A second thing that will be happening next month is that my students will be learning about living in a sufficiency economy community. They will be learning how to farm, how to cook, how to make organic fertilizer, how to recycle, how to build, how to make soap and herbal medicines. They will spend a month on a vegetarian diet no where close to a Pizza Hut or McDonald's.

They will also be learning to appreciate life without a lot of the things they are used to. There is TV at the Asoke community, but not individual TVs. The community watches TV together. Most of the students I will be taking to Sisa Asoke are not poor .... not by local standards here and certainly not by Ugandan standards but they are poor by western standards. They aspire to live like Americans. (I wonder where that dream came from!) I will be very interested to see what their reaction is to people who have chosen to travel a different path and to find happiness, joy and personal growth in a life style that says that possessions are not the way.

For those of you unfamiliar with Buddhism, The Buddha, before his awakening, came form a royal family. He was a prince but renounced that as not leading to true happiness and he went on a spiritual "quest". The concept of renouncing wealth and choosing to live a simple life will not be new to them but seeing it in action, I suspect, will be learning that story on a new level.

While building this community and helping Aj. Khwaundin to set up the learning-by-doing school is central to my personal goals, it is too broad to be a research proposal. My research will focus on a wee, tiny, small part of this and that is the evaluation tools. I have been working on developing tools that will help us to measure personal and community development. (I hope they are better at that than the Gross Domestic Product or Human Development Index are) I will be testing those tools when I am at Sisa Asoke by interviewing and surveying that community. I will be teaching the students how to interview and ask questions and listen to and record answers. That means we will be working a lot on language. They will learn how to keep a detailed journal.

The rainy season should be done while we are there (though it doesn't feel like that right now!) and we hope to be able to do some building. Learning how to make temporary structures and permanent.

In the discussion with George Ayittey, He emphasized the need to get down to the bottom and deal with the grass-roots cheetahs rather than the "governmental" hippos. In the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy, we see the same thing... an emphasis on starting at the bottom and working on the individual. I think that all of us know this concept on some level or another. Change only happens one person at a time. The King called it an inner explosion. Here is an image that might help

I believe each of us has to change ourselves. I also have finally realized that I can not change you. (Boy, did that release a lot of energy to other more useful projects!) I can live my life and hope that it influences you.

There was a chant/song that I learned from Thich Nhut Hahn's sanga when I went to hear him in Bangkok a few months ago:

Breathing in, Breathing out
Breathing in, Breathing out
I am blooming like a flower
I am fresh as the dew
I am strong as the mountain
I am firm as the earth
I am free

Breathing in, Breathing out
Breathing in, Breathing out
I am water reflecting
What is real, what is true
I feel a space
Deep inside of me
I am free, I am free, I am free

I am not sure that Buddhists hear the same thing I do in that second verse, but to me it tells me that I have to live my life so that what people see in me is real and true. I have to put down my masks that I might have to protect me from the world or perhaps to hide from the world or even to pretend with. When I can do that I can finally communicate.

Christianity is very similar I think. God gives us empowering forgiveness in the gift of His Son. But if we can't admit our faults (it's required to ask for the forgiveness) then the gift sits on the table unopened.

Everywhere around the world, people are taught that we need to stop, admit that we are imperfect and need the help of others. We must admit our need of community. Until we do, we will wallow in our pain, and suffering and continue to create more misery for ourselves and others. The only thing I can do is in my own life, witness to the power of community. I can only work to reflect what has worked for me and listen to what has worked for you and see if there isn't something there that will help both of us grow.

Mainly that is what I want to work on in Uganda in March, April and May. I want an opportunity to meet the people who want to make this incredibly powerful community in Uganda. I want to see the phoenix rise out of the ashes of war in northern Uganda and become a beacon to others that from want and pain and sorrow we can rise to joy and power and that it can be done sustainably, and in a better way than has been reflected by the industrialized west.

Amen. Let us pray. ;-) [End of preaching!]

Edit: repaired the image link.