Hakuna Matata

Remember Pumbaa? Every safari park or game reserve you go into has a Pumbaa or two hundred, haughty walk, tail erect into the air like a radio antennae. Apparently they are the most stupid of all creatures (The more I see and learn, the more I think Disney got it spot on in The Lion King). A wart hog has a memory span of about 5 minutes. It forgets what it was doing and where it was going, so after running like crazy for a few minutes it stops and asks itself “where was I going in such haste?”, only to discover what he’d forgotten the moment the lion arrives with its jaws around its neck…”oh, yes, that’s why I was running”.

Yesterday we spent the day in the Solio Game Reserve – the largest population of Rhino’s that you can ever imagine amongst other notable friends such as the giraffes and baboons and waterbucks. The afternoon before we went on a walking Safari in the Aberdare National park.

All this to say, we are ‘chilling out” for a few days before heading back to Nairobi tomorrow. When the kids were young we used to call them ‘down days” or “bummy days” (as in, ‘bum around’)

I’ve been reminded in these few days of a quote by Salman Rushdie (who one doesn’t often get to quote) who said
                       ‘Those who do not have the power of the story that dominates their lives – power to           retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it and change it as times may change – truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts’

The view of Mt Kenya from our room at dusk

“Think new thoughts”.
As we’ve been unwinding, it isn’t that we end up thinking about nothing, but we now have the space to think new thoughts. Whether it’s standing in breathtaking silence looking as far as the eye can see in every direction and seeing the most beautiful expanse of space, under the watchful presence of Mount Kenya, or marveling at the tapestry of tree shapes and colours and entwining wonder, in the wetland valleys of Solio, whether it’s what we are seeing or what we cant see….everything allows our minds to wander to new places.

Even the people we meet by just stopping and making time. A casual ‘hi’ turned into hours of conversation and lunch with a delightful Palestinian couple who are working for UNICEF and who shared with us perspectives on Palestine, the middle east, what its like to live with an Israeli tank at the end of your street - a view of the world that has enriched our own.


So what kind of new thoughts?
- Meeting the Palestinian couple opened up new possibilities for our next steps... or maybe not
- We’ve created two new short programmes, Leadership for Life and Leadership for Legacy to support our flagship Leadership for Hope programme
- We’ve looked at what we’ve achieved so far this autumn and what we haven’t and where we are stuck and how to turn the difficulties on their heads
- Jane has been working on her longed for book on helping children to understand the power of their awesome brains in developing resilience for their young and future lives
- We reflect on the power of silence and ‘not knowing’ and how the ‘life’ of new thinking emerges from the ‘death’ of simply stopping, being and waiting in the silence
- We’ve been reading Susan Glenks research book on how people seem to either have a fixed mindset in life or a growth mindset and how this shapes our approach to every aspect of our life….and that then set our minds thinking about the work we are doing and how one of these mindsets shapes peoples response to what we’re teaching

- ….and Jane is drawing…wonderful drawings that continue to feed her soul and enrich my heart and eyes


All this without trying. We haven’t been trying to find anything. We just slowed down; stopped; and made a space, a space for new thoughts….and like the elephants that come to the watering holes in the quiet of the evening, so new thoughts have just found their ways into our hearts and heads.

TW

Tea-leaves & transformation

As a new mum I can remember that ‘sucked-inside-out’ feeling, when tiredness came to live in my bones and there were moments when I felt so exhausted I could have happily laid down on the kitchen lino and nodded off in an instant – Have you ever felt that tired?

This last week we have been staying in sight of Mt Kenya, running another Leadership for Hope programme – this time for tea pickers and workers in the huge Tea processing factories. As part of our prep for the training we took a trip out to a tea farm and factory. Under the tutorship of Mr Chai, our guide for the day, we learnt about the lives of the 60,000 small-holders in the tea growing region, eking out a living on between 800-10,000 acres of rolling hills, planted with tea-bushes that must be nursed and tended from dawn to dusk. The precious leaves are picked by patient souls who traverse their fields for 8 hours each day, come rain or shine, filling their back-baskets with between 20-40kg of leaves each day….and tealeaves aren’t heavy!

