting to be able to send back about USD$80 each month. To get a work placement overseas she registered with an Indonesian based Saudi employment agency. She didn’t receive any training before she left and was sent to a family in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper. After several months she complained to the agency that the husband of her host family kept trying to rape her. They advised her to ask her employer for extra money and sleep with him. Rather than do that, she decided to come home to Indonesia. This means that for her 120 days work, away from her village, her children, everything familiar to her to a land which she didn’t not speak the language, she has only been paid USD $150. The balance was deducted by the agency to pay her original plane ticket. She seems resigned to things as they are and is looking forward to seeing her kids.
Because people smugglers only charge a month’s salary as opposed to 6 to 12 months charged by the “official agencies”, many migrant workers become “unofficial” which makes them even more vulnerable to potential abuse and exploitation. Impacts on the workers themselves can be life shattering. Men returning to villages with HIV and AIDS, naive village women who may have no rights or access to any outside help in a new country may be beaten by their hosts for failing to perform as expected or raped by household men. There are many stories of female workers returning with unwanted pregnancies and as a result, losing their husbands and becoming ostracised by their families. Money sent back by a married woman may be used to fund a second wife for her Muslim husband back in the village or to pay for celebrations, house extensions or assets that mostly need to be sold again, at a loss, within a few months of the migrant returning. Then the family is back to where it started and the migrant worker returns overseas again.
Throughout Asia issues surrounding migrant workers are not new. There are some 6 million Indonesian Migrant workers sending almost USD 10 billion home each year[ii]. It is Indonesia’s second largest source of foreign earnings, the number one earner in the Philippines and high in almost every Asian country. Governments are unwilling or unable to train workers in vocations or in their human rights or pass regulations to protect workers like the simple self sacrificing, brave village woman sitting on the plane next to me. She has the “life in all its fullness” clearly in mind for her children, and has been prepared to take almost unimaginable risks to “make that so” , we share the same aspiration and there must be something we can do together.
I remember a quote "In development work, we have learned more about how to measure poverty than how to reduce it. "[iii] But I think to myself but there is always something we can do.
I am flying on Qatar. Their logo is an Oryx , before now I had never heard of an Oryx, the magazine says it is a type of antelope but it looks like a goat to me. If you are starting an airline why would you pick an oversized goat for your logo? Which leads me reflect on flying Kangaroos.
I did have a real piece of luck on the previous Washington DC to Doha leg. I sat next to a Colonel who introduces himself to me as Dr. Bill. He is a member of the US Army and on his way to Doha to deliver lectures on emergency field medicine to military physicians working in Iraq. We become friends, talked philosophy, daughters, wars on Taliban, wars on poverty. When Dr. Bill retires he wants to work for an aid agency he thinks he could help introduce some US military systems thinking. I gave him my card and he gave me 6 tablets of Ambient . Now , Dr Bill explained to me each tablet has a half life of 3 hours so if you take a full tablet it will knock you out for 4 hours cold.
“The trick is” he says ,
“don’t take a tablet until you are about half an hour in the air and fairly sure the plane is not going to turn around and make an emergency landing. Because you won’t wake up and your friends will have to carry you off the plane. But after four hours you will wake up fresh as a daisy, no side effects, scouts honour.”
Now to a person in my position who at that point had not slept for 24 hours and still has many hours to travel and as one who doesn’t generally sleep on planes, Bill is a drug bearing gift from God. Unfortunately it is too late for me to take an Ambient on this leg, we only have 3 hours to go and I don’t have any friends to carry me off the plane to wake up somewhere in Doha.
After a 7 hour stopover in Doha ,we are onboard again for the 8 hour flight to Singapore. I wait for an hour to make sure we are not turning back and take just half a tablet.
I wake up 3 hours later after the most wonderful sleep, I can’t believe it. And I am full of life an bon ami that I go and sit beside a French women at the bulkhead . Her young son seems to have more arms than a Hindu deity and all of them in her breakfast. So I hold him while she eats and tell this delightful five month old boy about the wonders of the universe.
It turns out that the French woman’s husband is Indonesian and flies for Qatar but she doesn’t know anything about Oryx either.
The plane is getting ready to land and a woman’s voice makes an announcement which ends;
“and we hope you have a plentiful supply”
A plentiful supply of what?
I turn to the Chinese guy across the aisle from me, who has something to do with repairing electronic eyes on oil drilling equipment.
“What did she say?”
“She said we hope you had a freasant fright”
And I look around the small community of friends I have made during the flight and think that all in all it was a “freasant fright” partially made possible by the US Army.
[i] White person
[ii] Business in Asia Today - Sept 2, 2009
[iii] DR. MANUEL OROZCO Inter-American Dialogue Conference on Remittances and Millennium Development Goals, 2008

