During my two years of illness, I had intense misgivings about what I knew I was being called to do. I had an image of a donkey being pulled but refusing to move forward, digging its four hooves into the ground. I had to let go and trust the force that was driving me to where it wanted me to go. That direction turned out to be Trees for Life.
On the day I signed the incorporation documents for Trees for Life in March 1984, I drove 300 miles to Colombia, Missouri, to meet with a man who had started the Ford Foundation in India and headed it for 17 years. After talking to me over a two-day period, that methodical old man said to me, “You are being led to conduct a social experiment that has never been conducted before. While people will want results and want them now, you will be pouring test tube after test tube down the drain.” That statement articulated exactly how I was feeling.
I did not have the least idea what this experiment was going to be. Nor did I have the necessary funds to conduct such a test. Whenever such questions arose, I would get a strong feeling, as if I were being told that this would not be “my” experiment. Over time, I came to understand that I was simply a means through which the experiment would be conducted. My task was to create and maintain the platform for this experiment to take place and allow the resources to come.
Even so, I did not feel I was the right person for the task because I did not have my fingers on the pulse of the poor. I was not poor and did not know how they lived, felt, or thought. If that was not enough, I was not an agriculturist or a horticulturist. I was born and raised in a city and enjoyed reading a nice book more than planting a tree.
During one of my early trips to India, I wrote a letter to Treva stating that for the next ten years I would consider myself a student, trying to feel the heartbeat of the poor. Without such training, I might spend all my life being off the mark.
The tests came immediately, inundating me.
A few months after my initial trip to India, I returned to the first school that had agreed to plant trees. I discovered that all 300 trees had been destroyed. Papaya trees are fragile to begin with, and the inexperienced teachers had planted those saplings on the children’s playground. At the ashram, the trees died because no one person had been put in charge of watering them.
We found out from this experience that not only are papaya trees fragile, but you cannot tell if a sapling is male or female. If a farmer was given ten plants and nine were male and only one female, he felt cheated to have done all that work when only one tree produced fruit.
There were many other issues we were working out during that time.
To get the trees from the market to the villages for planting, which could be a distance of 40 or 50 miles, we traveled on bicycles and trains. We would get up at 4 a.m. to catch a train, riding in crowded third-class compartments to the next village. I had to get a good feel for how the poor traveled. I didn’t want to drive to the villages in a car, making the statement, “I am from America.” I was wearing native clothes, not in an attempt to deceive the villagers, but genuinely to be one of them.
Soon fruit trees were being planted in 30 villages. Our tree-planting experiment started to spread beyond the capabilities of our small network. I noticed that wherever we went, new networks of people formed immediately, as if they had been waiting for me to arrive.
I was spending anywhere from two to six months at a time in India, working long hours. I had learned by this time not to set any goals. There were no time limits, no expectations. I did whatever I could, without concern for whether our efforts would succeed or fail. From childhood I had been taught that I should do the best I could and surrender the results to something beyond my control. Now, I was putting that into practice.
If I had a gift, it was to play with complex problems, breaking them down into their smallest parts to understand them and then putting the pieces back together in a way that created something totally new. I called it the shirt-making formula. I was like a tailor who cuts a bolt of cloth into pieces using a pattern, then sews those pieces into a wearable garment. I had used this formula in my consulting business to make money. Now, I was using it to serve others. I believed that this formula would work when one was being a keen listener and not trying to tell people what they should do. In this sense, I was in my element.
I felt there was some sort of guidance leading me. I could go to sleep and ask, “Hey, is this really going to happen or am I all wrong?” I felt I would have an answer within a few days. I gained confidence in things working out, even in the most desperate of times.
I operated on intuition. I had learned to distinguish between a simple impulse and those where I felt commanded to do something and to follow through. There was a sort of language, a vibration I would feel going down my spine. They were not common occurrences, but when they happened, I knew I must follow through with all my might, even if the impulse or feeling seemed irrational. It defied logic, but acting on such impulses never failed me.
During this time, I was invited to dinner at my friend’s house in New Delhi. One of the guests told me he and his friends were leading a caravan of religious people through a large number of villages to spread their message. I proposed an idea to him: Trees for Life would create packets of papaya seeds, with a picture of their group’s deity on each packet, along with instructions on how to plant the seeds. They would give the packets to the villagers as part of their communion. He presented the idea to his team, and they enthusiastically accepted the program.
A beautiful package was designed and we provided 150,000 seed packages. The villagers accepted them with great fervor.
A similar arrangement was made with the Rotary Club of Bengal, which distributed a papaya package designed on its behalf.
In both cases, the distributions were highly successful.
balbirmathur.com 