I just returned from seven weeks with Seeds of Hope Zambia! It was wonderful to meet the people whose lives are being impacted, and hear firsthand the real changes they are experiencing. I spent hours listening to people’s stories and asking them to show me what seed of hope had been planted in them. But as I traveled around, the question “Are we there yet?” began to follow me from community to community.

It seemed that people in every community, from rural to peri-urban, had the same answer to my question of how their lives had been transformed by Seeds of Hope’s work. “We’re not sick anymore.” I thought maybe I wasn’t phrasing the question clearly, or perhaps something was being lost in translation. I found myself constantly wondering with disbelief: Is the highest hope of everyone I interview really just not to have diarrhea? We want to transform these communities. Are we there yet? It took a few weeks before I realized the problem wasn’t their answer, it was that I didn’t know how to hear what it really meant to them. I couldn’t imagine being sick so frequently that the absence of stomach problems was equal to a life transformed. I was asking people to think about an existence with no “impossible”, but their reality was a life with no sickness.

Once I learned to listen and ask the right questions, I saw that people do aspire to more—the little boy who wants to become a teacher, woman training to become a community health promoter—and having access to safe water
and living without sickness are the first steps of many towards their hopes becoming reality. In some places, these steps are taking entire communities in a new direction, like the community changing its name from Chipulukusu
(“cursed” in Bemba) to Mapalo (“blessing”).

I learned in Zambia, that where we provide practical help, nurture local responsibility, and empower people to embrace hope, transformation will ultimately follow.

So we’re not there yet, but we are on our way.

Article by Sope Otulana, photos by Pam Crane and Erin Schauer