Some Feedback to Postcards

I began writing what I call ‘postcards’ for fun and to communicate with a few friends about some of my reflections as a result of my work in the field. My first postcards were written around August of 2008. And not long after that these short written slices of life began to be published through the intranet at World Vision Australia which is available to around 600 staff. It never really occurred to me that I was writing for more than my own amusement or to fill in time doing something creative (and safe) to while away hours in some dull hotel room in whatever far flung country where I happened to be. And it has been a surprise to me that these little vignettes are meaningful to others in the organisation and to cause a surprising number of people to reflect on their lives and work in ways that seem to be positive. And it makes me pause and wonder how generally casual I am with what I say, as well as my shallow understanding of what my gifts are. Of how important it is to acknowledged that everything we do has some impact somewhere and my own need to listen to others to help me understand my own giftedness and voice when I have been too busy or self focused to notice. What a responsibility we have to play a small role in the lives of one another, in helping us all become all we are called and have been gifted to be! So for the record I have copied in some of the feedback I have received. It never occurred to me to save peoples responses until now so below is some of the feedback I could find from the last few months.
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I found it incredibly moving and also felt a sense of hopelessness for the people in the Wema region that Jock meets with. I wondered what/Who keeps Jock upbeat through all of these incredibly difficult and emotional issues?
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I found the quote from Thomas Merton that Jock commented on helpful..... “Do not depend on the hope of results....you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself....You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people....In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything." Thank you Jock so much for sharing with me. It brings the work we do so much closer to home when we read your stories.
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You do more work for the organisation in your missives than 10 of those 'expert' wankers do all year.
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I have been enjoying reading your postcards. The stories and insights assist me in connecting to the field. I have encouraged my team to read them as well as it can be difficult to remember why we join this organisation after time. This type of information can help us not lose sight of the important things. Thanks
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So good to read your postcard from Wema. These days I find it increasingly difficult to really stay connected to our work - being lost in the maze of phone calls and email civility. This morning your postcard with all your insight and sensitivity dragged me back to the kernel. The stark reality of our work.
Whether we make a difference or not ultimately is indeed as you say another matter. The fact that our hearts are in the right place when we are doing what we do - has to be a large part of it. Thanks for showing me your heart as you faithfully involve yourself in our work. Thanks for showing me that my heart had become full of weeds.
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This was very powerful, I love the descriptions of the people - their character and dress, have you planned your first novel? Writing as colourful and evocative of life on the other side as this would be very popular. Your writing style reminds me of No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. It is a sobering reminder of what poverty really is on the ground - people desperately trying to maintain their dignity in the midst of hunger.
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Just loved your postcard of life in Utsar. I used to find development dilemmas such as us wanting to develop independence with our community workers so we didn't pay them to plant trees to allay erosion. Then the government came along and paid them to plant trees - a good thing to plant trees - but then community dropped our scheme and even used to pull up plants so they could be paid to replace them.
Anyway, thanks for these postcards.
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Just wanted to pass on a quick thanks to Jock for his published stories in weekly vision. Always a great laugh, and thoroughly enjoy reading about his latest journey's. Please pass on my appreciation if you can and encourage him to publish a book as it would be a best seller.
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Loved your story from the field - the many truths and our role in that! Was great!
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Loved the latest instalment on the hub! You should be a travel writer
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Your postcards are gold. Thank you so much for these. They make me feel both there and connected, but also very much that I am not there - and thus sad. Maybe doing WV work, in this mostly vicarious way, from the computer back in the homeland is not all I should be doing? Anyway your postcards stir the passions for our work giving me 'yourworkjoy' envy..... probably wrong..... but your passion for your work is very contagious.... even when the roosters need their heads cut off..and more green flashes and sunsets please
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It was really good to read your story on the web (once again!) - I loved the Merton quote - these are all issues I think we all grapple with all the time - and difficult to find answers to, but Merton quote does help, and I personally do think it's the walking alongside, and validating people in their experience and truths, as you say - good reminder while we're in the middle of the meta-evaluation which brings all the questions of 'results' to the forefront and makes you despair at times, thanks for your article,
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Thanks for your postcard story from Kenya...I love the way you construct your story so that we can enter into the experience...& be humbled by it... I will share this with a number of key church people around the state...
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Just love your postcard from Kupang airport. Been there and done that but probably got too used to it to notice all the little bits although one trip I do remember was with Enrico Guterrez, the notorious gangster from the E Timor massacres at independence time. As I sat in Kupang airport, I wondered who else was with him and which firearms he was carrying, given that it was unlikely anyone would have prevented him from taking them on board. And wondering what I would say if his seat was next to mine.
Great stuff.
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You have once again written a piece that is entertaining, and engages the reader throughout: I'm a big fan of yours!
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I hope it’s OK to cry when we read stories on the Hub
Thanks for once again reminding us all what it’s really all about

