Fearless Hopelessness

“Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for”  Amos Nathan Tversky,

Many NGOs working in international development are finding that their revenues are falling, there is increased competition for funds and people who are poor are at risk like never before because of food and water shortages, climate change, natural disasters, rising energy and input costs, refugee influx, population growth or migration. This can lead to new organisational pushes that focus on making staff redundant, redoubling fundraising and marketing efforts and a new emphasis on risk management to protect the organisations Brand. As management and boards seek to try to have more control of their destinies , organisations that pride themselves in bottom up development and field effectiveness can themselves become increasingly hierarchal, struggle with issues of transparency and focus on growth and internal efficiencies with lessening apparent concern for the quality of outcomes for people who are poor.

International NGO’s generally have audacious visions such as “for every child, life in all its fullness”.......“A world in which every child attains the right to survival, protection, development and participation”........”A just world without poverty, in which people can influence decisions which affect their lives, enjoy their rights, and assume their responsibilities as full citizens of a world in which all human beings are valued and treated equally”. Each vision statement has at its core, hope within the hopelessness of a vision that can never become true. Some management along with marketers and fundraisers may well try to hold a world view that all development problems are solvable and the right strategy, focus, steady growth and clever marketing the organisation will sustain itself indefinitely.


I want to raise questions about what International Development NGOs really trying to sustain and why the promotion of hope and vision among each organisations staff is the most logical, effective and necessary approach to achieving each organisations Mission and Vision and sustainable future. And how an undue focus on size, the generation of funds and management of risks is in fact less likely to sustain the organisation in the long term than having fewer funds, more flexibility and focusing on which activities approaches and resources are most likely to achieve unsurpassed development outcomes.


In the hybrid causal loop/perspectives map (Fig1), I have attempted to depict linkages for how more funds, an aversion to risk, staffing whose fit is more important than abilities and systems that place predictability over need, are likely to undermine everything that might sustain an NGO into the future. A reading of the diagram suggests that the key element to NGO organisational sustainability is going to depend on how effectively impact and aspirations are achieved in the field, as well as how this impact is communicated to donors.

Some of the key conclusions that can be drawn from this Causal Loop Diagram are:

• There is potentially a non-virtuous spiral that means more funds and more programming exposes the organisation to greater risk, posting threats to the Brand, causing more focus on risk minimisation actions, which leads to poorer development outcomes, which makes funds generation more diffulut, or at least risky, which leads in turn to more risk minimisation and a redoubling of efforts to raise more money.


• The impact of an organisation wide “taboo” on discussing the true quality of the development work relative to the aspirations of donors and developing communities.

• How organisational and staffing structures negatively impact on community development aspirations and how these lead to decreased development effectiveness and thus increased risk to the Brand of the NGO to its donor communities.

So what is it a typical International Relief and Development NGO trying to sustain?

A Vision Statement is a way of articulating the dreams and hopes for the people who comprise and support the organisation. The reason donors give their money to NGOs is in the hope that a difference will be made. Most donors will never meet the beneficiaries of their generosity but they give in the ‘hope’ that through their sacrifice, the lives of some people who are poor will be changed for the better, in sustainable ways, that their donation of itself, has made a real difference.


Aid agencies have consistently found that donors are more inclined to give money to support relief efforts to a few people who are impoverished rather than tens of thousands. Apparently the larger numbers are overwhelming and donors lose the hope that their contribution can actually make a difference. Thus the donor perspective is most likely to be one where they are supporting the NGO to provide a solution to a poverty situation.

From the perspective of an NGO, in this time of rising prices of food, fossil fuels and agricultural inputs, population pressures, environmental degradation, climate change, wars, famine, migrations, natural disasters and water issues, the larger perspective cannot be one of solutions but rather of a predicament or “wicked problem ”, where outcomes are better or worse rather than solved. In this context an NGO can logically only maintain hope and a vision for the future for some beneficiaries that is better rather than worse. In this context “a solution” is a hopeless aspiration.

It would seem that while a donor may have some hope in specific solutions the collective hope needed by the NGO’s leadership would seem by necessity to be a different kind of hope, along the lines described by Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel.


“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem hopeless as ours do, here and now.”


Here Havel seems to be talking about how hope can still reside in hopelessness, as being something beyond the hope of results and instead the hope to do the right thing even if the challenge seems to be overwhelming.


Thomas Merton, the late Christian mystic and writer also talks of hope, and the hope he seems to be referring to is not the hope from finding solutions rather than the hope that survives in doing what is right, regardless of the consequences.


"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


What both Merton and Havel seem to be pointing to is that strength, inspiration and action can all arise freely in spite of a seemingly hopeless situation and that as Merton says within the “truth of the work itself”.


The “opposite” of hope is therefore not hopelessness but fear, as it is fear; fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of utter powerless that leads to despair; it is fear that saps the strength from hopes wings.


Thus the question arises: What would it take for an organisation, as an entity, to hold a vision within hopelessness, to be working within an overwhelming predicament, free from fear and be supported by tens of thousands of donors most of whom believe the organisation is providing solutions?


It would seem logical that International Relief and Development NGOs will not be able to survive indefinitely if there is a disparity between their vision and what donors believe they are supporting. Could it be that fear arising from the size of the predicament also has a role in over energetic fundraising, growth for growths sake, bureaucracy and risk management as substitute actions for work arising from “the belief in the work itself” that Merton speaks of?


An organisation, of itself, cannot hold hope within hopelessness, organisations have systems, structures, policies, resources and so on. It is the people within the organisation who will or won’t carry the hope and vision of such an utterly outrageous proposition of “a just world without poverty” or “every child who is today in poverty will experience life in all its abundance”.


It is paradoxical that NGO’s may ask donors to believe in an audacious vision and ask people in communities to increase their lots though self determination and belief in their own power to make a difference, and yet in their actions as organisations appear to be driven by fear thus sacrificing their authenticity with donors and communities alike.

So to rephrase the sustainability question, what is it that the organisation needs to sustain in order to do its work and achieve the most it can with purpose, effectiveness and relevance into the future?


I believe there is a strong case to suggest what will sustain Relief and Development NGOs into the future is the vision and hope of the people who make up the organisation and that the expression of this hope will lead to actions that improve the lives of people who are poor and offer opportunities for impact that are greater than the other alternatives available to donors. My hypothesis is that the leadership of these NGOs will need to convey each organisations vision in such a way as to realign the staffs worldviews with Donors and Communities who have more hope for change than is generally true within the NGO and its partners.


To survive and maximise its potential for impacting on the lives of people who are poor, my belief is NGOs need to refocus their leadership towards seeking to sustain vision and hope in the midst of overwhelming challenges.


For Development NGOs to sustain vision and hope in the midst of overwhelming challenges there will need to be the emergence of new and innovative approaches and new ways of reframing the “solution” orientation to one of “predicament”.

The only Wicked Problem strategy intervention consistent with international (community) development theory is “Collaboration” (Roberts, 2000), to work with all stakeholders to find the best possible options for proceeding with development approaches that builds the hope and vision amongst donors, NGO staff and communities. And to be less engaged with providing solutions than we are with improving predicaments. With this orientation hope does exist that we can communicate in new ways with our donor community and that our authentic aspirations will drive change throughout the value chains that we are a part of, towards more meaningful engagement with our stakeholders and better quality outcomes that are based on comprehensive shared visions rather than parochial short term survival activities.

