I am thinking about how being a student could become an opportunity to be a catalyst for change. One of my classmates took great initiative in creating a mini enterprise to raise money to send a student in Sudan to school. Not a number, not a good cause, but a friend. I chatted briefly with him, and another friend about how development is so often viewed with a negative lens, I thought about how sometimes our education gets in the way of our learning about how to become people of change, people of love, and people of hope in a dark world. I started to think about how it might be possible to think about our situation as students differently, we consider ourselves to be poor, when really we are the most privileged and resource rich people alive. Sometimes we just don’t know it. I bought a T-shirt, paid 20$, and realized that although I sometimes feel as if I don’t have a lot of money, I can’t afford not to invest in things that carry a glimmer of brilliance such as this. What would it look like if a bunch of students took ownership of our learning in a really unique way, thought of ways to save money, to slow down, to live a life of meaningful intentionality? I pay nearly 80$ a month to have a little piece of metal as an appendage that is constantly interrupting me, filling me with information that overwhelms, and bringing me into a world in which I am constantly available…and busy. I don’t like it, not one bit. Imagine if I found other students who felt the same way, and we all threw out our cell phone contracts, or reduced them, pooled our money and our space, lived in community, and got a landline costing 30$ a month. Overall, even if we each paid 20$/month on a cell phone, if there were five of us, we could save 60$ each, 300$ total/month on cell phones alone! This is more than 3000$ a year! This small amount of money could pay for lots of people to do lots of new things, to have new freedom in new ways—this could be development from the inside out, embracing a life that is not focused on our own development, and our own comfort. Imagine!
Imagine if we talked, and realized that together, we have so much, and that learning to share could be amazing. We could live lives of simplicity, each one offering what they have, be it cooking skills, nutrition, micro enterprise, business savvy, and engineering. I feel like I am surrounded by brilliant people who are simply waiting for an opportunity to be brilliant.