Mr Chai explains how to pick the best leaves

It’s easy to be mesmerised and delighted by the eye-popping beauty of the patchwork hillsides of seductive greens, or the intriguing processes within the Tea factories themselves, but the everyday reality for these tea-folk paints a different story. It’s a grim and relentless reality…no days off, no slipping off work early and no relief from the grinding cycles of poverty, debt and hopelessness. You see the women walking for miles, delivering their baskets of leaves 2 or 3 times a day to their local factory and then queuing to get them weighed… and tomorrow and forever will be the same.

This week we were joined by Jon & Andy from the UK

 So, this week we met some of these tea pickers and learnt about their lives. And through the training they were able to gain insight into how they could learn to diversify (not just rely on tea growing), how they could start to break their cycles of debt, to change their entrenched mind-sets of hopelessness and move towards a new found self-esteem. 

It was another amazing week, but at times it was as emotionally enjoyable as pushing a beer-barrel up Everest….our batteries were definitely needing to find a source of refreshment.

We are now half way through our Kenya trip and tiredness has arrived. But what we realised this evening, after training 250 young Catholic priests from across Kenya this morning, that even if you are surrounded by challenges, you still have the opportunity to grow and flourish (not just collapse on the lino).  Currents of weariness are just part of the marvellous mix, that swirl around us and have the ability to move us forwards to places of deep joy further down stream.

Alice

As the sun sets I know that what we are doing is a profound honour, it's changing lives and bringing hope. I’m reminded of the face of people like 70 year old tea-picker Alice, standing in front of 320 people yesterday morning, telling her story of how her life has turned around in amazing ways in the past three days.

She was shining for all to see.

- JB

Mugumoini & the dilemma of decision making

Until this week I’d never heard of Mugumoini. And that’s the problem. No one else has heard of it either. I’d heard of the Kibera slum, the biggest slum in Africa and one of the biggest in the world. Kibera is the one you’ll see Lenny Henry visit on Comic Relief and it’s one that gets all the media attention and therefore gets all the donor money from around the world.


Last week we got a desperate message from international photo journalist Georgina Goodwin www.georginagoodwin.com (we’d met her three weeks previously as she was sent to photograph Leadership for Hope in action in Nairobi). She wrote

              “I have been working on a story on rape in a slum community on the edge of Kibera, the         'village' of around 20,000 is called Mugumoini and they have virtually no outside aid/help at all. Forgotten. One of the key issues that causes men to behave like this is lack of self-esteem and money. Your training could really help this community (as it does help everyone who is lucky enough to have it). Please can we talk further on what is needed to make this happen?”

Trevor chats with Thomas - youth leader.
Jane chats with bar owner Bob

(Please look at Georgina’s docu-photos http://www.lightstalkers.org/images/show/1382840 scroll button on the bottom and let your cursor rest of the persons photo and you will get the stories behind these women. As you read it, remember this is where we were today)


We agreed to visit the slum with Georgina this morning to see what we can do. As we drove there Georgina told us more about this forgotten nightmare of a community. Numbers vary, but a conservative estimate is of a 20,000 population in the core slum, made up of 5,000 adults and at least 15,000 children. The whole community has hardly any toilets. We did our sums and our best estimates was one toilet available to 80 families. We only saw one toilet block of 5 toilets. There is one reported rape in Mugumoini every 12 hours. HIV rates are at 12.7%. (This is very high!) If you ever wanted to see what hopelessness looks like then welcome to the abandoned world of Mugumoini.

Trevor wins over the Slum Chief

We started our visit with the ‘village’ Chief and his assistant and a few others. As the meeting got started some young people began to arrive. The discussion was around explaining what we do and seeing if Leadership for Hope was something that they would like and accept in their community. Without the invitation of the Chief we wouldn’t even get into the slum, let alone run a 3 day programme.

Georgina with her key contacts in the community

“We don’t bring any money with us, just the training to empower people to start earning their own money”, I said at one point. While the polite conversation continued, spirits instantly dropped in some people on hearing my words. One guy got up and left. The meeting went as well as it possibly could and an invitation was issued. We now asked to go into the slum to see for ourselves. Permission was granted.