Postcard from Velingara

Meeting in the village of Foudou - The floor is earth and the sides are open, the essence of humility

Too dumb to keep but too hard to leave behind

It is March, I am in Dakar and have just been picked up from my hotel to go to the office. The Novotel is a better hotel than i am used to, modern French minimalist. I was upgraded to a room with a sea view but the room is dark, the sea view window is less than half a door in size, I suppose for some eco design reason, and at an angle so you can only see the sea if you stand right at it. I can make most things work and when I can’t it is apparently because i am not thinking enough like a Citroen mechanic. Some room features seem to work better when I try them backwards for example in the bathroom, up means on and down off and green means hot and blue means water flow and things of that nature. Some aspects remain a mystery, like the moulded plywood feature that covers the orange vinyl cushion on the stool under the desk. I arrived last night from Nairobi, the time is three hours behind, so bed was two a.m. and I am feeling it a bit this morning.

My drivers name is Aziz, his English is good and we make ‘morning in the traffic’ small talk.

“So how is the office?”

“The office is very fine”

“How is my friend Brett? “ Brett is originally from Canada and has been working in Senegal for a number of years.

“Brett is very fine.”

“Brett just got married?”

“Yes maybe one month ago and his wife is very beautiful”

“Have you met his wife? “

“Yes she is very tall, she is like the Cooka Cola”

“The Coca Cola?”

“Yeeees, she is tall and has good shape and is very brown.......... like the Cooka Cola.........and she has very good teeth. Aziz said this laughing so that the words and the laughing were all one.

We wind through backstreets of an old part of town, its all an old part, we pass the Hotel Croix du Sud a fine old art Deco style hotel built around 1950 that apparently used to be the best in town. It reminds me the Bakelite radio that my father gave me as a child to listen to the Argonauts on the ABC. We cross Boulevard du General de Galle, and go around Independence Square, which is the size of several soccer fields and in it are low concrete retaining wall instalments painted and sun bleached, un-kept paths and several dry fountains. It has a mad broken garden gnome feel about it. There have recently been some pre-election protest riots around here. We take a road the goes near the old market in an area that translates to something like “Walk of Barrels” and hit the coast.

Now we follow the road from the edge of the city centre along the coast towards the airport, we swerve only to avoid those things that might do us damage. Like donkey carts, or aging yellow Peugeot taxis. Pedestrians run between speeding cars like a dare. The street sign says Route de la Comiche Quest – ‘Road to the Comic Quest’, and I remember Don Quixote and wonder if we all need to be a bit mad to make sense of what is going on around us, not only here but anywhere.

Last time I was in Dakar, Brett took me to dinner along this same road, a clutter of buildings behind a taxi stand in front of little Luna Park that is all painted up like a harlequin hat. The Cafe Sportif is perched on a small cliff overlooking the beach. We arrived at dusk and watched the water turn from aqua to mercury to ink. And we talked about work and Africa and he talked of his upcoming marriage and me of lost loves.

When it came time to came to go, there was a scramble of taxi drivers around us and under coloured light bulbs draped in a tree and somehow we ended up in one of the old beaten up black and yellow Peugeots with a Rastafarian driver , he was high on something, maybe herbs or drink or just on life. A crafts hawker stops me closing my back door desperate to sell me three carved ebony monkeys each about the size of a Russian doll, hear no evil, speak no evil , see no evil. And I didn’t want them but I buy them anyway and pay a quarter the price he started at and still feel I pay too much. We lurch off up the road , the old 505’s diff is wining, the tappets sound like shaking rocks in a tin and the springs and shocks are gone and with every bump we bottom out with a jarring thud and each time I close my eyes, it has an end of the world feeling about it. The driver is shouting at us in French, we make the first corner and both his and my doors fly wide open like it was something they were supposed to do on cue. I nearly fall out but grab the door and slam it back in but the same thing happens at the next right hand corner and I move to the middle of the back seat, holding the back of Brett’s’ passenger seat with one hand and the opening back door with the other. And the driver is grinning and shouting and laughing and I can’t understand a thing he is saying but I am getting him anyway. And when I get back to the hotel room in the light, I see that two of the little monkeys are see no evil, accompanied by one hear no evil. They are too good to throw away, and too dumb to keep, but I pack them anyway. So many things in life seem like this and I am thinking of all the things I hold on to that are no good for me or for others.

My task this trip is work with two new business councils in their rural villages. We have some new Business Facilitators and part of their job will be to form as many as twelve business councils and so I am here to do some training and mentoring while actually in the field working with community groups.

We are in the office I am sitting with my colleague Benedict who is originally from Mali. We are planning the logistics for the week ahead. When I have visited previously the projects are generally three or four hours from Dakar, so if we leave early we can schedule community work in the afternoon.

“So where are we going” I ask.

“Velingara”

“Okay good, and how long will it take us to get there?”

“It is not so far” he says, but his eyes flicker

“Benedict” I say, “how far exactly is it?”

“It is a really beauuuutiful drive” Benedict says looking through me to the wall behind. “It is near the border with Ginea Bissau”

“Okay, how long will this beautiful drive take?” I ask

“Ten hours, but this is a very, very nice drive, a very beauuuutiful drive”

“Ten hours!”

“My broder “he says “everything is possible in Senegal”

And so now it is two days later and we are in a community meeting place in the middle of a small rural village about an hour out of Velingara. We are seated in a shelter that can hold about two hundred people, the roof is a thick grass thatch bound to rafters with rope like raffia held on tree trunks each with a natural fork at the top to hold the rafters. The floor is earth and the sides are open, the essence of humility. People filter in and several men whom I assume are village elders bring traditional chairs, that have the dimensions of a deck chair and made from two wide rough hewn planks that both have a notch taken out about one third of the way along, to half the width, and so fitted together they form an off centric cross with the short side forming the seat and the longer the longer the back rest.

After about half an hour we start the meeting and I gather that about ten years ago we bought a large plot of land along the bank of the passing river for some struggling farmers and helped them develop it into a communal banana plantation. We provided big diesel pumps to irrigate from the river, the banana plants, the fertiliser and training. And when fences were needed to keep livestock and wild donkeys out we provided the materials. And for a while apparently this was a model project. And then as one thing or another went wrong or broke we fixed it. Everyone’s intentions were good and the community became increasingly dependent on us and we on them for results that might justify our increasing investment. It was a pity that no one had sufficiently researched the demand for bananas and now the famers are struggling to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.

Looking out over the fields, women and boys are leading donkeys pulling hand ploughs worked by men in kaftans of sky blue, cloud white, and earth brown . And I am thinking this project is like an old Volvo station wagon I once had, first I needed to replace the gear box and I thought after this all would be well for the future but soon it was the electrics that blew, so I fixed them and was sure that the car would now be worry free. But then the dif went and I replaced that and so by the time the power steering stopped working, I was so committed I didn’t really make a decision and when the radiator blew beyond repair I had invested so much that I couldn’t walk away because I couldn’t even sell it for the price of the power steering repair. That question again, what do we hold dear and what do we leave behind?

So as usual, I have no idea what discussion is going to be helpful for us, for them for all of us. So I asked the gathered group what they wanted to achieve and they told me they wanted World Vision to give them more school classrooms and more teachers and to find a buyer who would pay more for their bananas.

