On Sunflower Oil and the Writing of Good Blog Posts: Reflection on Work Part 1

I recently grabbed Indian food with a new friend who works for an agricultural development organization similar to Planting Faith. Talk invariably turned to work, and equally invariably lead to questions about the real impact of missional development, of what works and what doesn’t, and of how much bad work seems to get done despite the best intentions. “Yeah,” he said, “but we sure do write great blog posts.”
2 groups of 50 farmers that we helped start recently began selling over 1,000 liters of sunflower oil using a machine that we bought for them. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Check out these pictures: look amazing, don’t they? Surely that’s the golden glow of success.

Maybe. But even if it is, that’s not the whole story. Getting the machines required over a year of work, and they arrived over 8 months late. To understand how terrible that misstep is you have to think like a small scale third world farmer: you are almost always paid immediately for what you harvest, and you use the profit for basic necessities like school fees and food . . . and for planting in the next season. But our farmers took up land planting sunflower that they still, almost a year later, haven’t seen a shilling from. I helped with some of the planning right when we arrived, and based on the planning that we did before we ever met these farmers, we were going to include the machines as a part of the loan-in-kind: these groups would own the machines themselves. Midway through, for a whole host of reasons, plans changed and we had to go back and say, actually, no, these machines will be owned by our partner, and next year, you’ll have to pay to use them. Meanwhile, the market for sunflower remains uncertain in the villages where they live, meaning that they may try to rely on our partners to do the selling for them, because locals are unwilling to buy sunflower oil if it is more expensive than alternatives (and it usually is). We are increasingly concerned that the initial idea to produce the oil was not so much the result of careful research but of government “promotion” . . . not exactly a recipe for finding a good market, given this and most other government’s abysmal track record on such things. Much of the necessary work for these projects was done by staff whose contracts end later this year, work like getting the packaging bottles, getting people to fix the machines when they break, getting inputs. Who will do that when their contract expires? We have now realized that there are numerous other sunflower oil processing machines near both of the stations where ours are now housed, and at least one of them, given as part of another agricultural non-profit effort, has fallen totally idle and broken down through a lack of community ownership; it seems people are waiting for the folks who brought it to come back and pay to have “their machine” fixed. Even if they sell all the oil, many farmers will still owe the group money on the loan either because of low rainfall or because they didn’t take the loan seriously; and while we aren’t looking for repayment, anything less than near perfect performance on the loan means that soon all of that money will have “leaked” out of the group’s hands. Not only did the farmers not participate in the planning, over and over again we have realized that these groups did not initially understand the plan when it was presented to them; crucial details apparently lost in translation between us, our partners, and the group.

On the other hand, the machines are there now (and we hope that by July both will be fully operational). Farmers seem pleased to have the sunflower oil in hand, and excited to try to sell it. Through the process they may be gaining new skills in trying to think through marketing and value addition and their viability as methods to bring more money into their households. If they manage to sell all the oil a significant minority will repay their loans and get profit on top from the oil, and the others might be able to pay out of pocket to finish the loans and succeed in the future because they have seen the viability of the business. Sunflower oil is significantly healthier than other major alternatives, meaning that an increase in consumption in these areas could improve health and livelihood. Planting Faith, led by Horace and Anne Tipton, worked hard to raise the money for these projects, to monitor their implementation, and to provide the knowledge necessary to make all of this possible, and there are real successes that seem to be at hand because of those efforts.