The next few hours were both inspiring and emotionally exhausting. How do the poor live on less than a dollar a day? Come to Mugomoini. How does a young person forge a pittance of a living when their energy-filled enthusiasm is constantly thwarted by corrupt people who will only allow any thing to happen if they make some personal money out of it? Come to Mugomoini. How does a young girl ever get to feel safe and thrive in a male dominated unsafe world? Come to Mugomoini (& reread Georgina blog above). How do 80 families survive on one toilet? Come to Mugomoini. How do you live in a darkened 9’ x 9’ room with no windows, whose front door step is a stinking, open sewer with last nights toilet running past you? Come to Mugomoini. And so it goes on….no clean free water, no refuse collection, unschooled youth, no jobs, street-boy rule, endemic abuse of every kind and life without hope.

A few young people are trying to take the massive rubbish issue in hand

The question for us is how do Jane & I make the decision whether to come and bring Leadership for Hope to such a community? They can afford nothing so we need to raise the money. We must also consider that if we empower the young people and they start being proactive and making an income and start social projects to benefit the community then the resistance against them from those who demand bribes for everything will increase. That means our training, whilst making things better, could actually make things a lot worse. And we always address this issue of corruption head on in the training, so how will we be viewed by the hustlers of Mugomoini?

How do we make safe, wise, hope-bringing decisions? If we say ‘yes’ then………. If we say ‘no’ then…….. Whichever way you look at it Mugomoini is an abandoned world and we are asking ourselves if we could walk past it knowing we have something to offer?

Sometimes (often) in life, decisions just aren’t straightforward.

This is the only clear space in the whole community.
This was the dump until recently

.....All photos in this blog were given to us today by the wonderful Georgina, whose heart and campaign for justice, as a photo-journlist, left us challenged and deeply inspired.
    - TW

'Some days are better than others'...

....So goes the song by U2. Life has the ability to hijack us if we are not self aware. Circumstances, people ‘stuff’, ‘things’, can all silently rob us of our joy, our energy. It can leave us in an unproductive place, a place of desert and inertia. You often only know it when you feel tired or stuck or just not wanting to get out of bed.

We’ve noticed these symptoms creeping up on us over the past few days. So, today we took ourselves in hand and by lunch time things were different. We got hold of the pen and made sure we were writing the story we wanted to write.

Sink = water where I washed my feet prior to my bath.
Bath = 'clean' water where I'm about to have a bath - JB

So, what did we learn today?

1. Pay attention to what is not giving you joy.

2. Pay attention to the negative energy around you and therefore draining you

3. Have the courage to change something if you are not in a good space

The kitchen at the orphanage

4. When you don’t want to get out of bed then …….get up!!!…. and go somewhere different. Drag yourself into a different space

5. It’s not for you to sort out the ‘noise’ going on around you but it is your job to get away from it ,if it having an unhelpful impact

6. Go back to basics – remind yourself of what gives you joy.

Maasai boy with his cattle

8. Lead. It’s your job to lead your life. No one else’s.

9. Lead every meeting you go into – have the pen; use the meeting to write your story rather than freewheel and hope for a better outcome. No one is going to give you the better outcome.

10. Don’t work with people who you don’t like or who don’t have integrity

- TW

When words can't convey..........

I've tried to write this Blog more than a dozen times in my head this past week and have lost my nerve and bottled-out each time. I know that won't make any sense to anyone but me...so worry not if it just appears to be a filler sentence.

The truth is, so much has happened this past week that I'm in a tizz to know where to start...

Have you ever watched the Comic relief appeal nights? You know the ones I mean...when you go from one tragic story to the next, from one rubbish dump community to other, hearing about heart wrenching life stories until you feel emotionally hung out to dry?  And as the evening goes on the stories get more and more distressing until you end up disappearing off to the kitchen to collect tea and biscuits when it all begins to get too much. Then eventually we can stand it no longer, so we dial the number and make that pledge.

