Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! For squash and farmers and the power of the poor working together, for oaks of righteousness and rebuilders of walls! 

This past week our farmers in Ngare Ndare harvested almost 4 tons of squash, and are working on harvesting another ton this week. While we sweated and fretted and lost sleep at night over how they would market them, they found a buyer to purchase them at a relatively good price, and to buy all of them at a go in Ngare Ndare! This is a huge victory for us, the result of a group of committed hard working farmers with strong leaders looking for ways to use what God has given them to provide better lives for themselves and for their communities! Hallelujah!

Michael

P.S.- This is the second post in three days! Don't miss Monday's update on the Pilot Project!

Pilot Project Progress Part 5: More Rocks, More Decisions

Last Thursday we had our third general meeting in Murang'a. Sitting under the eucalyptus trees and watching rain clouds coming quickly towards us, we again brought out the rocks and tried to dig deeper into the agricultural minds of the farmers.

A word on method: some of you may think all of this stuff about notecards and voting stones is a bunch of garbage. Why not just ask the questions and get answers? But there are several reasons why this particular tool seems to give great results.

First of all, it removes the white folks from the conversation almost completely. We give a task, and then watch as the farmers complete it. In the process, they organize, arrange, and discuss what they already know, and we learn in the process. Secondly, it's visual, requires few if any abstract categories or ideas, and because it inevitably leads to everybody squatting around a bunch of notecards on the ground and counting rocks, it's about as unintimidating an excercise as you could possibly wish for. And what all this means is that everybody participates. In the Kenyan culture, it can be difficult to get people to speak before the "leader" has spoken, and once he has spoken, even harder to get people to disagree, regardless of their own opinons. These excercises allow everyone to have a voice without disrupting important cultural dynamics.

So on Thursday we laid out the cards with the crops for cash written on them, and then asked the farmers to come up with all the different issues that needed to be considered when trying to decide on a crop for agricultural business. Farmers came up with things like input costs, gross profit, perishability of the product, distance to markets, suitability to the area, susceptibility to disease, and several more. We then had them use the stones to rank the crops in each of these categories, i.e. to show how maize compares to tomatoes and mellons in terms of perishability, or how beans, mangos, and pidgeon peas compare in terms of distance to markets.

Rebecca led this section and was absolutely brilliant. The farmers took the idea and ran with it, and by the end we had come up with a great visual chart to help us think systematically about how to compare the crops with one another.

Best of all was the farmers reaction to the whole process. Although we can't understand Kikikuyu at all (the language they inevitably use amongst themselves), Beth can. And she explained to us afterwards that during the excercise, people expressed surprise and delight at how much they knew, and also about how new an idea it was to take what they knew and put it into an easily accesible format. They also clearly enjoyed the discussions, and said so. One guy went so far as to say, "When I come here to these meetings, I feel so relaxed." This may seem surprising, but I think the key is again in the fact that the poor really do deal strongly with a marred identity, that they tend to believe the lies the wealthy and even missionary culture tells them: You need us, you're ignorant, you can't handle your own business. But with these tools, over and over again we're asking them to tell us about what they know. And they're beginning to see that what they know, not what the white people, the outsiders, the rich know, but what they know will be the key to their plan. And when, as the authors of When Helping Hurts argue so powerfully, we the rich outsiders open our eyes and ears to what the poor are good at, to what they know, when we ask their advice instead of constantly giving our own, then Christ works His healing power for the poor . . . and for us!

This point was brought home powerfully with our Mang'u farmers this past week. We mentioned in a few posts that we've started some "urban gardening," trying to grow different things in tires to learn a bit more about agriculture. When Hezekiah, one of our heros from the Mang'u group, learned that we were trying this, he decided to help. I mentioned that I wanted to grow tomatos, and maybe he had some advice? Pretty soon, Hezekiah had brought sacks to plant seedlings in, had brought us seedlings he had grown for his own crop (12!), had brought us to his home to send us back with soil to fill the sacks with (because 'if you go in Nairobi, they will charge you a very high price'), had started swinging by our house every two weeks when he's selling passion fruit to counsel us on potential pests, and promised to show us how to build a small trellis to train the vines to grow up next week. And somewhere in the midst of this, it dawned on me that our relationship had totally transformed, becoming something much more wonderful, healing, and in every since of the word "Christian," than it had been before. For once maybe in his whole life, Hezekiah was coming and giving much needed advice to a "rich" white couple. And for one of the few times in our life, we were listening, and learning, and finding that our friend who we had tried so hard to help was in a reality a great storehouse of knowledge about things that we desperately needed to know.