There are two reasons I’m airing these questions: first, because for us this entire endeavor has been a huge learning experience mixed with our best efforts to have a positive impact. Getting to work alongside our long term missionary coworkers for Planting Faith as well as the local developers from the church has given us the chance to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and to learn things alongside more experienced practitioners. But also the people back home who have loved us, prayed for us, given to us, taught us, in short who are an integral part of this whole journey, deserve to get an accurate picture of the real complexity of these issues and to join in this learning process with us. A missions pastor at a supporting church once told me a story about a mother who said her kid wanted to be a missionary, ‘but she knew he could do better;’ well I don’t know what she meant by that, but if she meant that all that’s required out here is good intentions from mediocre churchy types, it doesn’t seem to fit the bill. We have spent countless hours studying these issues to try to be able to bring professionalism and best practices to these projects, and I find that thousands and thousands of expatriates from around the world, many of them from institutions like Harvard and Yale, are also here giving it their best. Our coworkers left lucrative and successful careers in the States to relocate their family to Kenya and to use their agricultural expertise to help farmers, and there are countless other similar stories. And yet these issues crop up, these projects stumble along like rambling drunks, and we wonder whether they end up at home or in the gutter.

Second, and more importantly, I think that as Christians we have a responsibility to do a better job of discussing our goals, our methods, and our short-term results. Let’s think through each of these in turn in light of these recent events (which I’ve picked because they represent our most frustrating experiences on the field, and also some recent short term success). In terms of goals, too often we’ve agreed on the what but not on the why. For us the what is profitable business, but what is the why? If the answer is just profit to help poor farmers get more money for their families, well then there are a whole host of implications. First and foremost, with profit as the sole indicator of success, as long as these farmers sell the oil, most of the problems I’ve mentioned disappear. Who cares who owns the machine? Who cares who came up with the program? And that of course will affect our methods. If it’s just about profit, the methods are whatever works best and biggest fastest. You can apply this to all sorts of development. If the goal is drilling wells, full stop, the method will be to find the best drillers to dig the best wells lickety-split style. If the goal is getting orphans to go to school, full stop, the method will be to find the most money we can and the best administrators to make sure that the most kids go to school as fast and for as long as possible. And in these cases, short term results will look at the bottom line. If the bottom line hasn’t been reached (we dug 5 wells instead of 10, we haven’t processed the oil yet), we’ll tell the folks back home, “we haven’t reached it yet, but we’re working on it.”

Here’s my problem: profit, whether in the form of money or even in terms of simple physical output as the sole measure of success is theologically questionable at best. Of course there are all sorts of physical needs and Christ is addressing them through his kingdom, but there are also deeper spiritual, emotional, and psychological needs that are under and often behind the physical needs. We’ve blogged about our friend who thinks she’s cursed because she’s black, about the endless bribes and injustice that tell the poor ‘you don’t matter, you don’t count.’ What I’m saying is, what if the problem isn’t just that our farmers need profit? What if they need the confidence that comes from making a profit? What if they also need to have their status as humans made in God’s image affirmed in the face of injustice and the demoralizing effects of poverty in a society where the breach between rich and poor is currently sky rocketing? What if they also need to be affirmed in their ability to take risks, and step out, to think creatively and to work together? What if the problem isn’t as simple as “I need more money,” something almost every American would say, but lies somewhere in the realm of “I need to believe what God says about me and my family,” something that’s true about all of those Americans and almost all Kenyans as well? What if communities don’t just need clean water, they need to know that God has given them natural water resources and the ability to get water and distribute water as a community? What if kids don’t just need to go to school, but communities need to be affirmed in their ability to educate their children? What if children don’t just need to be healed of malaria? What if mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers need to be reminded that they have a God-given ability to help cure their children of malaria?

If we look at this sunflower deal from this perspective we find tremendous concerns: our method of designing a program and putting it on top of farmers was not only inefficient for cross-cultural communication; it cut off the branch we should have been sitting on by implicitly telling our farmers that their plans and goals didn’t matter. Our decision to take ownership out of their hands and put it into the hands of the organization didn’t just break trust and transparency, it reinforced the feeling that they the poor are the powerless, the ones left out of the conversation, the ones who are acted on. Our decision to inject outside money into the community in the form of “loans” not only created all the havoc that comes in poor communities when big money flows in from outside, it stole an opportunity from the community to pull together their real and existent resources to finance projects they actually felt were worth investing in. Who knows if next time they have a need they will be more likely to wait around for donors to fund something, rather than to chip in and pull together to do it themselves? And to whatever extent the project succeeds mostly because “we” made it work, through selling the oil ourselves, or coming up with all the ideas, or whatever, we will give these farmers more money and a deep sense that what was really missing in their lives all along were some white folks and a few educated wealthy Kenyans to come and rescue them.

