In Korea, there’s a saying: “Dong Sang Yi Mong”, which translates to, “same bed, different dreams.” This refers to the idea of having completely different ideas and thoughts even if two people are in similar situations. In today’s post, we’re going to talk about how a group of people with totally different histories, thoughts, ethnic backgrounds, and languages got together, gathering around a common dream, and went beyond the borders of the United States, Uganda, and South Korea, and are attempting, together, to work a new model that other nonprofits have yet to realize.
Let’s dive into the story of the “salad bowl” of RUN!
This week, we’ll cover two topics: “the establishment of trust” and “guilt”. Today, we’re going to talk about the former.
Trust! To some of our readers, this may seem all too familiar and quite frankly axiomatic as a recipe for successful cooperation. To have the “same dreams”, it seems imperative to have a sense of trust. However, others argue that trust is neither necessary nor sufficient to a achieving the same goals. And perhaps, historically, they might have a case!
For instance, there were three famous high schools in Kenya that produced around 60 exceptionally qualified students every year, even before Kenya became an independent nation. Scholars say that Kenyan faculty and students must have had a deep-rooted sense of trust in order for them to have achieved a common dream.
However, schools like Alliance, Mangu, and Maseno were institutions in which elite faculty from schools such as Oxford and Cambridge came not only with a religious impact in mind (Catholic or Protestant Christian), but envisioned the normalization of young minds through a western civilization-centric pedagogy. Furthermore, scholars like John E. Anderson writes in The Struggle for the School that the colonial government needed a skilled and semiskilled African labor force (e.g. clerks, junior administrators, policemen, telephone operators, etc.) whereby the initial goal was to ensure that enough capable young men had access to education to enable them to occupy these jobs, ultimately for the British Empire. In other words, they never quite dreamed the same dream.
<Today’s Alliance Boys High School>
But the Kenyan boys didn’t let it stop them. To them, education was the best arms they could ask for, turning it into an asset that allowed them to turn themselves into a Kenyan elite, by Kenya, for Kenya, and with Kenya’s dreams in mind. For England and Kenya, their journey was one that was sometimes based on trust, and one that was absent in others as they ventured through a tumultuous turn of events, much of which we now call history.
< The bond between RUN Staff members has no borders >
Then what does trust mean to Raise Uganda Now? For us, it means at the most critical of times, we will not hide behind euphemisms or sugarcoating--instead, we will be honest even if it means facing sometimes upsetting truths head-on. It means even if the walk is hard now, that we remain hopeful because we have a road behind us that we walked together.
The story of RUN started with a high school student who spent a summer in Uganda in 2012, relying on the help of the Ugandan staff. It’s a story of how in 2014, the staff in turn asked for his help, and in 2015, the student goes back to keep the promise of overcoming the difficult times together. It’s a story of trust that binds us, heading together toward a new way of running in 2017 and beyond.
To the Ugandan, Korean, and American staff of RUN, our mutual trust is our history. The history we share is the foundation of our trust, and because we have shared the glories and laughters of success as well as the heartbreaks and tears of losses, we are able to dream the same dream even though we’re sometimes thousands of miles apart. It’s our drive: it’s what makes us RUN.
<Starlights seen from RUN Children’s Home>
The story continues...