Building Rainbow Nations
Seven years ago, I took my sons Henry and Patrick to South Africa to check out some new charitable project requests for the Utopia Foundation and to review some projects we were already supporting. Utopia’s mission is to create a world where every person goes to bed feeling safe, fed, happy, and optimistic about tomorrow. The emphasis is on communities and transformative education, and our process is centered on humbly asking what people need, being as local as possible, and having conversations on how we can love the community without judging it.
In other words, we come to listen, and the intentional bias that guides us is to listen primarily to mothers and grandmothers. We do it because it works, and also because I was raised by a feminist who taught women’s studies and a dad who made sure we learned to listen with curiosity, intention, and acceptance because he did not wish to raise any bigots. The result of the process on that visit to South Africa is that we purposefully interacted with a lot of different people in many different situations. When we returned home to Uganda, my wife asked how it went, and I replied, “We should live in South Africa.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because no one there asked me if Patrick is my son,” I told her.
