Tēna Koutou/Greetings, my name is Nicola Sian Frater. Haere Mai/welcome to Live in Love. When I was a child a school teacher told us “4/5th of the world live on 1/5th of the world’s resources while 1/5th enjoy 4/5th of the world’s resources.” Of course the proportions are far worse than this now. My childhood heart and mind decided I wanted to change that. So I have always had a concern for these global inequities as well as the inequities within our own communities. Let's begin in our own community. When we walk down the street and see a rough sleeper lying outside a shop how do we respond? Perhaps we ignore them and walk on as if they don’t exist. Perhaps we would prefer they didn’t and resent them making our tidy world untidy. Perhaps we want to care but are afraid of what might be expected of us if we were to engage with them. How would it be if we began with the belief that they have the same inherent human dignity as we do, the same human worth, and simply engaged them in conversation respecting them as our equal? This is what I do as I pass a rough sleeper. If I have no cash I apologise for that but still greet them and wish them well. If I have some time on my hands I may ask them if they would like to join me for lunch or a coffee. Or I may say, "I don't have any cash right now but would you like to come into the shop with me and buy some food?" Regardless of whether I am able to give them money I always find they deeply appreciate me for treating them with respect and dignity. And I sense this is the main thing they ask of me. If I have some spare change they will be very grateful. If I do not, I will have made their day by simply respecting them as another human being. I have never had much time for social media. However when I retired I decided to apply the same principle to the inequities of the globe. I made a decision to accept Facebook friend requests from people in other counties. My adult children and friends were horrified saying one should never accept friend request from people in other countries that one doesn’t already know “in real life”. However I decided befriending people who were poor and powerless, treating them with dignity and respect, was too important to me to take that advice. Facebook Algorithms made sure that, before long, I became quite overwhelmed with the sheer number of people I was conversing with daily. Sometimes it would take me an entire day to get through them. Finally, I could not accept any more. I received many messages from scammers. I quickly came to know some of the most common types of scams and some of their tell tale ways of connecting. I soon found I could recognise many scammers in their opening message or after a few exchanges. However I also learned to my cost that there are others who play the long game, building what seems like a genuine friendship and then, when you have come to trust them, heartlessly exploiting that trust to get money from you. The first reason for starting Live in Love was to build a community learning together to build safe international friendships including safely responding to genuine needs in love . |
Some of those who reached out were running programmes in their own communities to help vulnerable women, children, elders and other marginalized people and were hoping to find sponsors for those they were helping.
Kasolo Peter Okocha, the then Mayor of Jinja City in Uganda reached out for help to fund his Kasolo Foundation working with women who have been sexually abused and then abandoned by their families and communities. Shahid and Saima Nawaz in Pakistan reached out for help with their Faith Ministries Pakistan which works to bring some dignity to the "Brick Kiln Children" working in bonded labour. Segawa Ephraim reached out for help to find sponsors for the children and young in the schools he directs through Foster Friends Uganda. Paul Odiwuor Ogola reached out for help for his PermoAfrica Permacuture training school through which he empowers poor farmers in Homa Bay County in Kenya. I tried desperately to find Aid and Development organisations willing to partner with these projects but none were interested. They were all working at capacity with the programmes they were already running or supporting. They each had their own wish list of potential projects to support. And they often had built their own rigorous partnership processes developed over time and simply weren't interested in taking on these projects. So the second reason for starting Live in Love was to build a link between such projects and people willing to support them. Sadly the hard lessons continued. The Director of a wonderful programme in Uganda noticed that one of the young men was particularly bright and had a lot of fundraising ideas. He gave the young man a phone and a laptop and set him loose to see what he could achieve. Hindsight is 20/20. This young man became very secretive about his fundraising processes and kept all knowledge of his success from the Director and the board so that both assumed he was not successful. In fact he presented himself on Social Media as the Co-ordinator of the programme and spoke of the Director as his mentor. This young man made sure he was always available to chat. He gained the trust of many people. I even arranged for a friend to visit and interview him at the school and have videos of those interviews. It all seemed legitimate. In hindsight there were red flags I ignored, things he kept vague, things which weren't quite consistent. I was devasted to find, through a chance conversation with the Director, that he had no knowledge of the funds I had given. Many others gave to the work and very little of this money reached the young people. The young man was stripped of his position and immediately fled and set up afresh using another "charity" as his front. This was a hard lesson for me. If something feels odd, it generally is. If there are red flags, we need to tug at them and keep tugging at them and see if they remain red flags or change colour to orange or green. At this very time Ritah entered my life and told me about her charity, African Hope for Single Mothers. She explained to me some of the processes NGOs have to go through in Uganda and how to use these very processes to safeguard our money. She explained other processes for outwitting scammers and opportunists. I was coming to realise this work was a whole lot more difficult than I had thought. Together Ritah and I are developing a process we call "Safe Bridges" to enable others to befriend and safely give to individuals and community initiatives and know:
Nurturing friendship between ordinary people in the community and homeless people and empowering them to safely respond with practical love is a piece of work Ritah and I would like to build into Live and Love in the future. |