And what do we remember the next day? The devastating expression of that orphaned child perhaps, or the tearful celebrity begging us to 'make a difference' and save a child's life by buying a bed net?  You are caught between holding it together and allowing your heart to break.

George 

Last week we met George. He was sitting outside an alms house, up the road from were we live. He was munching on a couple of muffins he'd been given. He was full of smiles and chatted with us instantly, sharing his story without self pity. His mum had died of AIDS when he was 13 and for the past 16 years he'd been scratching a living. We asked how he managed to keep body'n'soul together and he showed us his 2 sacks, half filled with plastic. "When theses are full I will make 15p", he told us. We bought him water and money to buy shoes (his soles were wired together and it didn't look possible that they would take another mile), and money to get his painful teeth fixed.


And this week....this week we've been down in Naivasha, by the lake itself, which is full of hippos and countless numbers of exotic birds. Here we're been running another Leadership for Hope for 150 workers who provide M&S shoppers with stunning roses and veg (all smartly packed in cute little convenient bags). It's been an extra ordinary week. Many of those who attended were locked in mindsets of hopelessness, cycles of debt and poverty, and lives peppered with corruption and fear. They earn less than £3 a day and every day is a dinosaur of a struggle to survive...just to survive.

We gave everyone a small tree when they left the Leadership for Hope training, as a symbol of their potential 

All this week I have watched them struggle during the training and watched them win through and grow and change and fight inwardly to begin to see themselves as leaders and to 'lead' themselves from a mentality of Hopelessness to one of Hope. We have literally marvelled at their courage, to lift up their heads and step out with new found skills, to start plans for businesses to bring themselves out of poverty and projects to benefit their communities.


One lady grabbed my hand at the end and said, "You have changed our heads forever. This is a gift we will not keep to ourselves. We will teach and spread this good news when you have gone".

Already there have been many stories of personal change and transformation and we know of planned community projects that will have a massive impact for years to come - toilets for communities that at the moment have no public toilets and a small library in another, that has no books. The whole experience has been truly humbling for me.

This morning, back in Nairobi I'm reflecting on the profound need all around us here. As I awoke I let my heart break for what I have seen and experienced; the insane inequality in the world and the injustices of life... and I also marvelled at the awesome ability  of those I'd witnessed, who found the courage to triumph over fear and hopelessness and to thrive in the harshest of places.

Even I as finish this blog I am acutely aware that my words simply can't convey the depth of what I feel.  And when the words don't work you are left without the tools to express profound emotions.

JB

Our training tent

A day with William

William is our driver. He picked us up as two weary travellers from a makeshift Nairobi airport (after the big fire of last month) and has gently guided us along the half-life streets of Nairobi (Definitely watch the film Nairobi Half Life!)

Today was another day with William. Except it wasn’t just another day, it was a snap shot of bigger world that William inhabits and is expanding into.

“So, tell us about the training you did on Sunday William” We asked as we headed off this morning. He began, in full joy and enthusiasm.


On our second day with William, after arriving in Kenya, he took us to check out the training venue for teaching 150 people from life’s most challenging backgrounds. After sorting things out he drove us home, but on our way we just had this sudden thought; if William was going to have to crisscross Nairobi traffic each morning and return us to Karen each evening, then why not invite him to sit in on the training for the 3 days. Who knows, he may get something out of it. So we invited him and he leapt at the opportunity. He sat on the front row for 3 days, pen in hand and each evening on the way home he took the opportunity to have an extra tutorial with the teachers.

Jane with her new drum 

The course finished on Friday afternoon. On Sunday we had a text message.
”I’ve just trained 25 people in Day 1’s teaching. They are hungry for more so I’m going to teach them every Sunday”.


So today he was telling us what happened at last Sundays second session. He said
“I started by asking everyone what new stories they had written in their lives since I taught them last time. Everyone had a story! Everyone!”


