What Burning for Change Means

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

-Robert Kennedy

I never thought I’d be in business. Never thought I’d be cut out for it. Aren’t businessmen smooth operators? I picture a sear-sucker suit, smooth haircut stiff with product, dark sunglasses, gleaming smile and a tongue dripping with quicksilver. I've always dressed a little sloppy, usually with weird of funny t-shirts. I’m often messy haired, well-spoken and funny but a little too honest to be a real shark. Once, when I was young, my older sister Kristin, younger sister Ariana and I woke up early on a weekend. After a short and frenzied deliberation, we ate most of my mom's Pop Tarts. We weren't supposed to. Weren’t allowed. All mom said was, "Did you guys eat my pop tarts?" And I blurted, "You said she wouldn't know!" to my older sibling, who shot me the dirtiest of looks. Hilarity ensued.

Despite my not fitting this or in my opinion any other mold, I find myself the founder and president of a start-up company. I have to learn to speak business-ease, a cryptic and perplexing tongue. The words feel awkward in my mouth. They have an unfamiliar texture, like trying some strange new food. I’ve often thought of business as Darwinian, and iniquitous—a process of fighting with nice words, of backstabbing with smiles, and as with the multinationals, of acquiring wealth for a tiny few, while social ills for the many pile up like industrial waste. De Balzac one said that behind every great fortune lay a great crime. I’m sure not every one. But looking behind the curtain doesn’t always reveal a strange little man, but instead something more sinister.

But now I see the concept of business more clearly, as many others in the social enterprise and green tech movements do. A business is just a social mechanism, machinery that can be a force for good, or for ill. Just as nuclear technology brings energy, chemotherapy or thermonuclear destruction. Knives cut food or foes. It’s all depends on method and intent. For sure, business apparatuses can and have become vehicles for positive social change. Still, I’ve been finding it hard to pivot to this new outlook and vocation. But it's occurring. I feel the shift inside myself at every new meeting, marketing event, handshake or exchange of elevator pitches.

I've formed a company. We plan to sell a gourmet African hot sauce and give the profits to charity. Ergo my clever title: Burning for Change! I want the rich, deliciousness and the burn that follows to scorch away the inequities of the old order, and to clear a path for this new paradigm. Imagine enjoying the most delicious hot sauces, something you were going to purchase anyway, but one that is more rich and flavorful than you’ve ever tasted. Then imagine that same item causes development in one of the poorest countries in the world, and helps the poverty stricken in America too.

This is my dream. This is the new capitalism. This is how we change the world from one of scarcity, competition and ruthlessness to one of bounty, cooperation and good. Don't believe the world is so bad off. Globalissues.org states on their website that 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, and half the world lives on less than $2.50 a day. These numbers are mind boggling. But I think when we hear them, and without seeing what that really looks like, we sigh, and return to our lives without really digesting what that means. But how can we take things like human rights seriously, something almost everyone subscribes to, when we never live up to the goals we set, encapsulated for all to see in parchment and ink. Those who are this poor never get proper healthcare, proper education or a chance to become financially independent. These swarming masses all over the world, the majority of humans on this earth are allocated to a life of mere dogged living with no hope for escape.  

I believe that we have the means to transform our world and give each human being a chance for prosperity, good health and peace. For the very first time, due to the exponential growth of technology, ordinary citizens can see for themselves that the peoples of the world have all the same basic human needs and desires. It is only their cultures that make them express these differently. In all my travels, I have always found that people are basically the same, and that most people are basically good.  

But how come all this changing the world stuff is often made out to sound naïve, cliché, or the stuff of mere fantasy? Build Up! then should be the herald’s horn inviting celebration, marking a paradigm shift towards fun, lightheartedness, compassion, engagement and a more positive outlook for the future. This whole new millennium, though justifiably so, has been a real downer. We’ve rusted, atrophied, fallen from grace. Why does everything have to be so serious? All we encounter are fear, viciousness and polarization. All over the world, the news seems to be one group furious with another without end. All the world’s poor gets poorer, and cascading down everyone gets poorer, and all those in power do is fight amongst themselves, never solving anything.

Development work has also devolved from wanting to help the poor to cries for help so loud and pitiful, the same way over and over, that we all suffer from compassion fatigue. In Malawi for instance, where I was, the poorest country, with 15 million living in less than a dollar a day, with so many lost to HIV/AIDS, not to mention all the orphans left behind. In a preschool project near the teacher education college where I worked, we heard reports of six children dying of Malaria, a curable disease. Treatment was free. But there was no transportation available to get them to the clinic, and if there was, the poor, rural villagers had no money to pay for such transport.

But we don’t have compassion fatigue for these things, the real face of abject poverty, because we don’t know about them. Maybe even, because we'd feel compelled to do something about these cases. We don’t hear of real cases, especially in the West where we only view Africa as a place stocked with skeletal toddlers with swollen bellies whose detached faces swarm with flies. If these toddlers exist, I haven’t seen them.

Of course these toddlers probably do exist. But Africa is so much more. It has an enormous portion of the world’s young people and will be a powerhouse in decades to come. Africa is rising. But even now, with so much suffering, it is much, much more. During my three month stay in Malawi, I found so many warm and friendly people, witnessed unimaginable vistas and experienced exhilarating adventures.

So instead of the deadly serious, I will try a new tactic, one of irreverence, curiosity, lightheartedness, with a bend toward suspense, the need for exploration, the desire to eat delicious food and to have fun with total abandon. These are the core of the human spirit, the things that have made us survive for millennia. They never get old.

Let enjoyment, wonder and possibility be our motivating factors, the sparks that ignite social change and develop our world. Why can’t we see real people, real sites, the sparkles in the eyes of the barefoot children as they shout “Azungu” when you drive through the villages? Why don’t we gaze upon the stately boababs the natives say God planted upside down to keep it from running away, hear the calls of peddlers selling candy, sodas, snacks at minibus stops, follow up the long necks of the giraffes in Nyala Game Reserve, the gorgeous sands and the bright blue waters of Lake Malawi from Livingstonia Beach--right on the rift valley, while we sway to the techno and reggae beats at the Lake of Stars festival?

Usually, in the developing world things are extracted to the betterment of others, and an economic desert, a dead zone is all that's left behind. Why can’t a unique product improve the lives of the people from whence it came and fill them with pride, and also be the engine of change needed to develop their and our country? It could build a bridge of wonder and understanding between America and Malawi. Help could flow one way, and the other. It could be a cultural exchange, and development in Malawi will help America. Doing well will give them buying power, and American exports with increase. 

Cooperation. Development. Worldwide love through universal language, delicious things to eat. So I came up with a mission, to: Have fun. Sell hot sauce. Save the world. This is the battle cry for the new millennium. More background, more on my idea, and other stuff to come…