I have found that following my instincts is generally better than ignoring them and also that stories are often a first step to something else. So the best thing I could think to do was to tell a story about the opportunities. I said that it sounded to me that they were like some farmers caught in a flood who had climbed onto their thatched roof even as the water was lapping at the edges of the grass thatch. And there was a murmur and several people looked anxiously at the thatch overhead. And I said that the farmers were good Muslims and they prayed to God to save them and they waited in hope. Then after some time some fishermen came by in a canoe and offered to take them to higher ground but it looked risky and they said no, they were waiting for God to save them. A little while later a large tree that had been dislodged from the bank , brushed by the roof and as the waters were rising the famers thought of clinging to the tree and it taking them to safety, but they remembered that they had faith in God and after all, wasn’t it Gods job to save them? Before long the flood swept the roof off the house and it sank and the farmers drowned. There was murmuring in the group and I could sense at this point they could all see themselves swept away in the a swirling muddy river. And I said, the farmers went to heaven and there was Allah, and they said “Blessed Allah, why did you not save us?” And Allah said to the farmers, “Sons and daughters, what do you mean? First I sent you some fishermen in a boat and then I sent you are huge tree to carry you to safety”. And one of the village elders stood up and through translation said that he understood the message and that he saw they needed to use what they had been given and to take some risks to save themselves. So I asked him to chat with the gathered group. I know from experience that nothing is easy, that words are just words particularly from visitor and also that worlds can have power. I have learned that I generally can’t tell the difference. That all of us there that day hold a part of the truth and that all I could do was to try to contribute something that in some way may be helpful.

We are so often afraid to lose what we have even when logically there is a real prospect of gaining something of much greater benefit. Believe it or not academics have spent lifetimes researching risk aversion and decision making theory. Loss aversion refers to people's strong preference to avoiding losses over acquiring potential gains. Some studies suggest that fear of losses is twice as powerful, psychologically, as the potential for gains.

I have noticed this when impoverished farmers have a strong reluctance to try new methods or even in some cases work together in new ways. They may recognize the theoretical logic of making a change but they are worried that deviating from their traditions poses a risk of losing the little they have. I have talked with farmers who would rather endure three or four hungry months than risk letting go of tradition trying something new that is likely to mean they will be better off. And it is not hard to see how in an evolutionary way this can make sense, at least they know with the old ways they will survive just like their parents and their parents before them. But there are always exceptions and risk aversion is not true apparently for gold rushes or martyrs.

It is not hard to see how the banana farmers quickly became dependent on World Vision and that when a problem arose they turned to us to fix them. A downward spiral where the more we invested the more we had to lose, the greater the community’s dependence, the less the project was successful the more we invested. And the question arises, “who is trying to sustain what for whom?” We believe in assisting communities increase their social capital and determine their own future and yet our fear of loss and failure can bind us into a spiral in which sustainable development is unlikely. And here that we repeated it for so long must have meant that we weren’t prepared to risk losing the little we had for in the hope that the community would and could find ways to do things themselves. And if we are not prepared to risk loss how can we expect the communities we work with to do the same? It is so seldom about the money and so often about our skills and abilities to take risks with others. And who is it that benefits from taking these stories back to our experts and our supporters.

I like the following quote from the late Amos Nathan Tversky who was one of the pioneers of decision making theory, he said:

“Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for ”

Post Script

This was around a year ago and last month I saw part of a report and in it the following excerpt of a speech by one of the Elders from that village near Velingara:

“The village of Foudou exists by the will of World Vision; this is why we must not disappoint. World Vision has set up a banana with a major investment to develop the area economically. Therefore, I would like to return abroad about "Noble Jock" who came when starting the project with BDS Cisse (a new Business Advisor). If I remember correctly, he made us understand that we first had to rely on ourselves before seeking support from others. To return to the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding today between the partner and we Abdou Faye banana producers, I would simply say that we have an incredible opportunity to have World Vision as a "big ship" and Abdou Faye partner as "small ship" and if we are not careful we may lose these two ships if we do not redouble their efforts to succeed. If we fail, we are alone in the ocean and we risk drowning. Through these examples, I was merely a repeat explanations from abroad from World Vision Australia, to say we believe in and enjoy the opportunity we have today to move forward. "

I am not really sure what it means, but I hope it means something true, and if that is the case then that will be a mystery to marvel at and if I am there next year and I have twenty hours to drive to and from Velingara I may just try to find out how things are going.

Postcard from Lebanon

You want buy gun now?

The proprietor of my local Milk Bar in St.Kilda is a Lebanese man in his fifties named Frank. Frank is short, thickset, mostly unshaven, often in shorts and thongs and always looks unhappy. Frank grimaces rather than smiles. He calls regulars “mite” but he says it like a threat. Frank is generally bitching about something, how the local prostitutes steal from him and the attitudes of the Irish backpackers or the rise of street crime.

One night a few months ago, late from work, I dropped in to pick up some milk and in the shop is a young woman, attractive, dishevelled, early twenties, confused. Her hands are trembling and her body tense, her hair is messed and maybe she slept rough last night. She is wearing a short lime green cardigan which looks odd over her pale floral cotton dress. The girl is asking Frank the where she can stay. Frank doesn’t do help so I ask if I can assist. The girl’s mental health doesn’t look so good and at the moment I am guessing that she is spiralling, looking for something to hold on to and afraid. In the wild in Kenya I once saw a male gazelle walking toward a lion, he knew the lion was watching and he wanted to see if the lion was hunting or if he could graze in peace. So he kept walking closer and closer, it was the weirdest thing. This kid knows she is getting closer to her craziness and she doesn’t know whether to be afraid or not, so she is tense, scared and walking in to it all the same.

I ask the girl what she wants to do and she says she wants to find backpackers hostel to stay in. So I buy her a carton of chocolate milk and I take her big red hard plastic suit case and put it on the back seat of my Volkswagen and we drive to a backpacker place up on Chapel St. The girl goes in and comes out and says it is full, and we go to another place on Fitzroy St. The girl goes in and comes back and says it is full as well. And after several more hostels I ask her what she wants to do. It is getting late and we have been driving around for an hour. I talk her into going back to her Grandmothers place which is where she says she has been staying. I know the street near Ripponlea Station and we drive there and I drop her off. As I see it, all of us are on a continuum of mental health, not good or bad, just better or worse and the girl has the right to make her own decisions.

We stop at a californian bungalow on Oak St and she goes up the path to the front door and I drive off but park 200 meters up and watch my rear view mirror. In a few minutes the girl comes back out through the gate to the street, dragging that big old heavy plastic suitcase, her determined little body leans forward against the weight. I wonder if it really was her grandmothers and anyway she just wanted to do something different. In the dark she has more courage than me. I wonder if there is something more I can do. She needs help but I don’t feel it is right to take her home to my house and I know she is not sick enough for a CAT team. I drive off feeling confused and unsure.

Next day I drop in to the Milk Bar and tell Frank that I tried to help the girl but ran out of options and took her back to her Grandmothers. Frank says “Mite why didn’t you just take her home and !V<% her”. Frank says it sharp, he means it, he seems to resent me for not trying to take advantage of her. Like I said, Frank doesn’t do help.

“Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be processed; for love is sufficient unto love.” Today I am in Lebanon, the home of Frank from the Milk Bar and also the land of the great poet, mystic and artist Kahlil Gibran. Lebanon stretches 150 km end to end and is about 50 km wide. The Mediterranean laps up against its western coast, its southern border is with Israel and the rest of the county is surrounded by Syria. Damascus is less than 100km from Beirut.

I am here for work. We are involved in youth initiatives for young people in the Palestine refugee camps. Some camps have been there since 1948. The camp we visit is really a small city, a patchwork chaos of concrete houses pressed in against narrow lane ways and streets. The tangled spaghetti mess of electrical wires go from house to house room to room all external and at head height so you have to duck and you know some must be live. In this one camp last year during the rains thirteen people died, electrocuted from live water streaming of the wires into the lane ways. The travel advisories all say the camps are unsafe for visitors because of kidnappings and extremists. But there is no feeling of danger as families go about their business and young men stare with curiosity not hostility at the western visitor. I am afraid that my grandchildren will say to me, “what did you do when the Palestinians were being persecuted, did you learn nothing from what happened to the Jews in Hitler’s Germany?"

