39. Yearning for life

How do we change bad situations? Why is it so tough to tackle Sustainable Development Goals, even when everyone seems on the same side? Allow me a little diversion to illustrate the difficulty … then persevere through the serious bits, because the conclusion not only illustrates why the Women’s Group ‘Tushikamane’ project is necessary, but casts an explanatory beam or two on how we might make Earth a better planet.

But to begin with the diversion:

Common chicory is a woody perennial found on the roadsides of Europe. Being one of the few roadside plants which is not poisonous to humans, it has found its way in various forms into our diet in times of need. In times of positively desperate need, in fact, because it tastes like a woody perennial found on roadsides.

 One such time of desperate need was in 1876 in India, when Gordon Highlanders sat around the camp fire gagging for a nice cup of wet after a hard day’s colonising. Coffee was more popular than tea in the early Victorian era, but coffee in the military field of combat was not to be had. Victorian Britain may have had plenty of colonies that produced the bean, but they also had plenty of other fields of combat, as they endeavoured to subsume the Canadians, Afghans, Chinese, Sikhs, Maoris, Hottentots, Ashantees, Zulus, Egyptians, Sudanese, Boers, Mexicans, Malays, Australian Aborigines, Caucasians, Ugandans, Tanganyikans, Persians, Bolivians, Nagas, Abyssinians, Burmese, Greeks, Crimeans, Japanese, West Africans, Ceylonese, Somalis, and of course, the Irish.

Then someone back home in Scotland had the brilliantly parsimonious idea to add chicory to coffee to bulk it out. Or, to be more precise, to add a tiny touch of coffee to chicory. The resulting brew is called ‘Camp’, and has been popular in every war ever since. Indeed, for many, it continued to be the chosen stimulant right up until the end of rationing in 1954.

Here’s the rub: my mum was brought up on the stuff, and so you would have thought that she would dream of the day when she could get an extra-hot-skinny-latte whenever the whim took her. Not so. Camp carried on being her tipple for another five decades after proper coffee became available. Why? Why do people carry on doing what they have always done, even when it includes drinking something that looks and tastes like mud?

Is the answer this: that awfulness is preferable to possibility? Or rather, that comfortable, predictable, secure, stable, in-your-control, familiar awfulness is more appealing to the human condition than uncomfortable, unpredictable, insecure, unstable, out-of-your-control, unfamiliar possibility?

Is this really true? If you do not like philosophy, you can stop reading now, but if you do, then get yourself a Grande Cappuccino, a comfy seat on an old leather sofa, an exorbitantly-priced two-centimetre-square piece of flapjack made of three seeds and a sultana, and read my take on this fundamentally vital topic:

Imagine a bubble village, where each house represents one of us:

For most of us, we make the inside of our bubble comfortable, predictable, secure, stable, and in-our-control. Indeed, so strong are these instincts, that we persuade ourselves that everything within the bubble is as it should be. Self-deception is at the heart of obstinacy. In this process, Knowledge and Reason are laid carefully in a bottom drawer, to be accessed only when called for. (We commonly use Reason not to modify what we want or believe, but to justify it.) The internal environment of our bubble may not be healthy, but we get used to it. We develop habits. We grow accustomed. We do what we always did. And we pretend to ourselves that this is How Things Should Be.

Then someone arrives with Information, or Reasons, or ‘Help’, or Instructions, and tries to break into our bubble – to persuade us, for instance, to stop smoking; to eat less cholesterol; to be nice to people we don’t like; to exercise more; to be more client-friendly; to be more spiritual; to be less traditionalist; and to be more reliable when told to buy some more bread next day even when she only told you in passing at midnight when you’d already had two glasses of wine, and anyway why didn’t she buy the bread when she was at the shops herself that very day; etc. Of course then when someone tries to break into your house, you bolt the boor, bar the windows, and hide behind the settee.

Others of us, (the more enlightened?), spend most of the time out of our own cocoon, pestering people by trying to break into theirs. But to give unwanted information is simply nagging; unwanted rationalisation is spurious; unwanted help is imposition; and unwanted instruction is oppression.

To make the whole situation more complicated, the entire bubble-village is itself within a bubble, and what applies singly to the individual, also applies collectively to the community and the culture. The bubble-villagers like things just the way they are, thank you. The truly enlightened, by this metaphor, will be outside all bubbles, exhausting themselves going from village to village, bashing their ideas on the outer walls. (Oscar Wilde was one such wanderer, whose quote, “Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong”, laid the foundation for 21^st century Democracy.) 

