Visual therapy

'We must find the courage to change the future' - Al Gore

                  ....Shalom and love.... JB x

Wrestling with Westgate

Jambo jambo


Over the weekend we wrestled with some pretty uncomfortable emotions; like insects under the skin, we found no rest.

The evolving story of mayhem and Al-Shabab insanity at the Westgate Shopping Mall grew and grew from Saturday onwards, leaking out terrible stories of terror and fear, which then spilled into Monday and Tuesday. We watched the unfolding news on Al Jazeera mostly, as the BBC were pretty rubbish and with severe disquiet, wondering what sort of person could possibly carry out such atrocities.

A happy Saturday morning shopping trip, turned into hell-on-earth for over a thousand ordinary people...ordinary people, like you and me, who were out buying trainers, picking up holiday souvenirs, bringing their children to a puppet show, buying an engagement ring or treating themselves to a Java coffee (which is what we might have done).

And now....what now?

We're wondering how those who survived Westgate will move into their futures.
This has been so momentous, so traumatising for so many! Like all the terrible, traumatic events that come blazing into our lives with the ability to paralyse and devastate our inner worlds... there is always 'tomorrow' as long as we are alive. Some will find the resilience to graft this shocking experience into the tapestry of their life to come and others, we know, will be deeply scared for life. Our levels of resilience are only tested, unfortunately, in the red-hot fires of life.

To find some sense of inner equilibrium and normality we took ourselves off to the nearby elephant orphanage on Monday which was blissful and then on to meet Helen the oh-so-friendly giraffe.
So here we share with you some photo's from our healing morning.                                               - JB

Elephant tug of war

Baby elephants at their orphanage - bottle fed every 3 hrs for 2 years

Kenya contrasts

A snapshot...

Through the window of my eyes I look out towards the eternal Ngong Hills (think of the scene from the film, Out of Africa). They seem so close today, appearing to begin where the garden ends and tips off into the scrub. Their impressive mass captures my attention, while above them I see rain clouds are arriving from neighbouring skies, to hover above their bony ridges.....rain will come before tea I'm sure.

We're sitting on Johnnie's huge outdoor veranda (our new Kenyan home), shielded from the harsh rays, gazing out with wonderment upon the delicious vista and wondering what could ever shatter this blissful moment.

I let the sweet beauty of the moment fill me.

The past week has been full-on and crazy-busy. Trevor has trained 15 people from 5 different countries to be the first generation of trainers for Emerging Leaders and the Leadership for Hope programme.
All very exciting. It was a fabulous experience for us all. They have all returned to their natural habitats now, including Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, to start running Leadership for Hope in their own places of work. We are excited to see them go and wait with anticipation to see what they will do with their training.

Then suddenly my tranquillity is shattered. News races to our ears that there's been a terrorist attack at the shopping mall in the north of the city. 15 people have been shot dead, 7 are being held hostage and 80 are trapped in the basement. The Westgate shopping mall was full of Saturday a.m shoppers having a leisurely morning when hell descended upon them. We realise too that we had been living less than 2 kilometres from this Mall all last week and nearly stopped there last night on our way home to Karen...

Out across the horizon a steak of brilliant light sweeps across the darkening hills, a gust of wind unsettled the garden trees and a rumble of thunder crawls in the distance. The guard dogs look edgy and trot off to check their domain and we are left reflecting on many things......

- JB

                                            

                                                     Celebrating a 'Here to There' exercise

Africa's first 15 Leadership for Hope trainers

Trevor teaching on the move

“……that which came to me as seed, goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes to the next as fruit”

I love these words and I love the whole poem by Dawna Markova. “ I will not die an unlived life” 

It certainly feels like we have lived a “lived” life in these past two weeks. I shared with you Eunice’s story from week one.  Today, as we sit and look out to the beauty of the Ngong Hills and recover from a week of 16 hour days running Emerging Leader first ever Train the Trainer programme for Africa, we are reflecting on more stories of changed lives.

