Dear Friends,
I was grateful this week to attend the 50th wedding anniversary of some good friends of ours. My wife, Lynn, and I sat in one of the four corners of the “properly” social-distanced porch while the eight of us talked.
It was fascinating to listen to a couple there who had lived all over the world as part of high-level diplomatic work throughout their lives. The husband told us a story of what it was like when they lived in western Africa. He was in charge of the diplomatic mission there, and an even higher-ranking government official wanted to support local villages there by installing hundreds of village-based solar systems.The husband on the porch with us went on with his story, telling us about what happened first to the pilot system they installed. Just before they moved ahead with the deployment of the hundreds of new installations, they went back and found that the pilot system was not being used as intended. The sadness in his voice was palpable.
This made me think of how important it is to have any program run by local leaders. And it makes me grateful that over the last four months of the Coronavirus pandemic, local leaders around the world are continuing to run our programs well. We may not be able to get on airplanes now to visit them, but they have the skills and the dedication to keep the work going.
If you have a group, a church or other group, that would like to meet some of these wonderful leaders, please let me know. We’ll work to pull together a Zoom video call if possible.
Until next Monday morning,
Dale Stanton-Hoyle,
Executive Director