I am writing passionately and openly about this because I believe that this kind of analysis is terribly lacking from much of the work done overseas, faith-based and otherwise. This blog post could have been a happy tale of golden sunflower oil and delighted farmers, and I’m afraid that sometimes the folks on both sides of the pond are happier with that. But it isn’t the whole story and we the workers know it! And so we go back and forth between letting the folks back home in on the complicated messy reality and the easier alternative of skipping the struggle and heading straight for the optimistic ending. Too often we just don’t think that the folks back home will support us if they know how hard it is, how complicated it all is. "For seven cents a day you can save a village" is almost always a lie, but it sure does sell. And because it has sold for so long, now it’s even harder to tell the much less simple story that most of us are living. But if it’s the kingdom we’re seeking we have got to start asking different and more difficult questions about the goals, methods, and outcomes of our work. This isn’t about useless quantifying; it’s about running in the right direction.

And all is not lost! As Rebecca and I drove away from our last meeting with the sunflower group I got really excited by the fact that they had actually carried 100 liters to their home villages to try to see how much they can sell from their own shops, to their own local primary schools and small restaurants. I realized that despite everything else, if they can have the experience of searching out markets and making sales, they may not only make some money but develop skills in business, be encouraged in analyzing and taking smart business risks, and most importantly be a part of a project where they say “we did this, we worked hard, and we saw the benefit” . . . and that would be a movement towards a fuller recognition of God’s image in themselves and their fellow group members that would make all of the sweat worthwhile. Moreover, Horace also helped the farmers negotiate a contract with our partners so that they will be able to take a more active role in the use of the machine, softening the blow of not owning it, and helping develop a more trusting and safer relationship between these farmers and our church partners. Now that’s a step in the right direction!

Furthermore, all of this indicates that none of us who are trying to help the poor “have arrived.” It’s ok to not know everything, the problem is that many organizations act like they do (back to the seven cents a day deal). Here again the Lord has given us a huge blessing, because Planting Faith is committed to the learning process. The Tiptons began experimenting the moment they got here six years ago, and they haven’t stopped. Slowly but surely our team is trying to take what we learn and turn it into a better model. When we arrived Horace was asking questions about whether or not partnering with a bank would be better than making loans, and taking that idea and running with it we together designed and launched the pilot project in Murang’a, which seeks to take into account these foundational goals, methods, and short term outcomes at a deeper level. No matter how long a team or organization has been doing what they do, we can all continue to learn and grow in our understanding of Christ’s kingdom ways and kingdom ends.

Amidst the long history of cooperative failures stands a gigantic landmark of unprecedented success: the Mondragon complex. Started over thirty years ago, the Mondragon network of cooperatives has grown from humble beginnings into a group of international corporations that has routinely beaten private corporations in the region in both profit and sustainability, all while maintaining the goals of worker owned cooperatives and laying off almost nobody in all of its operations over the last several decades. In the conclusion to a lengthy study on the cooperative in the late 80’s, author William Whyte concludes with a few principles and practices that helped make this cooperative succeed where the vast majority failed. And on that small list of factors necessary for success was one that I found very odd: self-criticism. Whyte wrote that he was shocked by the humble and self-critical way that the founders and leaders of the movement, looking back on huge successes, talked freely and regularly about what they did wrong, and how they could have done better. Intrinsic in the management of the cooperatives was an attitude of constantly asking, “What can we do better? Where are we really? What did we do wrong this time around?”

I think that most of us out here need a strong dose of kingdom self-criticism. We need to look with the most objective eyes we can muster at our goals, our methods, and our short-term outcomes. We need to enter into conversation with other workers and ministries and churches and friends around the world to try to bring the best minds to the biggest table to try to figure out how we can improve what we’re doing. Maybe that’s part of what being the body means.

