Spirit in Action
Walk In Their Shoes: Can One Person Change the World? Education & Service As Transformation
Since 1991, Jim Ziolkowski & BuildOn.org have been transforming inner city schools in the USA and building schools - over 550 to-date - in the poorest countries of the globe.
- Duration:
- 55m
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Aug 2014
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along We've got a great inspiration of a guest here today for Spirit in Action. Jim Zilikowski co-founded Build with Books, now called Build On About 20 years ago with a dual focus. Build On combines a focus on rejuvenating inner city schools in the USA Through service in those communities and sometimes as part of the other focus Building schools in the very poorest areas around the world. Jim wrote about his incredible journey with Build On with many, many thousands of volunteers transforming and being transformed and with over 550 schools built, and the book is "Walk In Their Shoes Can One Person Change The World". Before we go to Jim, I'll note that support for this show comes from Eau Claire, Wisconsin attorney, Catherine B. Schulz, a believer in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work, therefore supporting the work of Northern Spirit Radio. Her world healing work includes helping her clients get a new start to their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed. For help, you can call Catherine B. Schulz at 715-835-8904. And I also want to remind you to put a special Northern Spirit radio event on your schedule for November 2nd. It will be hosted right here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and there will be a speaker on organic standards, some organic and/or local pizza and Middle Eastern foods, and concerts by three different musicians. Find out more details on northernspiritradio.org and be there on November 2nd, 2013 for what we're calling "Feed Your Body, Feed Your Soul, Turn Your Radio On". One more thing, to get us geared up to talk to Jim Zylikowski about his book, "Walk In Their Shoes Can One Person Change The World", we're going to listen to a song by Andy Murray, "One Person At A Time", and then we'll get to Jim on the phone. ♪ Oh the world's so big and I'm so small ♪ ♪ It hardly seems I matter at all ♪ ♪ Sometimes I think I'd like to do something to help out with all the problems of the world ♪ ♪ But whenever I sit down and think it through ♪ ♪ I always wonder what can one person do ♪ ♪ I wrote that myself ♪ ♪ Well what can one person do is a very good question ♪ ♪ If you don't do nothing at all ♪ ♪ You can spend your time saving every little time ♪ ♪ Or just curled up by the wall ♪ ♪ But if you think back some overall has been done ♪ ♪ And you wonder who did it and where it came from ♪ ♪ Figure it out without a doubt ♪ ♪ One person at a time did it all ♪ ♪ One person at a time it sure works fine ♪ ♪ Just roll up your sleeves, sign on the dotted line ♪ ♪ Whatever gets done is done by one ♪ ♪ One person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ Yeah, one person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ Well what can one person do ♪ ♪ Is a very good question ♪ ♪ If you don't do nothing at all ♪ ♪ You can stay in bed, pull the covers overhead ♪ ♪ And wait for the sky to fall ♪ ♪ But if each one would just do what they could ♪ ♪ Working one at a time we could do a lot of good ♪ ♪ Figure it out without a doubt ♪ ♪ One person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ One person at a time it sure works fine ♪ ♪ Pick up your load and get in line ♪ ♪ Whatever gets done is done by one ♪ ♪ One person at a time they do it all ♪ ♪ Yeah, one person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ Well what can one person do ♪ ♪ Is a very good question ♪ ♪ If you don't do nothing at all ♪ ♪ You can soak in the tub ♪ ♪ Or join a social club ♪ ♪ Or just go shopping at the muh-huh-huh ♪ ♪ But if each one would work side by side ♪ ♪ With another one the work gets multiplied ♪ ♪ Figure it out without a doubt ♪ ♪ One person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ One person at a time it sure works fine ♪ ♪ No use to wait for a better time ♪ ♪ Whatever gets done is done by one ♪ ♪ One person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ Yeah, one person at a time does it all ♪ ♪ Listen children, one person at a time ♪ ♪ Everybody working one person at a time ♪ ♪ Or we can all do it one person at a time ♪ ♪ They do it all ♪ Jim, I'm really excited to have you here today for spirit in action. Thank you Mark, I appreciate being here and I'm very honored. As one person who's traveled in Africa to another, I want to start out with an appropriate question. How are Jenny and Jack and Quinn doing? Oh, thanks for asking Mark. My family's doing well. As I write about, I'm incredibly grateful to have Jenny as my partner and my wife in this journey and my two boys. I find inspiration with every single day and I'm especially moved and inspired by how strong and determined my boy Jack has been in spite of the challenges that he faced with encephalitis and meningitis. So they're doing well, but every day is a new day and it's a long journey and we've got to stay focused and be mindful. And I want to give a shout out to Quinn who has really a different kind of hard that he has to live through with Jack's medical trauma that has happened so much. I mean, he's had to be center stage just for survival reasons, but Quinn, in that case, being the loving brother has done monumental work of his own there. In a word, Quinn is awesome. He is such a wonderful, hilarious little guy. He's incredibly creative and he's really been loving and supportive with Jack and with the family and we definitely could not have gotten through it or continue to keep going without Quinn. He's a remarkable little guy. We love him an awful lot. Now, if I had given you the full African welcoming, I wouldn't have asked just about Jenny, Jack, and Quinn. I would have asked about the ancestor and I'd asked about your goat. How much did you pick up of Native ways living as you did so often, you know, about building these schools? Well, I think the greatest teachers and mentors I had were community members, the parents, the grandparents, even the children, the village. You know, the first time in the first