Praxis

Life has been a bit strange since being back in Kenya. For whatever reason work is just now starting to pick up, and we're struggling with how to think about the sustainability and feasibility of our projects, especially in light of the fact that we're in the second year of our two year contract. With our old projects, we're trying to figure out how to improve the way we work with our Anglican Church partners and the community groups, while also recognizing that these groups should be running themselves more than us running them this year.

On Friday, we had a meeting with Horace Tipton (PF Director), Gitari (our field staff partner), and three other CCS staff members who are specifically engaged on our sunflower projects in Meru and Embu. As I believe we've explained, this project has caused us tremendous problems, most of which hinge on the fact that we have been trying to empower farmers to process their seeds for oil using oil press machines that CCS and PF purchased for the two demonstration stations in the area. These machines were supposed to be up and running last July; they are now at the CCS stations, but neither are functioning, and farmers are approaching their third season without having processed anything. This delay has been caused by all sorts of internal and external factors, but regardless, we've come to a stand still.

This meeting in some ways was the result of the way I have grown to think about community devlopment over the last 6 years of study and work in the field: we began with our convictions, our principles, with theory. You can't get anywhere without a foundation. In our discussion on Friday, we talked about a theoretical foundation of people as image bearers of God, as stewards of His creation; of organizations that value professionalism, accountability, and transparency between the organization and the community; and empowered communities and community owned projects as both the means and the ends. But we then moved to discussing how we can practically stand on that foundation while pursuing our more tangible goals of economic development, etc.

The difficulty in community development work, and really in all kingdom efforts, is that it is so darn easy to quote the principles and pursue your goals and 'never the two shall meet.' Everybody and anybody can and is talking about "empowerment," "sustainability," "participation." Or, to use a different set of buzz words, how about "mercy ministry," or "word and deed ministry?" As we discussed with our partners on Friday, we realized that in several significant ways, we had quoted the principles in our proposals and trainings, and then ran the actual program in ways that bulldozed those same principals. As one of our partner staff said, "You know, we have participation and community ownership up there as principals. But in this project, we went to the groups and told them what they should do. That's a top down approach, and it doesn't fit with our stated principals."

This sums up a great deal of the learning that Bec and I feel that we have gathered at Advance in Memphis and with Planting Faith in Kenya. When the principals shape the program, both the community and the organization experience the kingdom in powerful ways. When the principals exist alongside the program, and separate from it, whether intentionally or unitentionally, you are building with your right hand and tearing down with your left. When a pastor teaches about Jesus washing His disciples feet, and then acts like a dictator, he undermines the ground he claims to stand on. When a community development worker tells a community group that they are all made in God's image and given the skills and abilities necessary to improve their lives, and then implements a program that makes the community dependent on the organization, or that leaves all the hard work and decision making to the white folk, or rich folk, or church folk, or whoever, we are lying with our lives. When "mercy ministry" means creating as many hoops as possible for the poor in our midst to have to jump through, we're establishing a ministry model that's the exact opposite of the mercy we claim we're sharing. Words must mean something.

As the founder of the Mondragon worker cooperative movement said so beautifully, "we have learned that theory is necessary but not sufficient." We have to live what we say we believe.

By the end of our meeting on Friday, we came up with concrete objectives that centered on achieving our goals by following our principals. On Monday, we again met with the pilot project group. As we've repeatedly said, planning for this pilot centered around trying to design a model that flowed out of our convictions and principles. Our task for Monday's meeting was to design a survey together with the "marketing team" to be used in the market survey. The marketing team (8 people) will be visiting 4 markets over the next three weeks to attempt to gather information about the demand fluctuations, profitability, quality demands, etc., of the 4 crops they picked at the end of last year to help them decide on what crop to produce and sell together. We emphasized that the survey would only require them to do something they do regularly (go to market, talk with traders, etc.), but this time in a systematic way. We asked them to discuss and decide what they needed to know to make a good decision, and then asked them to formulate questions that would give them that information. They decided when to do the survey, where to do the survey, and how many traders to talk to. Along the way we gave some advice, and talked a bit about the best way to engage with the traders and to record the information.

When we left yesterday, we promised to take the material the farmers had given us and put it into a printable form. On our way home, I couldn't help feel really great about the day. At every step, we have given decision making power to the farmers, we have encouraged them to consider their own resources, and to plan for new ways to use those resources to improve their lives. The principles are shaping the project. We still don't know if it will work, of course. But it certainly feels like we're on the right track.

Jane Vella, author of Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach, defines praxis as action followed by reflection. Both of these two meetings involved this reflection on previous actions as preparation for future actions. And I think that this is a pretty good way for the community of faith to pursue God’s kingdom; we cannot be hearers of the Word only, constantly pondering and preparing but never engaging. But when we take a step of faith, God’s Word calls us to reflect on that action, to consider what we learned, where we succeeded, where we failed, how we can do better in the future. This is, I think, what it means to live Biblical lives, to constantly let our convictions, the experiences of others, and the Holy Spirit shape us and call us to reflection on what we’ve done and what we will do in the future.

Community work is difficult. We often feel like we're going forward into the dark. But I'm confident that Jesus is walking with us as we try to engage with our coworkers and our farmers groups in this process of action followed by reflection on that action, that the Holy Spirit will guide us in our efforts to be constantly learning and growing and moving toward His kingdom vision for our lives and our work.