By coming to read this blog, each of you has already proven that you care deeply about us and about the poor around the world. I know that many of you are involved with ministry or work among the poor vocationally, as volunteers, or just in day to day relationships. Here's a challenge that we're trying to take up: the next time you're with someone that you consider poor, that you feel God calling you to help, begin by asking their advice about something. Ask them to teach you something. Ask them to talk about something that they know a lot about. And just see what happens.

Isaiah tells us that when the Messiah comes he will bind up the brokenhearted, declare the year of Jubilee, and preach good news to the poor. And then he tells us that those rescued, healed, liberated poor will be called "Oaks of Righteousness . . . that they will be called Rebuilder of Walls." This is the good news of the gospel: that those God heals, He also calls to be a part of His huge saving the world project. And when we open our eyes to the ways God is making the poor and destitute, the things that are not, into Oaks of Righteousness, Christ's kingdom will come just a little bit more in our own hearts and lives.

Please pray for our continued work, especially as we have year end meetings with all of our groups, and specifically for our last pilot meeting on December 3rd. We're ecstatic about the meetings we have had, but discouraged by the numbers of farmers participating so far. There are plenty of good external factors for this (people forget, there is a lot of seasonally related work right now, etc), but Beth and the farmers who came last time are making a big push to make sure that the last meeting of the year is well attended. Please labor in prayer for that with us.

Peace,
Michael

Pilot Project Progress Part 4: What To Grow and Where To Go

Typically I don’t think of rain or weeds as obstacles to attendance at meetings. We made several attempts at meeting with our pilot group the past month, and after cancellations several weeks in a row due to weeding season and then to heavy downpours on our outdoor meeting place, we finally successfully met last week and it was brilliant.

We didn’t start immediately when we arrived; in fact we even had enough time for some manual labor in a farm immediately next to the grove of trees where we meet. Phyllis (the one wearing lavender), only 17 years old but a faithful member of the group, was good enough to invite us to experience the joy of weeding in her family's rice field.

Weeding has always been one of my favorite things to do. Yeah. After only a few minutes of bending over at the waist, being confused as to what was rice and what was weed, and having the equatorial sun beat down mercilessly on my back, I was delighted that the meeting under the trees would begin soon.

We sat together in a semi-circle as Michael began by leading a discussion about what we did last meeting, and then Beth jumped right into the first activity. The goal by the end of the meeting was for us and the group members to have a more organized understanding of what crops they grow in their area and for what purposes (for consumption versus for profit), and then to understand what markets their community uses, what markets are the best markets for profit, and what some of the barriers are for the community in getting their products to those good markets.

So Beth started with the crops. She asked the group to think of all the crops that their community has grown in the past 2 years and to write each of those crops on a note card. The 23 crops identified were then laid out on the ground to analyze. The group was given 20 small stones to rank the crops in 3 different categories.

 First, they ranked the crops according to how much each crop is grown in the community, so they took 20 stones and placed them on the note cards to indicate how much or how little it is grown. Then they picked up the stones and rearranged them, ranking the crops according to importance for consumption. Last, they ranked the crops according to importance for profit; the group identified 11 of the 23 crops as for profit crops.

Having identified all the local crops grown for profit, we transitioned from crop analysis to market analysis. Michael passed out blank note cards again, this time having the group write down all the markets that they used in the past 2 years.

Ten markets were identified, including markets as close as the “Broker that comes to the farm” and “Neighbors,” and as far away as Nairobi (a two hour drive). The 10 note cards were laid out on the ground and the group members did two more rankings. They ranked each crop to identify where they actually sold that product. And finally they ranked each crop according to where the best market was to sell that product.

After finishing the analysis and making notes, the group talked together about the results. They were excited about having organized their knowledge as farmers and business people to understand better where they have been and what they have done in the past.

They saw huge discrepancies between where they generally go to sell their goods as opposed to where they should go for the best profit. Transportation, time, safety, brokers, and limited production (not having economies of scale) were all identified as struggles and obstacles to getting better profit and going to better markets. How could they afford to hire a pick up truck to take their produce? How would they get to Nairobi, sell their goods and return home before nightfall since the roads are so dangerous after dark? How do they deal with the broker cartels that force small scale farmers to sell at excruciatingly low prices? These and many more issues surfaced during the discussion. Yet the group also seemed to be excited about moving forward with this knowledge and these challenges to work through how to do better business in the future.

