Releasing potential @ Jambo Toto

There is something sweetly liberating about letting your life go 'off piste' from time to time. I’m talking about letting life rattle you off-tack a little, slipping yourself into neutral, ready to have fun with whatever happens on the way.

Children at Jambo Toto school

I have to admit that my melancholic streak (that, ‘little miss worry’ part of me), can become a pest at not letting me find neutral and I feel that it should definitely be on my agenda to kick up my heels more as I tip-toe up to 60.
My natural temperament is, unfortunately, happier with to-do lists, rather task driven and trying to manicure my moves on the main runs, afraid of what might happen if I chance life on more challenging slopes.




But hey, there is always opportunity for change, especially if you travel with an ‘off pister’.

The past 9 months have seen Trevor and I living like focused nomads - hotel hopping and learning to make home wherever we found ourselves. And yesterday we returned home with 4 scruffy suitcases full of battered TOMS (Blake Mycoskie’s amazing shoe company), warn out clothes, a pile of much adored books (more like comfort blankets), shells from far off beaches and a thousand memories tucked into every item. Yes, memories too numerous to fully chart. Memories of adventures and happenings that have shaped and shunted us into becoming slightly different people than the ones who left Oxford months ago - certainly inwardly.

What I have learnt is that life will do its work if you let it. Life has a way of not letting you off the hook if you put yourself in the path where your passion and skills meet.

Jambo Toto school, Nairobi

Our last weekend in Nairobi saw us visiting Jambo Toto school in Nairobi.
Some of you will remember that we raised, with the help of many of you wonderful friends, the funds to build a school for the children of the stone quarry mothers.  These women had their little ones with them each day wandering amongst the flying flints and abusive practices of that environment (they earn $1 a day for their punishing work).

We're thrilled to be able to tell you that Jambo Toto has now been running for almost a year, with 50 students - from tiny tots (with nowhere to go) up to 12 year olds.

Rose, supported by 2 other teachers is caring for all aspects of the children’s lives. They feed them breakfast and lunch each day, often wash them when they come filthy and wrap them in blankets when they arrive cold and shivering. They provide after school care for up to 100 children sometimes and have created a ‘safe haven’ for these vulnerable children.

In the past 4 months Rose (and Charles) have been able to build much needed toilets - at last!!
 (2 composting toilets, which the children had fun learning to use!!)

.......and 2 eco stoves and a small rabbit farm (part of their sustainability plan, which has a way to go)

...2 ego stoves

It is deeply moving to visit the school and to realise that this is the vision of 2 people who, ‘lifted up their heads’ and saw the great need. Who allowed themselves to be moved with compassion. Who did not look over their shoulders, waiting for someone else to step up, but made the responsibility theirs.

Chief John, William, Charles, Jane, Rose...and rabbits too pretty to eat!!

They have brought hope, not only to the children, but the knock on impacts the whole community.

The mothers have been asking for a while if Rose will teach them to read and write too and we’ve now supported them to build a small outdoor classroom for the women and Rose had already started teaching 2 groups of 10 (even though the builder has got distracted and left the pavilion unfinished).
In these afternoon sessions Rose intends to teach life skills, crafts and bring in help for sexual health clinics.


All this will enable the women to make better choices for their lives and an opportunity to leave the ’slavery’ of the rock quarry.

“Leadership is not about title/post, it’s about unlocking the potential of others. It’s about motivating, challenging the order of things, since everyone has potential and human potential is limitless” 
- Carly Fiorna 

Potential is all around us, but so often it's lying dormant, or squashed, oppressed, or ignored, un-challenged, un-warned, un-released or un-discovered.



Our job is to release our own hidden potential and then help others to release theirs and find their bigger self.

JB

“First we’ll take Manhattan..."

