Dear friends,
I have been missing this space, and am so happy to welcome you back to Living Stories! Please forgive my long absence.
In this post, I turn my thoughts back to a visit I made last December to a place called Kufunda Village near Harare, Zimbabwe. I visited with my colleague Prof. Adipala Ekwamu, who was retiring from leadership of a pan-African network of universities engaged in agricultural research and food systems that I work with. Our purpose was to learn, connect with and gather ideas and inspiration from visiting a community dedicated to practicing the values of ‘healing through community’ — with emphasis on childhood learning and development, biodynamic farming and building an engaged, participatory way of life among a small community of about 80-odd people.
As a ‘living storyteller’ keenly aware of how stories can shape the life of the future as much as they carry the past, I was eager to see what inspiration Kufunda could offer. And I wanted to see if Kufunda might likewise offer some ideas to Adipala as he left behind the heavy demands of the university network to focus on the healing and emancipation of his own community in rural eastern Uganda.
Several years ago, I worked with Adipala on writing his autobiography, the Unfinished Journey. As we went to his village to revisit his childhood and interview his 100-year old auntie Ada and other family members, I saw through Adipala’s eyes a vanishing world. The abundance of fish in the vast Olyanai swamp — a tributary of the Nile River — that had once sustained the community, and where he had fished as a child, was long gone. Instead, we saw dozens of men, women and children scrambling along riverbanks and diving in the mud, surfacing with empty nets. The forests were gone. Shea and mango trees were being chopped down for charcoal production. The community had suffered deeply under the civil insurgencies of the 1980s up until the early 2000’s, and now suffered even more from environmental degradation and lack of economic opportunity.
We visited schools Adipala had attended, and other schools he was supporting, where up to 200 children crammed into a single classroom. Local jobs or industries were virtually nonexistent. As Adipala reflected, the traditional life of Olyanai was eroded, yet modernity brought little to offer in its place. He expressed his fears for the future, but his eyes lit up interacting with children we met in the schools. Perhaps with a sense of stubborn optimism that I wrote about before, he cared deeply about making the best possible future for the kids from his community through supporting local schools.
At Kufunda Village, we found a refuge of beauty, in the midst of verdant green forest. As we arrived, the children were celebrating their end of year festival inside of the thatch roofed school building, singing and dancing with infectious joy before their families.
We were then shown around by Admire Gwatidzo, a community facilitator. As he told us, Kufunda was born in 2002 with the mission to support a vibrant local community through the appreciation of its indigenous knowledge and peoples’ resources, skills and talents. Biodynamic farming was introduced on land that was previously farmed for tobacco, bringing an ethos of regeneration, caring for the land and sustaining the soil from one generation to the next. On arid and depleted soils, contours for water harvesting were introduced along with agroforestry practices. From an approach of working with all the living relationships from the soil microorganisms to the plants and trees that form the ecosystem, new abundance was slowly emerging.
Likewise in the community, an ongoing process of dreaming and building was being sustained, guided by constant attention to the questions: what are the resources and the talents available to work with in the community, and to help people earn a living? What are the sources of beauty and wealth?
These questions were continuously explored through community dialogues, women’s and men’s circles, and creative multi-day games including Go Deep and the Oasis Game, both intended to bring communities together to envision and map out their shared dreams. As Admire put it, Kufunda is a learning village. In fact, ‘Kufunda’ means learning in the Shona language. ‘We try and take practical actions and find natural and simple methods using what is available and making it possible to implement. Simple clay and rammed earth buildings with thatched roofs built in natural clearings. Each musasa tree takes 50 years to reach a full grown size. We’ve discovered that for the rains to come we need indigenous trees, they’re like the water towers.’
After showing us the biodynamic farm, Admire led us along a forested path to a large thatch roofed boma structure where community gatherings are held. On one wall of the structure was a mural of a great tree with the words: ‘Living the Future Today.’ (see photo above) To the left of the tree were depicted everyday scenes of the community today: people farming, cooking and dancing amidst crops and animals. To the right of the tree, the visions of a desirable and prosperous future that the community is visioning toward. Admire explained: ‘We called it living the future today, because whatever we want to see in 10 or 20 years, we have to start living it today. We can come back to the mural every year to see how we are doing. We want to see the herbal clinic - where are we? We want to see the youth having conversations to build the community - where are we?’