Like Michael was saying in “Part 2" (you should read it if you haven't yet!), we really are trying to begin at the beginning with this group, to walk with them to help both us and them to recognize and then to build on their abilities, talents and strengths as image bearers of God, and more specifically as savvy farmers and significant members of their community and economy. We have five steps that we are working through pole pole (slowly slowly) to eventually lead to this group doing collective farming as business. The first step, kuvumbua, “discovery,” is where we are now. It's about the group members talking about, remembering, realizing, and organizing all the things that they have and all the things they know about the assets of their community, and also about farming, marketing, and business.

What we did today was part of this first step, and by the end of it the group will have a narrowed down list of 3-4 crops that the group is interested in growing and selling together. Step 2 is when the group’s marketing team will study the market and report their results to the group. The third step is where the group will decide on the 1 crop they want to grow collectively and from that they will form a business plan. Kushirikiana, “Linking,” is next (step 4) and very important since this will be the point where the group will work to get connected with the appropriate agricultural and/or financial advisors and suppliers. And finally, step 5 is putting it all into action – using their own knowledge and resources to do collective agrobusiness.

Please continue to pray for us as we continue to develop relationships and walk along side this group of talented and intelligent people. Pray for Beth. And pray also for the farmers themselves. They have done so much and will do so much in the future, and pray that they will see that God is at work in their community and in their lives, and that Jesus is using them to help to bring His kingdom to the world.

Love,

Rebecca

Christ's Corpse Bride: Poverty of Being and the Mzungu Legacy

For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and the bride has made herself ready.

During my years at Covenant, I read a great deal about how poverty is fundamentally relational, a result of broken relationships that no longer work for life. At the heart of this idea is the observation that the poor are held back by the lies that they believe about themselves, lies that are often told by the rich in order to keep the poor “in their place.” This is worlds different from the “boot strap” perspective that the poor are poor because they’re lazy or unmotivated; but it does recognize that the poor are literally trapped in a web of lies about their value, their ability, their very personhood. Until recently, I believed this in theory. Now I know it as fact.

One of our friends, who currently lives in the largest slum in Africa, had come for a meal at our place. Let’s call her Mary. Talk turned to the post-election violence that ravaged Kenya in 2008, with our friend relating stories of how she had partnered with a friend from another tribe to sneak out and get food: if a Luo greeted them, the Luo friend would reply; if a Kikuyu, the Kikuyu would reply. This way both friends were protected from the other’s tribe mates. Rebecca and I were explaining our belief that Jesus gives a clear answer to tribalism, for in him there is “neither Jew nor Greek.” “The answer to tribalism,” I said, “is rooted in the Bible.”

“And why are the mzungus so rich? Is that in the Bible, too?”

“What?” I replied laughing. “Of course not . . .”

And then it came tumbling out, like a river breaking its banks after a hard rain. “They are teaching in Sunday School that black people are cursed, because we come from Ham,” “I have heard that you are rich because you had the Word of God first,” “But Jesus, wasn’t he an American?” “But your people are so smart, so good. Our people, most of us are not very smart. And we are very bad.”

This didn’t come from a textbook, a liberal psychological journal, or a rant about “the man;” it came from my dining room table. And before that, it came from the church.

The final scenes of Revelation present a picture of Jesus coming to reunite himself finally and ultimately with his bride, the church of his elect. This is our destiny: marital union with the resurrected Lord and Christ. But what happens when the bride plays the whore, when the church seems more like Burton’s corpse bride than Shakespeare’s Juliet?

And we have indeed played the whore. Oh yes, our churches in Kenya and America have stood on the solid rock of the Scriptures as the inerrant Word of God, at least the parts that make us feel comfortable. Oh yes, we know that homosexuality and abortion are terrible sins, and we know that no amount of good works can save us. But we have played the whore none the less.

How else do we explain the pastor in Nairobi who tells another friend of ours that she is outside of God’s will because she isn’t ready to move back in with her husband who beat her, never had a job, left her for another woman, and threatened her with a knife the last time they met? How else do we explain the emails that fill up our inboxes about how Barack Obama is the anti-christ? How else do we explain our thunderous noise about abortion and our callous hearts towards African American single moms and our resolute opposition to any kind of health care reform? How else do we explain the way that so many Kenyan pastors have used their position as shepherd to bully and oppress, or the American pastor who preaches that the Bible is only about a “personal relationship with Jesus” and that if we only follow Him we’ll get “our best life now?”

