Letters from the Field: On Distance and Belonging
There is a particular kind of stillness required when you are working against the grain of urgency. This is a letter about that stillness, and about the long horizons that education quietly demands of anyone patient enough to serve it.
A language does not die when the last speaker does. It dies when no one writes to carry it forward.
When you fund a child's schooling, you do not see the result for a decade. There is no quarterly return, no dashboard that turns green. You plant something and then you wait, and the waiting is the work. We have had to learn to measure ourselves in seasons rather than weeks.
Distance is the other theme of this letter. Our students travel far - from village to town, from one language to another, from the world they were born into toward one they can only partly see. Belonging, we have found, is not something you leave behind when you travel. It is something you carry, and sometimes something you build twice.
I write these letters partly to remind myself why we began. The foundation is not in the business of charity; it is in the business of patience. We hold a small space open, for a long time, and trust that the people we serve will fill it in ways we could never have planned. So far, they always have.