On my day off I have arranged to have a look around. The taxi driver I hired is named Fouad, which he proudly tells me means “heart”. Later on I forget his name and just call him Mr Heart. The late model Nissan saloon smells like an ash tray. Right now we are on our way to Byblos, which is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world, going back over seven thousand years when it was used by fisherman and sheep and goat herders. It is my first time in Beirut and as we drive along the main north south road through the city, I still can’t get over how almost every building has shell and small arms fire pockmarks on at least one wall. Often there is distinct shell peppering around a window and I imagine that there was a sniper there once whose life was changed forever during one of the civil wars or invasions of the last thirty years. I read some of a local newsprint guide book in print since the 70’s and come to know that Lebanon, one of the smallest counties on earth with a population of just over four million, has been ruled by just about everyone; this is including but not limited to the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Egyptians , Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, Muslim Arabs, the Crusaders, who lost it to the famous Saladin, who lost it to Cyprus who lost it back to the Muslim hordes, who lost it to the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then back to the Egyptians, back to the Turks, then the French, then back to the Turks, , then the Allies in WW1, then the French again, then back to the Allies in WW2. And since independence there has been more or less been constant conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Muslims and the Christians and some organisation called Druze, a faith in which three quarters of their two hundred and fifty thousand loyal followers, are not allowed to know what they believe in. I am wondering what this means for a sense of identity. The history and the politics here are just too complex for me to get a handle on. And I am thinking that actually the history and politics everywhere are too complex for me to get a handle on and I am wondering whether it is important to even try. I see no evidence around me to suggest that Santayana’s statement, “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, is true, in fact it is those who focus on their history that most seem to have trouble moving forward. I am thinking it is just as likely that the future is forged by those who survive and keep on moving, like Lots wife, looking back can be a problem. I mean birds presumably don’t lose any sleep grieving ‘once we were dinosaurs’.

I say to Fouad,
“Lebanon is wonderful, the mountains are breathtaking, the men are handsome the woman are beautiful, the food is rich and delicious and people are so friendly. Your country has been beaten up by every other country in the region for seven thousand years why isn’t Lebanon neutral like Switzerland.“

Fouad’s dark eyes fixed me in the rear view mirror and he said louder than he needs to,” Because every Lebanese people is stupid.......every 15 years they make it war”.

We pass a supermarket sized Berretta gun shop with dummies wearing camouflage suits in the lit windows and holding high power rifles with long magazines and there is big stuffed deer with antlers.

I point to the shop and say, “Is there any game to shoot”

Fouad’s face lights up and he becomes animated and says, “You want buy gun now?”

“No, I am just interested is there anything to shoot in Lebanon except people?”

“Now just bard. “ he says somewhat sadly

“What?”

Fouad flaps his elbows impatiently as he drives “bard....bard”

“Are still any deer”

“All gone”,

“What about pigs?”

“All gone, just bards now”.

And I am thinking hitting a bird with that high powered rifle in the window would be like hitting a hitting a man with an anti tank rocket, wouldn’t be much left, but ....... we pass more buildings with bucket sized rocket scars.

So many apartments, office blocks and hotels sit gutted, rooms and parts of rooms exposed or missing, frequently on one corner the upper floor is folded against the level below, other buildings seem abandoned and then alongside themthing some brand new. Most buildings are two and three storeys with the top floor unfinished waiting for the next generation to add another storey to the expectant concrete pillars and rusty reinforcing steel sprouting out of the top floors like bad hair.

In Afghanistan during the late seventies, before the Russians went in, I was in the hills near Musarsharif watching the Pashtun game of buzkashi. Horsemen drag a headless goat around a field and you can’t predict where the reckless bravery of the riders will take the game. You are squatting on a dusty rock strewn slope in the sun and your heart is racing, your muscles are tense and you know that this game has no exact field of play and every rider is out for themselves and you are there at your own risk and you are not playing, but you are in it all the same. Lebanon is like that.

In the centre of the Lebanese national flag is the picture of the famous Lebanese Cedar . Fouad tells me the two existing remaining old growth cedar forests are not worth visiting “don’t go, the forests are finish and very bad but new tree coming”. I get the sense that Fouad thinks that the last seven thousand years has been a rehearsal for Lebanon’s eventual greatness, like an aging spinster with no suitor preparing for a wedding, all expectant and almost believable.

We reach Biblos and park at the old souk of cobbled stone lanes and curved stone archways. I wander from there down the hill past some roman looking pillars in a field, past a little cave grotto with people praying outside, to the old harbour. It is a natural inlet the size of a soccer field filled with twenty or so small fishing boats, The port is partly surrounded by Greek and Roman ruins including a small tower one side of the mouth. I take a table at Pepi’s Biblos Fishing Club which overlooks the harbour.

This restaurant was made famous by the glitterati who visited during the 1960s, before the civil war. On the wall are pictures of Pepi in a sea captains hat surrounded by presidents, politicians and film stars. Anita Ekberg, Kim Novak and Ginger Rogers in black and white behind big texta autographs on photo paper rippled with age an moisture. I stand beneath the flotsam ceiling of the glass floats, nets and cray fishing baskets that have been painted and made in to lamp shades, I stand where the dead Stars stood look at the view of the small harbour. I wait for my seafood lunch alone except for a German tourist who is messing with his big Canon camera.

I walk back up the hill and when Fouad sees me he guiltily puts out another fag and though I have paid him for the day he bustles around the car, opening the passenger door for me like he can’t wait to leave. “You want go now?” he says expectantly. But I just leave my heavy camera and go to the market and by a piece of flat shale with a fossilised fish the size of sardine embedded in it. The fossil comes a certificate which attests to its authenticity as an extinct species over one hundred million years old.

When I return to Melbourne I give the rock with fish to my mother who passes it around to the other ladies at ‘mix and munch’ at the outer suburbs retirement village where she lives. And everyone is amazed by the stark perfect skeletal relief of the tiny hairlike bones and no one can picture what one hundred million means. And so I tell my Mum that if every year was one millimetre then a meter would represent one thousand years and so that makes Jesus two meters away and the ruins at Biblos seven meters and the life of that fish a one hundred kilometres. And I have no idea what this really means and Mum looks at me troubled, like she doesn’t recognise me. And I am thinking how mad it is for that sea fish in shale, chiselled out of a mountain 800 metres above sea level in Lebanon with a history that can be described as 100 kilometres long can turn up in a suburban living room in Melbourne. I am contemplating that maybe it is better to drag our big old red suitcase out into the night into a new future than trying to make too much sense of where we came from.

In Praise of Dreams

Postcard from Solomon Islands

We are sitting in a circle on white plastic moulded chairs on the sand. I am in Honiara with a group of Solomon Islanders, they are speaking of high youth unemployment, few jobs and little money, of feelings of alienation about the past, about the current power structures which tend to shut young adults out of decision making, of no real sense of a better future and of cheap plentiful alcohol. There is an elderly woman in the group, sitting in a pink chair, her lips and teeth are stained with beetle nut, she doesn’t speak English and she is wearing a tee-shirt that says, Social Hazard - Will Not Conform, and on her in this moment it looks right for her, and it looks right for us.

We are here to talk about what to do. I don’t have the answer and they don’t either but that we are talking about it as thought the discussion and the answers matter, is a start. No different from anywhere in the world, who am I and what will I do? Who are we and what will we do?

