The Deep

The Wild Coast of the Transkei, South Africa

I’m looking out over a vast ocean that sprawl’s effortlessly from the southern tip of Africa and careers on forever, until presumably it bumps into icebergs in a far off world. Its magical pulsing bewitches me; an eternity of water with bolshie waves that dash themselves deafeningly upon shore’s strewn with dying shells. 

In my consciousness thoughts bob untethered and unformed.

There is something deeply challenging and disarming about being close to the sea – as if it won’t let you go or off the hook. I feel it calling me into an easy vulnerability.

Being this close to an un-fathomable, un-tameable, awesome mass of ocean has a strange affect on me. It appears to dare me to a bigger self…I wonder suddenly what it’s like to sail the oceans for months or live permanently in sight and sound of the honest sea.

The past 5 months in South Africa have brought me a plethora of unexpected experiences and growth opportunities. Like the sea it’s never been calm…always moving and changing.

Together, Trevor & I have chartered some crazy rapids and wondered at times how we got so close to rocks without knowing it.

Wendy and her ‘adopted’ boys, with Trevor & Lennox

I remember standing in a soggy shack with Wendy from Mbekweni and listened to her story of deprivation & struggle and thought my heart would actually break. Hearing about the 9 abandoned children she had adopted and how she feeds 67 children every evening (she had no electricity, running water or sanitation). They come to her because there is no food at ‘home’, only violence and abuse. And her neighbours even steal the meagre possessions she has and how she tried to stand up against the brutality and sexual abuse of the gangs, even when her own life was threatened: a story of raw and gritty courage.

Filming for the LEAD NOW children’s Leadership programme

And there were wild, ecstatically, joyful moments for us, when we heard stories of transformation and change in the lives of people who took our training and did something with it. 

People who literally turned their lives around by taking up their own pen, for the first time, and started to write a story of hope and liberation for themselves. People, who then got their families back together, pulled their communities together and are now writing a story of prosperity (Prosperity = Towards Hope)

What is surfacing and re-surfacing while I write and think about the sea is this…

The sun arriving from India

"We’ve got to stop trying to do life alone…TOGETHER we can achieve great things, but not alone. We’ll do SO MUCH MORE TOGETHER…so let’s get together, and use our awesome talents for good. Let’s connect and then CONNECT BETTER and fight and struggle TOGETHER and… when the going gets tough, let’s pull more people into the story and make the battle for a more just world winnable”

The sun leaving....

A few months ago we heard a talk by the extreme sportsman and social activist David Grier (he ran the Great Wall of China and the whole length of India…yes, from top to bottom). 

In his punchy and unforgettable talk he said, ‘we need to challenge ourselves by asking’:

1 1. Do I have the ability to CHANGE & ADAPT? “Embrace change…it’s the only way”

2 2. Can I improve my ATTITUDE? “Get the right dam attitude – wake up every day with a hopeful attitude – with the right attitude you can achieve almost anything”

3 3. Am I trying to go it alone?  – You can’t do life alone. “The journey is greater than the individual”

And that last point is my message.

At the end David told us a story of a wise old man he met in India who looked him in the eye and asked him, “Are you in a negative space…? Remember, all you need is already in you to complete your journey well…. you have all that you need, but you need the right people around you. 

Don’t go it alone”

Shalom

- JB

...and we all get to be a part of this amazing world!!!

A View from the Top

When we arrived in South Africa with our suitcases at the end of last September, we started in Grabouw – following riots, rampant HIV, TB and youth unemployment. Grabouw was challenging, striking and cold, high up in the mountains. But we let our heart get attached to Grabouw.

We then headed to the other side of the Cape and found ourselves in Paarl. A town that spreads down the valley supporting much agricultural activity. Since early October we have lifted up our heads to Paarl Mountain in quiet awe.  This mountain is made of granite and is, we are told, the second largest rock of its kind after Ayers Rock in Australia. 

We have noticed it, looked at it, studied it, tried to draw it. It was months before we began to find a way to climb it. Eventually in early April we found a route and, then found a circuit that took us half way up the mountain and down again. It was a challenging uphill climb of very steep gradients that had our heart pumping hard. We got used to our lovely circuit. It became our friend. It became comfortable, manageable. Early one particular morning we tried to hit up the higher trail, but after a while we turned back, a little defeated by the challenge of it. 