school we built was in Malawi, Africa, and that's the first time I'd been to Africa. We had gone into that village with the intention of completely immersing with the community, learning from them how to build this school and how to work together behind a common purpose and a common cause. And there are no greater teachers in the world than these community members. They have been generous and inspiring on so many different levels, so I'm very, very grateful to have learned basically everything I know about work and developing countries from them. So let's spell out what built on. It started off being known as "Build with Books" and the website buildon.org. Please sketch in more of the current day big picture. Sure. What we're doing at Build On is working to break the cycle of poverty, literacy, and low expectations through service and education. And we do it by running intensive after school programs in urban high schools in the United States. And in these schools, in some of the most challenged communities and neighborhoods in the country, our kids are contributing remarkable amounts of direct service, working with elders and homeless people and younger children every day in their neighborhoods. And at the same time, these kids are building schools in developing countries. So we take kids literally from the South Bronx to West Africa to build schools from Detroit and Chicago to Haiti to build schools. And it's transformational on every level, and we have now built about 550 schools around the world. Uniting and partnering with community members in Africa and Asia and Central America and Haiti are kids in the United States have contributed over 1.1 million hours of service, which is a testament to their compassion. You know, I think that the work with the urban schools, the inner city schools, people who are often challenged just in their own finances, that work, I think, has to be unimaginable. The transformations that happened. I really appreciated the stories that you shared of Johnny and Raya, I think was her name. Those stories which are included in the book. And again, the name of the book is "Walk In Their Shoes." Can one person change the world by Jim Sielkowski? So you shared those stories of people like Johnny and Raya. Can you flesh in some of the people who actually do this traveling to other countries to help build schools? Sure. Well, why don't we talk about Raya for a minute. She is one of the most remarkable, inspiring kids I've ever met. There are thousands of people just like Raya that are involved in our work every day. So I met Raya for the first time in a shelter for homeless veterans in Detroit, Michigan. And we were working together preparing meals and serving meals to these veterans. He's homeless vets. I noticed how Raya was connecting with these vets. And she wasn't even 16, maybe just turned 16 years old. And the way she smiled, connected, and lifted up the vets was remarkable to me. So I said to Raya, at the end of the day, I said, "Man, what is your motivation? How do you connect with these guys the way you do?" And she told me that they gave her her smile back. And I didn't know what that meant at the time. And I got to know her a lot more deeply and found out that Raya was never closer to anybody than her brother, Arnaz. Arnaz was the guy that took her to school. He took her to service projects. He was the guy that always took her out to celebrate her birthday. And Arnaz was killed. He was shot by an AK-47 about three weeks before Raya's 15th birthday. And Raya was devastated by that. She couldn't function, man. She was paralyzed. And when her birthday finally rolled around, she knew she couldn't celebrate. So she decided to do a day of service in honor of Van Dell instead of celebrating. And that's the first day that she went to the Detroit Vet Center. That's the first time she met with these vets. And instead of going there and she expected to serve them and help them, they lifted her up. And she's gone on to contribute over 700 hours of service in her community. And she went on to build a school in Nicaragua. And now she's going to be a sophomore at Bowling Green State University. And she won a full ride at scholarship for her service. And she's got honors, her first year in college. So it's heroes like Raya that inspired me and made me want to write this book. I wanted her voice to be heard and for her to get the recognition that she deserves. Yeah, just amazing stories like that. The one about Johnny was perhaps even more transformative because, you know, we all have messed up lives in one way or another. But the challenge is that a lot of these volunteers face at home are some monumental. Yet when they go and travel to another country, get loved there, get appreciated there and can make such a difference in someone else's life. I just got to believe that that brings them back with superpowers to our culture to make a change here. Absolutely it does. I think kids come back understanding not only the importance of education because they're working side by side with villagers to build these schools. Everybody's contributing to build and working together, all volunteers. And so they see how hard the parents work to build these schools. And the second thing they get is a sense of accomplishment. They know what they can do, what they can accomplish and that really nothing can hold them back. So they elevate expectations for themselves and they elevate expectations for their community. And in the toughest schools where the graduation rates are lowest in the United States where we're working, truancy goes down. And 95% of the kids we work with not only graduate, they go to college. So it's pretty powerful, very powerful. I can't imagine a greater testament to the kind of work you're doing at BuildOn. Again, folks, the website is BuildOn.org. And the book is "Walk in Their Shoes Can One Person Change the World?" And I bet you the answer is yes. That's the question mark. Can one person change the world? When we decided on that subtitle, I was hoping it would create a conversation where optimists would say, "Yes, one person can change the world." But then other people would say, "No, that's arrogant to think the one person can change the world." And I got to tell you that the best answer that I've heard came from a girl named