Suppose...

Suppose that, being in love with the sun, you lost the light.  The world in all its splendour is still accessible, and you can perceive its beauty in spite of the ubiquitous shadow.  Perhaps you would rededicate your life to exploring that beauty more deeply than you had ever considered possible; perhaps you would use every sense you never knew you had or that you had taken for granted since your first days beyond infancy to re-engage and re-define your universe.  In doing so, suppose that you found yourself upon a path that was to lead you on a great quest.  Not a quest for fire or light, but rather a quest whose nature was based upon the communication of beauty in a dark world.

Now, suppose that, barely embarked upon that path, the Sun returned, except brighter and more splendid than you had ever known, a Sun that cast no shadows, that lit from all directions and yet radiated even the most distant and most obscure items into perfect relief and clarity.  Suppose it warmed you and nourished you and eliminated every need.

There are two possible responses to the ascension of the light.  One would be, I suppose, to sit down cross-legged on the path, or perhaps to begin to wander aimlessly in the brightness of the world.

The other action would be to consider that the quest has gained not only value, but also potential and clarity by the return of the light.  It would be to follow the path with greater enthusiasm and confidence, excited by the possibility of being able to finally see, and to see in ways that you never imagined before.

Now, suppose that the light is not some soul-less artifact of the universe, but a spirit akin to your own.  Suppose that all of this is just an impoverished metaphor to try to describe the feeling of falling deeply in love in the very weeks preceding your departure for the other side of the planet.  Does this change your reaction to the path or the quest that lies in wait for you upon it?

And now let me stop being coy and answer directly; to be in love is to cherish all of the paths and quests on which a lover embarks, confident of convergence.  I have written before that it is not about sacrifice, but rather the deep and perennial desire to make every moment of another's life perfect.  And I will add one more thing: it is also about the profound, unrestrained, unapologetic and unequivocal desire to see your love succeed in every quest, and walk every path, all the while waiting with great anticipation for the frequent mutual returns to Home.

There is a traditional Scottish song wherein the chorus is a bellicose "tha tighin fodham", which means, depending on the translation, "The wish was mine" or "It comes upon me".  Two disparate concepts in English parlance are, in fact, unified as a single phrase, and a single idea: that moment, or mission, or quest, or path that at once smacks of destiny and desire.  Love understands and celebrates this sacred idea.

And having been enlightened to the truth and possibility of this, I feel infinitely, divinely fortunate.

Implications

My brother hosts what is (and I don't wish to be told otherwise even in the face of evidence) the biggest and best private Robbie Burns Day party in the City of Windsor.  He has done this for the better part of a decade.  Without elaborating on details that should stay snobbishly exclusive to those of us fortunate enough to be invited, the plan involves preparing a haggis from scratch, watching Scottish film, playing Scottish trivia, singing Scottish folk songs, and drinking just an extraordinary amount and variety of fine single malt.

I mention it because I will not be there for Robbie Burns Day this year.

There is an expectation, I think, that I will lament not being near my family for Christmas, being in Zambia instead, where there is not even a remote chance for a white Christmas.  That expectation has allowed me to focus on Christmas as a sort-of gold standard: if I can get my head around not being here for Christmas, then anything else should be easy.

But the thing is, I don't particularly enjoy Christmas in the same way as others do.  I suspect that I will again in the future, but western notions of Christmas (if this is news) are singularly antithetical (or at least taunting) to umarried independent adult childless men.  It may be an arguable point, but that doesn't change the fact that the Christmas experience for me is no grave loss.
Burns Day is something different.  It is an important tradition, and I will miss it deeply.

Such revelations in no way diminish my anticipation of boarding the plane, my anticipation of meeting the people of Kibombomene, my anticipation of helping the good work of Same World Same Chance to progress, my anticipation of mango time, my anticipation of all that I cannot possibly anticipate at this point.  It is a simple and pure acknowledgement of something that is true about me, that I will miss Robbie Burns Day this year.

And perhaps the greater truth in this statement is that it is important for me to talk about whatever feelings and apprehensions I have, even when there is absolutely no reason to change them or fix them or alter circumstances surrounding them.