Next day I decide to find out what some children in this community think. And at my request we go to a school where some colleagues know the teachers. Here are village children, whose families are not wealthy but they have enough to provide their kids with the basic uniforms and books. There are about 25 village boys and girls; I guess the average age is around ten years old. They stare at me wide eyed. I greet them and ask some questions and they respond in whispers like wind in grass and I can’t make sense of what they are saying. The staff is looking at me as if to say, “this is going well.......not”. So I collect all the adults and divide the kids into small group with an adult to shepherd and ask them two questions. What would they like to do when they leave school, what are likely challenges they think they will face? The answers that emerge are probably the answers that one would expect from kids in any school in the West. Three of these kids want to be doctors, two want to be airline pilots, two want to be lawyers, one an architect , two policemen, several want to be nurses, a couple teachers, one wants to be a carpenter and another a farmer. The challenges they express are whether their parents will have money, whether there will be peace in their homes, whether there will be less violence, less stealing, less drinking. In our culture we celebrate dreams, there is apparently an American dream somewhere in the DNA of 360 million Americans - God Bless America and the American people. And I am thinking that the chances of most of these little ones finishing form four is small, and the chances of them attending a university or college are infinitesimally small. And so what of these youthful dreams? Should these children be discouraged from having them? Will they be wounded by them? Does it make sense to even have such dreams?

American author Dave Pollard[1] writes, “When things are hopeless - Give up hope, embrace hopelessness, it makes sense.” A Tibetan yogi once said of dreams; “ like the birds that gather in the treetops at night, and scatter in all directions at the coming of the dawn”[2].

The late American author Joe Bageant said in one of his Blogs “Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies” and living in a Mexican village he spoke often about the satisfaction that people there had with their world and how in his view the western idea of hope and aspirations added nothing to their lives.

“.... in the morning the roosters crow, and wood smoke stirs in the air, and this village wakes up, and does all those ancient things decent people do in so much of the rest of the world. Old women sweep the street in front of their doorways, men uncomplainingly go in search of a day's labour, and young mothers nurse babies in the courtyards, full knowing that what they see around them is all there will ever be for them, and that the Virgin of Guadeloupe blesses each morning. Just as their mothers and grandmothers knew it. Already they are tired for the world. But not joyless......... Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. The world we awaken to each morning is the only real thing there is. And if we are spiritually, morally and philosophically intact, and humble enough to feel it and love it each day, we don't need to hope some unseen force or bunch of politicos, or an "economy" or so-called leaders are gonna make it better for us. The orchids outside my doorway are blooming and my wife still loves me after all these years.”

Call me naive, but I thought saying “hope springs eternal in the human breast” was from the Bible, God telling us something about how we were made. But that is not right, it comes from the poem “An Essay on Man” written in 1734 by the poet Alexander Pope. I don’t know anything about Pope except that he is not God and I am thinking that he probably didn’t know much more about the qualities of hope in poor communities than I do, and that is not much.

[1] Author. 2007 author Finding the Sweet Spot: A Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work (2007) Blog: How to Save the World, [2] Shabkar Tsodruk Rangdrol Tibetan Yogi (1781-1851)

When you have no choice

Postcard from Kenya

I am flying into Nairobi from Dubai, I have been in the air for twenty hours since leaving Melbourne, twenty eight hours since I locked the door of my apartment. The TV screen on the centre aisle bulkhead shows map of East Africa and the position of our jet between Kisumu and Nairobi, there are a smattering of other familiar names and places, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mombasa and further down Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar. The text on the screen reads Nairobi 29 mins. I slept for a total of around four hours and so have joined “the thousand yard stare club”.

There was a five hour stopover in Dubai where I caught up on emails in the Emirates lounge and made Cappuccinos from a machine with more buttons than a flight deck. In the air, I watched four or five movies, they merge into each otherm, a collage of past lives and dreaming and now I am having flashbacks, like pop up boxes, lifetimes of well meaning people making dumb choices, betraying each other in unhappy romances with predictable endings, the man and woman who can’t stand each other, until their best friends die leaving them a baby to try to raise together, the Woody Allen Movie where half a dozen people’s lives become increasingly precarious as their various dreams implode. Please turn off all electronic devices, stow your tray tables, bring your seats to the upright position, and open the window shades. I look to window, blinding bright after timeless lounge light of the cabin, I squint through the glare and the terrain below takes from, a crazy web of dirt roads etched white on the beige brown Kenyan landscape.

The plane makes one very steep bank and then another, shudders a little as it slows, banks again slicing the sky like the sweep of a blade and straightens for the last decent. The city of Nairobi, buildings in a haze are out to the left and an arid expanse, as far as the eye can see, to the right. I don’t understand the need for these steep banking manoeuvres but it is always the same. There are special people waiting for me in Kenya, people I love and I my heart swells a little when I think of some of my meetings over the next few weeks. I wonder if hearts only break through love.

A few days later in Nairobi I am with my friend Nimo and carrying six one litre bottles of spring water the kilometre back from the supermarket to the hotel. It is hot; the air is thick with the diesel fumes from noisy, badly maintained city busses. It is hard to talk above the noise of the traffic, trumpeting horns, and the cries from Matatu touts. The sidewalk is uneven and the plastic supermarket bag is cutting into my fingers.

Finally we reach the hotel, go to the open air cafe and order tea. Nimo is a beautiful Kikuyu woman working with an NGO in Nairobi, she has coffee coloured skin, platted braids in her hair, almond tiger bright eyes and a laugh like a bird’s song. It is so good to sit, to put the water down, to watch the busy street life rather than being part of it.

“That was heavy” I say, opening and closing my hand to get the circulation back.

“I am glad.... “ I pause, “You know the women I have talked about at Ndabibi?” Nimo nods. “They carry 20 litres three or four kilometres and often a child as well, every day, sometimes twice.......whether they feel like it, or not. I have just realised in a new way how hard that must be.”

Nimo says: “When you have no choice, you must be so strong”. She says it flat, the way you can say things if you know they are true today and still true tomorrow. Nimo is from a village and carried water as a child.

Nimo’s statement sits somewhere in me, stuck in the space between my brain and the back of my eyes. We sit without talking; the roar of the city surrounds us.

The streetscape is a thing alive, a mass of dark skinned humanity. A man in a white short sleeved shirt so unhurried as to be almost slow motion, another making long purposeful strides, one moving faster, quick and out of step with the throng, turning his body left and right, a matador in the crowd. A women in a bold African print, some hawkers selling magazines, sunglasses, maps and bright sun umbrellas, fasces eager, resigned, hopeful ,hopeless, I begin to ponder what separates them from me? But it is too noisy to think. A Mhindi[1] in a suit passes, he is wearing a gold watch and chain around his neck. He is nowhere near as invisible as he probably thinks, perhaps he is a visitor, and unlikely he will have the neck chain for long, even here downtown. A small gang of street urchins swarms around a middle aged couple, Mzungu[2] tourists, red faced and flustered, lost looking.

Later I am thinking about what Nimo said, “When you have no choice you have to be strong”. I have a feeling that my own multitude of choices often undermines my ability to be strong and to do wholeheartedly what is necessary and just and healthy and true. So often I have the luxury to do what I feel like doing, in my sophistication my conscience has become something to “take responsibility” for. As I think about this now, feeling like doing something is just one way of deciding what to do and how to act and actually I may make better decisions if I didn’t relate so closely to what I feel and instead I just do what needs to be done. Thoughts about lilies and birds and sowing and reaping and growing and toiling and spinning all somehow adding up to some kind of encouragement to be present, or in Swahili Hakuna matata; “there are no worries”.

