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In the summer of 2003 I found myself hiking with a small team through a leech-infested cloud forest in the Himalayas. In big woven baskets carried by Nepali friends were parabolic dish antennas, long-distance radios, solar panels, and a cornucopia of other electronics: strange cargo in a region with no power, no phones, not even roads connecting the scattered mountain villages. But we had a mission. Against all odds we were building the area’s first computer network.

Nepali men not only carried the equipment, they helped construct and continue to maintain the network. Click above for larger image.

This wasn’t my idea. It was the vision of a Nepali man named Mahabir. Hidden behind Mahabir’s quiet nonchalance is a brilliant mind and a tectonic dedication to the wellbeing of his people.

Mahabir is a what I call a local visionary, and I believe he is the key to global development. When I went to Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world, I had no idea what its people needed or what opportunities existed. But Mahabir knew. He knew because he was raised there. He absorbed all the various nuances of Nepalese culture and society like we absorb our first language. And with great personal sacrifice he pursued a vision for his people that far exceeded what any outsider thought possible. Working for Mahabir’s vision was by far the best thing I could do for Nepal.

Mahabir holding the beginnings of a delicious dinner, with JoAnn, an American volunteer. Click above for larger image.

I think this is true everywhere. The best thing that I can do for Nepal or India or Haiti or Uganda, or for that matter for America, is to find a local visionary and support the work she gives her life to.

This caliber of local visionary is rare. But just one can change her community, her country, even the world. Most great global visionaries are local visionaries. Gandhi, Mandela, King: all were deeply and primarily rooted in the challenges and potentials of their place and people, and by their dedication they each shaped the global story.

Mahabir is one of a small handful of such visionaries that I have been lucky to meet. Sister Rosemary in Uganda is another, working simultaneously to rehabilitate war-affected girls and to recycle Uganda’s waste into socially useful products. Another Ugandan visionary is Abramz Tekya, who inspires hope, direction, and social consciousness in the youth of his country through breakdancing and hip-hop, the same pursuits that, as a young man, saved him from the dangers of the slums. Amani Matabaro, a Congolese visionary, splits his time between working for international non-profits and investing his earnings in community development work for his home village and those surrounding.

Those that I haven’t yet met include Alastair McIntosh in Scotland and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma (who today reportedly won a seat in Burmese parliament after decades of struggle), among thousands of others.

These remarkable people are the future of their communities and their countries. And they are part of a proud tradition. Local visionaries are not just the future of development, they are its best history, and its most impactful present. Collectively they are building a better world.

Living down the mouth
Of darkened waters steaming
Into my cup

Crumbling bricks like
Crackers into this tea of despair
This lonely sip

Overhead the sky embraces it clouds
Rolling over their mounds and playful colors
Darkening like eyes in candlelight dying

I watch from the cold footsteps
Farther away than movies’ heroes
Isolated like a gene under an eternal microscope

I scream as a tree hits the ground
But neither of us make a sound

That answers that.

[Written during my years working in northern Uganda's IDP camps.]

Gandhi found his vision for India in South Africa. I got the first glimpse of my future in Nepal. Sometimes what’s closest is only visible from a distance. When you feel impossibly distant, maybe you’re almost there.

[click the image above for wallpaper-sized version]

“The great disease of our time is meaninglessness,” says Alastair McIntosh in the introduction to his book, ‘Soil and Soul.’ He hooked me with that line. I feel the symptoms of that disease in my culture, in myself. It was my own search for the cure, in a long, winding sort of way, that led me to his book.

McIntosh, a Scottish professor of ecology in the grandest sense, offers a deeper diagnosis than most. And he offers, if not a cure, at least an ontological prescription, a worldview that, as we embrace it, might begin to flush out the virus.

“Dig where you stand,” he says to begin his diagnostic. McIntosh stands atop the fertile soil of the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and its long heritage of history and myth. He digs here, he says, not to celebrate his own heritage above others, but precisely to find those deep commonalities between his own slice of earth and others that share similar pains, and similar points of deep, if often latent, wisdom.