Believing into Real.

Postcard from Flores

(Left; Flores kids on the beach at Maumere)

Belief in what is real takes all kinds of forms. I recently bought a new pair of glasses in Jakarta. The ones that I felt suited me best and gave me a new look, were some by Giorgio Armani. They cost about the same as they would have in Australia, but I needed them, my world increasingly out of focus. I proudly collected them a week later and I am now wearing some spec s that turn my head into a bill-board for Giorgio Armani. That Giorgio reputedly sniffed so much cocaine that he burned out his nasal passages and had to have a stainless steel plate inserted in his nose, didn’t diminish how special I felt for the first few days. I think it was about the fourth day that I was and working with an economic development committee in a slum community. One of the Ibu’s (women) came out the front of the room to write up something on the flip chart, and I noticed that she was wearing the same glassed as mine. She too had the silver Giorgio Armani emblazoned on each side of her glasses. Were they real, were they fake, did it matter that this humble woman was also sporting my precious designer look? Did she spend $400 at an optometrist or $5 down at the local market?
A few months ago, I also became the proud owner of a Rolex Submariner. I had wanted one since I was a teenager. Naturally, it has a Swiss movement, a shiny Oyster case with the little bubble in the glass to better see the date and the weight conveys strength, reliability and quality. The Balinese man who sold it to me swears that no one can tell the difference from the real timepiece, in fact he said he is not sure, it may even be real. That it was made in Korea and was $4000 cheaper than the original made it affordable, believe me, I didn’t put any Swiss watchmakers out of work. I wore it proudly for my four days in Bali between work assignments and spent time in restaurants looking admiringly at my wrist. But there is a problem. It is so realistic that I no longer feel comfortable wearing it. When working directly with people who are poor, it is one thing to wear a $50 watch, but quite another to wear one that is $4000. And what is the point of wearing such a watch if you have to explain to everyone you meet that it is a fake, whenever you look at the time?

