Things That Work: Simple Ways to Healthier Communities

Evelyn Rodriguez' Crossroads Dispatch on Appreciation and the Self-Actualized Person

I wanted to share with you someone that I find to be a daily inspiration in my own life. Her name is Evelyn Rodriguez, and she shares some wonderful snippets in her Crossroads Dispatches log. She's posted something about "Appreciation", and linked to a wonderful piece on self-actualization. It resonated with me, and I assume if you're here reading this blog, you might be the kind of person who will connect with it too.

Here is a piece from Evelyn's "Appreciation" blog entry from September 3rd:

The characteristics of self-actualized persons are described in Frank Goble's book, The Third Force: The Psychology Of Abraham Maslow (available as an e-book), where he states (via Humanists of Utah):

"They never tire of life. They have the capacity to appreciate the sunrise or sunset, or marriage, or nature, again and again."

If you're not familiar with Evelyn's Crossroads Dispatches, why not take a moment to visit now? You'll find a wonderful, kindred soul waiting there.

ThankFest 2004: My ThankStory

Well, today is the launch of ThankFest 2004, and I wanted to share my own ThankStory here.

A lady named Milli Akinsuluré recently came back into my life after a number of years. I thought Milli had been lost to the war in Sierra Leone several years ago, and because of a wonderful piece of serendipity through my friend, Niny Khor, I found Milli again, alive, well, and ever the ambassador of uplift.

Today, I am thankful to Niny for being a catalyst to closing this broken circle in my life, and to Milli, to whom I shall remain indebted for her influence for the rest of my days.

When I first shared the story of Milli (below), I had no idea that I was only one day away from having this amazing woman come back into my life. She is someone that I will always be truly thankful to for the way she changed my life, and the tremendous ripple effect it's had.

I'm sharing this piece here today as part of ThankFest 2004. While there are many, many people that I remain thankful for, this lady is my starting point. I shall remain indebted for her loving influence all of my life, and for the fact that she is back in it.

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In my profile I mentioned that Africa remains a central motif in most things that call me. I also mentioned that I truly believe, as Peter Drucker and Alan Kay both imagine, that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”, and that I think Pam and Pierre Omidyar have held a powerful candle on this by asking the following question: “How do we get more and more people to discover their own power to make good things happen?”

What a wonderful way of framing the challenge of creating cascades of uplift!

I originally shared this note as part of a discourse on the value of gifts, and how to best use the resources that existed within an online giving community that I am a part of. A discourse evolved around the difficult issue of knowing how to give, and why even the smallest gifts can be life-changing. Some people seemed to have some anxiety about what they sensed to be the greater purpose of our group: that if there is a finite amount of energy and resources to be invested by it's members, it seems sensible to direct those in a manner that will offer the best return for the investment in humanity. I suppose I came with a slightly different way of looking at the potential of thes group. I think that minimum investment and maximum return is a wonderful economic theory that even I approach the groups I choose to support with. In this case, I think the intention of our community is not finite, but rather catalytic. It's not a set number of people and resources responding to particular "problems", but rather a group of people who have the capacity to thoughtfully consider and invest in behaviours that will trigger cascades of uplift. If this is true, then the benefit of a vehicle as simple as our mailing list is that it creates a safe and compelling place to explore the possibilities, apply them, come back and share what works, celebrate it, and spread it exponentially.

I'd hate to think that our capacity might be limited by choosing only a few problems to solve, and the daunting task of trying to determine which of them would be more worth the group's time than others. I think that our ability to act more as that enzyme will create the kinds of changes that will, in turn, not only solve those big problems, but many, many others along the way. I love the notion of "paying it forward", because it doesn't presume to know what might need healing at any given time. It allows each of us the opportunity to respond to what's important as it presents itself -- and I really DO believe the universe chooses to reveal herself to each of us in different ways as we have the capacity to respond. The goodwill that results is something that I think is terribly difficult to quantify, but terribly important to cultivate.

If the only gifts considered worthy of giving were "the big ones" then there would be monumental giving opportunities missed. The "goodwill" factor, at any level, is such a tremendously powerful enzyme! I can say this because I've lived it, and my life was changed because of it.