So thanks for being part of that process. Many of you are the people who have prayed and supported and encouraged and emailed and taught and discipled us into being where we are, and during this journey of learning and struggling and thinking and re-thinking again, many of you have entered in with a love and grace that is overwhelming. We have felt a freedom to be open about our struggles, because we have felt a love that is based on our common kinship in Christ and common calling to His work. So keep on coming with us in this conversation and these questions. I truly believe that if every missionary couple trying to help the poor overseas had the supporters that we do, who graciously allow and encourage and enter in to the more difficult questions, the church would be doing much better work. So ask good questions. Get real answers. And let’s give God’s kingdom work the best we’ve got together.

Peace,

Michael

The Week(s) In Review: Some Ideas for Prayer

If you're here for the first time in a while, don't miss the recent post on church in Kenya below:

For those of you who are praying regularly for our projects, here’s a quick update from the last two weeks of travel that can guide your prayers:

1. Ngare Ndare: We visited these folks for the first time since November this past week. They are doing well, and should harvest onions within the month! If they manage to repay their loans and give out new ones with their crops, they will have gone farther than any of our other groups. There is, however, a new and at least for me totally unexpected problem: too much rain. The el nino effect has caused flooding and unexpectedly large rains that have the potential to damage the crop seriously. Please pray fervently these next few days for the rain to stop!

2. Sunflower Groups: We also visited our group in Meru where, after a year of trying to get a sunflower processing machine up there, we found out that the station wasn’t set up to run it. That issue got so complicated that I finally told our coworkers that we wouldn’t go to the group again until they had gotten their seed processed and returned as pure sunflower oil. This past week that happened, and we had our annual general meeting with them. Their counterparts in Embu have also processed now. Please pray that these groups, which have just been tremendously encouraged by the arrival of the oil after enormous delays that were totally not their fault, will mobilize quickly, sell the oil, and make well informed decisions about how to go forward with oil production as a business in future.

3. Pilot Project: We had a great field trip with these guys to a government run research center devoted to rice production and to another cooperative style group that has been running for almost 30 years. This was very encouraging and informative for everybody, but complications with the lending institution mean that these guys need to mobilize and act fast in order to get the capital they need for planting. This also means that they will have to self-fund planting in the nursery. Please pray for energy, efficiency, and good communication among Planting Faith, CCS, the bank, and the ministry of agriculture as we try to get these seeds in the ground in order to harvest before the nearest other rice scheme floods the market.

4. Aloe Vera: We had an order that some of you have prayed about for over 2000 aloe vera seedlings. The buyer has delayed, which is common here, and also could easily mean he’s backing out. This would be a real loss for a group both financially and in terms of morale. Please pray that this guy would commit and buy the seedlings, giving our farmers the opportunity to experience some long awaited success!

Peace,

Michael

New Opportunities at New City Fellowship

Work is a gift, and one of the greatest and most unexpected gifts God has given us in Kenya has been the opportunity to get more involved with our church fellowship at New City Nairobi. Because all of our Planting Faith work takes place in villages and towns in rural areas far from our Nairobi home, we have taken on some responsibilities at New City that have opened up incredible chances for us to serve and be served through ministry at our church. Here are a few of the ways we’ve been involved this year:

Worship

I have been involved in leading worship since 7th grade chapel, but leading worship at New City has been rewarding and challenging in ways that none of the college groups, youth groups, chapel services, or church meetings prepared me for. New City’s vision for racial and tribal reconciliation between Asian Kenyans (majority from India) and African Kenyans, and the church’s efforts to reach out evangelistically to the largely unreached Indian communities in Nairobi, requires a level of stylistic, linguistic, and participant diversity beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been leading at least once a month (3 times coming up in May), and in all of those services we sing in at least four different languages with a worship team composed of people from at least five different ethnic backgrounds. During the fast paced Indian songs, complete with the tambala (the traditional Indian bongo looking drums that can sound like drops of water), we often have Indian congregants come up front and dance, and some of our Kiswahili call and response songs get the whole congregation, black, white, brown, and everything else, clapping and dancing wildly before the Lord. But we also sing English praise choruses, old hymns translated into Hindi or Kiswahili, and a few real fun ones that combine all three. Last week we sang “How Great Thou Art” in two languages at the same time. And through it all I’m up there trying to remember how to pronounce words from two or three different languages I don’t speak!