I have been wrestling with the idea of what I believe in and my role in helping others to believe in things that are a lot more real than my Rolex. And I am struck that the value of something or someone has a lot to do with the belief we project and how we name it. I notice that I am much more productive and infinitely more creative when others believe in me. And I am astounded by the power of my belief in others. Some of this has to do with our use of words. For example I have begun to discipline myself to say “people who are poor” rather than “poor people” as I think this better conveys the belief that we are all people first and we share a common humanity rather than a portfolio of labels. It is like, we don’t say “cancer people”, as though their cancer defines them, we say “people who have cancer.”
I am travelling in a car to a remote town on the East Indonesian island of Flores, it is late, the other five passengers are asleep. I am sitting in the front seat and exhausted. I only returned from Africa the day before yesterday, that trip was 25 hours with no sleep. In Dubai I bought a new Canon 550D digital SLR camera, I think it was a good deal but I don’t really know, anything looks like a good deal when you are sleep deprived . So I am somewhere between excited by my new purchase and concerned that I have just put the equivalent of two years income for one of the people I am working for, on my credit card. I know from past experiences that sleep deprivation merged with a deep ingrained retail compulsion is a risky combination . Like when I bought some Bose ‘noise cancelling’ earphones and latter discovered from my credit card statement that they had cost me the equivalent of a small car; not of course that I need a small car when travelling in an aeroplane at 35,000 feet.

We flew 5 hours today and are now taking a 4 hour car trip to Larentuka in the east of Flores. It is just dark, we are on a narrow bitumen road that passes through small villages, there is no electricity, just the soft glow of a kerosene lamp here and there. On my lap the new Canon, in case we pass the shot of a lifetime, or because it makes me feel special,? A slight contraction of the heart, I am too tired to work it out. Around each curve our headlights reveal one surprise after another, a broken down truck, some rocks from a landslide, a section of road partially collapsed to the valley below, we swerve to miss a some brown skinned villagers walking in the middle of the road. The women wear beautiful locally woven ikat sarungs dyed in dusty earthen colours. The men have the sarungs draped around their shoulders like Indonesian Masai, have I been on the road too long? The radio is playing country and western music by a local band from Flores. Every so often one of the songs is in English. The chorus of one is “He drinks tequila and she talks dirty in Spanish” , this refrain goes over and over in and out of my half sleep, I see the Sphinx and the Pyramids and again the road as we swerve to miss another group of locals.
The hotel is uncharacteristically clean, we come through the doors into to a wide entrance hall and all the rooms open on to it. There are armchairs beside each door and there are half a dozen men relaxing with sweet tea smoking clove kretek cigarettes. The men look relaxed , do they know that their island fags are now being produced by the global Philip Morris and have twice the nicotine and three times the tar of a regular cigarette? Marlborough country. There are also mosquitoes, swarms of them. I have a little plug in anti-mosquito device, but there is no power, so I give one of the boys some money and he goes off to buy me some mosquito coils. There is no towel in the room. I ask the house boy but he thinks I want soap and I can’t make myself understood. I am so tired I give up. I take a bath in the mandi, throwing cold water over myself from a water tank in the bathroom and dry myself with the shirt I have worn all day. About 3am, something smacks my cheek, it has legs, and in a second I am standing on the bed, heart pounding not really knowing where I am, but knowing that something and I have had an unnatural connection. Fortunately the power is now on, and I see a cockroach the size of a cigarette lighter running for its life. Not fast enough though, my one litre bottle of water nails it to the floor and it is an ex-cockroach. At least I know what it was. It must have been running across the ceiling and lost it grip, landing inauspiciously on the cheek of the only white man in Larentuka. I go back to sleep wondering if God loves cockroaches.
Next day. My work this morning is work with twenty of our staff to help them come up with ideas on what they can do to help to increase the incomes of people in this ADP in eastern Flores. They have been working in the area for 10 years and generally household wealth has not increased. It’s not that these earnest young men and women don’t want to make a difference to peoples economic wellbeing, but it just seems that they don’t know how. And part of not knowing how is that they don’t share a belief that things can really change. They are often so preoccupied with all the problems, the powerlessness of villagers and our own systems that they seem almost confused as to their role. I ask them, one by one, “why are these people poor?” and they come up with a number of different answers, one says “because they are not educated” and I say, “ but I know uneducated people who are not poor” another says “because they are not motivated” and another says “because they are lazy” and I say “ but I know people who are not motivated and who are lazy but they are not poor” and then one says “because they don’t have enough money”. And as an economic development person, that is the answer I am looking for . Someone else says “but it is not in our Annual Operating Plan” and I say, “the people in your ADP cannot eat your AOP (Annual Operating Plan).“

There is a lot of malaria here and this morning I noticed some mosquito bites and so on the way to the ADP I bought some anti malaria tablets. So in the middle of this discussion, I have just remembered I have them and take a couple of bitter pills. It is a brand I don’t know and I have a reaction to some anti-malarials, I know I should have started a few days ago, but what to do, probably can’t do any harm and believing I am doing something, makes me feel better.

