I love Google don’t you? I mean gone are the days that when you did not know anything you had to take out the dusty encyclopedias or dictionaries, or hope you were within the vicinity of someone more knowledgeable than you.  Now, you have a query you just “Google it”.

Anyway I decided to look up the words educate and re-educate.  Courtesy of Google one definition for educate is: “The process of acquiring general knowledge and developing the powers of reasoning and judgment”.    I like the idea that I can acquire more knowledge and increase my ability to reason.   To re-educate, again courtesy of Google is: “To educate again for new purposes”.  This again, I assume can continue into perpetuity.

So my re-education would mean that I am “acquiring more knowledge and increasing my ability to reason, for new purposes!” I can deal with that!   Why my interest in this particular area, at this particular time?  Remember my initial premise, that as much as I am “eating life with a big spoon!” I am also learning and growing, hence continuous education I hope and pray will be my constant state of being!

In my line of work, I meet a lot of people from all walks of life.  I meet the wealthiest and the poorest and everyone in between.  It is however in my work with communities where I meet people who challenge me and inspire me the most.  People who do not share my ideals on wealth and poverty, who do not use material possessions to define themselves or gauge their happiness and joy of the world, people who the world externally would call marginalized, but to me have the real pulse on the real quality of life.

I work with communities that are dotted around Kenya.   And because of what I do I am fortunate enough to be embraced by these communities as a person who is there for the benefit of the communities; not to exploit them, but to assist in a small way.  While I work with these communities and feel I give them something, they inadvertently give me much, much more.

They teach me a new and different perspective of seeing the world.  They introduce me to the simplicity of life, of nature, of the wonders of this universe, untainted by layers and layers modern life. They show me how to listen to all around me, they give me back my childlike wonder of the smallest things; sunsets with their final warm amber glow, birds perched on a tree in rest on their way somewhere, a small crab scurrying sideways along a deserted beach. They teach me to be one with the world, in a way I could never be in my stressful everyday life. They teach me to be still!

I am constantly challenged by the most unlikely people, like a situation where I was telling one of the company drivers where I work about the fact that we, the company were discarding sheets and other bedding, and we were going to donate them to our neighboring community of Shimo La Tewa prison, Mombasa.  He looked at me with such contempt and disgust and said he found it ironic that we were helping the very community of people who were in their current situation by wreaking havoc on society, murders, thieves etc.  The same people who probably at some point adversely affected our own staff members.  They got bed sheets and other bedding from our company, yet staff, hard-working law-abiding staff, slept on the floor sometimes without so much as a sheet to cover them?

His statement impacted upon me greatly, I felt so ashamed that I had not looked more closely at how we define and decide on the worthiness of a community for our donations. Further what are the broader implications of the decisions we make regarding assisting communities.     I certainly before that point had scarcely considered my co-workers and colleagues as a community worthy of consideration for that sort of assistance.

His disdain for my line of thought and logic challenged me and changed the way I looked at this notion of community and how to define exactly who qualifies for assistance and how an organization relates to its internal and external community .   I must say that after that conversation with the driver, the internal community of an organization is as important in my mind and as worthy of consideration as the external community.  I stand corrected and from the most unlikely source.

I am contentedly re-educated on this matter.  World, bring it!  I am awakening!