Please pray for our farmers, particularly those who will be doing the survey this next week, and for Beth who will be with them in the market!

Peace,

Michael

P.S.- The birds are Crowned Cranes. They're some of my favorites, and are rarely seen in groups larger than 2. But on this particular day we saw a whole flock!

Cricket, Krishna, and Crates of Onions

In reverse order:

Onions

Just before we came home at the end of the year, we reported that our farmers in Ngare Ndare had successfully sold several tons of squash. During our last meeting with that group of the year, the farmers still had some left to sell, but were beginning to look ahead towards the future in terms of new crops and new ways to manage their revolving loan fund.

There are many issues facing the group at this stage. Because the money for the fund initially comes from white people within a church organization, farmers have a hard time treating the loan with due gravity. Research shows that community managed credit schemes that use “cold money” (money that comes from outside of the community) fail the vast majority of the time. This is why we’re exploring the possibility of working with a local microfinance bank in our pilot project. But needless to say, we were anticipating the group’s decisions about how to give out new loans with some trepidation. I had some informal conversation with the decision makers about the importance of designing a program with good incentives (reward those who repaid, don’t give loans to people until they’ve finished paying, etc), but I couldn’t tell if it stuck.

At the end of last week, we got the report from our Director that 9 farmers had fully repaid their loans, 6 had paid most but not all, and 6 had paid little to nothing (due to crop failure). Within two months, the leadership had collected loan payments, decided to grow onions for their next season (planning on rotating squash and onions in the future), and redistributed loans to all the members using the following criteria: those who repaid fully got large loans that would cover the cost of production for onions using the best ag methods. Those who repaid the majority were given about half as much as the others (allowing them to produce a lower quantity), and those who didn’t repay anything were given just enough for a packet of onion seeds. The second two categories had to put up collateral, and agreed to try to repay the previous loan as well as the current one.

Will it work? I have no idea, but I think they have done a good job of trying to keep incentives steady while also considering how to keep all of the group members involved. We’ll give updates on how the onions go! It’s also exciting that they did all of this with very little guidance from us. That alone is a positive sign that, against the odds, this group might find a way to make it work sustainably. Praise the Lord!

Krishna

On Sunday, Rebecca and I had the opportunity to visit the Hare Krishna temple with a new friend, Mukund. I met Mukund at a grocery store where he was selling literature written by the guru who established the Hare Krishna beliefs in the West. I talked to him a little bit about my faith, listened a little to him talk about his, and bought a book. After we got back from the States, I contacted Mukund, and he invited us to visit.

If you’ve ever seen Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what we experienced. Because Sunday is their big day of worship, we entered the temple to see the incredibly ornate altar decked with the marble painted carvings of the deity while some several hundred worshippers were chanting in unison to the sound of five or ten Indian drums and other instruments. The temple has a live-in facility, and huge kitchens which they use to feed their many followers as well as 2,000 kids in the slums . . . every day. During all of our tour, Mukund answered our questions about the Hare Krishna beliefs. Finally, he introduced us to an African follower of the movement who heads up the temple’s interfaith outreach programs. Karuna asked us what we thought about the book, and we got to spend about an hour talking about Christianity in contrast to the Hare Krishna movement. Because the movement is very inclusive (we’re all on different paths to the same God), we spent most of the conversation discussing whether there really were differences between the Bible and their ancient eastern scriptures.

I felt like we had several real “a-ha” moments with Karuna and Mukund: the difference between a theology that makes the material world an evil to be escaped through an end to the cycle of reincarnation versus a Christian theology that promises that God will do to the creation and to us what He did through Jesus’ body: resurrect us to new redemption life in the new heavens and the new earth; and the difference between a theology that focuses on attaining “God consciousness”, which will give the adherent the power to stop sinning, and the Christian view that Christ died for all of our sins, that He took on the “bad karma” of the world because we could never do enough good things to balance out the bad. But probably the greatest paradigm shifter occurred when Rebecca explained that we really believe our Scriptures to say that Jesus is the only way: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Jesus said, “Nobody comes to the Father but through me,” she quoted. For a few seconds nobody spoke, and then, two guys dressed in full length robes, with paint on their faces and their chanting beads around their necks said: that makes you a fanatic.

And you know what? They’re right! We are fanatics! We believe that the whole key to the salvation of the cosmos comes in the story of one man who lived 2,000 years ago and who spent the majority of his life in a little no-name village! What a great reminder that we believe the most radical thing in the whole world, that most cults and religions have nothing on us in terms of the extremity of our conviction! What a convenient thing to believe that Jesus is one road among many that lead to God! What a world changing thing to believe he is he only one! We’re thankful for Mukund and Karuna’s hospitality, and hope to invite both to a Christian celebration that seeks to create a missional response to the Hindu festival of Diwali.

Cricket

And last but not least, I fulfilled one of my long-term goals for life on Monday: I watched, and understood, an entire cricket match. Thankfully it was one of the ones that only lasts an afternoon, but our friend Hash took Rebecca and I, as well as our Kenyan friend Anne, to an international match between Scotland and Kenya. It’s a pretty neat game once you get it, every bit as lazy and relaxed as baseball, and Kenya demolished the Scots, so all and all it was a great afternoon.

Peace,
Michael