Power, wealth, security and control have blinded the bride in America and exposed her to the beast. And we have exported our idolatry around the world. Where did our friend learn that she was cursed from Noah because of the color of her skin? Old propaganda from the South, it seems, dies hard in the rest of the world. Where did she learn that she is poor because she is stupid and bad, but white people are rich because they are good and clever, if not from the wealthy stream of white folks running around her country from the colonialists to the missionaries to the United Nations and World Bank? And where did so many Kenyan pastors learn to lord their power and money over their congregations, if not at least partially from the televangelists on the airwaves and the wealthy missionaries in their midst?

We have but one option: resurrection. If we are a bride, we are the corpse bride. But in the same way that Christ took on a mortal body and the Father raised it immortal and imperishable, Christ will take our rotting, corpse of a church and raise it to be the beautiful bride prepared for the groom. We catch resurrection glimpses in our Kiswahili teacher who walks the muddy streets of his rural village ministering to the poor despite his high level of education and access to much greater economic situations, in the Mennonite missionaries who have worked in drought regions for thirty years, and in the relationships that we see beginning, broken as we are, across racial, ethnic, and socio-economic lines in our own work. But the first step in the process is not the triumphalism, arrogance, or patronizing posturing so common to our career; it is repentance. Down on our knees. No, down on our faces, for the ghettoes and inner-cities in America and the slums of Africa and South America which our idolatry has been a part of building whether we like it or not. If the poor believe lies about themselves it is because, we the rich, have been such talented tellers of lies. “Forgive us for our sins and the sins of our fathers,” Nehemiah prayed. And so must we. This is the first step in walking with Mary into the life-giving reality of God, where every person is made in His image, and every believer given a place of honor at his wedding table. And it is the beginning of taking us off God’s throne where we’ve put ourselves, and getting back on our faces before the King of kings.

Pilot Project Progress Part 3: Meet Beth

Thursday afternoon we’ll be having our second general meeting with the pilot project group, but before we do that we’d like to introduce you to Beth Muthoni Kabathi, our new CCS partner in the work!

Beth was born and raised within the Murang’a district where our project is located. She received her degree from Daystar University, a very well respected Christian university near Nairobi committed to raising up Christian servant leaders in every area of life. Beth studied business and accounting, and after graduation went to work for CCS for six years as the Mount Kenya regional accountant. During that time, she not only did great accounting, she also learned more and more about what CCS does in the field. Along the way she took part in a distance course through the Chalmers Center at Covenant College on community development, and later decided she wanted to be involved in something more directly related to helping the poor.

So, get this, she went and got her Masters in Micro-finance! Just last week, Beth defended and presented the research she did on insurance among poor Kenyans, and now we’ve got a real master on the team!

Best of all, Beth is passionate about the work, and about the community. She has brought tremendous insight to our work, helping the two dumb wazungu (white people) figure out what the heck is going on. Beth is a tremendous example of a highly educated Kenyan woman on the front lines of serving the poor, making great sacrifices to do so (including having to learn how to ride a motorbike). Please pray for Beth as we continue to sail into uncharted waters together, and that God would help her to build real rapport and community within the village where we’re working.

Peace,
Michael

Missionary Stuff

So occasionally, very very occasionally, we act like “real” missionaries. Some recent examples:

Rebecca has been involved in several women’s outreach events, using them as an opportunity to try to help some of our Kenyan friends from town get plugged into a church (ours, preferably). Two of our former neighbors have been really good friends to us, and have come to church events with us on a couple of occasions.

Rebecca drove a car load of Kenyans and Congolese refugees out into the Rift Valley last Sunday to be a part of a soccer match between our church’s youth (18-35) and a group of IDPs (internally displaced persons) living in a refugee area because of the violence after the last election.

Rebecca actually gets asked to play a lot, not surprisingly, and both of us played with a team of Congolese refugees one Saturday morning a few weeks ago. The refugees we know come from two families who attend New City Fellowship. Despite being “aliens in a foreign land,” they have been incredibly hospitable to us, and Rebecca and I have enjoyed playing soccer with them, making a visit to their home, and watching the dance group they’ve put together for the young folks. They’ve got a lot of free time on their hands but they’re making the best of it, and Rebecca and I have been brainstorming about how to be more involved in their lives (see below).