Marlena. And Marlena is from the South Bronx. I met her in Haiti while we were building a school. And before she got involved in our program, she had missed 44 days of school and gotten all F's as an eighth grader. And she entered a school where only 38% of the kids graduate, a high school as a freshman, and the odds are stacked heavily against her. And I find myself working with Marlena side-by-side to build this school. And I looked over at her and I said, "So what do you think? Can one person change the world?" And she thought for a few minutes and she looked back at me and she said, "Yes, one person can change the world, but not by yourself." And I thought that was the best answer. It's profound, it's simple, and it's a paradox. Well, and it's like the song that I started this program with, "One person at a time does it all." But yeah, if you want to know how it got done, one person at a time did it all. And that's the difference that Build On is making. It's letting people know that they can do it. So let's go back to the beginning for Build On back when it was called Build With Books. One person at a time didn't all. It was three of you. It was you and your brother Dave and your friend Eric Dorff. The three of you came together and hatched this hair-brained idea. You know, you're going to build schools internationally. What were your motivations back when Build On started? The idea for Build On really came when I traveled around the world. I'd graduated college, worked a couple of jobs, saved as much money as I could, in backpack and hitchhiked around the world and spent most of my time in developing countries. The first country I went to was India. And I was overwhelmed by really extreme poverty and the injustice of extreme poverty. And then I went from India to Nepal, really went from the frying pan into the fire, because the poverty index is much worse in Nepal than it is in India. And I was climbing up into the mountains and I passed through a village and saw that they were celebrating something. And it was monsoon, so it's raining. I look around and there's maybe 200 people dancing in the rain. And it turns out that they were celebrating the opening of a school. And it was a two-day celebration mark. They never went home. And it was really, for me, very, very inspiring because not only had I seen the injustice of extreme poverty, but now I'm seeing the dedication, the hope, the courage that people have around education. And when I came back to the United States, you know, I saw poverty in America much differently, and especially in American cities and inner cities. And I really wanted to act on my experience because I saw the common threat as being the hope and the courage and the determination of American youth have that same determination that the people in Nepal have. And so I wanted to act on this, but I completely chickened out. And I went in the opposite direction. I joined GE and started a fast-track career in finance. And then finally, after about 15 or 16 months, you know, I felt I had a responsibility. Though I love GE and it was everything I had studied, I knew it wasn't the right thing for me to do, so I left GE to start build-on. Let's talk a little bit about the skills that you had, or maybe more importantly, even some of the skills you didn't have when you started a build-on. I think it's so funny. It's kind of the mason presumption of youth that the three of you, you, Dave and Eric, when you're going to do it. None of you had particularly construction experience, right? If you didn't have construction experience, and yet you're going out there to build schools as the 20-year-old experts, that's pretty presumptuous. No, it's presumptuous. It was borderline idiotic. It was lunacy. So you're right, Mark. We had no experience. We had no experience building schools in construction. We had no experience with community development, mobilizing villagers to build these schools. We had no experience in youth development. In working with American youth and urban youth, we didn't have a strategic plan yet. We had committed to building three schools, three different continents, and we had set up our programs in three different American high schools. We formed these partnerships and identified specific villages, and maybe 200 American youth were behind us and in the program back here in the States. But after about five months, maybe six months, we hadn't been able to raise a penny. We had faced immense rejection. Not only did we get rejected by every foundation, corporation, or individual that we talked to about funding it, but they'd give us a lot of reasons why we would fail. And the worst part was that they were legitimate reasons. We couldn't point to any track record, and it was a very, very difficult time for me. Probably one of the low points in my life was just realizing how inadequate my experience was to do what we had committed to doing. But, and this one I want to give you to your credit, you didn't end up believing them. And have you ever read the book, The Phantom Tollpoot? It's generally considered maybe a kid's book. It goes through imaginary adventures and so on. But there's a guy who pops up along the way and he says, "I've got something very important I've got to tell you, but I won't tell you until the end." And so anyway, get to the end. He says, "Well, what was that you wanted to tell me?" He says, "Well, what you were about to, what you just did is impossible." And it's like, "Yes." So it's a good thing you didn't buy into the fact that it was impossible. I guess I'd say with faith, all things are possible. And you were just learning your faith, I think, along that path. I was, and that was probably the most pivotal time in sort of my own faith and development. As that rejection mounted, we received a fax message from our partner in Malawi, Africa. They said, "Today we announce to the village that you're coming to build this school. The kids immediately broke out and sung and danced and celebrated for hours." And they weren't, Mark, they were not supposed to tell them about that. You're a Peace Corps person, you know. You don't announce anything to a village until you're sure you're going to be there. We were far from sure, so they said that, but the last line was the worst, the killer. It said, "Needless to say they will