The pains of his heritage would certainly be recognized by millions, perhaps billions, as similar to their own. Scotland, like so many places in the world, was brutally colonized by the English. They overwhelmed Scottish military opposition (and terrorized civilians), dismantled and outlawed Scottish cultural education and expression, paved the way for Scottish lands to be owned by British aristocrats and plutocrats, and replaced the mutuality of village economics with the individualism of cash. During the 1800s and 1900s, half a million Scottish people were forced off their ancestral lands to make way for intensive sheep farming by wealthy British landowners in an injustice known as ‘the clearances’.

The result of this wholesale domination by the systems of wealth and power, says McIntosh, was that many Scottish people lost their most important connections: with their land and its myths and histories; with each other; and consequently with their deep, true selves.

Loss of soil, loss of community, and loss of soul, is McIntosh’s diagnosis, and reconnecting with them is his prescription. Vibrant, mythopoetic connections to one’s land and people, grounded in their true histories and circumstances, are at the heart of human well-being, of deep, existential rightness with the world, he argues. When these connections are fractured, people and the planet suffer.

With that simple formulation not only does McIntosh illuminate our world, but he lit a candle in some dark cavern of my own psyche, a place that had been pumping out emergency signals for some time, but that I had not yet discovered. It is, perhaps, the center of my own strain of the disease of meaninglessness.

The world that McIntosh illuminates is one in which consumerism has replaced connection. It’s a world in which we feel that we are more independent than ever, when really we have traded loving dependence on each other and a on generous planet for sterile dependence on electronics and machines and a global system in which the rich have de facto dominance over the less rich.

McIntosh says that this modern dysfunction is a dysfunction of love. Each of the things we have lost in McIntosh’s diagnosis is an instance of deep, natural love: love of the earth; love of each other; love of the deepest, truest parts of ourselves. And the only thing offered to replace such great loss is a global system that demands our complete submissive reliance, while causing us to degrade the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the only planet that we have to sustain life and joy. Any love of this system is a dysfunctional love.

McIntosh goes on to give examples from his life about how people and communities can renew their connections to soil and soul, and how with that new strength they can overcome the predatory elements of our global system. It is a hopeful prescription, and I will leave those stories for you to explore and enjoy on your own.

Here instead I will share some of my own story, and how McIntosh’s diagnosis seems uniquely applicable in my case, and so too his prescription uniquely hopeful.

Six years ago this month I moved from California to Uganda. An initial stay of three months turned into almost two years, and over the four years since I have split my time almost evenly between Uganda and America.

Such frequent movement between continents, seemingly between worlds, has kept me from putting down firm roots in either place. And though I am lucky to have tremendous friends on both sides, I seem always to be either gone or preparing to leave. Physical distance, over time, becomes emotional distance. You have heard of first world problems; I have two world problems.

When I arrived in northern Uganda in 2006, almost two million Ugandans were confined to terrible camps where suffering and death reached levels I had never imagined. It was enough to set me questioning the existence of a good God and to start punching angry, analytical holes in the faith of my youth.

Like the Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland, I suffered loss of connection to soil, to community, and to soul. And I feel it. I feel it as that epidemic of meaninglessness.

Like all of us, I crave meaning. So in its absence I scoured the universe for it. I searched in religion and science and humanitarianism. I looked in entropy and extropy, in reason and intelligence. I looked in the long, slow march of evolution and the supernova explosion of technology. I longed to align myself with the deep reasons of the universe.

But the universe, it seems, does not offer such meaning, does not know the meaning of meaning. The universe is not about meaning. We are. We, tiny temporal members of the vast universe need meaning, and perhaps we alone.