He then proceeded to tell us about people starting businesses, being reconciled with their wives, setting up a poultry rearing projects and so he continued until we rounded the bend on the Nairobi – Navaisha road where suddenly you break out on to the ridge of the Great Rift Valley. Breathtaking is the only word for it. Words cannot describe. Think of looking down from a mountaintop onto those vast plains seen in Disney’s Lion King and you get the flavor. We stopped to take in our breath, to be inspired. A little stall holder was charming Jane into buying a drum – she loves drumming, and so it was an easy sell. He told us we were the first people to stop that day. He told us how, since the Westgate terrorist attack, business has simply died and with it their income. We drove on.

Jane, William & children from the orphanage

Half an hour down a deserted road, flanked only by shanty little kiosks and numerous herds of cows or goats being shepherded by the Maasi in the vibrant coloured blankets and bone thin legs, William speaks up again.
“Over there is the school I support”
'Over there' was a desert, a dustbowl, a dirt track, a route for more Maasi herd boys.

The school rabbit hutch!

“Take us there” we said, “If it’s close enough, lets visit”
“It’s only five minutes” he replied with obvious pride and joy that we were going to see it.


It was an African five minutes. After twenty minutes navigating the dust bowl and deep ruts and bumps we came to a site with children playing outside. He pulls up at the gate and we drive to the buildings. The children come over to see who we are and William makes the introductions. Dusty school clothes and worn out shoes. It is hard to describe these experiences. It is a school with 68 orphans. Remember the violence around the 2007 elections in Kenya? Remember the massacres? Remember the church that was torched and many many
people being burnt to death? Well, these are the orphans of that nightmare. These are the children who watched their parents die.

The children show Trevor & William their garden

This school, set up by a Christian evangelist, is now their life, their hope and their future. The school is so basic, some buildings looking reasonable on the outside sleep 37 of the boys under threadbare mosquito bed nets, other parts are unfinished because there is no more money.

They want to be sustainable and yet their gardens are scrawny, the rabbit hutch has more repairs on it than original bits of wood. The kitchen is full of lunch being prepared on pots of firewood cut down from trees that Kenya cannot afford to lose.

William is cross with them. William got involved in this school because it turns out that our very own driver taught himself about biomass fuel and managed to persuade a government and donor to install one in this school. He is frustrated because it isn’t working properly. His motivation for installing it is that the cow manure produces gas, which is piped to the kitchen to cook the food on gas, so that they will stop cutting down trees. He shows them what to do to get it working again and then shows it to us, now in action. Amazing. Cow dung = cooking for children = protect the environment.



We are now running late so we get back on the road to Naivasha. We arrive at Finlay’s, Kenya’s top exporter of fresh flowers and produce. We head to their football pitch. On the pitch is now set up the tent we used to train the 150 people – one of which was William – a few weeks ago. We check out the site, work out how to run key outdoors exercises because tomorrow we start another three days training of Leadership for Hope.


William waits patiently for us. I tell Purity, a wonderful lady we trained as a trainer in Nairobi a few weeks ago, that our driver is already teaching 25 people a week, has arranged to do a 3 day event with over 50 other people and has set himself the target of training 200 by Christmas. William wasn’t on the Train The Trainer programme. William was just meant to be the driver, but William is already changing his world. Purity is impressed and goes over to William and tells him so. He tells her excitedly of what he is seeing happen in the lives of those he teaches and then he says these words

“This training is worth training”

We have been searching every day since arriving for great Trainers we can use in Africa. Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Maybe the answer lies in emerging leaders like William.

Relaxing at Lake Naivasha

With that, he drives us to our accommodation where I write this blog. We are surrounded by Colobus Monkeys and Flamingo’s and multiple other birds as we wait for the evening’s entertainment to begin – enter the hippos who will come right up to our tiny chalet. We are staying at Elsamere (www.elsatrust.org) for the next 3 nights? Remember “Born Free”? Well, this is Joy & George Adamson’s home, and for three days it is ours. And we feel blessed and overwhelmed by a joy that words cannot describe.

TW

Seeds look dead...

I often get stuck on words. Not that I can’t read them. I just stumble against a familiar word and ask myself ‘what does this word really mean’? I find myself chewing on words, often in my journal. Last year it was ‘integrity’; this year I’ve chewed on ‘resilience’ & ‘anti-fragility’. The word that has stuck in my minds ‘throat’ in the past two weeks is the word Potential.