Leonard Cohen is a poet. At least I think so. His song title above makes me think about constantly moving on from one place to another. It’s like the film from the 60’s “It’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium”. Well, last Saturday we were on Cape Town’s Waterfront, Sunday we spent the day on airplanes flying to Kenya in stages. On Tuesday night we fly back to the UK. Wednesday until Sunday we are in UK and then on Monday it’s off to Peru for 2 weeks. Hence the feeling “It’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium”

Our group of CBO Leaders from across Kenya, working for World Vision

Kenya is so different than South Africa. We feel very different in both countries. The past week has been full on and head down, training 90 local leaders of community based organisations from across the whole of Kenya (it took some of them 2 days to get to Nairobi from the North –remember The Constant Gardner film? Lake Turkana?.....it’s a long, long way from Nairobi). These were people we first trained in Leadership for Hope in August and this week we were training them to take that training back to their communities.

Tea break for the attendees

Some of our Team of certified trainers
 - from left:Vincent, Stephen John, Millicent, Purity (up), Anna (down), Peter

When life gets so busy it is easy for the nourishing things of life to go by the way side. After a few days of no journaling, reading, table tennis, meditating, walking…you really begin to feel yourself bending out of shape.

Happy attendees

Today (Sunday) we stopped. You can feel balance returning as those important parts of life get rediscovered. I have long believed in reading widely and deeply. Reading what will stretch and challenge my perspective on any aspect of life. What I noticed today was how everything I am reading at the moment is so different, such different schools of thought. And yet everything seems to be saying the same things from different perspectives.....
- Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond
- Russell Brand’s Revolution
- Deepak Chopra on Consciousness
- Ken Wilber’s One Taste


They all seem to exploring how, in the first half of life, we build up a version of ourselves that makes sense according to our parents, culture, schooling, environment, careers etc and yet there’s a more true and lasting version of ourselves that sits patiently awaiting our discovery. Heavy? No, actually the more I read, the lighter I think I become, the more I realise there’s nothing I need to defend.

Anyway…..remember our table tennis idea. Remember the photos of the wine cellar? We are back under ‘house arrest’ in our hotel in Nairobi because there is no where we can go, no where to walk, no street we can easily browse the shops, no games room and no table tennis table (yesterday saw another pointless massacre in northern Kenya) …….except that there now is! I asked the concierge Angelina if she could work a miracle and find a rectangular table or bit of wood and set one up some where. She’s sorted it!! A table in a little tent in the hotel grounds….but today it’s our table tennis room!!
(and Jane thrashed me….again)

- TW

Perspective

 Perspective changes everything. If I put my hand up close to my eye I can see age and wrinkles. If I move my hand as far away as possible I can see a hand that can write and the landscape behind it.

This past week we finally went up Table Mountain, one of the new 7 wonders of the world. It was everything the adjectives suggest ‘awesome; wonderful; amazing; stunning’. Words are never enough.


But it was also a symposium in perspective.

Yesterday we finally bought a new camera. (Our old one has been worn out by our incessant ‘clicking for the past years and had got to the stage where it was taking a little afternoon nap between pressing the shutter and taking the photo).
And, predictably we took loads of photos from Table Mountain, but I was struck by two photos in particular.

Here is Jane sitting at the top of the mountain looking out to sea. In the background is a tiny, benign looking island. Green with white sandy bays and a bright white area inland. But actually it is Robben Island. Nelson Mandela’s prison for 18 of his 27 years.

Viewed from those years of mindless labouring in the lime quarry on that island it only looks like a prison sentence that will last a lifetime, eyesight destroyed by the glare, a world contracted into a few acres. But, from the top of Table Mountain it is just a small part of a much bigger landscape, a dash between the Atlantic Ocean and the ‘new world’ beyond and the ancient shores of Africa beneath us.

Here is a photo of a boat in the distance. So many boats sail on these seas. But this isn’t just ‘any boat’. It's the MAPFRE boat, finishing 7th in the first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race. A team of 9 people, knitted together as a seamless unit of human potential, racing the ocean for the past month from Alicante to Cape Town. Each of the crew are away from the people they love and the people who love them, the people who are knitted into their life tapestry, who they will be separated from for the next year.