But last week we did it. We went to the very top and were breathless not just with the climb but also with the views and the perspectives. We could see the whole of Paarl Valley, the mountains that surround on every side and a clear view as far as Table Mountain in Cape Town. The Paarl Mountain that has eyed us up every day and kept us in our place, was finally put in its place, at least in our mind. We now look up and wink at it each day. “We did you”

Paarl mts

 Potential is a word I love. 

In every programme we run we talk about potential. Even last Saturday morning in a gangster controlled, 80% drug abuse rate amongst youth kind of a community, we talked to the youth about potential. Human potential is the great unexplored ocean. There is so much more to each of us than we even begin to realise. 

The thing I also realised again this week is that it doesn’t matter how much potential a person has, it’s still a mountain climb to liberate that potential.  I can look at my potential but stay down in comfortable valley, I can venture up a few paths on the lower slopes and feel good about it, I can even make a big climb into my potential, go further than I’d imagined but then for fear or whatever reason, I can make my new ‘stretch zone’ in to the new ‘comfort zone’.  

Fulfilling my potential is always going to be a mountain climb. Stretching and risking and some hard walking to find the rewarding vistas.

And I’m still left wondering what makes a person decide to climb their mountain?  Do enjoy with me Erwin McManus TED talk on how everyone is an artist and we are all works of art. 

‪https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsJBGxmFQkU …

It’s end of term here. As I sit here in this beautiful Western Cape morning in the middle of what South Africans call winter, but we call either ‘hot summer’ or ‘mild autumn’ I am reflecting on the fact that  we are entering our final week of work here. On Saturday we head up the Wild Coast for 2 weeks holidays before returning to the UK, but by Friday this week our work is completed. When I say ‘complete’ of course I’m lying. The work is nowhere near complete. We’ve barely started. But this chapter for Jane & I is complete.

Two years ago about this month, after running a pivotal Leadership for Hope event for 400 people in Nairobi we were confronted by the reality that the only way we could ever truly grow this work to its potential was to come and live in Africa in order to establish working ‘hubs’ for both East and South Africa. So for the past two years we were either planning or actually living in Kenya and South Africa, Nairobi and the Western Cape. – roughly half the time in each.  Its been a mountain climb with extraordinary views, totally challenging ascents and lots of courage and risks along the way.  

As we left a restaurant this lunchtime a young lady who I didn’t recognize behind the bar, held up her pen so I  could see it and called out, “I’ve still got my pen”.  She must have been on one of our training programmes. So we stopped and asked her about the impact of the training on her life. 

In some small way we leave knowing that we have helped release a little of the potential of a few thousand people and set up a team here that will go on and reach many more thousands.

 - TW

CREATING something new

The struggle to CREATE something new

Since being in this glorious country of South Africa, I’ve tried to nudge myself towards drawing more regularly, not just carting unused chalks and pencils around in my suitcase, which is of no use to anyone.

I’ve been asking myself recently, “So, what’s the problem girl? Why aren’t you drawing every day, like someone who is keen to improve and also values the creative process that brings balance and perspective into daily life?”

…”What’s holding you back?”

And it got me thinking about why any ‘creative act’ seems so hard and why we often shy away from

–       - Having a go at something new

–       - Working at improving a skill

–       - Allowing ourselves to trust our creative instincts

–       - Making time to create, just for the sheer delight of it

…And most of all, being willing to feel the pain and struggle that goes with creative activities and push through to that end place.

Last week I decided to try and capture my raw thoughts and reactions as I tried to draw. So, here it is, it’s not pretty…. it’s just my uncensored notes, as I literally battled to create something now.

 

“I don’t know where to start on this paper.

I don’t know where I’m going….I have no plan…!!

I see what’s in front of me... I see the mountains, but it’s all confusion…I can’t find my brain

I feel like a toddler, knowing that they want to walk, but having no clue how to start

But I start…the marks are ridiculous they make no sense. They are lies compared to what I’m seeing.

I don’t know how to interpret what I’m seeing; I’m out of my depth completely.

It feels uncomfortable.

It feels impossibly hard. My brain says, “You can’t do this” (Loudly)

I make many more marks…they all look ridiculous.

I feel doubt. I fear disappointment and failure. “What if it gives me no pleasure and I end up feeling frustrated and disappointed with my efforts”

“What if I can’t find a way to access my creative, right-brain? I know I can’t do this unless I find my way there…to that mystical, other space inside myself”

I’m living now with chaos on the page – why am I bothering? It’s not working!