And I wonder if that's something that can be generalized.

Under a Tree

One of the goals of this blog is to make a record of my impressions and thoughts, no matter how naive they may be.  Of course, I greatly welcome your impressions of how naive I am in saying what I am saying.  I welcome you telling me that what I am writing is right out to lunch.  One of the fascinating things to me about Connectivist Education is how deeply it invites us all to fail and unlearn.

For example, a couple of days ago I got to sit in the shade under a large maple tree in my yard for about a half an hour.  I don't come from a culture that particularly prizes time spent meditating (napping?) under trees.  But there is something about the shade and trunk and life-line of a tree that gives you crazy ideas, if you just listen.

One of my greatest fears, as I have already written about, is that I will inadvertently be a part of introducing some infrastructure to Kibombomene that is not sustainable in the long-run; or that I will introduce something that will irreparably alter their culture and make it more like mine.  I don't want that.  The maple reminded me of the maples that stood in impossibly sprawling groves near Kitigan Zibi of the Algonquins.  And I was thinking about how the Awazibi syrup folks use modern techniques to harvest the maple syrup, but they're still harvesting syrup, as they've done since, roughly, the last ice age.  And though I never talked to any of the company's workers, I think they're likely just as happy that they have rubber hoses and electric pumps.  And it validated for me a little bit the notion of using technology and modern techniques to bring a world of information to this village that wants accessible education so badly.

The second meditation that I had was about greetings.  Kim told me that the greeting customs in Kibo are something to get used to — that every greeting is a long one, and nuanced, and heart-felt, and that one needs to clear an hour to walk for five minutes in case there are people about.  For the past week, Goderich has been like that; it has been wonderful.  For us, it took the devastation of an f3 tornado (I love my FU f3 T-shirt, you can order some if you want, by the way) to shake people into this sort of momentary awareness of each other.  I hope it sticks in some small way.  And I think it was good training, from what Kim says, for what I am going to see in Kibo.

Tempest

A short post here.  Inasmuch as I want to focus this journal on the impending trip to Kibombomene, it is still my journal and I cannot possibly write right now without mentioning my hometown.  I am from Goderich.  Perhaps you've heard of it.

I get lost when I walk in my hometown at night; much of it I cannot recognize.  Other parts are more like a dream, where I can identify everything but something is off-colour.  I used to do historical architectural walking tours in this town, and many of my way-points are gone.

The relevance to the Kibo project is that I had hoped to rally support for the cause (moral or otherwise) from folks locally in the coming weeks, but all of the local efforts will now necessarily be put into disaster relief.  This is as it should be, and I'm not complaining.  Friends of mine lost their houses; some lost their businesses.  Many people are out of work, their work having been utterly destroyed.  To have my ideas fade to the background in advance of my departure is such a small thing to have lost.

Now I am trying to do what I can, as we all are, and the rallying has been terrific.  So many of my Goderich friends live elsewhere now and wish they were back, but there is really nothing to be done at this point.  Electrical wires and busted gas mains are everywhere, and many of the old buildings could be on the verge of collapse.

All of it makes me feel like this is a strange time to be leaving Goderich.  We will not be rebuilt by the time I go; we may never be fully rebuilt.  I have not changed my plans, and I am not questioning them.  But I thought that it was important for the sake of posterity to note that though I go across the world unattached to commitments that require me as an individual, I am not coming without a strong sense of original place.  My hometown, of which I have always been so proud, is forever changed.

Note my last entry ("When?") on impermanence and my mistrust of plans.  One more reason why I believe as I do, and I'd really challenge anyone to defy me.

Forgive me if this is not the most eloquent entry — like everyone in this town, I am in shock and very tired.

When?

Late November, God willing.

Two things about that.

Late November

Which is about as spontaneous as one can really be for a trip like this.  I have to send paperwork to Zambia, which must be processed and sent back to me, so I can apply to the Zambian consulate for a visa, which then needs to be sent back to me before I can go.  Then there is the non-trivial matter of intersecting the right plane ticket with the right amount of money in the bank...