be equally disappointed if you fail to come." And the key word was fail, we were failing. And then, once I got this fax, I realized the repercussions of failure that kids from one of the poorest villages in Malawi and Africa would not get a school. And 200 American youth would once again be disillusioned by empty promises made by adults, like me. And I was thinking, you know, I was really being paralyzed by the fear of failing. And it's at that point, I think, where I was at rock bottom. Didn't know where else to turn that I found a very profound message in the Gospel of Mark, where Christ is going to heal a little girl. But they tell him, "She's past. She's dead. Don't bother." And then they ridicule him a little bit. And he looks back and he says, "Fear is useless. What is needed is trust." And I realized, you know, and I read that, that I was being crushed by fear, that I would never be able to live out my values if I succumbed to the fears that I was facing. So I knew I had to overcome them and I knew they were useless. So I started to put it in the right perspective and just keep going. And in spite of the resemblance between the Gospel of Mark's name and my own, I don't take any credit for that. I got inspired by some of the same stuff, of course, right? Yeah. But I'm sure you resonated more with Mark than the other 3A. Well, actually, kind of John is my Gospel. Well, and I'm a big fan of Matthew, Sermon on the Mount, all those things. But all of that makes a difference for me. I want to remind you that you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org, with eight plus years of programs available free. For listening and download, you'll find links to our guests there, a place to share comments. We need you to talk to us, folks. And there's a place for donations as well. Much appreciated. Also appreciated is support from Eau Claire, attorney, Catherine B. Schultz, a big believer in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work. In her case, that includes helping clients restart their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed. For help, call Catherine B. Schultz at 715-835-8904. I especially want to remind you to support your local community radio station, both with your hands and your wallet. Community radio gives you music and news that only very rarely make it to the airwaves of other stations. There's also a profound, fun, and tasty way to support Northern Spirit radio coming up. Markdown's Saturday, November 2nd, for Northern Spirit radio's event called Feed Your Body, Feed Your Soul, turn your radio on. There will be Will Fantle of cornucopy institutes, speaking on small farms and organic standards, an organic and local meal of pizza and Middle Eastern foods, and concerts by Peter Feppen, Robbie Crawford, and Sue West, all held at pizza plus in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Show up on November 2nd, or send a contribution, and check it out on northernspiritradio.org. Now let's get back to Jim Zilikowski, co-founder of buildon.org, transforming inner cities in the USA with community involvement, and having already built over 550 schools in the poorest areas of the globe, and his author of Walk in Their Shoes Can One Person Change the World. You know, Jim, you've got a lot of great stories in the book, and you're pretty transparent about the rather steep leaning curve you had to go through. In particular, your second school was in Malawi, a village called Musomali, and you had a bit of an adventure. As first your brother Dave and then your friend Eric got sick almost to the edge of death, and then shortly after that, you come down with malaria and go right to the precipice of life's end. What did you learn from that brush with death? Wow, that's a good question, Mark, and something I think about all the time. So just to give you, in your audience and context, Dave and Eric and I had decided to live in this village, and as I mentioned before, learn from the community how to build, how to unite, how to work, to build something. And when we got there, there were about 150 kids going to a thatch hut, attending a school that was just in a thatch hut and only 12 of them were girls. We agreed that if they would send their daughters to school and equal numbers with their sons, and if they were willing to contribute the labor to build the school, and to help lead the project, then we could do it. We could build that school, and we decided we weren't going to leave until we got that school built, which was a much bigger commitment than we realized. So as you mentioned, my brother Dave contracted malaria. As did Eric in both of them almost died, eight days after my brother contracted malaria, I collapsed, I had 104 degree fever, lost consciousness, went into convulsions, and really by the grace of God Dave was strong enough, and able to drag me into one of two hospitals in the country at that time. And when I came out of it, a day or two later, we're not even sure how long I was out, the doctor came in and told me, he said two more hours away from this hospital, and you would have been dead. You know, my veins had already begun to collapse. You know, I was very, very fortunate. I was back on my feet in a couple of days. Dave had a different strain of malaria, so he had to come back to the states to recover. I went back, decided to go back to the village, and I'm walking those last two miles back, and I looked around, and you know, I realized that when these community members, especially the kids, when they can track malaria, they do not have a near-death experience. They die. You know, why did I survive? And they don't. And I asked myself, and the answer is extreme poverty. They can't afford the $1 for a mosquito nut or the $20 to go to a hospital or even the medications. So, you know, I was pretty demoralized, and almost turned around and started walking the other direction, but then I thought to myself that if we could get this school built, then maybe they could break that cycle of extreme poverty. So I turned around and kept going, and went back to the village to keep working away at that school. And the history is now 550 schools that have been built growing from this vision. One of the things I want to talk about your early days, things were not very smooth at the beginning, particularly between