I’m back in Singapore– it’s good to be home

As I mentioned in my previous post, working with the high school students has been very rewarding, but it hasn’t always been easy.

The experience of the past two months has been a lot of good with some not-so-good thrown in. One of my teammates summed it up simply (and well) when she said, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that doing good things is hard. It’s really hard.”

We came to the Navajo Nation with good intentions and a good (or so we thought) plan. But there’s an Irish saying that goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Good intentions and a good plan are necessary but not sufficient conditions to ensure success– especially when it comes to short-term service projects.

We’ve established meaningful friendships with our students and with others in the community, but we’ve also strained other relationships by our “privileged” and “proud” behavior. I think it’s unfortunate and unfair that some of our actions were perceived as such, but I also recognize that we judge others according to their actions, but we judge ourselves according to our intentions.

We took responsibility for our actions, and we extended a few apologies in our last week in the Navajo Nation. I really hope that any damage we’ve done is not irreparable!

One incident that happened two weeks ago encapsulates our DukeEngage experience pretty well.

It was a rainy day. We were driving on a dirt road in our 12-seater (and non-four-wheel drive) van. The road was extremely muddy and it was difficult to control the van.

All of a sudden, we spotted a motorcycle lying in the middle of the road and the rider next to it. The bike was a beautiful Harley Davidson that looked like this:

The rider was a tough-looking guy and was dressed kind of like this:

You kind of get the picture, right?

His bike was stuck in the mud, and it was obvious that he needed help to lift it.

Two of my teammates and I got out of the van to lend him a hand. We assumed lifting position.

“Okay, lift on three. One, two, three!”

“Whoops!” I exclaimed. I had grabbed part of the motorcycle’s seat cushion, and it had come off while I was lifting.

The rider let out a grunt of annoyance and shot me a disapproving look. I apologized, and gripped onto a different part of the bike.

We eventually got the bike upright, and the rider started the engine and rode off.

Interestingly, the rider didn’t thank us for our help– he seemed far more embarrassed that he needed assistance than grateful that we had provided him with some.

One of my teammates who had lent a hand later realized that he had suffered a pretty bad burn because his shin had rubbed against the hot exhaust pipe while we were lifting the bike.

All in all, not the best “helping” experience. But it does represent the not-so-good parts of the last two months quite accurately.

• Our intentions were pure and good, but I still accidentally removed the seat cushion and upset the rider.

–> Sometimes we carry out noble service projects, but we cause unintended harm to the communities we are trying to help. Most of the time, this is due to the fact that we don’t fully understand the “bike”– the culture of the people we’re serving.

• The rider was more embarrassed than thankful.

–> We all have some pride, and we’re not always happy to receive “assistance” or “service” (even assistance or service that we really do need).

• My teammate suffered a bad burn on his shin.

–> In short-term service projects, good actions and intentions are often misconstrued, and volunteers can be “burned” by unfair negative comments.

• We accomplished what we set out to do: we got the motorcycle out of the mud. But no one involved felt happy!

–> Just because you achieve your service goals, it doesn’t mean that all is well. Service, at the end of the day, is about people; we cannot turn people into just another statistic or measurable goal to quantify how successful our service project was.

I’ve learned a lot about service through this DukeEngage program– what service means, the importance of making service sustainable, the danger of attempting to serve a community that you don’t fully understand.

Doing good things is hard. It’s really hard.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

Over the past five weeks I’ve been part of a team of Duke students that’s been running a college-prep program for Navajo high school students.

As part of the program, we’ve been doing standardized test preparation, teaching college life skills, going on college visits and working on college applications.

The response from our students, however, hasn’t been as positive as we’d initially expected. They occasionally fail to complete the assigned work, they sometimes lack motivation (it’s summer time and they’re enrolled in an exhilarating college-prep program, but still…), and they don’t always show up for class.

I’ve concluded that a big reason for this is that we are not role models for our students.

It’s not that we don’t try to be– it’s that we can’t. We don’t know what it’s like growing up on a Reservation, we don’t fully understand Navajo culture, we don’t know what high school is like for them, our family life is nothing like theirs. We’re simply too different from them for them to want to be like us.

And this college-prep program, in a sense, is about inspiring our students to be like us, to want to go to college and to overcome the apprehension of leaving home. It’s just that we’re probably not the right people to motivate such desires. It’d be a different story if our team consisted of Native American Duke students.

In thinking about the problems we’ve faced running the program, I came up with this Venn diagram (I know, I know… slightly geeky ) which illustrates what I believe is the relationship between role models, heroes and celebrities.