But importantly, I am leaving behind a job that suits me very well — curriculum coordinator at Virtual High School.  I've very much made this job my own, and have endeavoured these past two years to shape our teaching and writing to reflect excellent research and state of the art pedagogical best practices.  Steve, my boss and good friend, and I agreed that we would be able to make the transition into new staff as smooth as possible if I stayed for long enough to help with training folks to replace me over a couple of months.  I believe strongly in what we are doing at Virtual High School, and I want to be able to provide this service.

The implications of deciding to leave my niche job, and the way in which it is viewed by people who love me, is the subject of further reflection.  Stay tuned.

God Willing

I learned along time ago that it is a dangerous folly for one to define oneself by hopes and plans and ideas about the future.  I didn't need to have that proposition violently reinforced these past years.  The lesson was quite lost on me.  All that happened was a stoking of my indignant belief that whatever else may or may not be true of God, or whatever it is that orders and disorders the universe, planning makes that force furious.  I suspect that there is nothing more evil and assured of retribution that we can do in this life than to set our hopes on someday, and there is nothing more good and right and true than now, and every experience in my life backs me up.

So the end of November, yes, God willing, and I acknowledge that I would go tomorrow if I could and if it wouldn't negatively affect others, but I am resisting all temptation to look forward to the journey.  It will happen.  Or, due to an unimaginable circumstance, it won't.  I have no ambition to be either disillusioned or disappointed, so I am doing what I do best, which is focussing on today.  A part of today involves getting the paperwork in order, and it involves doing a little writing and reflecting so that folks know what I am up to.  It involves leaving VHS in good shape for my departure.  It involves making sure I see as many of the people that I want to see as I can do.  It involves saving money at every turn, which is a new trick for me.  Those are all things that I can do today, but they are in service of today, because this preparation exercise itself is interesting and fulfilling and amusing.  The today I have spent, which I shaped as I did because I was inspired by something I saw on the horizon, was still itself fully today.  I am not living and will not live for the future.

Having said all that, I will licentiously contradict myself by restating something that I told a good friend earlier this evening.  If you consider it deeply, though, you will see that it is no true contradiction, and it is this: that I am more relaxed than I have been in a while because I see an end in sight; and it's making me panic a little bit, and it's making me scared a little bit, and it's making me grieve a little bit, and I'm just a little bit lost without those sick muses urging me on.

Where?

Blogs have evolved into splendidly crafted works of literature.  They tend to be reputable primary or secondary sources used by scholars, industrialists, plutocrats and politicians to stay on top of things.  They are what the New York Times was fifty years ago.

And I'll try, I really will. But the fact of the matter is that the beauty of writing a journal that chronicles a journey is in re-reading it, and watching the evolution.  I want to read this post in a year and think to myself, "but how naive I was back then!"

I know very little about where I am going.  More information than what I will tell you is likely available, but the thing is, I don't feel the need to know much more than what follows.  I will tell you more when I am there.

Kibombomene is about fifty kilometres east of Solwezi, which is a city of about 60 000 people within a two days' walk of the border with DR Congo.  Kibo is in the Northwest Province, and about a six hour drive from Lusaka; or so I hear.

Sustenance agriculture is the name of the game in that part of the world.  The people have food and a lot of it, but that is the limit of what they have, really.  They are poor by most standards because there is no economy.  Other areas of the world are rich but the people starve.  This is a small slice of the insanity that I hope to wrap my head around in the next couple of years.

The area is heavily forested, with some land cleared for agriculture.  The food crops have been named for me, but they are mostly not names that I recognize, and I have forgotten all of them.  I suspect I will learn them quickly enough.

Zambia itself is a relatively stable country, even though it is one of the world's poorest.  SWSC has had an excellent working relationship with the Zambian government and all indicators are that this relationship will continue.  Zambia is also a member of SACMEQ, an education consortium for southern and eastern African nations; its government is serious about helping its people and ensuring that they have access to resources.

Beyond that, I know very little about the geography of where I will be heading.  I'm at peace with that.

Over the past month, I have lost track of the number of people who have asked me if I would be near any civil violence, or near the drought.  I have quickly forgotten that a year ago, I would have asked similar questions.  We might intellectually know that Africa is a very enormous continent, but it is so often described as one homogeneous political entity, isn't it?