you and Dave in terms of first fundraising, how you're doing that. And then when you were building, he wanted to hire some people, and you had a very strong principal. No, they have to do the work we can't do that. Otherwise, they'll see it as a gimme project, you know, a gift. And you saw enough of how that went awry in places, well-meaning gifts to people, disempowered people. So, you know, you had your good motives, and Dave had his good motives. One of the things I thought was kind of ironic, maybe a bit funny, was that you eventually came around to Dave's way of thinking, although you had really had butted heads with him on this and, you know, kind of went your separate ways in terms of what to do about this. So, I guess I want to ask you about the benefits of stubbornness, or maybe insistence or dedication. You can call it by nicer names, but stubbornness can work against you and can work for you. How do you see that and other attributes that you had as being influential in what came to be built on? Well, first I, you know, I got to tell you, as I write clearly in the book, that I've made a lot of mistakes over these 22 years, and that was one of them. Dave was right. You know, he wanted to hire skilled construction supervisors that would be able to work with us in the village, and I wanted those skilled construction supervisors to volunteer their time the way we were. In addition to all the community members, you know, any school that we build requires between 1,500 and 3,000 volunteer work days to build. When we were in Miss O'Malley, I wouldn't compromise. You know, I said everybody's got to be all-in volunteering, and I was wrong. Dave was right, and the next project we did compromise, and I learned, you know, from Dave that that was the right way to go, that the community could still lead the project, could still contribute and build the school without being so extreme. So I feel like I was not only stubborn, but extreme, and once we changed that aspect of our methodology, things really took off and improved, and, you know, we developed a covenant out of that between us and the community members, outlining their commitments to build the school, contributing the labor to build the school, and setting their daughters to school and equal numbers with their sons while we bring in the materials and the construction expertise, and it's been amazing. It's been an amazing journey. Mostly in the book, experiencing the journey along with you, the stories just are world-changing for someone who hasn't been exposed to this thing, and you opened my eyes to a number of things that I hadn't experienced. I have to open your eyes to one thing that I think you got wrong in the book. It's a minor mistake. You know, when you talk about your visiting Mother Teresa's group, and you know, when you heard them pray, the Lord's Prayer, without these thou's type language, right? You know, in modern English, you talked about how valuable it was to you to hear it without the formal language. Well, actually, few enough people know this. I know it because I'm Quaker. The English language, there used to be the informal and the formal. The informal is the, the formal is you. We abolished the informal in English, and everybody's used, and now we use it for informal. Both. I never knew that. Right, and so, you know, you've been exposed to other languages, where in French you have Tu and Vu, and you know, you use the Tu for individual, the Vu you use for plural, a group of people, or for formal. You're talking to the King, right, you know, whatever. Yeah. So, actually, the language that's preserved, you know, when we talk to God with V, we're actually speaking as a familiar. We're speaking intimately with divine. So, anyway, given that V and thou, all that sounds stilted, your reaction is still true, is still right. You know, let's speak like we do when we're really speaking to our friends now. So, I'm not knocking it, I'm just pointing out to you. Oh, I appreciate that, Mark. I didn't know that, and that's valuable. I like that. I like that a lot. While we're talking about this, let's talk a little bit about faith. You grew up Catholic. I grew up Catholic. I became a Quaker somewhere in my late teens, early twenties. Faith has played, as I read in the book, walk in their shoes. It's played an important part in sustaining you and motivating you. Can you talk a little bit of how you see that, your own journey into deeper faith? Sure. You know, I think for me, the faith was really something that was passed down to me for my father. He had remarkable faith. And my mom said early on, like, it's a gift. You know, I don't know anybody like him. And he said that, too. Faith, in some ways, is really a gift. And I think I was very fortunate to have inherited that same faith that he had. And it became sort of the cornerstone of who I am. And it also became provocative. I believed in the ideals of social justice. I believed strongly that we need to serve our sisters and brothers. And that was our essential purpose. But I was not living that belief to the extent that I felt like I should. And so it was that faith and the challenges that come with faith that really moved me to live a more active life. Have you always felt clear you were a Catholic? Did you rebel? I mean, a lot of people, you know, after you get confirmed, I think Protestants do this particularly. A lot of them, okay, I've got confirms and no, I don't have to go to church anymore. I was raised Catholic, you know, we go every Sunday. I got confirmed. Yeah, I go every Sunday. It was part of that. Did you have a point where you felt like your faith was a little lapse? Do you certainly got exposed to a lot of the world's religions and got benefit from them, too? Well, no. You know, I think that the exposure that I had to different world religions helped to enrich my own faith and my own tradition. And I don't follow the dogma to the T. You know, there are parts of the Catholic tradition that I am less invested in than other parts. But I certainly learned a lot about compassion and learned a lot about mindfulness from reading some of the books that His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote and by interacting with the Dalai Lama. And I've also learned a lot from studying a lot of the stories and philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and also the way he lived his life and his principles of nonviolence. And I've learned tremendous amounts from Muslims, you know, in Taoists and people that are agnostic and even atheists. I think everybody has something to contribute and the common thread is compassion. We all want to share. We all want to lift each other up. And so exposure to different religions really enhanced and helped me to focus on my own faith and really be more mindful about the liberation theology and the social justice aspects of it. Yeah, we do learn and we profit from those things. We grow where we're planted, right? We've got branches that reach out widely. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned something about this earlier and I want to delve into it a little bit more because I was very aware of it when you were writing in the book, like you mentioned in Misamali, one of the things you wanted to insist upon was that girls attend the school equal numbers to boys. And that goes against culture. When I arrived in Togo and when I went out to my village, the first class as I taught, out of the first 60 students that I taught, two were females. And that's because I was teaching at a high school level. Already the numbers had been more balanced out in the lower grades. But when you got up to, you know, 15 was prime time to get married for a girl there. That's right. A different worldview than what we have. So I was teaching someone who's 16, 17, 18 years old. But you were fighting the culture in particular female genital mutilation. I mean, there's things like that that are part of the indigenous cultures like in Mali where you were at at that time. How hard was it or how much did you feel like you had to back off or toe the line carefully? Talk a little bit about your struggles, not just imposing the Western view on people, but yet feeling like there was something important that needed to change. Oh, that's a very good question, Mark, and a question that's not asked often enough. So we do not at all impose Western values or standards in the communities of the countries where we work, we insist upon it. But where the governments and the leaders have made statements and have actually penned laws against gender discrimination and against other sorts of atrocities, we really follow up. And so with our methodology, we really put the community members in front. So before we build a school with any community member, we talk to them, we listen to them, and we ask them if they're willing to send their daughters to school in equal numbers with their sons and why it's important for daughters to go to school. And we hear what they have to say. And if they do want to build a school and they do want to send their daughters to school, then we ask everyone to sign a covenant. And I think the signing of the covenant is one of the most powerful parts of our process because it's where elders who are the first to sign step up and make a commitment. And in a lot of cases, in almost every case in Africa, the people that sign these covenants can't even sign their own names. All they can do is add their thumbprint, yet they're willing to work to build a school so that someday their daughters and their sons can read and write. You know, that's, I think, the answer to your question in terms of the challenges. It's not much of a challenge. We put it to the people. And if they're willing to send their daughters to school, we work together. If not, then we part ways respectfully and peacefully. We rarely, if ever, have parted ways because education is a valuable thing that any community that has opportunity for wants to take advantage of. You told one story that was particularly moving to me. I've forgotten the woman's name now, but I believe that she was in Mali. You know, she'd been married, arranged marriage kind of thing, I think. And it was hard on her, female genital mutilation. Sure. Comba doombia. Comba, yeah, yeah. And so share a little bit of her story because, I mean, of course, I think people should go out and get the book, walk in their shoes. Can one person change the world by Jim Salikowski? But do talk about Comba. Sure. So it was about 10.30 at night. And I was in one of our schools in Mali in West Africa. And in almost all of our schools, the community members were on adult literacy classes for the parents that worked so hard to build these schools, but themselves can't read or write. And I was watching as this woman was like learning to hold a pencil for the first time. And signing and writing her name. And I found out that she had two granddaughters that were attending the school during the day time. You know, they were day students. And I looked at her and I said, "Wow, you must be very proud. Her name is Comba doombia." I said, "Comba, you must be very proud." And she looked back at me and she said, "I'm proud, but I'm also ashamed." And I was surprised by that. And I said, "Why would you be ashamed?" And I got to know Comba much better and found out that, well, as Percy said, "I'm ashamed because I've lived in the darkness of illiteracy." And then, you know, I wanted to know what she meant by that. And I found out that when she was a young girl, she was subjected to female genital mutilation. And then when she was 15 years old, she was forced to marry a man that she never met and became one of three wives and was forced to leave the village with that person. And ultimately, he was abusive to Comba and the other three wives. And Comba lost three out of five of her children, didn't survive. So she had lived this life of sorrow. And then she stepped up and wanted to become one of the leaders to build the school. Wherever we build, we form a leadership committee of six women and six men. And Comba joined that leadership committee. And she had a crew that she worked with every week that she was responsible for. And she became this really powerful leader in the community. And she went on to outlaw female genital mutilation in her village. And she was once illiterate, started to petition different agencies for support and funding and loans so that they could buy income-generating equipment to process some of their agricultural products. And they went on to great success to raise money for the causes of the community through their own