Some of my work in Kenya’s Rift Valley is an area we call Wema , we work with communities in two areas, one is Weseges and the other Maji tamu and we have combined the two names. Weseges people are primarily Kalenjin and in Maji tamu the people are mostly Kikuyu. They are traditional rivals and at times there has been violence between them. We are meeting in a hut with a tin roof, concrete floor and split log walls. Bright light shines through spaces between the logs like halogen in the half light of the room. The windows have no glass but shutters for lock up. It is like the hut in a Wild West movie and has recently been taken over by the Waseges committee on loan from the local government and the group has renovated it. They have installed a 2 meter square blackboard at one end and the room is filled with white plastic moulded chairs. The group proudly tells me they purchased the chairs from membership contributions. I am meeting with around 25 men and women who comprise management committees from the two economic empowerment groups. Normally I ask them to tell me what has happened in each of their group’s during the six or so months since I last visited.

Getting a true sense of what is happening can be awkward as the achievements for one group in some areas may overshadow the other and there is an unspoken competitiveness. This time I decided to try something different. I made a vertical chalk line on the blackboard and at one point put ‘Start’and the other end I put “Now”. And then I asked all those present to help me plot the achievements of the last 3 years. And from their own history it emerged that they saw the first year was about dreaming what might be possible, the second year was dealt with difficulties and disappointments including many resignations within the committees and some confusion about direction. And then when we came to the third year there were so many actions and achievements that there was hardly space enough to write everything in. And I joked that is seemed like a marriage; the first year was the honey moon, the second year we realised the reality of our choices and that our choice to work together was not going to be easy, commitment and faithfulness were required not just dreaming. And the third year was when the babies came and now it was our work to nourish and build what we had created. And there was a great explosion of laughter and adn little speeches by various members about the truth of this.

And I said, “Do you remember when I had first come and you said “Mzungu, tell us what we should do” and you looked at me expectantly with you notebooks out and the pens ready? "

Heads nodded and faces lit up, there were smiles and a hum of agreement

And I asked them,

“Does anyone think now this Mzungu can tell you anything about what you should do?” And we all laughed and laughed, like it was the silliest thing in the world.

This may seem a very small thing, but I treasure these small diamonds that shine unexpectedly from hard rough ground. Here and with these people I seem to know what to do.

Back in Nakuru I am staying at Merica Hotel, it is owned by a former politician and is the best hotel in town. I am sitting in the lobby waiting for a friend and there is an African wildlife documentary on the big screen TV. It is soon apparent that this is the story of the dry season and of a crocodile filled water hole that is slowly drying up. There is no commentary it is simply a visual account of the helplessness and horror of the animals that are forced to come and drink. I watch as a mother baboon has its baby snatched from her arms by a crocodile and she fights the croc and so lovingly retrieves the dying baby that it brings tears to my eyes, an antelope so perfect in its shape and colouring, black body stripe against its svelte beige body, ventures timidly for a drink and has its head bitten off by another croc. A young monkey loses its arm as it tries to get a mouth of water, it escapes confused skin hanging where its left arm used to be. And

I am thinking that there is much that is not benign or romantic or beautiful about this planet, it is really a very violent and savage place. And that things are not like this because of something I have done, not my original sin, not even what my people have done or not done. But I can make choices which may make things better.

I talked with Nimo on the phone this morning. Nimo shares an apartment with her sister and brother in law, in Nairobi’s Eastlands, she says it is safe enough during the day but it is not safe to be out after 9pm. This morning when Nimo stepped onto the rough dirt road on her way to work, there was a mob and two young men lay there, ragged and bloody. One was dead, the other barely conscious, an outstretched arm clawing at the ground, as though to drag his body forward. It was only 7am Tuesday morning. They had snatched a local woman’s mobile phone and been chased by the mob and stoned. Nimo told me she had to pass within a few metres of the young man who was still just alive.

She said “The image of this boy is burned on my mind and I can’t get it out”.

Nimo soon found out from her sister that this young man also died.

Nimo said, “Okay was very wrong what they did but who could tell how they were loved as children and okay they were wrong but the young men who stoned them are poor and just like them as well”.

And I am thinking it is so unfair that she must now carry this image like a wound.

There are two fundamental questions posed by many sages. “Who am I? And how will I live?”[3] And I think who are we, what will we do? St Augustine[4] of Hippo’s definition of a community is “a multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love”. I am worried about what my community loves. I am worried by what I love. I am wondering if too many times, I am giving myself too many choices about how to live and what to do. [1] An Indian, literally “the one who speaks Hindi” [2] Swahili for white men and women, derived from “the one who looks lost” [3] Who am I?" became a famous self enquiry and teaching given by the Hindu Saint Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi at the beginning of the twentieth century [4] St Augustine of Hippo In ‘The City of God’ written early 5th Century

Postcard from Senegal

Aisha next morning at reception

What am I doing here?

I am in an aisle seat and a traditionally shaped African woman in a tight full length dress, colourful like some giant exotic jungle bird, is in the seat next to me. She gives me the hint of a smile, and I understand her completely. She has only been in the seat 15 minutes and in a series of deft public transport manoeuvres, no doubt perfected on bus journeys across whatever African country she is from, she has claimed all of our joint armrest and the smile is just to let me know that for the next 8 hours she can do this whenever she likes. For the first time get a sense of why there are so many border skirmishes between African states. But I know one thing that she doesn’t. After a movie I am going to take a sleeping tablet which will totally knock me out for 4 hours and given her size and tight dress she will be landlocked and could find herself praying for a miracle if she doesn’t go easy on the water. I watch her take another sip from her water bottle with more than a little smugness, and smile back.

I watch a remake of the Karate Kid. Young African- American boy, Dre Parker, recently moved to China with his mother .......is bullied by the local kids. He meets Mr Han, a scruffy aging building maintenance man who just happens to be a martial arts expert, still grieving for the death of his wife and young son. Mr Han mentors Dre who prepares heroically for his upcoming fight at the martial arts tournament. Overcoming self doubt, being misunderstood and injustice, Dre wins the tournament, the respect of his former enemies, the crowd and his teen love interest. They would be lucky to share a hormone between them.

I successfully fight off another blatant territorial incursion from the African state to my right, whose open magazine had clearly drifted well across the border. One movie merges into another and I am watching Ninja Assassin. In this tale, the hero fights the brutality and oppression of his previous teacher to save world from evil and bad Ninjas. Ninja incidentally can mean ”the unseen”. So the hero here is fighting the unseen to restore the world to safety and righteousness.

The plane lands in Dubai at 5.30am. My sleeping tablet only worked for 3 hours and my African nemesis must have a bladder like a camel, because she didn’t move from her territory the whole 8 hour flight from Singapore. The next leg of my journey begins in 9 hours with a ten hour flight to Dakar in Senegal via Casablanca.

So I am passing time in the Emirates lounge, having sandwiches and a beer at 11am, who knows what time it is in the world I have come from. Drinking half a glass at a skull is like diving into the foam of a dumper at Lorne on a bracing sunny winter morning and surfacing, tingling, eyes watering, gasping, and triumphant, completely in the moment.

I am thinking of the movies from the flight, of the role of the hero, the role of the mentor, of unseen evils and fighting injustice and oppression. I think about our work in the International Development sector and about my work. And I am thinking of the heroes, mentors and of the archetypes at play in the hero’s quest. And this is where it gets a bit sticky. I know I am jetlagged but I can’t figure out where we fit in and I have a feeling that there is something very wrong.