Because of the influence and pervasiveness of the mass media, there’s been a dramatic rise of the celebrity. It used to be that famous people were famous because they had done something courageous, selfless, inspirational or otherwise remarkable. These people were heroes.

But today’s celebrities have big names, but they are not necessarily big people.

On the other hand, a role model is someone you both look up to– a hero– and want to be like.

We are attracted to celebrities, we admire heroes, but we aspire to be like role models.

As John Maxwell says, change is inevitable but growth is optional. The last five weeks have taught me that we can’t be role models to everyone even if we try our very best, but day by day we can choose to grow so that we serve as role models to as many people as possible.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

After reading this post by my brother on excellence, I thought of a common problem faced by people who get serious about goal-setting: others think they are “weird” or “lame” or “ridiculous” or “overly ambitious” for putting their goals down in writing.

My older sister went to college in Australia, and she told me about a phenomenon called Tall Poppy Syndrome. Here’s its Wikipedia definition:

Tall poppy syndrome (TPS) is a pejorative term used in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to describe a social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticized because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers.

In other words, it’s a case of sour grapes which causes TPS sufferers to view the pursuit of greatness with disdain.

But if we allow others’ opinion of us to define us– and in so doing seek the applause of the world– we essentially place our happiness in the hands of others.

I like Daniel Amen’s 18/40/60 Rule:
“When you’re 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you; when you’re 40, you don’t care what anybody thinks of you; when you’re 60, you realize nobody’s been thinking about you at all.”

At the end of the day, goal-setting is not about being better than others, nor is it about achieving more amazing things than others.

It’s about cultivating a spirit of excellence; it’s about being better than who you were yesterday; it’s about being the best you can be. Goal-setting is about doing your best– which is far more important than being the best.

Yesterday, I gave a presentation on goal-setting to our students. Goal-setting is something I started practicing three years ago, and it has helped me gain a lot of clarity in determining what is truly important to me and in knowing exactly what kind of person I want to be.

You’ll have to become a bigger person in order to achieve bigger goals, and who you become by achieving your goals is worth far more than what you could ever gain tangibly.

That’s not to belittle the quantifiable benefits of goal-setting. According to Dave Kohl, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech., 80% of Americans say they don’t have goals. 16% do have goals, but they don’t write them down. Less than 4% write down their goals, and fewer than 1% review them regularly.

That 1% earns 9 times as much over the course of their lives as those who do not write down their goals.

During the presentation, I focused more on the practical aspects of goal-setting: putting down your goals in writing, finding a support group of people who have goals similar to yours, reviewing and updating your goals regularly, determining emotionally compelling reasons for the goals that you set, etc.

But after reading this wonderful speech by William Deresiewicz today (you won’t regret taking 20 minutes to read it!), I’m reminded that the essence of goal-setting is the setting of goals, not the achieving of goals. Yes, there are many practical techniques which I’ve employed to fulfill goals in areas such as physical health, friends/relationships, personal growth and contribution to the community. The beauty of goal-setting, however, lies in knowing what things are worth doing– not in doing more things. Busyness is not synonymous with fruitfulness, and activity does not necessarily lead to impact and influence.

To borrow an analogy from Stephen Covey, goal-setting is less about finding the best ladder-climbing methods and more about ensuring that the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

If you’re not a goal-setter, will you commit to becoming one today? And ff you’re already one, may I encourage you to put the “being” before the “doing”– so that every goal you set and achieve will bring you closer to becoming that ideal person you want to be.

I’ll leave you with this excerpt from Deresiewicz’s speech:

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.

A week ago, I wrote about how Navajos view every day as sacred.

I just read an essay by an English professor who has lived on the Reservation for the past 10 years, and I think it describes well how Navajos see everything– and not just every day– as sacred and spiritual.

…In Navajo, though, no single word exists for nature. That English term is barely approximated in the nearly untranslatable phrase, hanaagóó áhoot’éhígíí, which does not denote a place elsewhere that we can escape to when urban life grows oppressive. Instead it is an aggregate term which roughly means all that surrounds whatever is surrounded. My Crownpoint colleague Shirley Bowman, who teaches Navajo language and culture there, points out that the expression includes everything: hills, mountains, mesas, the four winds; plants, animals and people alike, insects, birds; the expanse of sky and all things evident therein night and day; and most especially all spirits visible or otherwise that animate whatever moves or dwells inside what is immovable, and of course those who interact with it all along with the full range of that interaction. It designates, as it were, one encumbering organism that contains all others, presiding over which are the moon, the individual stars, the constellations, and most especially the sun, which Navajos call   Jóhonaa’éí–The One Who Rules the Day.