He continued:
It takes everyone who lives in this village to build this village. It takes each and every one’s voice. We sit in a circle. Each and every one shares their views and their challenges. When you’re speaking you are speaking to the centre for the best of our village. No matter who does what positive or negative, we speak into the centre and find a way to resolve it. It helps the voiceless people to be heard and share their wisdom. We say if you don’t share it’s your own fault, because you are the one who has seen it, the one with the idea. You have to contribute your ideas. We try as much as possible to find ways to address life with a very practical approach. We come up with an idea and we practice it. If it works, we take it out there.
We only had a morning to spend at Kufunda, but both Adipala and I left feeling hopeful, rejuvenated and touched by the beauty of the place and the approach. Small enterprises were growing, as community members made products such as jam and sold weekly biodynamic vegetable baskets to subscribers in Harare, in collaboration with other local farmers also trained in biodynamic practices. The children were cultivating their own biodynamic veggie beds and learning skills to develop farming as a business. Community facilitators were also sharing and offering learning and facilitated workshops and dialogues to other communities and organisations.
Our visit to Kufunda left me mulling powerful questions: what is the future you want, and how can you live that future today? How does a community build, sustain and live its vision of the future? What are the intentions, dreams, shared values and practices that enable this vision to live and grow in each person as they enact their part?
In a previous post, I explored the idea of enacting love in community. But if I am honest, in my own life any sense of community often feels tenuous, transient, fragmented. It is certainly not rooted in any particular place. Turning this phrase of ‘Living the Future Today’ in my mind, I think what a beautiful and powerful thing it is to hold a generative vision for the future as a community. Any community you are part of, whether large or small, in a village or scattered around the globe, harmonious and cohesive or fragmented and in conflict. All of us can do this. We can do it through telling stories together in our communities reflecting what we value and what we want to build. Through listening to and appreciating all our different voices, we can add our own richness and depth to a greater whole and cross-pollinate our visions with the different knowledge, skills, experience and perspectives that we offer.
Even through the simple outdoor storytelling gatherings I offer, for example, I do the work of developing, nurturing and sustaining community in my own small way. I offer stories and invite conversation around them. I feel how much I need that thick, nurturing and mutually sustaining weave of relationships that holds one’s sense of belonging in the world. Yet I also feel what a challenging, difficult, vulnerable thing it can be to do the work of community. What if no one responds to my call?
As the writer Toko-pa Turner points out, many of us steeped in ‘modern’ culture are unskilled in the practice of ‘community-ing’. It can be a struggle to reconcile practices of reciprocity and working for the common good with the individualistic and transactional ways we are taught by modern culture. Yet as she points out, ‘community-ing’ is a skill that we can all learn, develop and practice with conscious effort. And it is a practice through which we can offer our gifts, talents and creativity to those around us, as we receive theirs in turn.
This sort of reciprocity is part of the magic of telling stories in community. The stories we tell can in themselves be offerings through which we connect, listen to one another, share our different points of view and come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of one another.
This week, I am thinking back to the beauty and inspiration of my visit to Kufunda in Zimbabwe, and thinking forwards with a clearer sense of purpose to my own intention to help people and communities seed and explore generative stories; stories to give us greater insight about living the future we want today.
With love,
Megan
This really spoke to me Megan! Thank you!!! I too struggle to feel that I belong to any cohesive community. Spread out across the world, focused on earning a living, feeling perhaps you aren't in the right place. I recognise how I sit on my own and wonder what to do with my passions and abilities - my life. At times I feel I have lost my passion and doubt whether I have any unique or valuable abilities. And I think its because I perceive myself as an island, an individual among billions, and that what I do is a prescribed job that could be done by anyone. Output, with very little positive feedback or input. A transactional approach to life. How do we connect? I sense how challenging it is to step outside of our safe little bubble and make ourselves available, and so too, vulnerable.