how do you want the clothes washed?

It is 2006.  I am surrounded by a still foreign landscape of blowing dirt, elephant grass and UN conveys.  Some mornings I wonder if I accidentally got trapped in a National Geographic magazine.  It is all a bit surreal and I am on a journey to find my place in the strange new world around me.

I did what everyone said not to.  I did indeed just show up.  I found a makeshift home in a bombed out shell of a building riddled and pockmarked with holes from a history of automatic gunfire.  It was rented to me for a “bargain” price of $1000 USD/month.  No running water, no electricity and what I initially thought was a strange cultural form of ventilation.  Several weeks into this adventure, I begin to realize green did not only describe the grass.

All of this aside, my days rapidly develop an unexpected normalcy. They are filled with spontaneous meetings with new friends encountered in market and along roadsides.  Relationship.  It is the work.  The doors to our children’s home open Christmas day to our first residents.  Now just before the dawn of the new year, our basic accommodations are filled with laughter and dreams of brighter tomorrows.

I step out to greet the long rays of early morning light and one of my new friends who has joined our then all Sudanese team meets me with a question:

“Mama, how would you like the clothes washed?”

I am taken aback by the simplicity of the question and the complexity of the implications it suggests.  I would not dream to presume to know anything about washing clothes in this particular context.  Here it is again: an oddly absurd mixture of genuine concern and wanting to please laced and stretched tight over a framework of years of colonial subjugation and superior attitudes from the outside world.  Somehow I know intuitively how I answer this one question will lay a foundation for all that follows.  How much hinges on this one seemingly innocent response.

“Well, my friend,” I reply choosing my words carefully, “where I come from you take the dirty clothes, water and soap and put it in a special electric box, push a button, and the clothes get washed.  But here I have no idea how to wash clothes.  It would be lovely to get them clean, but I truly do not know how best to see this happen.  Perhaps you might teach me how to wash clothes without the electric box and I can learn from you.“

The smile that spreads long across her face says it all.

Again I am reminded about a key principle of true sustainability and good leadership. Both are about valuing people, seeing their worth and ingenuity and releasing them to be innovative.  Both are about foundational approaches of coming to learn from and serve, lord over and control.  Both are about powerful people walking together committed relationally to a genuine honor that is reciprocal and recognizes individual strengths.  Honor at its highest form is a value system that celebrates differences, gives permission to make mistakes and prioritizes authentic relationship, all the while harnessing the momentum of a shared journey.

How did I want the clothes washed?  Preferably… clean.  But clean clothes were not the central issue.  My response to her how would either release a new foundation of preferring one another or reinforce a system that dominates and dis-empowers all of its participants. 

This is the work of sustainable leadership:  To enter situations as a learner with a heart to serve.  To release people to recognize the solutions they already carry.  To give them permission to be powerful enough wash clothes in a way might even seem foreign to us at the time.  To care more about the person than their performance.

So my friend, how would you like the clothes washed today?  Is there anything in our simple responses to how that dis-empowers the what?  How can our attitudes intentionally release the innovative solutions carried by the people around us?

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Love to hear your responses friends.  As we begin to engage more in conversation, may I ask you to glance at our discussion guidelines?  Thanks for that.  Looking forward to dialoguing with you!