I remember the day I got cut from the university rowing team for being too “husky” 
. “I am sorry Mills” coach said gravely “but you are just too heavy for the other guys in the boat”. As I walked home that morning I knew there was a champion rower hidden somewhere inside, it was just a matter of digging him up from beneath the accumulation of 3$ pizza slices and Clancy’s amber ale that can accompany a hearty, yet sedentary, academic career. What I needed was an Inciting Incident, some crisis that would make me move. Getting dropped from the team became, instead of an opportunity to feel sorry for my plump self, that inciting incident.
12 months later, 100 pounds lighter, and a head full of Donald Miller’s ideas on Story, I met Venture Expeditions and joined a team to climb Kilimanjaro. Why? Well maybe it has something to do with the same principle:
“Characters don’t change without being forced to change. An inciting incident is the event in a movie that causes upheaval in the protagonist life. The protagonist, then, naturally seeks to return to stability. And in order to do that, he HAS to solve his new problem” – Don Miller
But raising the funds and climbing the mountain are just half of the “problem”.
I recently completed a degree of International Development at Dalhousie University. I was a bleeding idealist when I entered the program but I soon became disillusioned with even the idea of intervention from “Northern” or “Western” world into the “Southern” or “Third World”. A shameful history of colonialism and the recurring modes of oppression in a rapidly globalized world seemed to underscore the lesson that good intentions do not, on their own, make good results. Just what is the model of “Development” we are selling anyway? Cable-television, fast food and amoral corporations?
As a Canadian I had to wrestle with the fact my access to post-secondary education, clean water, food and health care puts me in the absolute top 1% of the worlds wealthy. Millions suffer and die from the lack of what I take for granted. Is there a connection between my wealth and their poverty? Why are things so complex, and insanely unjust, that attempts to end suffering often make it worse? What can I do? Hearing the fuzzy sentiments of my peers did little to alleviate my growing ennui. Soon the question became how can I throw myself into an experience that will force me to change?
After we climb Kilimanjaro our team will be serving with Kenya Children’s Fund at a school in a slum outside Nairobi. Kenya is a country where currently about half the population is under 15. Kenya Children’s Fund is writing a different story over the reality of disease that has left over 700,000 children as orphans on the streets. Given proper education, health care and nourishment these children have limitless potential to be leaders of a new generation. This is the story of the future leaders of Kenya getting the education they will need from African professionals. This is better than “participatory development”.
It is an honour to go on behalf of everyone who sponsored me, to support Kenya Children’s Fund and the Kinyago-Dandora School, and to witness a different story being written. There are no delusions of ‘saving the world’ or of being altruistic. The greatest benefits of this journey will be the learning our team experiences. We are not going as ‘hero’s from the west’ but are open to being wrecked and challenged. I know I am blessed to see life on other side of the world on my first journey outside of North-America, to witness a different perspective on community and on what is really important during this short sojourn on earth.
This is a journey to reclaim hope despite growing up on a planet of rapidly expanding slums, environmental degradation, disease and poverty. I am ready to say that my story is not a solo voyage even though I am naive, often self-absorbed and confused. This is a trip that we are all on.
Being cynical is like stopping all your stories before they start. I am tired of being ashamed of my privilege, of the illusions of disconnection and powerlessness in a culture where its easy to be distracted into comfort by trivialities. I am tired of second-guessing every course of action before it starts, dismissing ideals as a luxury of the rich. It is too easy to remain aloof outside the mess and to disqualify yourself from the tension. But that is not what we are called to.
“We begin to think the Christian life should be free of hardship. We think God is going to navigate us around the hard things. But there is really nothing in scripture that should lead us to believe this. What God offers, instead, is to be with us, to not abandon us, even in the midst of our hardship.”- Don Miller
I know that a short trip like mine is not “the answer”. I know you don’t have to go on a crazy adventure to find significance, fight injustice or join the gospel revolution. The realities of poverty and suffering are in front of us from city streets to our own homes. But for some reason this is an opportunity for one kid to move from the abstract to the tangible. This is just an inciting incident, where my story intersects with a bigger one, and where I say to my cynicism you can come that far, but no further.
you shall not pass!