Back in the mid-nineties I was at the height of my earning capacity when a colleague introduced me to a friend of his that had to come to Canada from Sierra Leone, West Africa. He had been her Univeristy history professor many years before, and was just back to spend the summer visiting. He said "Sue, this is Milli. She's here from Sierra Leone. She'd like to learn a bit more about technology before she goes back. I thought maybe you might have a bit of time to sit down and share some of what you know with her." This seemed like a simple gift that I was being asked to give, and, in all the glorious colours of my ego, I was thrilled to have been asked to do a little show and tell. It never occured to me to ask her why she wanted to know these things. I just bolted head long into sharing my toys and what I did with them, and telling her why that was so cool. She did seem fascinated, and I was certainly enjoying the chance to show even one more person just how clever I was.

After about 15 minutes, I noticed that Milli had become very quiet. I turned and looked at her, and there were tears in her eyes. She was, infact, overwhelmed with the possibilities, but not for the reasons I was imagining. She said she was thinking about her friends in Sierra Leone, and now understanding how they had been using the internet to tell people what was happening in Sierra Leone. I asked her what motivated her to want to learn more about these things, and she told me that Sierra Leone, a once peaceful and prosperous coastal city, had endured five years of civil war. The rebels had continued to spill over the borders from Liberia, devastating the interior, and butchering whole villages and families for miles around. Many people fled to the areas surrounding Freetown, the capital city. Almost 2 million people crowded the borders in makeshift camps, with terrible living conditions, and resurgences of river blindness, malaria and other illnesses. At times, a pharmacist or nurse would be the only health care worker for 50 miles, without adequate resources to combat the mounting healthcare crises.

She told me about the University that she'd built with her husband twenty five years ago, and how recently the rebels had come when she was away and burned it to the ground, killing and torturing the teachers and students as they went. When Milli returned, she refused to let that be the end of her road. She set to work helping to build orphanages and recovery programs for the huge numbers of children who had watched their entire families butchered before them, and were then hauled off into the frontlines of war. (I remember standing in my son's kindergarten class that morning, looking at 60 other 5 year old children, trying to imagine them being drugged and handed a gun and sent off as soldiers. It was more than I could fathom.) Milli also went to work creating programs for women with AIDS, with the mounting crises that was already at epidemic proportions back then in the 90s.

That summer I gave up my private practice and spent it with Milli. This woman had come to Canada to take back what she could of technology in order to help provide information to the health care workers that were struggling to cope. We spent the summer together, reading notes from her friends on the internet as Sierra Leone had the first democratic election in five years of civil war. The vote ended without a clear majority, and in the two weeks between then and the run-off election, rebels came into the villages and cut off the hands of those who had voted, and burned "NO VOTE" in their backs with branding irons. Two weeks later, people still went out and voted, and restored a democracy again.

After that summer, I couldn't go back to being the person that I was. I'd spent time with Milli trying to figure out how to get internet-based health feeds into Sierra Leone where it took 3 months to get a phone, and satellite feeds gave a window of opportunity for downloading only twice a day. Computers put into schools and libraries were often gutted. The challenges were like nothing I'd ever faced as a community technology strategist. Moreover, I was having a difficult time getting my head around the idea that this woman, by choice, had the courage to return to a place where there was so much fear and uncertainty. The only thing I could connect to was her need to make a difference.

Sadly, I lost touch with Milli after she returned, but what she left me with was a burning need to follow her example in some small way. I gave up my profitable practice and invested myself almost completely in working pro bono for a number of programs around the world, most of them working with kids at risk. While there are days that I think it would be nice to go back to that life where I had lots of money coming in, I wouldn't trade it for the world. Now I sleep very well at night. There's no finer purpose than to be in the service of kids.

Then an opportunity presented itself last winter. My children and I were watching television together. One of the "WorldVision" programs came on, talking about the great need there was in many places. My kids began to ask some hard questions about why some people had to suffer when others, people like us, had so mich more. The program was showing kids from Africa, and my own kids remembered Milli, and asked if that was what it was like where she came from. After a long conversation, we decided to turn to the internet to give Milli a quiet gift. Even though we didn't know where she was, or how she was doing, we knew how important kids were to her. We decided to sponsor a child in Africa. Through the internet we chose a little boy named Stanley Musankwa. He was only 6 years old, so we thought this was a child that we could help for a long time. This would be our gift to Milli. Stanley lived in a village a couple hundred miles outside of Lusaka, Zambia. His father was a peasant farmer with 6 other children. They lived in a mud hut with a thatched roof, and had a difficult time getting by. We're thrilled to have Stanley in our lives.