Ben Witherington argues that worship should be fundamentally eschatological: “We worship in the shadow of the kingdom . . . with one eye on the horizon.” And one of the primary signs of the “end times” in the New Testament is the bringing together of every tongue, tribe, and nation before the throne of Jesus. Ephesians tells us that in His resurrected body Christ tore down the wall of hostility and united all peoples in his own new creation second Adam self. So when all of the bizarre, what-the-heck-is-going-on stuff hits the fan (turning around to begin the service and seeing a dude on the drums I’ve never laid eyes on, much less practiced with, or the power going out and turning our worship band into an acapella choir backed by an acoustic guitar and two Indians on really loud traditional drums), and I start hankering for three music majors from Covenant and the Trinity hymnal, I remember that we are supposed t o present our bodies as sacrifices of worship, that our existence together as a radically united community is worship to God, that just by showing up and shouting and crying aloud to Jesus in all of our diversity and brokenness is worship. In my tradition we labor endlessly over the theological accuracy of our songs. But what about the theological accuracy of our style? Shouldn’t our styles in worship reflect the diversity of our personalities and cultural traditions? Shouldn’t we search out and try to include all the gifts of culture and taste that reflect His image? Shouldn’t it sound a bit like the kingdom? Or what about the theological accuracy of our choir? Shouldn’t we look like the people of God in worship?

Some of you can’t even begin to answer those questions because you’re too distracted by imagining me trying to sing in Hindi in front of 100 people. But to my credit, I’ve had some practice by now. In addition to leading worship on Sundays, I’ve also gotten the privilege of leading the singing in our small group that meets every other week, and even to lead at a few Asian outreach events known as Satsangs. A satsang is a traditional Indian fellowship meeting that often has a discussion on spiritual things afterwards. So for instance two weeks ago, I got asked to help lead music for a satsang at an Asian couple’s home because an Indian preacher with a healing ministry was coming to visit (as another missionary friend put it, “wow, that’s like cross-cultural squared). And it was amazing! We got a taste of what the gospel looks like when it’s planted in the rich Indian soil, and to be a part of understanding and replicating it. This is mind bogglingly cool, and when I found out just after we finished that almost none of the Asians there (probably 20-30) were Christians, but were all either Hindu or Muslim I just felt overwhelmed by God’s grace to us.

Hanging with the 20 Somethings

Because I’m an American I went to youth group from ages 12 to 18. I thought that that break down was probably hidden somewhere in the Old Testament, but as it turns out it’s totally cultural. In Kenya, “youth group” means everyone from age 10-35, unless they get married! So at NCF, we have one youth pastor who is responsible for like 50-60 people across a 25 year age range from at least 5 different “tribes and nations.” Small wonder he has started looking for some volunteers to help and asked us to help with the 20-35 age group, with the goal of helping them become a sort of self-sufficient Bible Study group within the church.

