And then a Rainbow

Across a range of cultures and thousands of years, the rainbow seems to have always been meaningful. The marvel of how white light can split open across the sky into a range of colors, always in the same order, always in an arc, captivates us.

With the wide range of symbolism given to the rainbow, from the biblical idea of a promise from God, to the unity it represents in contemporary culture, there seems to always be one overarching idea that holds true for all: Hope.

This last year has been a tough one for Emily, specifically with her brother recovering from a severe health scare (he is a young, fit, endurance athlete and scientist who suffered a stroke earlier this year). During the darkest days of that, Emily has reflected on how seeing a rainbow with her sister-in-law Marie always somehow managed to invoke hope.

These last few weeks in Lesotho brought the rainy season to us. The ground and the crops need it, that’s for sure. But living in a bustling, developing city means that when it rains we often lose power and have sewer overflows. The roads somehow melt like sugar as soon as the rain falls, and holes open up big enough to swallow wheels of cars. The gardens get muddy, the dog turns from white to dark brown, and everything just feels a bit more exasperating.

And then a rainbow.

And sometimes a rainbow while Jane is jumping on the trampoline doing splits, which just seems to make the world ok again!

The rainbow isn’t a solution to anything. It doesn’t even really benefit us or fix anything in a concrete way, yet it seems to point towards something bigger.

South Africa, post-apartheid, has been known as The Rainbow Nation. Not only because of the coming together of all races and cultures toward unity, but also because it’s a nation pointed towards hope. The promise of what could be.

It doesn’t always feel that way though. A browse through the news in South Africa doesn’t really fill anyone with hope. Rolling blackouts (called load shedding) is the norm now throughout the country. Corruption in government departments and the deterioration of infrastructure and institutions dominates the news. It can sometimes be hard to see the rainbow through all of that.

Sometimes it takes a rugby team to show that to us.

Over the last few months South Africa participated in the Rugby World Cup, a competition that takes place every 4 years. We rarely pay attention to rugby, but as South Africa continued to do well and get through to each new round of the competition, we gained interest.

Two weeks ago we painted our faces with the flag colours and settled down to watch the semifinals against England: a game we won by a single point! A collective hope was building to the final, but we knew that playing against New Zealand would be a mighty task.

And so last week, we again painted our faces (despite watching the game from our living room in Lesotho).

What happened over the next 80 minutes was breathtaking. Seeing a team play so hard, and so fiercely was one thing. Seeing a whole nation gathered behind them was another thing altogether. For this moment no one cared about the load shedding, or the potholes, or the long list of other problems. Everyone in South Africa was focused on the game. There were tears in the stands from large tough men who had probably never had water run from their eyes before. There was a coming together of every race, culture and religion into a moment of unity.

The whistle sounded after 80 minutes of play, with South Africa victorious by a single point, once again!

That moment for South Africa was the rainbow. The promise of hope. Not a solution in itself, but a glimpse of what is possible.

We often want solutions, concrete steps of what it will take to go from A to B. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” is often how we go about our lives, our jobs, or how we face problems in the world.

The rainbow doesn’t do this.

The rainbow shines across the sky and forces us to look up, to look away from our daily concerns and problems, and to see just for a moment that the world is beautiful.

And filled with possibility.

Important Pulane Children Centre News

15 years ago I made a choice that would steer the next chapters of my life. The decision to move to Lesotho and assist at a children’s home would be one that impacted my life for longer than I could have known. My family’s lives have been shaped and steered by our involvement in PCC, and we would like to take some time to share with you some big, exciting and challenging news about where PCC is, and where we see it going in the future.

I’d like to walk you through a brief history of PCC and then share with you our ideas and hopes for its future. As I write this, I realize that many of you have followed along and supported us at different points in this story. Some follow along because you have visited PCC. Some because you know us and support our work through MAF. Many of you we have never met but you support us, or the centre because you believe it is doing something good. We are grateful to each of you.


A Brief History

In December 2006 I resigned from my job as a flight instructor, and somehow found the nerve to tell my parents that as of May 2007, I would be living in the mountains of Lesotho, to help a lady named Jill with a children’s centre she was looking after.

(Right: My first few months in the mountains of Lesotho)


I arrived in 2007, and in 2008 with Jill, we moved to Pulane and in October 2008 opened the Pulane Children’s Centre (Right). The only reason for the quick summary is to get through the story faster, not to give the impression any of that was quick and easy.


I stayed on in Pulane until 2011, when I felt like my stint in Lesotho had come to an end, and I wanted to focus on flying again.

In 2013, Jill suffered a stroke, and in the years that passed, Emily and I often wrestled with the thought of where PCC would go in the future, once Jill retired. We wondered about that so often and so hard that in 2016 we realized we could be part of the answer.



