This is the fifth of five posts from Team Dayā member Chevan Nanayakkara about his experience Building Change in Nchetana, Malawi. Please subscribe to receive future posts.
- Please donate to my Team Dayā fundraising effort – all funds go directly to building schools.
- If you are curious about Building Change with Team Dayā, please contact our Head of Recruiting Jaryd Knutsen.
Find all of Chevan’s posts here.
By Team Dayā member Chevan Nanayakkara
In this final post about my Team Dayā experience I’d like to touch on the most lasting and impactful learning from my trip: at home or abroad, developing a vision about the future is foundational to achieving that future.
One of the Team Dayā pillars is the idea of raising expectations within a developing country. Part of the difficulty helping a community raise their expectations for the future is that they often simply “don’t know what they don’t know” – developing a vision for the future outside of day-to-day experience is very difficult.
I had an opportunity to speak with the Malawi country director for buildOn about why sustainable development has a better chance of succeeding now vs. in the past. He remarked that the direct cultural exchange is an invaluable component of empowering the local village. It’s an opportunity for them to see that at a basic level their hopes and dreams are the same as people from another country: quality housing, opportunity, freedom, safety/security, a better future for children, etc.- direct contact and conversations allows them to experience that we’re all just people separated by geography and time (living lives in countries at different stages of development). Being able to see other cultures and other ways of living has made the world of possibilities much bigger and given them a “target to shoot for” in their own development.
The country director continued, saying that for a developing country like Malawi, besides the direct cultural exchange, the biggest accelerator to raising expectations and developing positive community visions was the availability of the Internet. This really surprised me, since I’ve always viewed the Internet through American eyes where it was an add-on technology to our modern lifestyle. For Malawians, being able to see and hear about what other countries and cultures are doing has made the world of possibilities much bigger. Even if people in the villages don’t have direct access to the Internet, somewhere along the way they have contact with people in small towns and cities who do. The people I spoke with were very hopeful for the future and feel like they are seeing and experiencing change and improvement in the country very quickly. Whether it’s a project like a new school for their village, that the government is improving roads and highways or that new jobs and lifestyles are available in city-centers, Malawians believe that the country is advancing and developing.
As I mentioned, Team Dayā is committed to the principle of taking on projects that support sustainable community development. If you have an opportunity to be part of a school-building project, your participation will go far beyond being part of a work detail. You’ll have a rewarding experience that will shape you across many dimensions but, more importantly, your presence and point-of-view will inspire people to help themselves while influencing and shaping their outlook about what is possible for them to achieve for their future and to improve their life.
I was blessed to participate in this Team Dayā activity with the following people, who provided me with an unforgettable experience and were also sources of unending inspiration, support and joy. Please reach out to any one of them to hear more about Building Change: Davina Kent, Riley Jacobson, Kerri Olson, Nicolle Pangis, Vib Prasad, Lauren Rosen and Jay Sears.
This is the fifth of five posts from Team Dayā member Chevan Nanayakkara about his experience Building Change in Nchetana, Malawi. Please subscribe to receive future posts.
- Please donate to my Team Dayā fundraising effort – all funds go directly to building schools.
- If you are curious about Building Change with Team Dayā, please contact our Head of Recruiting Jaryd Knutsen.
Find all of Chevan’s posts here.
