Who Knew?

And so we begin with the revelations about how truly sheltered I am. We've just returned from a week of pre-departure training about all things medical, insurance, cultural and procedural. But with the exception of the astounding variety of worms we stand to contract just by leaving Australia, far and away the most eye opening thing for me was the realisation that there is a big, wide development industry out there. Of course, I knew that there were plenty of NGOs and an Australian government aid agency, but it hadn't really occurred to me that together all those sort of organisations make up a multi billion dollar sector all of their own. There's a whole section of highly educated, veteran professionals (including the five other magnificent folk heading to Nepal in the same deployment as Matt and I, pictureed here with Nepal's Ambassador to Australia and his lovely wife) who have made their career out of working in development. As I said, these are fairly elementary observations I guess, but they've just never entered my realm of consciousness. All this time, I thought I was one of a raggedy bunch of misfits (none of whom I know, but losely based on that arrogant yet strangely alluring doctor from the movie Beyond Borders) who make a sense of purpose outside of profit a primary job criteria. It's a real paradigm shift to think about myself as just one contender in the highly competitive development industry - it doesn't really improve my job prospects, but it has definitely sparked new ambitions!

One Great Thing

In this age of 30 second World Vision commercials and charity telemarketing, is it naïve and trite to want to make a difference in the world? Worse, is it arrogant to think one can? Maybe. It’s certainly a question I’ve struggled with since I first began to get this itch to go somewhere and do something significant. When all the rhetoric about being a good person, and eventually a good parent, just didn’t seem like enough – enough to satisfy my own sense of reaching my potential, enough to fulfil all that my parents and other big influences have invested in me, enough to invest not just in the society that I currently live in, but the one that I wish I did and hope I will. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s devastatingly important to be a good person in the ordinary, every day sense – I believe that’s what God created us to be and what we all inherently want to be. But I also think we have a tendency to use the concept as a bit of a cop out, a conscience salve, a motivation sedative. I think we all have a responsibility to take notice of what’s happening to the world, both down the road and across the dateline, to expand our sense of possibility, and most importantly, to be prepared to get off the couch. Which brings me to my One Great Thing Theory.

Life is busy and stuff happens. We all have lives to lead and people to love and beauty to imbibe and mountains to summit and if we didn’t there wouldn’t be any point to it all. I can’t stand guilt mentalities about the good things in life – feeling sheepish about your own abilities and successes or the blessing and bounty of your country and community doesn’t help anyone who’s less fortunate. I think everyone should have the opportunity to enjoy those good things and we should focus on lifting the bar up across the board, rather than striving for universal mediocrity. The problem is, it’s nigh on impossible to pursue such lofty notions on a day to day basis, in between doing the washing and remembering to shave your legs before going to work in the morning. Therefore, as well as maintaining my general good person status, I aspire to achieve One Great Thing in my lifetime.

I’m not sure what it will be, but I’m certainly keeping my eye out for it. It could be this trip to Nepal. It could be funding a string of eco-friendly, locally operated guesthouses in developing countries, or creating some innovative way to curb carbon emissions, or painting a masterpiece, or knitting a world record number of socks for children and the elderly (although this would involve me learning to knit as that’s something of a gap in my skill base). Maybe I’ll get on a real roll and achieve more than one.

But what if, as a society, instead of indoctrinating ourselves to believe that a bank balance is the most important measure of a company and a country and a life, we looked at what had been done to raise the world’s bar? What if everyone aimed to achieve One Great Thing? We’ve got a population of six billion, and surely six billion Great Things would start to make a dint.