And through McIntosh’s ideas I found that we who need meaning also create it, and that love is its key ingredient. We imbue our lives and our world and our universe with meaning by loving things within them. And the things that many of us love together take on transcendent meaning: the earth, humanity, love itself. Soil, community, soul.

Meaning is not something outside of us waiting to be found, it is a product of our proper relationship to our existence, a loving connection to our place, our people, and the deepest truth in ourselves.

By repairing these fundamental connections, says McIntosh, these essential loves, we can begin to cure ourselves of the disease of meaningless, and we can start to heal the earth from the wounds we have inflicted on it in our fever. I am hopeful that he is right.

This is a special collaboration between me and my good friend Cody Small at Caava Design. I wrote the following words for my friends at Invisible Children. Cody was kind enough to incorporate them into the beautiful design below.

Have you ever walked up to the ocean, right where the waves are reaching up the sand, and just planted your feet? When a wave rushes back down the shore you can feel it trying to sweep you away. It tugs at your calves. It cuts grooves in the sand around your feet.

Click the picture for the full-size, printable version.

[Disclosure: Long ago I worked for Invisible Children, and I remain friends with a number of current staff and supporters.]

Kony 2012, like every Invisible Children media campaign, offers many things I wish they would change. But its goal is not one of them.

The film is touching and inspiring. As an advocacy piece, however, it is flagrantly simplistic, verges on misleading (like when Joseph Kony is shown with legions of rendered children behind him [11:30], without mention that his current force is thought to number in the low hundreds of fighters), and masks the complete uncertainty of its mission behind a veneer of easy cause and effect: if we tweet and put up posters, the US advisors will keep helping the Ugandan military, and Kony will be captured—the simple steps shown onscreen as falling dominoes.

This rosy reductionism contrasts sharply with a policy letter released with the film, to which Invisible Children are signatories, that asks President Obama for diplomatic help because, “Uganda withdrew more than half of the forces initially deployed to pursue LRA commanders and groups, and their forces are no longer allowed to operate in Congo, where the LRA is committing the majority of attacks on civilians.” No dominoes there.

The films Invisible Children makes are not advocacy films at all, they are advocacy advertising, advocacy propaganda. They are simplistic and over-produced and pop-cultured because that is what we as Americans respond to. Invisible Children pioneered this space, a space where other advocacy organizations still fear to tread, because they want to reach Americans. Lots of them. And they are flogged for it every time they release a new film.

How far they bend reality, and have bent it again with Kony 2012, is something about which I disagree with them. But whether we agree or not, it’s important to realize that their over-simplifications are not simple-minded, they are strategic. There is much more depth behind the scenes.

The most important questions raised by this film, and the ones that seem least touched by thoughtful criticism, are whether the film’s goal of militarily stopping Joseph Kony is worthy, and whether Invisible Children’s plan to do so is a good one.

To these I answer a deeply ambivalent ‘yes’.

Kony and his forces continue to abduct and kill, and two decades of evidence show that they are unwilling to commit to a peaceful resolution. The sooner they are stopped, the fewer people in central Africa will die by their brutal hands. There are deep, important concerns here that go unmentioned by Invisible Children, like the Christmas Massacres of 2008, when the LRA retaliated after a failed, US-supported strike against them by slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians. Nonetheless, it seems to me and to many informed observers, and importantly to villagers in the affected areas, that the military solution to Kony is the best of what are only bad remaining options.

And although Invisible Children’s plan of building a US lobby for continued and increased US involvement far from guarantees a positive outcome, it is intelligent and thorough, and is currently, as far as I can see, the best chance to bring Kony’s terrors to an end. If you agree with the goal of militarily stopping Kony (however hesitantly), this is the next step.

I wish Invisible Children would have offered viewers of their film a more complete, nuanced, and accurate look at the LRA conflict. But just as ends do not justify means, so means do not negate ends. The goal of stopping Kony is sound and Invisible Children’s plan is strong. I hope it works.