micro-enterprise and became more and more economically self-sufficient. And so it's just this amazing story of this woman, Comba. And I said, "So if you are ashamed because you lived in the darkness of illiteracy for so long, why are you proud?" And she said, "I'm proud because now I'm living in the light." And she said, "You know, I want you to share this." And she wrote down a message. She said, "I want you to share this with anybody that you see." And it was just a little few words, but profound words that she wrote on a slate with a piece of chalk. And it says, "Thank you for bringing the light." And that's what education is. You know, one part of the story that was kind of powerful is when you recount in the book that after, what, 19 years or whatever it was, you actually went back to Mizumali, which was, you know, really kind of the founding rock where you got started. How did that all go? Well, when we were there building the school, you know, 20 years earlier, there was one person who really I became close with, and he was my best friend in the village. His name was Stephen Tambani. And he was on the worksite every day. He was my mentor. And we were able to get the school built, and, you know, there were 150 kids attending when I left. And shortly before I left, Stephen, his wife gave birth to their first child, a little baby girl named Ruthie. And I got to hold her in my arms. And that was a powerful moment for me to hold a little child and hope that she would attend the school that we built, but not knowing for sure. And so going back 20 years later, you know, after we finished, I never looked back and never wanted to go back. Because I had lost so many friends to HIV/AIDS at the time, and I didn't know who would still be there. And, you know, I wasn't sure if the school would even still be standing because we built it at the base of a mountain, and there could be mudslides or anything else. But finally I decided to go back. And when I got there, found out that the chief he died from AIDS, and that our construction supervisor, his entire family, died from AIDS. And I couldn't find Stephen, and then finally, you know, after half an hour, I saw him. And it was this powerful moment when we reconnected, and then he took me to the center of the village, and I was shocked because I did not know which school we built. Instead of one school and 150 kids, there's five schools and a thousand kids attending these schools every day, and 533 of them are girls. You know, and then Stephen introduced me to his daughter, Ruthie, and he explained, you know, he was beaming with pride, and he explained that she went to the school that we built together. She went to all five of those schools, and then he started whispering. He said, "You know, I'm an illiterate man. I can't even sign my own name." But Ruthie, she became a teacher, and now she will lift up my family's name forever. And I think that is one of the most profound and important stories in this book, because it's about Stephen. It's about Ruthie. It's about the fire that Stephen lit 20 years ago, and how education is a flame that cannot be extinguished, and now Ruthie is lighting those fires. So we have a lot to learn from Stephen and Ruthie. There's so many amazing stories in "Walk in Their Shoes." One person changed the world. It's really wonderful all that you've lived through, and that you're able to share through the book. Of course, with James Hirsch's help there, too. James is an amazing guy. I learned to trust, admire, and respect him tremendously, and there's no way I could have written this book without him. In fact, I did not want to write it in first person, and did not want to write about my own story at all until I met Jim, but I just have so much trust in him that I was able to do that. He's a wonderful man. You know, from the days when you were struggling, to bring in a few cents was a great triumph to this point where build-on is just a major success. I think you mentioned along the way at one point you had a fundraiser. Didn't you bring in 2.3 million at one of these benefits or fundraisers, something like that? Well, that was our most successful. That was one of the most recent. But we certainly did not start at that level. We were scraping by in the early days, for sure. Well, and it's grown so much. How many people are officially build-on or volunteers or staff, or how does this work? Well, we have about 150 people that are full-time on staff worldwide. We're building 100 schools this year. It means we break around on a new one every four days, and we're running our after-school programs in 70 urban high schools across the United States. And then in terms of volunteers, every day there are literally hundreds, sometimes thousands of community members working to build these schools, these build-on schools around the world. And we're mobilizing between 3,000 and 4,000 urban youth every week to get out into their communities and volunteers. So it's really inspiring to see the kind of movement and the kind of passion that people have developed around this cause. It is just such a collective effort and a remarkable collective effort that I'm very, very humbled by the whole thing and being involved in it. Well, one more thing I wanted to highlight part of the experience that you share in the book, including trying to walk in their shoes. You and I, you know, you and Michigan, me and Wisconsin, we've all grown up with a privileged existence that a number of people don't recognize because we don't feel very privileged compared to those who are above us on the food chain. But at a certain point, you went and you lived in Harlem. And that has got to have struck a few people as counter-intuitive. It's like all the people in Harlem, I'm not sure this is literally true, but I'm sure there's a lot of people in Harlem who would love to get to a place where they didn't have to live in a life-threatening place. But you went and lived there. Could you talk a little bit about that? What motivated you to do that? And how much of their shoes did you really try on? I like the last part of your question. So, Mark, the reason I moved, I just spent almost three full years living in villages around the world learning from community members how to unite and build schools in Africa, and Asia, and South America. And