Stanley was about to turn 7 this May. We'd been giving a lot of thought to what we wanted to do to make it special. We'd sent extra money at Easter so that his family could buy seeds, a couple of goats and some hens, or a plough, to help his father provide enough for the family to eat, but for Stanley's birthday what we really wanted to do was send him a soccer ball.

I have four children. The youngest three are all soccer junkies. We live on the pitches spring, summer and fall, so a soccer ball was something they thought every 7 year old boy should have.

Unfortunately, the agency discouraged sending one, because with the hardship in the village they were concerned that other children might get jealous and that it may place Stanely in harm's way.

So I thought if buying a ball just for Stanley creates problems, maybe we'd just have to find a way to buy balls for ALL of the children in the village.

We went out on the internet in search of programs that might already be running in Zambia. I thought perhaps it would be the best way to open a door into Stanley's village so we could share a little soccer with them after all. I was in shock to find that not only was there soccer in Zambia, but that there was an organization that talked about wanting to set up a new program in Stanley's own village of Lusaka. That program was Grassroot Soccer. Ethan Zohn, who won the reality t.v. show "Survivor: Africa", had taken his million dollar prize and started the program with Dr. Tommy Clark, a pediatric intern that had played on the same pro soccer team that Ethan had played on in Zimbabwe several years before. Knowing full well the devastating impact that AIDS had not only on their teammates, but whole villages that had been wiped out, leaving no parents, but this entirely new social fabric of only children and grandparents, both Tommy and Ethan had been moved to find a way to make a real difference.

Having spent time with Albert Bandura, and realizing that, in addition to having to deal with the culture sensitivities in a place where even talking about HIV/AIDS was taboo, they knew they would be challenged to find a way to change "behaviour" if there was any hope of turning around one of the greatest health pandemics of our time. They knew the best chance to do that was through kids. Tommy had been a teacher in Africa and knew this is where change happened. They partnered with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta to create a program that was accurate and relevant. They worked with Albert Bandura to ensure that the curriculum was both culturally sensitive and worked on creating the kind of change in attitudes that would lead to change in behaviour. They partnered with schools in Zimbabwe to create access to and opportunities for the kids that were at risk. Then they used professional soccer players -- their equivalent of celebrities in our western culture -- to deliver this amazing program through a fun, two-week soccer clinic designed to create opportunities for dialogue and learning in a safe and creative way.

The first year alone the reached 1,500 kids, and many of those children went on to create "AIDS/HIV Clubs" were they continue to talk about the thing that continues to wipe out almost 20% of the population, and how they can be the ones to stop it. They do peer-mentoring, supported by other partners in the Grassroot Soccer network, so the initial education continues to be a lifelong system of support and ongoing learning for these kids. The GRS team is now looking to create community health centers where people can overcome the stigma and go for HIV/AIDS testing, and to continue to get the Anti Retroviral Drugs they couldn't personally afford, and to access a continued network of support. Using feedback from the African players they have managed to increase the number of children that go through the program from 2,000 each year to 8,000 each year, and are looking for new ways of growing the program so that, ultimately, it can reach millions. Johns Hopkins was so impressed by the success of the program that they reached out to the young men who created it and asked them to partner to create similar programs in the U.S., and engage in the creation of other knowledge products and services.

I found this group by accident, because a friend introduced me to Milli years ago and asked me to give her a small gift. This compelled me to sponsor a child years later. Wanting to give him the small gift of a soccer ball lead me to the doorstep of these amazing young men in the service of kids in Africa. That, of course, became my next gift. I've spent the last several months helping them build their financial capacity to continue to grow the program to reach more kids, to build community centers, and to maybe change the course of something that's killing so many people.

Never underestimate the power of one small gift. By accepting the opportunity that you have in any given moment to do something for someone else, no matter how small, there is indeed the opportunity for the ripple effect to lead to changes much bigger along the way.

By the way -- Nike partered with Grassroot Soccer to deliver 5,000 soccer balls to the kids in Lusaka through the WorldVision program that I sponsor Stanley through :^)

Like I said, while there are days that I think it would be nice to go back to that life where I had lots of money coming in, I wouldn't trade it for the world. Now I sleep very well at night. There's no finer purpose than to be in the service of kids, and all because of one small gift.

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If you'd like to know more about where my journey has taken me since I first wrote this note, I invite you to ask me more about Bob Bilheimer's "Walk the Walk" campaign. You can view an online 30-minute edit of the film, "A Closer Walk", that this Oscar-nominated documentarist is taking around the world in his people's revolution against AIDS.

Carpé Diem!

Sue.