And so after much thought and another job resignation, our family of 3 (Jane was 18 months old at the time), set off and moved back to PCC (Above).

Our focus from day one of taking over from Jill was to ensure PCC was set up for the future. A future that included less involvement from foreigners, and more management and leadership from Basotho.

In 2018, I was employed by MAF and we moved 5.5 hours away to the city. It was time to see if what we had been doing would work: Would the local staff at PCC run things well enough that we didn’t need to live there? The answer was a loud and confident YES!(Right: Our amazing management team, Ntate Hlompho, Me’ Esther and Ntate Labone)



In the last year, Emily and I have been wrestling and thinking about what the next steps are for PCC. We feel strongly that our goals have been met, as the local staff have grown and taken ownership of the centre so confidently. We are also aware that in certain areas we are reaching the limits of our skill set: neither of us are educated in childhood development, trauma counseling, or even management. There is a lot that PCC can still become, and we have seen for a while now that our limitations with time and skill that are stopping PCC moving forward. Lastly, we are aware that we cannot stay in Lesotho forever. In the next few years Jane will move into higher grades, and ultimately there will not be schooling opportunities for her in Lesotho. This is a reality all MAF families in Lesotho face and have to figure out, and our time to make that decision will come sooner than we realize. For our family, that will mean a move out of Lesotho in the next few years.

The Future


With all of that in mind, we spent the last year thinking about the best next step for PCC. After much time and consideration we have decided to begin the process of handing PCC over to new leadership.

Our main goals in this transition are:

- To have as little disruption on how PCC operates day to day.

- Take another step towards local leadership empowerment.

- Provide resources and support to PCC to keep improving.

In order to achieve this, we approached our long time friends and supporters from Liberty Church in Ireland to see if they would be interested in taking ownership of this responsibility. Liberty Church has been involved with PCC since 2015, and started their own children’s centre (under a project called One Day) in Butha Buthe in the north of Lesotho in 2018.



Rob Duff, one of the Pastors at Liberty Church, will be the point of connection between Liberty and PCC. Rob has been on the board of trustees for PCC/AFACTL since 2018. He and his family have visited Pulane regularly over the years becoming good friends with Jill, the staff, and kids (Rob and his family pictured above with Jill).

In addition to asking them to be the responsible overseers, we also created a new position on the ground in Lesotho called the Project Manager. This role is essentially a manager who oversees the day to day of PCC, the finances, the administration as well as sets the course for how PCC develops and improves in the future.



This person’s job is to support the staff at PCC and make sure they have what they need to do their jobs well. We interviewed and offered this job to an amazing person called Lineo (Pictured above with Me’ Esther).She is passionate about development projects that involve children and youth. She is also a natural leader and mentor and we are convinced she will work very well with our team at PCC to support them and help them achieve their goals. In fact, she has been a regular visitor to PCC since 2018, and has often been a resource for us with kids with challenging behavior or counseling needs.

Over the next few months we will be working hard to ensure that the Project Manager here in Lesotho knows how to run PCC well, and has a clear vision for where PCC is going. We will also be working with the Liberty Church team to make sure they understand what it means to direct PCC, to be ultimately accountable for it, and to provide the support and leadership that will continue to help PCC grow.

 

As our family still plans to be in Lesotho for some time to come, we will be helping PCC in more of a consultant position as this transition takes place and settles. The reality for us is that my work at MAF has increased as I have become the Director of Operations and the Chief Pilot, and it has not been sustainable for us to give PCC and MAF the full time and energy needed for each one to thrive. Right: Rob and Lineo at PCC


I would also like to address the recent passing of Jill Kinsey, the co-founder and previous Director of PCC. Jill passed away in June, but our decision to take these steps with PCC were in motion well before that. In fact, the last conversation I had with Jill was talking about how she felt about Liberty Church stepping in to assist us and ultimately take over.


She was happy about that idea, and had a lot of love for the leadership of Liberty Church and the work they do. So, despite the timing, we are not making this change because of Jill’s passing. Above: The board of trustees for the Centre in 2021. Our family, Jill, and Ntate Mojela, Ntate Sekeka and Me’ Martha.

Our hope through all of this is to clearly set up PCC for a bright future. We have loved playing a part in that, and are excited to see how PCC can continue to help the communities in the Pulane Valley for decades to come.

The timeline for this change begins now, and we will slowly take steps in handing over more and more. Our hope is that by January 2024, Liberty Church and Lineo will have received enough training and help from Emily and I that they are able to run things, with us available for input if needed. The next step would be that by the middle of next year, we would step away completely and allow them to do things without us looking over their shoulder.

