Winds of Peace Foundation

Steve Sheppard | February 21, 2011

In conjunction with my January visit to Nicaragua, I also accompanied a delegation from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, the parent organization for The Center for Global Education (CGE).   The delegation included Augsburg’s President, Paul Pribbenow, five members of the college’s Board of Regents (of which I am one), and a number of Augsburg faculty and staff members and spouses.  This occasion marked the first time that a Regents’ delegation had traveled to any of the CGE sites around the world and thus served as an important moment for that governing body.  After all, it’s more difficult to adequately consider strategic direction and investment for an organization like CGE without having any direct knowledge of its work, and the only way to really attain that is by going to where they are.  The visit proved to be invaluable to the Regents as an act of asset evaluation, of prudent stewardship.

The visit also proved to be a special one for the staff members of CGE, affording them the opportunity to demonstrate the transformative nature of their work as they carefully immerse delegates into the difficult realities of Nicaraguan life.  Their work is not to spoon-feed answers, but to cultivate questions for our own deliberation and conclusions.  Our collective reactions over the four days of traveling together suggest that the staff performed their work beautifully.  Within a week, the Regents convened at their winter meeting, in part to share their experiences and feelings about the journey.  Their reflections served as strong testimony to the personal impacts that such experiences often provide, and affirmed the importance of their first-hand observations on behalf of the Board:  in other words, good stewardship.

I remained in Nicaragua for another week after the Regents departed, visiting our current and prospective partners, trying to understand how and where Winds of Peace might make a difference, and even participating in a workshop on cooperatives which the Foundation sponsored.  It struck me that I was performing the same sort of work as the Regents: assessing the work being done and, in the process, being a good steward of the resources being employed.  I noted to myself the similarities of purpose between the two weeks, the first on behalf of Augsburg College and the second on behalf of WPF.  And it dawned on me that there is likely a third stewardship at play during any of the visits made to Nicaragua, the stewardship of hope.

Just as Augsburg Regents are the keepers of the CGE asset and WPF staff are the keepers of Foundation resources, anyone who has the chance to travel to a land like Nicaragua and discern the realities there is a keeper of something valuable: the notion that somewhere in the world there are people who care about what happens in such a place.  For Nicaraguans, knowing that someone else has witnessed the struggles of their lives is a comfort.  To those who daily face the uncertainty of how to survive an oftentimes friendless circumstance, the commodity of caring is priceless.  It is a gift to be given by those of us who can, a wealth which conscious stewardship calls us to share.  It is an accompaniment which transcends material aid, a development not of economy but of the spirit. 

I’m pleased that Augsburg Regents are looking after the “jewel” that is CGE.  I’m privileged to be watching out for the use of Foundation resources for sustainable impact.  But likely the more important work for each of us is being a good steward of optimism and good faith, which our neighbors in Nicaragua so desperately need….

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Steve Sheppard | February 1, 2011

I’m just back from twelve days in Nicaragua.  It’s a bit longer stay than I usually have, but the agenda warranted the time.  And partly due to that longer duration, I had a chance to experience some aspects of Nicaragua for the first time, hiking to some rather remote spots.

Now that I’m back and catching up on E, postal and voice mail, I’m back in the flow of communications with my usual circle of contacts.  They are always interested, curious and a little mystified, I think, about my travels there.  Yesterday, one of them wrote to me an innocent thought: “I bet you’re glad to be back home after being down there so long.”  I thought about that comment all day yesterday; I’m not exactly sure why it stood out in my mind, but I have some thoughts around it.

Down there.  The phrase felt as though it had something potentially condescending about it, as though there might have been some sacrifice or hardship involved in going there.  I’ve probably fed that notion by many of the things I’ve written about the difficulty of life in Nicaragua.  But beyond its struggles, it’s a beautiful country, a warm and hospitable culture, inhabited by people with inspirational stories and lives to share.  And for Nicaraguans, it’s home.  

         

I am glad to be home, of course.  Always.  This is my home, where I am “at home,” the place where Katie, our kids and I think of when “going home.”  It’s a reflection of who we are and that, I suppose, is what makes it comfortable, content.  And even though Katie accompanied me on this most recent trip and I didn’t have the usual separation anxieties, we were both glad to come back to the place we have adopted as our own.  Most living creatures seem to have the need for a place to which they can return.

During a visit with local doctor yesterday, he asked, “Is it really pretty bad down there?”  (Down there, again.)  I did my best to deliver balanced reporting, relating the work of the Foundation with some extremely poor people, but also sharing the stories of people who live with a richness and groundedness to their lives that  some of us only dream about.  Are they poor?  I guess it depends in part on how one defines being poor.  Too many Nicaraguans have too little to eat, insufficient shelter, little formal education and very limited vocational opportunities.  They are not naiive; they understand with painful clarity the material affluence of other nations.  But they have also learned what it means to enrich their lives through spirit and spirituality, through tradition and being home. 

So on this occasion, after being in the country for nearly two weeks, instead of feeling weary or eager to return to the U.S., I felt very much at home.  Nicaragua is becoming a “home away from home” in its feel, in the faces of its people, in the growing familiarity of its language and the persistent hope that permeates some very difficult circumstances.  I have begun to experience what Father Fernando Cardenal means when he says, “The poor have needed me.  But I have needed them more.”  They have become teachers, mentors, role models that I could never have imagined if I had never had the opportunity to be among them.  What a gift!

 

There seems to be a threshold of some sort that I have crossed in my developing relationship with the people of Nicaragua.  This is not something political or ideological, but more personal in nature.  It’s a step beyond the comfort of my home and the material excess of my life.  Where will it take me?  I don’t know, but I have the curiosity to find out.  As Father Cardenal further states, “The United States is not the real world.  Nicaragua is not even the real world.  But here in Nicaragua we come close to the real world.”

It occurs to me that our time in this life ought to include coming as close to knowing the “real world” as we possibly can.  It’s both our right and our responsibility, as human beings who are hard-wired to discover the meaning of our lives….

                                

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