Help! I Cry Help from Ghana.

Help! I cry HELP from Ghana. If you can read this, HELP me celebrate an amazing day. I don’t want to let it be lost or just reflect on it alone. We took our 16 doctoral students from China, Europe, Africa and the U.S. to visit a micro lending institution in Accra that is taking lending to the poor to a new level. They provide loans to the very poor by taking the banking process to them, often in their shanty towns and mega slums. Mobile bankers establish daily visits to individuals to help them save in a very liquid, informal economy. Though savings amounts are small, they accumulate and provide a base for getting micro loans – enough for a sewing machine or a storage unit or a small stall in a market. Portable deposit machines record their savings and issues receipts. These loans, like most micro loans in the world, are made mostly to women, and the mobile bankers are mostly women. The repayment rate is 95%. Lives are being improved physically, and meanwhile, the staff of the bank has daily prayers with each other and their customers. Next week we will meet with a similar organization, this one more of a ministry, and spend time with one of the recipients of a loan. Our students are getting all sorts of ideas for their contexts.

But that’s not all. The morning began with Stephan de Beer of the Tshwane Leadership Foundation (TLF) in Pretoria, South Africa, who walked us through the essential disciplines of becoming Reflective Practitioners of Transformational Leadership. I can’t possibly do it justice! Stephan helped us become “imagineers” – those who can envision characteristics of a new reality for each of our cities around the world, and outline initial steps to fostering some of those components. Stephan called us to cry more for and shout less at our cities, and then called us to laugh with those among the poor who laugh – laugh, in the words of Cox, as the “last weapon of hope.” He helped us deconstruct the narratives that are told about our cities – Fresno is an armpit, Fresno will always be uneducated, Fresno is a nothing town, Fresno is dangerous – and construct an alternative godly vision that can give us practical guidance as to how we apply ourselves. Then he demonstrated what he had said by sharing what is happening in Pretoria through TLF.

There is so much more, but for now, just celebrate with me, won’t you? God has done something very fine today. And cities around the world will be different in the future because of it.