I can’t get that word out of my head since I heard the story of Ben Carson who was from the most deprived background and was the bottom of his class and is now the worlds leading peadiatric neurosurgeon. Like a dead-looking seed, who would have looked at Ben and seen who he became? It’s almost as if there is this smaller version of me sitting within this bigger version of me and yet I don’t see the bigger version because of so many limiting thoughts inside my head. “I cant do this; I’m not clever enough, brave enough, experienced enough”

Lucy from Dandora

So, when I stood in front of 50 people this past week who are living on subsistence money and who are fighting to get themselves into secure housing here in Nairobi, I’m quietly thinking “potential”, what is their potential? Not who they are but who they can become. My encouragement to keep on asking the question about potential with the 50, came from having just spent the lunch with 22 people who we trained in Leadership for Hope back in May. This week we ran a focus group to see how they were doing.

How were they doing?
* The 22 people had already passed on what they had learnt to 1643 others in their communities
* Moses has started a project for an affordable school on the Soweto slum
* Gilbert has started a saving group for 30 men (unheard of!) and women and they have started a preschool in their slum
* Lucy is involved in a project to clean up her part of her Dandora slum
* Emma has set up a bore hole in her front garden, with her own money and is now supplies clean water to 100 families in her community.
* Sienna has set up a poultry project, a scarf making project, a tree planting project and two-baby care centres
* Jackie has set up a little farming project to grow maize to sell so her kids can go to school




Potential. They have all amazed themselves with who they’ve become and what they’ve done.

So what is a nations potential? Kenya has 8 million youth between 15 -24 years old. The bigger issue this week was sitting in meetings with the government where we looked at how to bring Leadership for Hope to the nations youth. What is their potential? What is our potential to deliver this?

So, we’ll carry on thinking about potential for a little while longer I think.                            - TW

Jane drawing in our Kenyan garden

Surprised by Light

I remember the first time I spotted C.S Lewis's book 'Surprised by Joy'. I bought the book just for the title (not sure I've done that since). At a time in his life when he was least expecting it, Lewis suddenly found himself in love with a gal called Joy. Love caught him off guard and basically knocked him for six...how perfectly lovely. He was a deeply religious man and I know that the book wasn't actually about how he met the love of his life, but I just mention it in passing because I think it's a delightful thought....to be ambushed by love !

I found myself ambushed in a different way this morning....left in a state of wonderment and caught in a daze of delight. And I'm going public on it right now.

When I woke this morning and tugged back the toffee coloured curtains I was met by a panoply of lush foliage of every description and shafts of ridiculously bright light, bursting through every gap that wasn't filled by a plant. The scene was seriously glorious and beyond description. I stood, dumbfounded by the immense beauty before me. I found myself beaming spontaneously and shaking my head - the light was exquisite. If I told you that the beauty almost hurt would you understand?

My morning view

Nairobi is still rocking from the aftermath of the Al-Shabab attack at the Westgate shopping Mall. These aftershocks come daily in the form of stories of unbelievable incompetence and insane behaviour by security forces and those in places of power and authority - stories of the army looting jewellery shops and robbing banks while innocent people died at the hands of terrorists. Stories that make your heart fill with inky-darkness and tempt you to lose faith in the human race.

....but amidst the floorboards of bleakness, chinks of brilliant light could be found. During the 4 days of violence and fierce fighting there were acts of immense courage: like the man who raced in and out of the mayhem rescuing terrified souls, including one little 4 year old girl he found fleeing all alone.

Drinks at our local shopping Mall - identical to Westgate

So here's what came through for me today? 'Light' is found in unexpected places. We just have to allow ourselves to see past the shadows and let life dazzle us. And curiously, we need the darkness of life to appreciate the Light that is there, waiting to be seen, waiting to be appreciated and delighted in.

As Leonard Cohen says '...There's a crack in everything; thats how the light gets in'.
Be suprised by the light of life today.                                                        
                                                                                                                                                        - JB