Typically the heroic story will follow an outline something like this: The hero leaves the safety and comfort of the “ordinary world” to sacrifice him or herself for a righteous challenge in the “special world” in order to restore balance to the “ordinary world”. A Mentor provides motivation, insights and training to help the Hero with his quest. The Hero faces trials and tribulations, overcomes self doubt, yet committed to his quest devises a plan and finally meets his enemy head on. In the process the hero needs to experience an inner death in the midst of the ordeal and to be reborn....... having overcome fear and difficulty. Ultimately the Hero triumphs, seizes the prize and returns to the ordinary world again with new rights, having earned his place and bringing the treasure or an elixir to share with others and heal the wounded land.[1]

As I sit in the Emirates lounge pondering this, I am thinking this is sounding uncomfortably like the story the international aid and development sector seems to be telling itself. Do we really see ourselves as heroes fighting against the seen and unseen forces of darkness, to restore balance to the world? Or are we seeking to empower our donors to be heroes, or are we mentors trying to assist the heroic poor to vanquish poverty and injustice? There is something that doesn’t feel quite right about any of this, yet our story as we tell it, fits well with the archetypal heroes’ quest. I know why people don’t speak too much of these things, it is because it does your head in. Things you thought you knew become empty and words become hollow and you wonder what you can still hold to be dear.

So why am I uncomfortable? It is this: in the hero’s story, in order to live out my quest I need the poor, and in this story my identity is forged as I bring back the treasures of achievements to donors, our agency and our land of plenty which cannot be free unless we confront poverty and injustice and bring back the prise of achievement.

At the same time I know that this is not how I work when I am consulting or mentoring our staff or working with people in communities who are poor. In summary, my modes’ operandi is, showing up, letting go, and letting come.[2] The “letting go” part of this seems risky as it involves demonstrating confidence in the outcome and a fearless certainty that I and others will have what we need to solve the problems at hand. It involves me “letting go” of the known and falling without knowing the answers or the outcome. Then “letting come” is allowing for the discovery of a new future and a plan together. I have generally found that this future is something quite unexpected that comes neither from me nor from others but emerges as something more or less in its own right. And when this happens it is something to behold, those there stand back and say:”Wow, look at what we discovered.” And it may be that this is attributed to me, or it may be that a group attributes it to itself, or it is seen as a joint creation. But for me the mystery is that it is dependent on us showing up and that it doesn’t exist separate from us, but that this new vision for a future also has some identity from its own side. It is as theorist Otto Scharmer says “allowing the inner knowing to emerge”.

In this story there is no hero, it is just being present and the motivation for this “showing up with fearless awareness” is a mystery. This mystery is not something I will be trying to sell to one of our donors anytime soon and yet I wonder whether we need to begin to try. Because if I have any certainty at all in this work, it is that a replication of “our western future” is not a sustainable solution among people in many of the poorest places. There will need to be a new future, one in which we probably have a role, but it will need to come from a place of co-creation, not heroes from foreign lands.

The hotel reception is just up the passage from my room; two women in their late twenties sit behind a high dark wooden counter and watch French soap operas on the television in the entryway reception. Opposite the counter there are a half a dozen cable television receivers stacked on top of each other flashing green lights. Behind the counter in the corner sits a gangly young man tall as a door hunched over a computer balanced on a box knee high off the floor. I register with one of the women who tells me her name as Aisha, she looks like one of the soap stars on the screen behind me. She records Jock Noble as Jacques Le Bon, I think, good choice for a stage name and sign Jacques Le Bon. The television screen is showing a man with an exaggerated Elvis Presley hairstyle kissing the neck of a sighing blond woman and there is a flash of bare breasts.

Aisha is wearing a black, low cut, body hugging evening dress, her chocolate brown skin shiny with the humidity, pretty face, bright eyes, long hair pulled back. She has diamond shaped partings her scalp marked out in lines of bright red ink. Aisha’s eyelids are painted fluorescent turquoise like tropical butterflies; she blinks lazily and flirts effortlessly. Named for the young wife of the prophet Mohamed, Aisha makes graceful slightly exaggerated gestures before her small audience. The gangly boy nods at me, grins appreciatively at Aisha and says he wants to marry her. His name is Serigne and he is the brother of the owner.

The other young woman behind the counter is wearing tight blue denim jeans and a blue tee-shirt which reads in white letters “I Am the One”. It could have something to do with Jesus but I am thinking probably not. She stares vacantly at something invisible and every few minutes flicks her wrist to check the screen of her mobile phone and intermittently sends a slice of herself into cyberspace.

The hotel is on the road just outside Kaolack about 4 hours south east from Senegal’s capital Dakar. I have been assured by the staff here that it is the best hotel available. Today I have no illusions of self sacrifice. I am tired, it is just 10.30pm Senegal time but it 8.30am Melbourne time and I am still trying to adjust. I had half a night’s sleep after arriving and we drove down from Dakar at 7am this morning. The mosquitoes in my room are the size of small birds. A cockroach runs across my cheek and I slap at it but am really too tried to care. Noise from the front desk, someone shouts angrily in a French soap opera, guests shouting in the passage, banging doors, and the wooden vibrato squawk of furniture being dragged by ghosts in rooms to the side and above.
As I drift off to sleep I am wondering if, like Don Quixote, I have constructed a heroic fight against the ferocious giant of poverty, a battle in my imagination against turning windmills and that the solution lies in a different kind of turning entirely, the miracle, which for some reason feels like a privilege, of just turning up and being completely present, no room for heroes in this space, they would only get in the way.

[1] Liberally adapted from"The Writer's Journey", Christopher Vogler
[2] Language borrowed from Otto Scharmer, “Theory U”

Postcard from Kenya

Solomon

Mount Qasioun

Travelling with Osama bin Laden; Solomon and the deaf cousin

I walk up the hill towards the apartment where am staying with friends in the Damascus suburb of Al Afif. Directly in front of me, desert sand coloured houses are stacked against the steep rocky side of Mount Qasioun and shimmering in the midday heat. I cross the street and have no option but to walk between some members of the Republican guard standing under a tree on the footpath. Some strikingly handsome, Omar Sharif like in dark suits and sunglasses, others in a mix of army disposal garb, like urban duck hunters. They are not difficult to spot. For a start they look at you penetratingly as though you are guilty of something, which of course you are; guilty of feeling guilty and they know it. And then there are the automatic weapons with well worn stocks casually slung across their shoulders, a kind of fashion obscenity. I ask my friends whether they ever shoot anyone and no one is sure. Someone says there are occasionally body sized blood smears on the footpaths. I believe that Coca-Cola is excellent for removing bloodstains from street scapes.
Escaping the heat back at the apartment, I am watching Syrian President Bashar al Assad in a BBC interview. He is saying that Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla has increased the chances of war in the Middle East, and that war could begin at any time and that when it started it would start unexpectedly and suddenly. Israel doesn’t have too many friends in this neighborhood, it is still holding around 700 square mile of Syria’s Golan Heights. The only condition to obtain a visitor’s visa to Syria is that you don’t have an Israeli stamp in your passport. Sitting on this couch in a darkened living room, not many blocks from the Presidents house but just over 9000 km from the Whitehouse, I am feeling we in Syria are misunderstood. President al Assad seems like a serious man and right now I am taking him very seriously.
I am here to do some work with my friend Paul who is consulting for the European Union. Together we are exploring ways in which development can be done more effectively. The approach we are using is mostly to do with the ways in which multiple players see and understand a development situation. We are attempting to build a generative process that takes into account these different ways of knowing and understanding and includes for an infinite range of possibilities and unknowns which can still be included into program design and implementation.