This one is from Peter, a single parent of three children from the Dandora slum, who is changing his world in ways that leave us speechless. Here is just one of his stories resulting from the Leadership for Hope programme he attended in May.

“My name is Peter from Dandora. After the Leadership for Hope training in May (2013) I changed my thinking to see what impact it could have in my life; so after the training we were given a task to come up with a community project.

I went to my community with an idea that I had always wanted to do, that is, a Talent Academy For Children.  I used the “five steps” on how to write a different story and realized that for this project to succeed I needed to work with other community youth and one of them was Michael. This Michael had always been my competitor doing things around children and I truly feared working with him since I thought he would take the glory. But I used the principle of “we can do more together than we can on our own”. So I set my pride aside and went to talk to him.  To my surprise he was grateful and we started a childrens project called M.T.I Kenya (Magicians Talent Initiative, Kenya).  I became the acrobatic teacher and he became the music teacher. I introduced my own children to the group and one of my children developed an interest in dance and Michael was his teacher. We have had done some amazing things together e.g. brought costumes for the group, done video shoot and documentary about children. We heard of a talent competition in Nairobi put on by the South Korean  government and so we decided to enter the children.  To our amazement our group won and their prize is that next month they are being flown to South Korea for a dance competition!!!”

Dandora slum is built on Nairobi City’s rubbish dump (http://www.afronline.org/?p=4780)

Here is a little youtube of the group practicing  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9bRLrUWVYk

- TW

Introducing Peter from Dandora

Morning and Evening in Nairobi

Every morning….

Every morning on our Leadership for Hope programmes we ask people to stand up and share what leadership step they took last night.  Even after one days training the stories often reduce us to silence or tears.

Eunice stood up on day two of this weeks three-day programme and this is what she said

“When I left the training last night I got on the bus to go home like I normally do. When the bus stopped I got off. There was a commotion at the bus stop and I saw this distressed woman on the ground surrounded by people. Normally I would have just kept on walking home without stopping, but because of all we learned today I decided to stop and go and find out what was happening and to see if I could help. As I got close to the woman I realised that she was laying next to a naked new born baby lying on the ground. It had been aborted by its mother and left to die, still with its umbilical cord attached. The woman on the ground was a passerby who was overwhelmed with grief and powerlessness as to how to help this fragile life.

I spent time talking to this lady and discovered that this woman was herself childless and this was the greatest sadness in her life. I agreed with the lady that to get any help for the child we needed to quickly get to the Police station for help.   As we continued to talk the woman said she would be more than willing to be this abandoned child’s mother. So, in the end the woman and I took the baby to the police station.  We explained everything. Papers were signed. The woman was given custody of the abandoned baby”

When Eunice arrived at the scene everyone was staring but no one was doing anything to help the baby or the distraught passerby. By seeing herself as a leader Eunice saw what was going on and took responsibility (one of the Mindsets we teach) and wrote a different story for an abandoned baby who now has a loving mother and a hope      
-  TW

This bus nearly crushed our car...!!

Jane is glad to be a vegetarian!

From a traffic jam....

It’s a weird feeling knowing that you really are boxed in and trapped by a roads system that is super-snarled up beyond belief 24/7. You really are unable to get from A-B in any part of this big city without sitting for hours and hours in stinking traffic queues, wrestle with your irritation and fretfulness.

We have a wonderful driver called William who’s a whizz at sniffing out any possible back route across Nairobi, but we still always have to return to the inevitable Langata Road, which is total nightmare. And there we sit filling our tender lungs with exhaust muck and red dust.

I’m writing from one of these jams right now…lungs complaining and eyes scratchy and dry. We’re itchy, tired and desperate to flee from the polluted air.  But some things you just can’t escape. I’m forced to accept the situation and hope the fumes won’t make me vomit.