I knew we needed to expand our work in the United States, especially in urban high schools. And I also knew that I had zero experience in inner cities in America. I grew up in a pretty small town in Michigan and just didn't have that experience, didn't feel qualified. So, I moved to Harlem to learn from community members, to learn from the students, you know, what is most effective and what is most empowering. What I learned while I was there is that these students, these kids, and I spent three years living in a half-boarded-up brownstone not too far from one of the schools we work in. What I learned from these students in these neighborhoods is that they are the most determined, the most courageous and fearless people in America, and they are the most compassionate. I never heard anyone say, "I want to escape from this neighborhood. I want to get out of this hood or that hood." I never heard that. What I heard, what I saw was students that wanted to transform their communities. They wanted to make it better for their families, and they stepped up and did it, and they're stepping up and doing it right now and every day. It's a very powerful thing. There's a lot to be learned from the youth in America, and their leadership is invaluable. In fact, I'm convinced that this generation of youth will be the generation to break the cycle of poverty, illiteracy, and low expectations through service and education. I'm convinced of it because I see it happening every day. You walked in their shoes for a while by living there. Somehow you had to interact with the drug dealers outside your door, and you had to interact with police. What did you learn from that? First, what I realized is, and I should answer this question, my intent to walk in their shoes, to walk in the shoes of the people in the Somali village, to walk in the shoes of people anywhere, I realized was impossible to me because I'm not subjected to extreme poverty or even poverty. My idea of walking in their shoes was born out of solidarity. I wanted to be part of the community, really part of the community, but it shifted to admiration. I wanted to walk in their shoes because I admire, I respect who they are, and I learned so much from them, and they have been so generous with me. That I want to definitely clear up so people understand the origin of the title for this book. In terms of your question about some of the specific things like being arrested, that was an interesting experience in Harlem. I was literally arrested for stealing my own car, and it sounds crazy, but my car had been stolen and recovered, and it was chop-shopped. I put it back together and got her back on the road, but they never took it off the list. I was driving down the road one night in Harlem and got pulled over by three squad cars and rolled the window down, and the officer had a gun about four or five inches, drawn in about four or five inches from my face. He informed me that I was driving a stolen car. I said, "Oh, I know it was stolen, but I didn't steal it." He obviously didn't believe me, nor should he have, and they took me in. I was trying to explain to the station supervisor that the car was stolen, recovered, et cetera, checked the venue insurance, and they're like, "Not a chance." You get thrown in the tank, and he threw me into the jail cell, and I'm sitting in there, and at this point I'm pretty frustrated and really angry at the unfairness, the inequity of that. I'm sitting there, and after about ten minutes I notice there's another guy sitting there with me, and I was like, "Oh, I look over," and I feel like, "Wow, I'm in jail." I got to ask the question, right? So I look over at this guy, and I say, "So what are you in for?" And he's like, "Oh, ten grams of this, twelve ounces of that, and there's this long litany of drug-related charges." And then at the end, he looks over at me, he's like, "What about you? What are you in for?" And I said, "Me, I'm innocent." And he said, "Yeah, me too. We'll be out of here in no time." And I didn't laugh at the time, but I was out in a few hours, and I'm not sure what happened to that guy, but it was another example of things that can happen to you when you're in certain circumstances, and you've got to be, I think, very diligent, and you've got to be mindful, and you've got to be patient and compassionate under all circumstances. And take into account the privileges and options that we have, like in Miso Malawi, where you and I can afford the medical treatment, or in Harlem, where you can post bail and might have someone actually listen to you, but there's so much that we can learn from walking in someone else's shoes. Both the experience and the book walk in their shoes. Can one person change the world? It's by Jim Zalikowski, co-founder of BuildOn, find him on the web at BuildOn.org. Of course, we couldn't fit all of your stories into this program, so there's more. If our listeners want to be further enriched, go to the web, NortonSpiritRadio.org, and listen to the bonus excerpts of my interview with Jim Zalikowski. Jim, thanks for sharing both the inspiration and the stories, and living a life of compassion and service, and especially for joining me today for Spiritian Action. Hey, Mark, I want to thank you for what you're doing, for giving voice to so many people, and shining a light on so many important causes and ways that we can all live more active and mindful lives. So, thank you, Mark, very, very much. My privilege. Again, find Jim Zalikowski at BuildOn.org. I also want to thank Catherine B. Schultz for her support for NortonSpiritRadio. She's an Eau Claire attorney, a big believer in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work. In her case, helping clients restart their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed. Call her at 715-835-8904, and mark on your calendar November 2nd in Eau Claire, Wisconsin at PizzaPlus. Concerts by three musicians, a talk on organic foods by Cornucopia Institute, and much more fun, including an organic and local meal of pizza and Middle Eastern foods. See you next week for Spiritian Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You
Since 1991, Jim Ziolkowski & BuildOn.org have been transforming inner city schools in the USA and building schools - over 550 to-date - in the poorest countries of the globe.