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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”
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| 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
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| Jane drawing in our Kenyan garden |
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