From the back of the car I watch a cacophony of action weaving about me: road sellers wandering with their wares from car to car (I wonder who could possibly want to buy a dusty face flannel or coat stand at 6 p.m), and there are the streams of folk at the sides of the roads…walking. Walking and walking to wherever they call home. And what I notice most are the children, thousands of them, walking by the side of the dangerous highway in groups or alone, trying to get home. Little ones of 5-6 yrs old dragging their tired little bodies homewards. I wonder if some of them were the figures I’d spotted on our 6.30 a.m. journey a lifetime ago?

Then I find myself dozing in the smog and suddenly we hear a commotion and see a group of about 20 standing around a body. Lying on the ground is a child of about 8 yrs old and we wonder if the child has been hit by a vehicle and might even be dead. The car crawls by, and we wonder if there is anything we can do. As we crane our necks the child regains consciousness. The young boy looks dreadful….but he’s alive. In the next moment our car is swept along by a sudden swell….and my heart skips with relief.

Children get killed crossing the roads on a regular basis in Nairobi. So far this year 145 people have lost their lives, and over half on our crazy route.

- JB

There are no safe places to cross roads in Nairobi

Thoughts from the sky.


When you're flying from London to Nairobi you can watch a random film, pretend to sleep, eat chocolate that's gone soft in your bag…..and reflect on all things great and small.


Journal entry 8/9/13- JB:

‘In a gentle way, you can shake the world’ – Gandhi


I’m just wondering, did this gentle radical always see himself as a shaker’n’ mover or was there a time in his life when he felt like a plain old grain of sand on the beach of life? How did Gandhi grow himself into a tiny-giant? How did he discover the power of gentleness and the mighty strength of non-violence?


‘Blessed are the peace-makers’, Jesus said…. Blessed are those who don’t give in to their desire to force their opinions on others in an aggressive way. Blessed are the gracious and humble and those who know how to keep the other person held in mind, in any and every situation. Blessed are those who ‘shake’ the earth with passionate, radical thinking, underpinned with love and kindness.


The cocky, aggressive, bulldozer does not benefit the world; no mention of them ‘inheriting the earth’! The angry heart is not offered a blessing, for anger is too easy an emotion. It comes like an indulgent flood. Anger is not pretty; nothing blooms in its soil.


A world that is shaken by anger is left a desolate place. We are made to focus on the voice(s) behind the anger and not the reason for the rage.


It’s a tough ask to keep cool and react with gentleness when your very bones are yelling out for justice and there’s a burning desire to be heard and understood (sheeeesh, I certainly recognize that in myself….)


Gentleness is not weakness. It is so important not to confuse the two. The quiet, gentle individual has the power to rock the universe, says Gandhi.


We have just started reading QUIET - The Power of the Introvert in a World that can’t stop talking, by Susan Cain. It already looks like it’s going to be a fascinating read. Check her out on TED talks and Youtube, talking about the power of the Introvert (by the way, one third of us are classified as introverts, living in a world that really would like us to shape-up and get loud)

All my life I’ve battled with a shy sense of self, but after reading Susan’s book I can see myself investing in a spot of mindset change. I could be ‘coming out’ as an official Introvert, ready to step up to do her small bit to shake the world.


Let’s shake it together…with gentleness! x

View from our new back garden

From the pen of Trevor

A “prayer”

When I breathe

                  deeply

I long for the lungs

             of my soul to be

filled

       stretched out

                 to the fullness of

their potential capacity.

I long that if God is

                  breathing

that His mercy will be

        His opening of my mouth

and that He will breathe

          the kiss of Life

into every seen

                and hidden part of me.

That today I will draw

                 off of this new

                       deepest in-breath

to breathe out into my day

             new ripples of

Inspiration

         Compassion

                    Gentleness

                            Insightful wisdom

                    Courage

           Vision

and yet more Courage.

May today be a mystery

                 full of all I know

                               and can be

and yet woven

           through with the

silent, gentle, enticing

                              mystery

of a life that

          is somehow

                     bigger than me.

Jane at our home for the autumn