So for the last 2.5 months, Becca and I have been meeting regularly with our peers at New City to try to “consider how we can spur one another on towards love and good deeds,” both as a group of age mates and as a group serving within the church. This sounds pretty basic; it’s anything but. You see, at New City we have what can feel like a bipolar social disorder. It goes like this: the predominately poorer Christian African Kenyans don’t get along with the predominately Muslim/Hindu wealthier Asian Kenyans and vice versa, but reconciliation and outreach to unbelievers is the heart of our church’s ministry. This is a bit difficult for us to get our minds around at first because we tend to think of wealthier people being the ones to reach out to poorer ones (probably because we don’t really believe the Sermon on the Mount. Whose is the kingdom again?), but that’s the way it is here. So in our church of Asian converts and African believers, things can be very, very tricky. Add to that the fact that the young adults group is made up almost completely of African Kenyan brothers and sisters, and the complications go even further. So we have had the fun task of trying to listen to these guys’ experiences to date, positive and negative, within the church, and to make a plan for going forward that includes traditional activities like studying God’s word, and less traditional ones, like learning more about Asian culture.

Two things that have emerged powerfully for me: first, that the Biblically rooted vision for reconciliation between different socio-economic groups is attractive; the world really does know us (or not know us) by our love, and these young Christians who could go to churches that preach and sing only in their home languages and that are just less complicated in general, come and stay at New City because the gospel is doing things they haven’t seen done before. How beautiful is that? Second, we’ve learned that reconciliation is long and hard and difficult . . . and very worth doing. Nobody at our church, and least of all us outsiders, has “arrived;” but for Rebecca and I it has been a big step forward in our journey towards understanding what Desmond Tutu called “the rainbow people of God.”

And The Rest

And then there’s all the other stuff: I got to preach on John 15 a couple of weeks ago, Rebecca ran a bake sale to raise money for a women’s retreat and then led some great games at the retreat, and both of us have gotten to lead our Friday night discussion group on occasion.

More and more we’re seeing that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed planted in soil that varies dramatically from place to place, culture to culture, economic class to economic class. It makes the Christian life lived among people who don’t look like you painful and problematic. It also creates a garden full of all the diversity of the flowers of the field. We’ve gotten a taste of what the gospel looks like planted in the Hindu soil, in the Muslim soil, in the African soil. This has been among the richest of our experiences here; we hope God is using us at New City, but more than that the church has been an incubator for kingdom growth in our life and marriage. I want to challenge all of us to pursue times of worship and fellowship with people whose lives are dramatically different from ours, not as some sort of “let’s outreach to those people over there” movement, but as a way to get a bigger look at the kingdom of God.

Peace,

Michael

The Fish, Mountains, and Elephants Declare the Glory of God (Wherever They Are)

This past week Rebecca and I drove up to Castle Forest Lodge on the lower slopes of Mt Kenya for a rainy couple days of camping. We went there to fish, get some good views of the mountain, and hopefully scope out a few elephants . . . from a safe distance.

In actual fact we not only failed to catch fish, views of the mountain, or pictures of elephants . . . we failed to see any of them, thanks to a) my total lack of skill in angling, b) an unbelievably persistent fog, and c) the fact that most of the elephants have continued on around the mountain for the year. What we did get was two great days relaxing, enjoying creation, and eating enormous quantities of unhealthy camp food.

T.S. Eliot wrote that "we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place we started from and to know it for the first time." Hiking down game trails made by elephants through thick, cool mountain forests was one part totally new and exciting, and another part delightful reminder of the Smoky Mountains that I love so much. That's a good picture of most of my trips into the wilderness: going out into God's grandeur and remembering the long trek the Spirit has led Rebecca and I on through the great riches of His world and  His work. It turns out that fishing on frigid mountain streams below huge waterfalls in the middle of a murky forest is fun even if you don't catch fish, and hiking around on game trails made by elephants gives one an incredible sense of expectation and excitement . . . even if you don't see any. And the Kikuyu people believed that God himself lived on the summit of Mt Kenya; what could be more fitting than to spend a couple of days enjoying the lower slopes but never being granted a view of the top?

In short, we enjoyed an incredibly refreshing few days together at the end of Becca's almost three weeks  of teaching at Rosslyn. And this is probably as good an opportunity as any to say thank-you to all of you who have not only prayed for our work but for our relationship, and to let you know that God's leading during the past year and a half has been challenging and beautiful, difficult and good.

Peace,

Michael