1. On the back of an African man’s motorcycle, a man you’ve never met before, as he weaves you through traffic that looks, feels, even smells like chaos.

2. On a stack of mahogany planks in a wood worker’s shop, the ground soft and undulating with sawdust and shavings.

3. Inside the cavernous speeding hulk of a resurrected Chinese bus, now rechristened the “White Cock,” in a locally clear reference to poultry.

4. In the Dickensian office of the production manager of the country’s largest printing business, the large windows in every wall allowing the Indian manager clear view of his dominion.

5. On a small wooden stool usually reserved for elders, watching the gray-cloth-covered corpse of a friend be carried into a dark hut as a young girl dances and a row of happy ducklings waddle by.

6. In a house or a hut, on a wooden chair or a couch, a woman kneeling in front of you, pouring water over your hands in preparation for the meal that she has spent all day preparing for you.

7. On the hot red ground amidst piles of crushed stones, surrounded by women teaching you proper stone crushing technique, your penance for asking to take their photograph.

8. On the inflated lip of a yellow raft, being sucked voraciously down into a standing wave that has stood for all time, and will soon fall victim to hydroelectric development.

9. On a small worn white swimming dock leaning out from an island on a fathomless crater lake, your feet sending shockwaves thru a reflected perfect sky.

10. In the waiting room, or in the room waiting. So much waiting in so many rooms.

When you move to Uganda you get a whole new set of neighbors. When I moved to Gulu in 2006, my neighborhood was suddenly full of people displaced by war, wives who had lost husbands, children who had lost parents, most surviving various states of poverty.

At the same time I was exploring ethics and had become fascinated by the elegant, powerful formulation recorded in the Gospels: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This simple phrase seems to carry in it a vast sea of ethical instruction. The same ethic appears in religions and cultures throughout the world. This principle, it seems, is foundational.

But what does it mean? Practically speaking, what am I supposed to do?

That’s what I have been asking myself since I got all those new neighbors. Though I can’t offer you the complete answer to that question, there is one conclusion that I’m pretty sure of:

Helping people achieve their dreams is one of the best ways to love them. Maybe the best way.

Love your neighbor, it says, as yourself. And how do I love myself? I get up every morning and try to make my dreams come true. I try to build the world that I want to live in.

There is perhaps nothing more definitive of human beings than our capacity to dream, and to bring dreams to life. It’s the central human magic.

So loving my neighbor as myself means supporting her in making her dreams come true, at least in part, and as I think more about it, maybe in large part.

That’s our commitment to the women of NUPECA, our partner co-op here in Uganda. Our fundamental goal in partnering with them isn’t to overcome poverty or put food on the table or put kids in school, though those are great steps along the way.

Our fundamental goal is to help our Ugandan partners achieve their dreams. After all, we’re neighbors now.

Economic Choices in the Face of Extreme Poverty

You have $1,000 to give away.

In front of you are two women, both widows with families, both living in extreme poverty. If you split the money evenly between them, both will be able to feed their families until their children are grown, both will be able to afford a little bit of healthcare, but neither will be able to properly educate their families. If you give all the money to one woman, it will transform her family forever through nutrition, healthcare, and great education, but the other woman and her family will be left in extreme poverty.

What do you do?

A somewhat more complex version of this problem is faced constantly by non-profits and socially-oriented businesses. Need is great, our resources are limited. Do we spread our resources thinly across as many households as possible? Do we invest deeply in a few lucky families? Do we find some sort of middle-ground?

It’s a gut-wrenching choice. The stakes are literally life and death.

At Ember, we invest deeply in a limited number of families to catalyze transformational, generational change. This means that we work with fewer women than we could, each of those women makes more money than she otherwise would, and instead of basic improvements in nutrition and living conditions, we drive towards deep, long-lasting change, especially university education for their children.

Why? Because we believe that a Ugandan will do more for Uganda than we ever could. And if we provide a platform upon which Ugandan kids can stay healthy, get educated, access opportunity, and become successful leaders, they will transform their communities in more ways and over longer periods than we could hope to do ourselves.

Still, the choice is not easy. It means saying no to people who need and deserve our partnership, people who will go on living in extreme poverty until they find some way out of it.

But instead of watering down our impact to bring them in immediately, our goal is to grow, to work deeply with more and more families and communities, and to see, eventually, the long-term change that new local leaders will create. To help create a new community in which we are no longer needed, only loved.

Last night a great conversation and a poorly timed cup of coffee kept me up into unreasonable hours. I checked my email before bed and found a request from one of my colleagues: Could I come up with a one-sentence soundbite that could be easily shared with busy business people, like rising life expectancy or something?

It’s a good idea – people often don’t have time for longer stories. But last night I couldn’t think of what that line might be. This is what I wrote back.

Michelle Larson doesn’t look the type to wade through knee-deep trash along the border of two developing countries. She’s pretty, stylish, and at the very least hygienic. Nonetheless she points to one such jaunt into the garbage as a formational moment in her life.

“The first time I took a visit to the city garbage dump in Mae Sot, Thailand [a Thai city on the border with Burma], I found myself knee deep in the trash, playing with the children who live there,” Michelle recounted to us by email from Mae Sot.  “Many of them had skin problems, horrible coughs, and smelled like… trash.” The children’s Burmese mother said that settling her family in the dump was the lesser of two evils, that keeping her family in Burma was far more dangerous.

Michelle has since spent the last several years traversing the borderlands of Thailand and Burma, educating herself on the brutal military regime that tyrannizes the Burmese people to this day, and exploring ways to support the many refugees that flee for their lives.

She helped found an organization called Eleho that publicizes the hardships of people in Burma and supports the best organizations serving them. And recently she was asked by those organizations to teach English to Community Health Workers, helping them to better understand the medical texts and drug labels that they rely upon. She is there now, working on a voluntary basis to spread hope in Burma.

We are proud to announce that Michelle is our next Ember Hero, and that 50% of all online sales through the end of October will be donated to Eleho to support Michelle’s work. You can shop online here.

Read the rest of Michelle Larson: Ember Hero »

During the month of July we kicked off a new project – Ember Heroes.  Our goal is to ignite hope by highlighting American women who are leading inspirational lives, and by supporting their projects and passions by donating 50% of a month’s online sales to the nonprofit of their choice.

Our first Ember Hero was Lisa Dougan, a young woman who has inspired thousands with her efforts to end Africa’s longest running war, and by her commitment to building and maintaining deep relationships with people from any political, economic, and social realm.

Case in point, she’s recently been getting to know a group of teenagers in Washington, D.C., kids that have grown up in tough family and financial situations.  When we reached out to Lisa about being our first Ember Hero, she was trying to raise funds to send 35 D.C. teens to a summer camp that had life-changing potential.  We were excited to join her efforts.

Thanks to your response, Ember cut a check to Young Life to send two kids to summer camp, and Lisa reached her goal of seeing all 35 teens glimpse a different perspective on life.  Thanks for helping us, and Lisa, ignite hope.

[Photos from the Young Life camp]

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