(It must have been a nightmare living with someone who only talks in quotes: 
You: "Good morning, Oscar. Cup of tea?"
Him: "I can resist everything except temptation!"
You: "So is that a yes?"
Him: "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
You: "So you do want one, then?"
Him: "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
You: "So you mean you want a cup?"
Him: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
You: "So you'd like a cup of tea?"
Him: "If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."

You: "OK, I'll make you a cup. I am a pretty good tea-maker!"

Him: "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

You: "I'm just saying I've always made a good cup of tea!"

Him "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

You: "I can't stand this! I'm going to make myself a cup of tea."

Him: "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."

You: "That's it! You're not getting a cup of tea."

Him: "Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

You: "I'm getting tired of this. I let you lie in, and then come up and offer you a cup of tea, and all I get is quotes!"

Him: "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

You: "Right! I'm chucking yours out of the window!"
Him: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
You: "Make your own, you sad ... !"
Him: "True friends stab you in the front."
You: "I'm off."
Him: "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.")

Anyway, where were we?
Oh yes! Let's come down with a bump back into musing on what makes people resist change.

Collective normality, it seems, is the ultimate determinant of our behaviour, and within those collective norms, we mainly sit in our bubbles and make our own delusions. And so it is that if a plane crashes in Russia with no survivors; or a Tsunami kills a quarter of a million; or your next-door neighbour develops aggressive cancer; or you develop chronic bronchitis; or you get put in prison with a tolerable enough room-mate; or the planet slowly overheats; or your country goes to war; or someone’s sister bleeds to death in childbirth on the floor of a mud-hut; that life goes on. You have your morning cuppa, and watch Coronation Street on Wednesdays.

Why do we behave in this way? Why do most of us live in a cocoon, within a cocoon-village? And what can we do about it? Maybe our carry-on-as-we-are mentality comes from feeling that when we lose what we are familiar with, we lose a bit of who we are, and that is scary. 

It should not be surprising, then, that change is so hard: To change the way things are, you have to change people. But you cannot change people - they can only change themselves. They have to take the chain off the door of the cocoon, have a peep outside, be lured to step out into uncertain reality ... and to become someone slightly different.

What might lure them - or us - to do this?! To change not just what we are familiar with, but actually to change something of who we are? Information, reasons, instructions are not enough. In fact, they can simply be intrusive. To get people to do something as radical as embrace change, things have to be yearned for. Indeed, I could go so far as to say this: without actual yearning, no sustainable change is possible. 

We cannot just tell people what they need. We cannot just pitch up with our ready-made solutions. Our stock-in-trade must be questions, rather than answers. We must listen. And to do this, we must give a voice to those who most need it - the women and children of remote villages for whom the death toll of life is so high. 

Such women have become accustomed to the awfulness of normality. They may feel powerless in the face the weary blocks that impede sustained development: inertia, opposition, vested interest, self-interest, partisan groups, intolerance, corruption, resentment, and ambition.

All of these, however, relate to the collective mentality, and when that collective thinking is a yearning for things to be different, then they will be.

And so to Tushikamane, the project which is trying to reduce tragic death of mothers and babies in the villages of Tunguli, in rural Tanzania. This month, the Tushikamane team leaders are visiting the MaiMwana project, to experience amazing examples of this collective determination in action. 

http://vimeo.com/12427420

http://www.maimwana.org/

Later in the month I will be going out to Tunguli, to be involved in the final week of team training. Thereafter, the team will begin the process of mobilising community participation and women’s voices in each of six hamlets deep in the Tanzanian bush.

Working from the manuals and materials kindly supplied by Women & Children First, we have produced a full set of materials, and have translated the key ones into Swahili for use by our front-line staff. All these resources are now posted on this blog. For those who like detail, they give a blow-by-blow account of how Tushikamane intends to reduce death of mothers and babies.

The bottom line is this: telling people what to do does not produce sustainable change. Even if the people are asking “Why must we do it?”, it means that they are still in the cocoon.

When they are asking “How can we do it?”, however, and yearning for the answer, it means that they are on the way to a new destiny, and for some, a new life.