What we are working on is less about what to do and is more about how to engage in development using building blocks that only emerge as a program develops.
Recently a number of people have told me I am the Guru of World Vision’s innovation in Economic Development. My knowing is mostly based on how little I know, knowing that all truths in this work are only partial, and knowing that if we are going to make a significant impact in economic development we need to come up with new ways of seeing the issues we are confronting. Some Guru!
At Damascus International Airport, my flight to Kenya has been delayed by three hours. Sitting in a comfortable chair in an airport lounge, I pull out my Utne Reader, a magazine I subscribe to from the USA and whose motto is “best of the alternative press”. Puzzlingly a number of Arab men in full length flowing white Dishdashah gowns stop in front of me and give me disapproving stares. I give a friendly nod, “Australian” I say, in case they think I am the American enemy....then I realize, on the cover of the Utne Reader is a picture of Osama bin Laden outrageously photo shopped in shorts sitting on a couch watching TV eating chips with a Coke. I am not sure how Osama is thought of here. I consider ripping off the cover and eating it to destroy the evidence but decide to stow it, I move seats and mentally rehearse plausible excuses incase some of the Republican guard appear.
Ultimately I was untroubled by the Republican Guard and some 10 hours later my plane lands at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport but now am more concerned about the possibility of being hijacked on the way to the hotel ...it is 4am, still dark, it is better not to travel in the dark here. I remember a story I heard when I first came to Nairobi four years ago. A hapless development worker takes a taxi from the airport but it stalls at an intersection on the way into town. The battery is dead and the driver and passenger both get out to push start the old Toyota. The engine starts and the taxi roars off leaving the passenger with just the clothes he is standing in, but at least with his money and passport. The newcomer finally finds his hotel and exhausted after his 24 hour flight takes a shower and on emerging finds his clothes, money and passport all gone. He has been in Nairobi a little more than an hour and he has lost everything but the hotel towel he now stands in. As they say here, welcome to Nairobery.
The latest advice from the Australian Governments travel advisory reads:
The level of crime in Nairobi is high. Violent crime against Westerners, including armed carjacking, kidnapping for ransom and home invasions, occurs frequently and can be brazen and brutal. There have been fatalities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that foreigners are increasingly being targeted in homes, tourist areas and while travelling by road.
You should avoid walking or travelling after dark or on isolated roads, especially in downtown areas, public parks, along footpaths or on beaches, and remain vigilant during daylight hours.
Muggings and burglaries are common, particularly after dark. Jewellery and bag-snatching from open vehicle windows frequently occur while motorists are either stopped at traffic lights or in heavy traffic. When driving, you should ensure that windows are up, doors are locked and valuables are out of sight.
The risk of armed banditry, violent robbery, carjacking and kidnapping is also high on isolated roads and after dark. Crimes of this nature are common in Kenya's urban centres, Due to the very high prevalence of HIV/AIDS, victims of violent crime, especially rape, are strongly encouraged to seek immediate medical assistance.
In Nairobi, confrontations between police and criminal suspects occur regularly. Bystanders have been wounded or killed as result of indiscriminate gunfire in crowded areas. We advise you to remain vigilant at all times.
But I am delighted to be back and though I have had a couple of uncomfortable encounters with corrupt police at night and daytime street thieves, I have always felt reasonably safe. And what I have never been able to reconcile is why there is so much crime when Kenyans are generally such friendly and relational people.
A few days later I visit an area called Soweto in Nairobi’s Eastands area. It is typical of Nairobi’s poorer urban areas, no reliable power or water, deeply potholed dirt roads winding randomly between buildings. Rough two and three story grey cinderblock apartment blocks of perhaps six or ten units, most owned by exploitive landlords, barred windows and steel doors painted bright turquoise or burgundy. Negotiating potholes teh land cruiser dips and weaves like a ship in rough seas. We pass small ramshackle businesses, timber buildings impossibly constructed with Dr Suess angles or solid concrete bunkers with steel doors and can be locked up like a safe.
We pass a seedy bar called Zebra Lounge with black and white painted stripes across the front, sloppy on the woodwork, coloured lights above the doorway, then New Hope Dressmaking next to the Ebenezer Butchery, which is not much bigger than the hanging beef carcass inside and The Ebony Fashion Centre, Glory Beauty Salon and Salvation Shoemaking. Youth unemployment in these areas hopelessly high, as is the rate of crime and most residents stay indoors after 9pm.
We have pass a church called Helicopter of Christ Ministry and meet the Economic Empowerment Committee at the Crown of Life Victory Centre, a corrugated iron shed with a concrete floor. Inside the walls have been roughly lined with Masonite painted cream and draped with cloth bunting which gives it a sad, day after the wedding feel.
I have been leading a workshop about how the group can plan and sustain itself into the future. We have broken for lunch and a meal of Ugali [1], bitter greens called Skuma Wiki and goat meat strew. It is 1.30pm and this will be the first meal of the day for most people in the room. Mysteriously food in Africa seems to keep the strong taste its origins. If it is cooked chicken you can taste the feathers, if it is milk there is the flavour of fermented cud and a sweet cow dung aftertaste, and if it is goat, like we are having today, then it retains a flavour that goes with the smell of freshly butchered meat when the skin has just been peeled off and the flesh steams in the morning off the warm carcass. I have renewed my vows of vegetarianism and am trying hard not to smell the stew.
I sit with Solomon who is a member of the group we are advising. Solomon is probably in his early thirties, he stands about sit foot two, his eyes are bright and he is so thin that I can see all the muscles in his face working when he talks. Solomon tells me he started his own community organisation for people who are deaf. Solomon has a diploma in business and marketing but learned sign language to help his cousin who is deaf. No one was able to assist the cousin so Solomon decided he would and he helped set him up with a hand cart so that he could earn some money by delivering water throughout the slum. And then Solomon began to help others and now there are 45 people who are deaf in the self help association he established. I asked Solomon how he managed to support himself. He said that he is able to pick up sporadic work doing deaf signing at meetings and he tries to pick up odd jobs here and there. Solomons wife sells fried donuts on the street each morning and a friend who runs a small school lets his three daughters attend school at no charge. “We get by” he says with no self pity.
Solomon says he is now studying counselling. I ask him why, and he tells me that the deaf cousin who carries water is often beaten because he gets angry in frustration and people don’t realise he is deaf. “He has developed a slow knock..... Poor fellow has lost his mind”. So Solomon has decided that if he studies counselling he will be able to assist his cousin and then perhaps others as well. As we talked more I began to see that Solomon sees himself as part of a human web in which we all have an important part, and his independent self interest was just not a high priority for him except as it had to do with benefiting the whole.
That evening go for an Indian meal. I have eaten Indian food all over the world; my favourite is the Bukhara Room at the Mauyra Hotel in New Delhi and next is Angithi at Westlands in Nairobi. I went there with my book for company and was shown to a table for two, last in a line of four tables for two. At the first table was another single male, maybe eastern European, pasty complexion, balding, probably in his late thirties. The waiter, and I were following the unwritten rule of men’s urinals, single men should be as far away from each other as the infrastructure permits. When I was seated I leaned towards the other man and said “excuse me... ah hem...excuse me” and the man looked over. I held up my book as if to say it wasn’t great company and said “would you like to eat together? “ Now this may seem slightly unconventional, but to me two westerners in far off places sitting alone in a restaurant should have something useful to contribute to each other’s life journeys. “I am fine thanks” he answered shuffling uncomfortably.
“Of course you are fine, I wasn’t offering you a kidney transplant, I just thought as two solo voyagers at an Indian restaurant, me with my book and you with your magazine, we might relate”. But of course I didn’t say that, the John Cleese in my head did. Instead I nodded, smiled and tried to put on my best heterosexual look in case he thought I was trying to pick him up.
I think that one of the greatest problems in life is fear of relating to other human beings and that we develop life time strategies just to deal with this one fear. Unless of course, we have the wisdom of Solomon.

[1] Maze flour cooked as a porridge until it reaches a dough like consistency