Rebecca and I got to do a “follow-up” lunch with a couple of deacons at our church, New City Fellowship. You may recall that we got a chance to lead two Sunday schools on working with the poor with the new deacons in June, and now they’re working hard to come up with a set of policies that will guide them in their work among the poor. Because New City is a small, highly inter-racial church, with a high number of very poor families from the slums, we can say that they have their work cut out for them! It was awesome to get to kick around ideas with a few of them, and to simply be a part of the conversation about what it means for a church to holistically care for the poor. In the next few weeks, we’re hoping to visit a few of the folks the deacons have worked with (particularly the Congolese refugees) to begin trying to do with them what we talked about in our last blog post: discussing what God has done for them, what gifts and abilities He’s given them, and how they can better use those gifts to provide for their families.

Rebecca lead our small group Bible study last Friday. We talked about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, with Rebecca helping us to look carefully at Mary, Martha, and Jesus’ characters specifically. The small group has been awesome for us, giving us a real base for making friends and real encouragement in our own lives with Jesus.

I got to lead worship the past two weeks at New City because our normal worship leader was sick. Although I’ve participated before, these were my first opportunities to actually lead. And while I’ve lead music for years in numerous different venues, this was, to put it mildly, a completely different thing altogether. The team consisted of about eight people with six different national ethnicities represented (India, Pakistan, Madagascar, Kenya, Korea and the US). We sang in English, Hindi, Kiswahili, and some language from Zimbabwe for good measure. I had lots of help, to say the least. But as someone who has been thinking and convicted about the importance of racial and stylistic diversity in all worship everywhere this is like a dream come true. And because the worship leader’s doctor asked her to stay away from singing for a month, I’m on the schedule twice more in November.

Moreover, Jesus has put us in relationships with several different individuals or families who are either Muslim or openly nominal Christians. Please pray that Jesus would use us to bring some of these folks to himself!

All of this is very exciting for us, not only because we’re passionate about Jesus and His church, but also because it allows us to bring our heart for his kingdom into our lives in Nairobi itself, instead of leaving all of that to our actual job descriptions. And things are happening all the time. I visited a Teen Challenge residential facility recently that is literally three doors down, and have been asked to preach at New City in November. So please pray for all of it.

Peace,
Michael

Pilot Project Progress Part 2: Appreciating Assets

Had any of you magically been whisked away to Nairobi last Wednesday night to visit the Rhodes household you might have been surprised at what you would have found. Two very stressed 20-somethings scribbling on poster boards, bickering about whose job it was to figure out how to say "values" in Swahili, and generally running around like chickens recently departed from their heads. Preparing for the first day with a new pilot project turned out to be a bit like getting ready for the first day of school. And we both slept just as poorly.

"Not with bang, but with a whimper." That's what T.S. Eliot said about the world's ending, but it fit quite well with our pilot beginning. When we arrived with our new coworker Beth at the beautifully shady grove of trees where the meeting was to be held, we found literally nobody (we were a bit early). But slowly and surely people streamed in, walking or on bikes, clearly having just left their farms or cows or other morning work. By the end of the day, 13 of 17 people made it, which isn't bad for the first day!

More importantly than the turn up, though, was the meeting itself, which was a complete success. The overall goal of the pilot project is to help a group of farmers to be able to collectively produce and sell a crop with a good market, while also learning the skills to know how to read the market and respond to its changes and fluctuations. But we didn't start with marketing trainings, or giving the group a crop to grow and a lesson on how to grow it. In fact we didn't really do any training at all.

That's because in this project we're trying to begin where the Bible itself begins: the story of God making human beings in His own image. If we really believe that incredible truth, then we have to treat every single human being as if they have value, skills, abilities . . . in short, that they have assets that God has given them to be managed and stewarded in His world. And while almost every Christian would agree, most of the time the way we think about the poor comes from the implicit idea that the poor simply lack things, whether money, knowledge, character . . . whatever. And when that's our implicit idea, whether we like it or not, that's what gets communicated to the poor people we try to work with.