…Likewise we humans cannot set ourselves apart from our surroundings or isolate our species from all others. We are all of a piece, we and nature—in that state Navajos call hózóón, which translates best by combining the trio of English words, “beauty,” “balance,” and “harmony”—-functioning interdependently as if one grand organism.  In coming to mind, that simile unites the systole and diastole of a single bloodstream with mighty solar revolutions and planetary orbits. Scientifically that may not be viable, I know; it is the spinning earth, of course, that revolves around the sun, and to condense all creation into a single body goes beyond literal credibility. But the image works, for with its similes and metaphors poetry has a way of conveying a deep truth that science alone cannot express.

- Paul G. Zolbrod, “The Rosy Fingers of a Navajo Dawn: Waking Up to a Reservation Sunrise”

We were in four states over the last three days– New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah.

That meant lots and lots and lots of driving, but we got to visit the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. Breathtaking scenery!

Every day is considered sacred in Navajo culture. Because each day is holy, we ought to carry with us a spirit of reverence and gratitude. There is no compartmentalizing life– all of life is spiritual and sacred.

As a Christian, I’m more aware of how “holy” or “unholy” my actions and intentions are on Sundays. I guess this is natural, because Sunday is the day set aside specially for God.

I believe that most Christians– myself included– have much to learn from Navajo culture. It’s flawed to view life as comprised of two mutually exclusive “arenas,” the secular and the spiritual. Work is sacred, family is sacred, education is sacred, relationships are sacred.

“We judge others according to their actions, but we judge ourselves according to our intentions.” – Unknown

We Duke students here in the Navajo Nation know that we’re blessed. We have electricity and running water in our homes (many people here rely on very unreliable solar energy and have to haul water from miles away), and we’ve not come close to experiencing poverty.

Since we’re here for two months to “serve the community,” it’s only natural that we might be viewed as privileged outsiders who are somewhat patronizing in our desire to “help.”

Case in point: a couple of days ago a woman saw me pouring a bag of trail mix into my mouth, and I later found out that she viewed this act as quintessential spoiled brat behavior.

She saw trail mix as a luxury food, and by pouring it into my mouth I was demonstrating just how entitled I felt to such extravagance– especially because I was pouring it instead of eating it out of my hand.

But I was actually pouring it because my hands were dirty and I didn’t want to contaminate the trail mix.

How true: we judge others according to their actions, but we judge ourselves according to our intentions.

I don’t blame her for judging me (although I was pretty shocked at first), because I recognize that we all have different paradigms through which we understand the world. In fact, this episode is a reminder for me to be more aware of how my behavior is perceived, and how my actions impact the relationships we have with the Navajo community.

We’re conducting our college prep summer classes for high school students in Diné College, a two-year community college in Crownpoint, New Mexico.

I recently read about Diné College’s educational philosophy:

Shitsijí hózhoo doo naashá:  With beauty before me, I walk.

Shikéédéé  hózhoo doo naashá: With beauty behind me, I walk.

Shiyaagi hózhoo doo naashá: With beauty below me, I walk.

Shík’igi hózhoo doo naashá:  With beauty above me, I walk.

Shinaagi hózhoo doo naashá:  With beauty around me, I walk.

Shinaagi hózhoo doo naasháShizaad hahóóshoo doo: With beauty I speak.

Sa’ah Naaghí’ Bik’eh Hozhó nishlíí doo k’é:  Through this I will have knowledge, balance and strength.

• With beauty before me, I walk.

- I will make short- and long-term plans as I complete my education.

• With beauty behind me, I walk.

- I understand my heritage and what it means to be Navajo.

• With beauty below me, I walk.

- I respect all of nature.

• With beauty above me, I walk.

- I am aware of the sacredness of the universe.

• With beauty around me, I walk.

- I understand my surroundings from both a spiritual and factual perspective.

• With beauty I speak.

- I communicate effectively in both Navajo and English. The Navajo language is our strength; without it we cannot be secure as a nation.

- I contribute to both Navajo and Western culture, without compromising either one.

Diné College is a small college– it has three classrooms and there are about ten students in each graduating class– but I think it has a big educational philosophy.

We spent a whole day at a sheep farm in Crystal, New Mexico. Here’s a picture of the sheep running out of the corral when we opened the gate (we let them out so that they could graze).

The funny– and slightly annoying– thing was that we spent the next two hours looking for them, but they were nowhere to be found. They eventually came back to the corral on their own before the sun went down– a fairly common occurrence, according to the owner of the farm.

We also got to play with some cute puppies (There are 20 dogs on the farm!)