One of the great appeals of this project is that, because the Zambian government and people are supportive in many ways, we will be able to help the people of Kibombomene achieve forward momentum as they see fit.  It does decrease the prospects for a cool story later on about my life being in some sort of danger, which is unfortunate, but for the sake of the project, the location is perfect.

Why?

Stop trying to 'save' Africa, wrote Uzodinma Iweala in the Washington Post in 2007, to headline a deeply rational and at once impassioned plea to notice how "Africans... are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself". He points out that condescending headlines like "Can Blair save Africa from poverty?" smack of the heyday of colonialism, when European powers decided that Africa would benefit from their take on "civilization".

I bring this up because whenever I tell someone that I'm going to Africa, I seldom so much as take a breath before adding, "This isn't a 'Save Africa' project. The people of Kibombomene do not need to be saved. They certainly don't need to be saved by me".

Upon telling people of my impending journey, I get a range of responses, but none so wise as a question from my Great Aunt Jan: "Do they want you over there?"

This is the question that everyone should be asking first.

Why African Charity?

There is a phenomenon called "Western Guilt" that I am altogether lacking. There were grave injustices carried out through Africa during the colonial periods, but I didn't perpetrate them. I feel no connection to them, and I take no responsibility for them. I have a clear conscience.

However, it is true that decisions that some people have made, without my consent, have detrimentally affected other people, and it just so happens by cosmic accident that those decisions have resulted in more opportunities for me and fewer opportunities others. I'm not guilty, but I'm not thankful. I'm going to try to take whatever extra opportunity I have through no fault of my own, and share it with people who don't have it through no fault of their own. And ironically enough, because of Western privilege (I call this a "Western opportunity surplus"), I can.

Why Same World Same Chance?

The founders of SWSC, Kim Hurley and Marissa Izma, are geniuses. Fresh out of university, they showed up in Africa, motivated by a strong passion for service. The long story short is that the people of Kibombomene, a small village about fifty clicks from Solwezi, contacted them with a problem. The nearest high school was inaccessible to most of them. Some of their youth wanted the opportunity to have a secondary level education. Could they help? And they said, "Yeah, I think we can totally do this".

And they helped Kibo to do it, but what's remarkable is how cleverly they did it. In particular, the elements of the project that impressed me the most were:

• The Zambian Board calls the shots. The Canadian Board is instrumental in planning, execution, publicity and fundraising, but at the end of the day this project starts and ends with the people of Kibombomene. They wanted the school, they built it, and they are developing their own infrastructure to maintain it, with a little help from Western opportunity surplus. This is a Zambian project.
• The project is organic. As Western opportunity surpluses have found their way to SWSC, the people of Kimbombomene have been able to build a health clinic, install solar panels for electricity, and start up a cash crop operation. The work evolves as it needs to. Some governments and NGOs are so focussed on targets and timelines and rubrics and goals and success indicators that projects continue in directions long after they have ceased to make sense.
• The infrastructure is sustainable. SWSC isn't setting up cycles of dependency (which are always colonialism in charity clothing); we work to ensure that we are building nothing that will crumble and create a liability someday. Everything is created smartly and purposefully, in a way that is sustainable in the medium and long term. As things get more expensive to maintain, the capacity to grow the economy is augmented. As the school program is expanded, Zambian teachers are recruited to teach.

I see SWSC as a true capacity development project, and I find that to be very exciting.

Why Me?

My experience is in multi-jurisdictional accreditation, connectivist learning, instructional design and curriculum implementation. I have the ability, by teaching and writing with Virtual High School, to live on my own dime in Zambia to help develop the school program in any way that I can. I have no wife, I have no child, I have no house, and all of these 'have nots' are at my phase of life a tremendous opportunity, a great uncommon 'have'. I don't pretend exclusive wisdom or knowledge, and I expect to learn more than I teach, but I can do something, and it would be irresponsible of me not to move on it.

Iweala finished his article by saying that "Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth." I truly believe that SWSC is such a partnership, and I unreservedly offer my service, for what it is worth, to them.