But don't people really need knowledge, capital, food? Of course we all have needs. But, as Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett have explained in their excellent new book When Helping Hurts (everyone should read it!), a Biblical view of poverty centers around broken relationships with God, with ones self, with others, and with creation. And whether it's inner-city Memphis or rural Kenya, one thing that all poor communities face is the consistent implicit message from the non-poor world that they're messed up, worthless, powerless, vulnerable, stupid, and incapable of change. The government, many NGOs, sometimes even the church, as well as the Primary School of Everyday Experience all teach poor people that they matter less than the rich, that their problems are their fault, and there really isn't much they can do about it. And when outsiders come in with programs that treat the poor as people lacking resources, it simply reinforces the lies they've been told, inadvertently reducing that individual or community's ability to really make changes in their own lives.

But the truth of the Scriptures that conquers the lie is that God has given every person His image! And that means that every one of us has assets and skills that we can use. And so in this pilot project, our primary objective is to help community members use their own assets and resources to study the market, to design a business plan, and to execute that plan to gain a profit.

So on Thursday, we started the whole process with two funny things: drawing maps and telling stories. You see, if we really want this project to be about helping the poor recognize their assets and empowering them to use it to address the problems and opportunities they themselve identify, we wanted to start with activities that would help us do just that. So Rebecca opened up the entire meeting by explaining that we believe that every person has God-given assets and abilities, and that we wanted to begin by learning about what assets God had given this community. She did an excellent job of explaining how every stage of the project would flow out of this foundational idea: God has given you the ability to make changes for the good in your community.

We then began with a Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) activity. PLA is a set of tools that community workers have used for a number of years to help a community process its own resources, opportunities, and problems. The foundational assumption is that community members are the experts on their communities, and that by getting them talking and thinking, an NGO can empower them to begin using their resources and abilities to address their own needs, all while affirming the Biblical message of being made in God's image.

Our first PLA activity, led by our coworker Beth, was a simple community map. The idea is remarkably simple: Beth merely asked the group to create a map of their community, emphasizing local physical resources. But what followed was extraordinary to watch. All 13 community members began scratching and drawing in the dust, gathering sheaves of corn to make crosses to represent churches and rocks for schools, and discussing in great detail all of the physical resources in their community. These included the irrigation project that they began, and also highlighted some limiting infrastructure issues, including far off markets, and a ferry that doesn't operate year round. Not only was this incredibly fun to watch, not only did it encourage every person to be involved, but it got all of them thinking about how resource rich their community really is, and it taught us a whole lot about the area where we're working.

Our second activity comes from a set of methods known as Appreciative Inquiry. The foundational assumption behind Appreciative Inquiry is that every functioning community is a miracle. The fact that people exist in community is a sign that God is working, that people have found a way to overcome obstacles, to work together. Appreciative Inquiry allows a facilitator to help community members form action plans based on their analysis of their own assets and strengths. And AI begins with something everybody loves: stories.

So after the mapping, I explained to the group that before we could begin to think about where we are going, we had to remember where we were, where we had come from. I told them that our project was all about them using their strengths, abilities, and successes to come up with a plan on how to keep moving towards their dreams. And then, I just started asking for people to tell stories. "Tell me a story about a time when you were proud of your community?" "About a time when you tried something new on your farm and succeeded?" "About a time when you faced an obstacle and overcame it?" As people would tell stories, I asked one of the young women in the group to write a few words about the story, and then I would walk through the process of analyzing the strengths, values, and enabling conditions present in the story. For instance, when one man told the story of how he had wanted to get married in a church, and the community pulled together to help him be able to pay for it, we said that the story showed the community was strong in unity, friendship, and love, that they obviously valued family, marriage, and following God's laws, and that in order to have had that experience, they had to have jobs, money, the willingness to help one another, etc. We did the same process with the stories about the man who started selling watermelons as soon as they arrived in the area, and sold them in a far away market, or for the person who told the story about traveling far away to learn how to grow rice, and taking the risk to try it in their own home place.

At the end of the day, the community had spent several hours talking only about their successes, only about their resources, only about the encouraging moments and powerful aspects of their community. Maybe some people think all of this is silly, but after years of development in the 2/3rds World and increasing Welfare states in the West, we believe it is something to begin where God does: that people matter, and that He's given all of us skills, abilities, and assets to manage and use for His glory. This is the beginning and heart of community development, and it was absolutely amazing to see it in action. And maybe, just maybe, it gave us the foundation, the starting point, to walk together with these farmers all the way towards sustainable agricultural business. We'll see.

Peace,
Michael