 

Following that, our family plans to remain in Maseru for the foreseeable future and focus on our work with MAF (Right: I love my role as a pilot, Director of Operations and Chief Training Pilot here in Lesotho)


We hope that in this transition you will continue to support PCC. Part of what I want to get across in this message above is that PCC is not at an end, but it is still very much alive and well. We hope you will follow along as PCC continues to help vulnerable children in Lesotho grow into confident and healthy adults.

Family time furlough

In 2021 we had a long furlough in the USA. It was a year later than it was supposed to be due to the pandemic. So it was longer than normal, and as such it ran during a time when Jane was ‘in school.’

Doing 3 months of travel while trying to keep a 6 year old on track with school (bearing in mind we are not homeschoolers, and have no ambitions to be) was one of the hardest things we have done in our time with MAF. Harder than living in Lesotho…

So, when another 2 years rolled around and we were due for a short furlough again, we decided to make it as calm and low stress as possible. Thankfully we were able to plan it to be in Jane’s winter (Northern Hemisphere Summer) vacation from school. That’s already a good start. Also, she is now 8, and 8 feels like 10 years more maturity than 6. Next, we planned to make our furlough away from Lesotho short: 6 weeks away, and focused on time with family. We then decided to travel as light as we could, and not plan to do too much while away. Activities add up quick, so planning to do little still means we are pretty busy.

A few days ago we arrived back in Lesotho. And we are excited to say that we feel like we achieved our goals. Our time away was very restful, low stress (besides airline travel, which seems like mess at the moment), and really enjoyable.

We began our time away with a few weeks in Texas, visiting Emily’s mom and stepdad. We had fun on the farm. Jane and I experienced our first rodeo and 4th of July Parade!

 

From there we went up to Minnesota, and had a great time with Emily’s dad and stepmom. A few days at their family’s lakeside cabin was a highlight, swimming and boating and having a fun time.

 

Our next stop was to join my family in the UK for 2 weeks. Our family had an amazing time seeing the country my mom grew up in, experiencing London for a few days, as well as the beautiful countryside in the New Forest.

Jane and her Corgi princess in London

Back in Lesotho, having missed the majority of the very cold months, we are grateful that this time away was as restful, fun and meaningful as it was, and that it was a huge improvement from our last furlough experience.

Why so quiet?

Something strange happened at the end of 2022. The whole year, in fact the many years previous to that as well, I had been excitedly motivated to take photos, and make videos, and write about things.

Then, almost like the flip of a switch that motivation stopped.

My camera seemed like a burden. The thought of making a video felt laborious instead of engaging and exciting. Almost immediately my Instagram feed ground to a halt.

I couldn’t understand this, nor did I feel much motivation to push through it and just keep trying. I think I just needed a break.

In some ways it felt to me like I had taken a picture of everything I could within my day to day world: The airplane. The airplane with people. The villages we fly to. The airstrips. And so on. My photographer eye was seeing less and less ‘new’ stuff, and was feeling strained with trying to make the normal stuff look different.

Likewise with the videos I had enjoyed making. This was a pandemic project that I really enjoyed and had a lot of fun with. But it’s a lot of work, and once I had filmed footage from the majority of our airstrips, once again I wasn’t seeing much that would warrant more content.

I think there may be a tendency in our modern world to create for the sake of it. Data is unlimited. Space to publish is unlimited. And the tendency for creative arts is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

I think I prefer a more limited, minimalist approach. Things should be created because they are bursting from your brain and need to be in the world. Some people are gifted with having a lot bursting from their creative minds. Others are slower, but no less inspiring.

In a similar way to all of this, I need to be honest and tell you that the last few times I’ve seen a reminder to send out a newsletter, I’ve snoozed it. Not for lack of appreciation for people wanting to know how and what we are doing, or for the support we get, but literally just because I haven’t known what to write.

The thing is, in the first few years working in the field we are in, there is a lot of new and interesting stuff to share. The first flight I did, or the time I had crazy weather and a medical patient on board. Or what life in rural Lesotho is like with a toddler (thinking back to 2016). There’s a lot to share. Most of it funny, interesting or thought provoking. But after 7 years, it feels harder to find those kinds of things to share. Not because they have stopped happening, but because we can’t think of another way to ‘frame this picture and make it still interesting to look at,’ to continue my photo analogy.

I also know that people don’t expect to be wow’d every time we send out a newsletter. Sometimes maybe you just wanna know that everything is good and that we are doing well. I know that. But I pressure myself into wanting it to be worthy of a national newspaper column.

Think of this post, then, as a picture of us standing on a mountain in Lesotho, with an airplane behind. You have seen it before. Nothing looks too different. Except that the photo is recent, Jane is taller, and we look a little older and wiser.