whiteboard not included

He stares incredulously from across an over-sized desk; his eyes stretched wide in disbelief.  The pause, pregnant with uncertainty, calls out to me to say something, anything to relieve the awkward expanse of silence.  Outside the September 2006 air is swollen with rain waiting to explode from a blackening sky in the middle of a Kampala afternoon.  Thunder rumbles ominously in the background.  I meet his bewildered gaze head on and smile.

“Yes, I am moving to Sudan.”

“Alone? Now?  Have you conducted a feasibility study?” he asks, eyes squinted narrow in inquisition.

“Yes, I am on my way there, now, on my own.”  I let the second question dangle.  What is more feasible than offering hurting, abandoned children in war-zone a safe place to call home?  Feasibility is the last question worth asking.  It is not a question at all.  In my mind, it had become a non-negotiable premise.  I would find a way.

The thought of all four-foot-eight-inches of me tackling the untamed reaches of an unstable region with no team and no professionally-conducted risk assessment is evidently unconscionable to this seasoned humanitarian project manager.

“But you are a white woman…alone,” he half states, half asks as if to implore me for some reasonable explanation for this madness.

Very astute observation, I think to myself as look down at my pale hand resting on the chair arm.

“With one leg… and crutches…” his words sputter and trail off onto the slab-like desktop, floundering, their intention waiting to be dissected.

I barely hold in a chuckle.  What a keen grasp of the obvious. Bless his heart, I am so far out of his box, he can barely even find room for me in the category called other.  He really is trying to figure me out.

Rhythmic fan blades thumping above our heads provide the only sound that breaks the humid silence.  Sweat and aspersions trickle together and drip from his forehead.

Slowly, I repeat my inquiry.  Could his office perhaps offer any trustworthy contacts I might connect with upon my arrival in the southern part of Sudan next month?

He responds with a blank look.  “But, but,” he continues as if I never said a word, “what is your strategy?”  He begins to look helpless.  “You do have a whiteboard strategy, don’t you?” he asks with concern so palatable it could have been sliced and served up on a plate to accompany the tea growing cold in my cup on the edge of his desk.

“Sir, to be honest. I don’t even have a whiteboard.”

“Well, what are you going to do miss,” he quizzes me with a smirk, “just show up?”

I smile again and nod my head.  “Pretty much.”

He scribbles some illegible names and numbers, thrusts them into my hand and ends our conversation. He waves me out his door exhorting me to try and not get myself killed in the process.

A few weeks after that meeting, I did indeed just show up in Sudan site unseen with virtually no contacts, no visible funding sources, no feasibility study and definitely no whiteboard.  Some of life’s greatest invitations have the audacity to come packaged without whiteboard strategies to navigate them.  This was one of those. And I decided to accept the invitation.  That was five years ago.

I’ll tell you more of the story as we go.  While my story in Sudan is not the main focus of this blog, it certainly is a primary contextual frame for its content.  So I will be sharing bits and pieces as they are relevant to our conversation here.

Chances are likely I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting you in person, you who are kindly spending your time with these words.  Please allow me to clarify a few things before we continue.  I don’t want you conjuring any images of Indiana Jones or Jack Bauer and trying to assimilate me into them.  I promise I won’t fit.

For starters, I am the most unlikely candidate to ever do what I do.  I am a petite city-girl from northeast Florida whose idea of camping is a day spa.  I never planned on working with children and I am positively averse to all things arachnid.  Mascara tops my list of survival essentials.  A writer, a creative, an aesthetic: yes.  A bush-whacking, swashbuckling, rough-and-tumble adventurer: not so much.  Toss in the fact I have one leg and use crutches to get around, was a veteran of 23 surgeries by the age of 13 and was not expected to live to see my first birthday.  Well, there you have it.  I epitomize the words unlikely candidate.  There is good news in that.  Unlikely candidates are often the most likely ones to make history.  I want my life to count for something more that matters.  How about you?

Since 2006, I have called a bush town in the Central Equatoria state of what is now the new nation of South Sudan home.  No running water.  No electricity.  Lots of spiders.  A smattering of automatic assault weapons.  Bush grass taller than I am. Occasional rebel group activity.  And in the middle of it all, I have become mama to over 120 children in what is growing into an indigenous movement that cares for the most vulnerable and broken lives around us.   It is from this journey with my Sudanese family, my beautiful sons and daughters adopted in heart if not on paper; it is from our living and walking together in community that I have truly started to learn the importance of the principles we will share together in the following posts, pages and days.

You are not reading an autobiography or an academic text about the state of affairs in the two new Sudans.  Over the next days and weeks I will be writing down some thoughts on a little collection of 21 ideas I have seen change lives over and over again.  I share them with you arranged around three organizing principles that help to guide our work here in Africa.  Keep it simple.  Keep it solid.  Keep it sustainable.  These words are not theory.  They work.  They transform lives.  I know, because their reality is woven into the fabric of our shared narrative here.  I am not writing a list of rules to be obeyed or formulas to be followed, rather I offer the ideas in these pages as gifts to be unwrapped.  If they can work here in the bush of South Sudan, they can work anywhere.  And perhaps you, dear reader, might just find in them keys to become the change you want to see in the world around you.

Yes, you sitting there reading these words right now can indeed change the world.  And you don’t even need a whiteboard to do it.  Simply bookmark this page, sign up to receive posts and join in the conversation as it unfolds.

With great expectation-

Michele