I saw something in this Swahili proverb I came across recently: “Patience attracts happiness; it brings near that which is far.” When we let go the urgency of conditioned mind, when we get beyond how we think life “should” be going, or where and when we think we “should” be headed, we’re free to be happy with the adventure of the process. The happiness that we are promised “in the end,” when it’s all finished and is how it “should be,” is brought from “out there” to right Here.
There are two places this feels helpful in the work in Africa:
The first is our young women are graduating from college! (I always have to put an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence; it’s that big.) As that happens, we’re realizing there is a whole new arena we know little about: how to secure employment in Zambia.
For a while this felt disappointing. All that hard work to finish one’s education only to be confronted with no employment. However, once we got past the assumption that one graduates from college and a position is there waiting on a silver platter, we were freed up to start the adventure of discovering how to find jobs.
I’m pleased to tell you we had our first major breakthrough. We finally had a conference call with Martha, the accountant of the Living Compassion project. It turns out Martha is passionate about mentoring young women in starting their careers! Since our call with her, she has been out to the Living Compassion property to give a talk on how to write a CV (resumé) and is now inviting each young woman individually to come to her office in downtown Ndola to receive coaching on how to be in an interview. Wow!
“These young women lack confidence and exposure, nothing else,” Martha said. “They are intelligent, hard-working, and responsible, and the very fact that they overcame what they did to go to, and complete, college tells you everything about them. It’s only a matter of helping them see their own value and mentoring them in gaining employment.”
Wonderful! We can do that. Plenty of patience and love to see us through. And the exciting thing is these young women are once again pioneers for those following them. As these women complete college and gain employment, the younger girls are seeing a world where “people like me” DO go to college and DO get jobs. This builds confidence and exposure for the whole community.
The second place the beautiful patience of the Swahili proverb is serving is in our annual fundraising. We are working to raise one thousand $80 donations, i.e., one $80 donation for each of our 1,000 children in the project. Again, now liberated from the assumption that this would happen in a set amount of time and in a certain way, we can enjoy the process. Fun! And we are almost halfway there; we have received 488 of the 1,000, $80 donations ($39,000). Should you choose to participate in the fun, we have two more wonderful workshops on the schedule in support of the project.
Cheri summed it up for us perfectly in a recent email class assignment: “It’s fun to work on a complex puzzle when we know we’ll be able to solve it.” We don’t yet know how, we don’t know when, but we do know that sometime (soon!) we will have the funds for another year of transformation in Kantolomba, and that that transformation will include all of your young women gaining employment. That does, indeed, attract a great deal of happiness, right Here, right Now.
Gasshō,
jen
Two of our young women, Silvia and Mirriam,
are among the recent nursing school graduates.