I must find a connection with these outrageously, awesome mountains.

I’m searching for the right marks that will tell a story, create a drama and force an emotion in me.

I’m on an adventure to find a million marks that will work together to tell a story.

But I want it to be easy…..I stab at the paper, making unintelligent marks…

“No” I shout, you can’t cheat, there are no short cuts…you must draw from your deep creative brain… you must find your way there.

"Be intelligent, there is no other way”

“Stick with the NOT KNOWING…make every mark intelligent and intense, but also unimportant and lost in the whole”

I want it to be easier than this. I want it to 'just happen' magically on the page. There must be an easier way (but I know there isn’t)

I hear a voice saying…

"Don’t be afraid to create a bit of random madness and mess. 

Feel the flow. 

Let anger be a potent emotion in the struggle. 

Fight with your creation and..

Let yourself escape onto the page”

-JB

“The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aims too high and falling short, but in setting our aims too low

…. A man/woman paints with his brain and not with his hands”

– Michelangelo

House of Hope

View from our Paarl home

This morning I was sitting outside our house in Paarl, drinking tea and silently absorbing the mystical stillness of the S.African autumn (like a warm spring morning in the UK). In the distance strings of whispy clouds were flirting with the audacious mountains; giants that that are not easily 'messed' with. 

I was lost in a plethora of fuggy thoughts - mind darting around like one does when not really fully awake.

Images from internet reports and film footage of the catastrophic earthquake disaster in Nepal strobed across my mind and I wondered what the hell it was like to be there...in Kathmandu or Pokhara...'hell' I guess. 

Then my mind lurched to Tegan, living and working at a primary school in Pokhara. My niece wrote and shared so brilliantly and vividly how terrible the situation was in the city. Pokhara and Kathmandu were about the same distance from the epicentre of the 33 earthquakes. She's been sleeping under a table with a friend by her door for days. And she watched in her state of shock as endless streams of traumatised and wounded people flocked into the already needy city. She told us that dead bodies littered the streets and there was no system for burning-burials or a process for bringing dignity to the end of these precious lives. 

My heart did summersaults of anguish.

....and then my head veered off and started thinking about our time in one of the Townships this week. Lennox, our head of EL here in S.Africa took us to visit a woman he had recently heard about who was looking after abandoned children. We went to visit Wendy who runs The House of Hope. Singlehandedly she set up and continues to run a home for children who have either been abandoned or have sort refuge with her. 

Wendy has taken 9 boys into her care and she also looks after her deaf and dumb teenage daughter. Every evening she finds a way to feed 67 children who flock to her home from the surrounding streets for something to fill their empty bellies and to escape abusive adults and cruel behaviour and sexual abuse. 

The Township is a place that thrives on violence and fear. Wendy unfortunately lives in the 'wrong' part of the informal settlement; the wrong side of the road, in an area deemed to be illegal. She had no proper sanitation, running water and no electricity. 

At night the dark is as black as pitch. Chronic boozing, drug taking (the raw kind...Tic and vile substances that corrode your innards) and sexually abhorrent acts are the perpetual pastime of those living in Mbekweni. Over the past few weeks riots and violence had hotted up - we saw piles of burnt rubbish, boulders, glass, trashed walls, debris and tyres where mobs had tried to set fire to the road (we could hardly pass in our car). It was vile.  

Wendy and her boys

Wendy has no supporters and no financial backing.... don't ask me...I don't know how she does this amazing work, but she finds a way. Neighbours break into her home, steal her meagre belongings and slander what she's doing..., but she still carries on. Her cardboard walls have massive gaps in them, the floods wash through her home, the children get sick from the cold...but she still carries on! 

And I'm left harrowed and humbled...yes, so deeply humbled. 

We left her home after an hour or so, heartbroken but in awe of this woman of profound courage. It was impossible not to be deeply impacted by her agonisingly tough situation and the gutsy wisdom that came from her mouth. Against all the odds she is shining a light in the inky darkness of Hell itself. 

We won't return because it will be very unsafe for her to be seen with us again. 

The children and their Subbuteo football game with rocks and one pingpong ball

This afternoon, I read again those word from the bible: 

"Learn to do good; seek justice

Correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless and plead the widow's cause" - Isaiah 1:17

...and with tears I resolved that, come what may I’d make these words my inner compass and driving passion. 

- JB