Ashoka
Spain 🇪🇸
Our executive team sat down for a nice French meal in Dakar. Preparations were complete to welcome 150 young people and families, half African, half international, to our 7th “Planting Together” campaign partnering with the “Great Green Wall” in Senegal.
We barely convinced our African field director to put down her cell phone, at least until dessert. It was time to celebrate! When fresh fruit and cream arrived, Brigitte* spilled the news. “Uh, the army has decided to use the housing we reserved, and the school set up for early arrivers is not available…” What? No place for people from Hong Kong to South Africa, London to Gabon arriving in three days?? “T.I.A.” “This is Africa,” our hosts said with a smile.
New accomodation was found, 12,000 trees took root in the barren north, our medical team attended 1000 patients in three days, and children’s activity groups brought cheer to hundreds of Fulani kids. Disaster or divine favor? Sometimes it was hard to distinguish!
“Planting Together" began as a question for our European King’s Kids Leadership Team: How could we partner with African teams to forge leadership and build a better future together? We were a youth changemaker organization, blessed with thousands of participants worldwide, but not with large funding resources or highly skilled engineers normally required for agricultural work in this great continent. Advisors cautioned “There are a lot of white people with good ideas in Africa.” Locals warned that outside projects ofter meant Western managers sitting in air-conditioned trucks while Africans bore the heat doing the actual work. What if we did the work, braving the summer sizzle and laboring side-by-side with Africans on a African-led project?
In 2013, after 2 years of research and pilot teams, we commissioned 100+ internationals and Africans to “get their hearts clean and their hands dirty” in West Africa. Years later, besides setting a tiny green brick in the wall against desertification, did we really inspire the soul of the region in some way?
I remember Sgt. Diallo*, the Northern field manager remarking, “We live differently here because of you guys!” Really? “Everyone knows what you have done, spending enormous sums of money to come from China, Brazil, Spain, just to help us. We used to send our children out in the dry season to gather fodder for animals. Now, because of this project, they’re at home. The parents decided we should start a school for them.” Really? Where? “Right there,” he pointed to a low cinderblock building. He then told about the men of the village protesting, “If all these people pay to work in our fields, it’s not fair that the government gives us money! We refuse to be paid!”
Their “strike-in-reverse” only lasted a few days, but signalled profound changes percolating up through the tender soil of their hearts because a bunch of clueless foreigners decided to plant hope back in the ground…together!
*Names have been changed