[Postscripts and Updates: I think it might be useful for me to address another key criticism of Invisible Children that's been making the rounds: that they are unprofessional and/or dishonest in managing of their non-profit. Here I can speak authoritatively and say that these criticisms are completely unfounded. Invisible Children is run with great professionalism, integrity, and transparency.]

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I’ve been publishing a lot of work on other sites recently. I’d be glad for you to check it out:

1. Elena Bondar, Ember Hero – a profile of a young woman following her dream to help survivors of sex trafficking
2. Spotlight: Ember Arts – the story of Ember, written for Darling Magazine
3. Dreams as Development – the emerging development philosophy of Ember
4. A Value Judgement - a short piece on judging people by the wrong metrics for Plywood People

The good people at Darling Magazine published an article I wrote on Ember this weekend. Below is an excerpt. Read the rest on the Darling site.

When you hear “African refugee woman living in extreme poverty,” you probably don’t picture a woman who has big dreams for herself and her family. I certainly didn’t.

But for the last four years I’ve worked closely with a small group of Ugandan women who lived that story. My company Ember Arts partners with 28 Ugandan women to create beautiful handmade jewelry. All of these women fled their homes to save themselves and their families from a civil war. And all of them survived a depth of poverty that I didn’t even know existed until I left the US.

I’ve learned that not only do they have big dreams, they get after them.

Before partnering with Ember, the Ugandan women we partner with crushed rocks into gravel for $1 per day in this rock quarry.

When I first met the women who would become our partners I saw my relationship to them as a sort of math problem. Their needs exceeded their resources. If I could help them balance that equation, all would be well.

But then we started to become friends. I heard their stories. I got to know their kids. I started to hear their hopes and dreams for the future.

Agnes wanted to finish her education, Jackie wanted to start her own salon, Esther wanted to build a house in the same village that she once fled at the ends of rebel bayonets. All of them wanted to send their kids to good schools and see them achieve the sort of success that would transform their families and communities.

This was more than just math.

Read the rest over at Darling Magazine.

original photo via monkeyc on flickr (click above for wallpaper size file)

I am addicted to the internet.

I realized it one evening last month, a few days after Christmas. I went to my office, which was closed for the holidays, to work on my book for a couple hours before I had to be somewhere. I opened my computer and sat down. An hour later I had done nothing.

Well, I had checked my email, refreshed Facebook any number of times, scrolled through some favorite blogs, read an ‘important’ article or two, and scanned my Twitter feed. But I had not even opened the file that held my half-written book.

And my book is my dream. It is what I want my future to be founded on. But instead of using that hour to push it closer to completion, I surrendered the hour to things that had no lasting value.

I realized in that moment that if I don’t write this book, then I am not the person I thought I was, that I aspire to be.

Thinking back over the past years of my life I saw a clear pattern: hours siphoned away into the stream of social media and blogs and funny videos. And if there’s one thing that determines whether a dream will starve or thrive, it’s how you use your hours.

650,000. That’s how many hours the average person gets on this earth. We sleep away a third of them and we’ve already lived another chunk. And whatever you believe happens when we die, the only life we know we have is the one we’re living right now, hour by passing hour. And the only way we will see the dreams of this life fulfilled is if we pour our hours into them.

I did the math for myself the other day. I have about 260,000 waking hours left. That’s it. And the hours that have passed can never be reclaimed. They have either enriched the current hour and pushed me closer to fulfilling my dream, or they haven’t. And for each one, it was my choice.

My mission for 2012 is to reclaim my hours, one by one, as they come to me, and to use them for the things I care about most.

That evening at my office I downloaded an app called Freedom that lets you cut off your computer’s networking capabilities for up to eight hours at a time. I set it for one hour, opened my book, and wrote.

Whatever your dream is, it needs your hours. Figure out what’s stopping you from putting your hours into the things you care about the most, and overcome it. Do it today. Do it now. Don’t waste another hour.