When we spotted them they were just being joined by a tiny flotilla, escorting them into the celebrations awaiting them in the harbour. From the isolation of the “team of 9” amidst a seemingly endless ocean, to the bustle, hype and carnival that awaits them on the shores of the Victoria & Albert Waterfront. From a micro community of the wild sea, soon to be absorbed into the macro community of the worlds media. And then they suddenly go away on their own to their own private room for the first time in a month. But in this moment of the photo, from this perspective of Table Mountain,  just a faceless boat on silent waters.

And then there’s this photo. Not taken from Table Mountain. Jane and I have set up a table tennis table in the wine cellar where we are staying so we can have some fun amidst the seriousness of life. Here is me, in the wonderful chandelierd-space of this very old wine cellar, now boutique sought-after wedding venue, losing all perspective down in the muck and dust under a cabinet trying to find a lost ping pong ball.




Life is like that.
Life is actually like all three photos. It just depends where I’m standing at any one time as to what life looks like in that moment....zoomed in: I’m in the moment, focused, intense, narrow gaze and poised for action....or zoomed out: I’m open, un-fettered, holding few answers and seeing the ‘bigger picture’. Life needs both.


- TW

Shawshank Redemption

View of the Fair Valley - where we live

This film is rated as probably one of the most watched films ever. And I can see why. It is a triumph of hope against hopelessness. The hero of the film Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says to his fellow prisoner Red (Morgan Freeman)


“Remember Red, hope is a good thing,
maybe the best of things,
and no good thing ever dies”


This morning was our second time in prison since being here in South Africa. The first was to visit Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent around 18 of his 27 years in prison.

Today was for real. We were invited to spend a morning in a prison in the Western Cape. It’s a prison built for 250 inmates, but this morning, as with every morning 392 prisoners were present at roll-call. We were simply full of admiration for the head of the prison and what he had done there. It is a disconcerting thing to spend a morning being introduced to prisoners, shaking their hands, looking at what they are doing to keep themselves sane, knowing that some are in there for life because they murdered people.

The highlight was being put into a room with a group of the prisoners and being asked to talk to them.
What do you say to men who are in prison for life (min 25 years)?
So I talked about hope.
I talked about potential.

As I looked at these men in front of me, all in orange overalls covered with those little arrows that prisoners always had on the cartoon figures of my youth,  I was flooded with fresh clarity as I spoke to them..... that these guys weren’t born to end up in a prison. They were young guys full of potential to be musicians, artist, engineers, firemen, taxi drivers, fathers. Not murderers. That wasn’t what the seed of their potential was designed for. And that potential for who they should have been was still there, sitting there, unrealised.

Children are full of hope, curiosity and playfulness (they wanted to know about our training)

I told them that Mandela had entered prison as an angry young man. Labeled as a terrorist. But he used the time to lead his own life. To work on who he was. To end apartheid within his own heart, because if he didn’t do the work in prison on leading himself then he wouldn’t have been able to lead anyone to a place of hope when he was released.


I talked with them about hopelessness and how poverty gets inside the head. I talked with them about that hopelessness feeling like an impossibly high wall, how after a few generations of that kind of hopelessness they lose sight of who they could be. I talked about how leadership is like getting the pen back to write your own life story, not letting others write it for you.

We chatted together about the power of gangs to write a story that causes harm, but the potential power of gangs to be a force of good in the community.
They sat transfixed. One guy told our host, in tears, that if he’d just known some of what we were teaching he knew he would have made different choices and not ended up in prison where he knows he didn’t do his victim or his family any good.

National flower of South Africa - the Proteus plant (it grows everywhere)

On our way to Robben island

Jane & I stepped out of the prison three and half hours later into the burning sun of the beautiful Western Cape. Free. But we were on fire in our hearts. We have had to work through some challenging things in the life of Emerging Leaders in the past few weeks but one thing has become clear – we are on a mission, to the best of our small ability….and it’s a mission of hope.
Napoleon said that a leader was a ‘dealer in hope’. In the midday sun you just say to yourself ‘if we could have just left a little bit of hope inside that prison how amazing would that be.

-TW