I am a very expedient user of Bible verses , I use them to make points I want to make, and I am not always sure that this is what God intended. But I believe this is my calling and I am trusting in a forgiving God.
So I quote some of Mathew 6 to the staff.
2"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 3But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

I hear myself saying: “what you put in your reports it is the equivalent of being honoured by men, a good report is acknowledged and acclaimed, and that is acclaimed by World Vision and there is your reward. But I am also asking you to do some things that may not me in the plan or in the AOP, that you may not be able to put into your reports, that you may not be acknowledged for and no one may know except the people who you are helping. But if really we want to make a difference then you have to make a choice about what is really going to make a difference here and perhaps add some activities beyond what you are doing now.”
I am thinking about how difficult it is, how long, how invisible, this practice of community empowerment and it is no wonder that this is not in their AOPs, and not being measured how hard to keep this in focus. And I am looking at beautiful open faces and I have some sense of the demands on them, and I know they want to do some things differently and are torn, and I can’t say for sure that I have made any difference or that they can, but in this moment I absolutely believe in them and I know that there is nothing more important for any of us right now than this moment. There is a silence that it is not right to fill.

I am awestruck whenever I catch a glimpse of this power of positive belief to make the unseen Real, it is what sustains me in this work. When my African friend Peter decided he would do something about water in the Wema ADP none of us had any idea he could mobilise local people to dig over 90 dams, he infected each group with his belief that they could make a difference. Now we jokingly call him ‘the Minister for Water’ but before he believed he could do something, he was just another dirt poor farmer in ragged clothes. Peter’s belief is contagious and now I see him and some others like him inspiring and empowering our own ADP staff.

I remember the story of the Velveteen Rabbit and for a moment I wonder whether I should take the risk and tell them. I decide not to. Once in Timor I made the mistake of trying to tell the story of the “King with No Clothes” . The people I was addressing had absolutely no clue what I was talking about, and the more I talked the less sense the story made, from beginning to end. It is hard to answer sensible questions like “if the King was so gullible, why was he still the king?” . The Velveteen Rabbit is a children’s book about a stuffed toy rabbit who becomes a real rabbit because of the love a of child. Let me quote you a section: “Real isn’t how you are made, “ said the skin horse. “it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with , but REALLY loves you, then you become Real. it doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. Generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been rubbed off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I am musing about how what I believe in defines me as individual, whether that belief is in Rolexes, or Giorgio Armani glasses, ADP staff or African damn builders. And how what I believe in, is always a choice and if I want to make a Real difference, how often I may need to transcend the limitations of what I think of as ‘the facts’.
I wonder if sometimes I am more worried about a portrayal of what our donors or our experts will perceive as real, than the potential for my work to believe others into Real. To help others “become” . Not being sure what is Real and what is not, means that at times I can become cynical and focused on all the things that might not work and I risk missing the opportunities to believe in the miraculous and in truly awesome potential of untogether and broken individuals. Of course it is safer to try to systematise approaches than risk and believe in the power of people to do things in time frames that don’t fit funding agreements.

Talking of risk, I am checking in to the hotel in Surabaya, the attractive receptionist’s name is Risky. I use her name a couple of times. “Yes Risky, thankyou Risky”, “Risky can I have a room on an upper floor?”, “Thank you Risky”. Now it maybe a middle aged man thing, but I notice that I am much more interested in talking with in a young woman named Risky than I would be in say, an Agnes or a Mary. I was delighted to learn later, that in Javanese, Rizky means blessing or gift from God.