Our first Called to CARE session for 2023 begins like a dinner conversation among friends. In this podcast, AfricaExchange.org co-founders and co-directors, Sam and Melody Harrell, share how their Baptist American-African lives led them to become global leaders in “integrated” sustainable development... “I am blown a-Way.” (Rev. Jimi Calhoun, co-host, legendary musician, author and pastor)
Sam and Melody are saving lives and ending poverty with education and holistic, community care. Now celebrating their 25th year, AfricaExchange (AE) has built 14 “integrated child development” preschools in Kenya’s most-isolated / least-resourced regions. AE’s projects are providing and fostering nutrition, clean water, education, sanitation and infrastructure, jobs, job training, Creation care and restoration, and more, on an ongoing basis in these places to help these children and their communities defeat poverty.
Meet. Notice. Exchange. Serve. AfricaExchange’s model is rooted in the best of Christianity’s and Africa’s worldviews. As the children of Baptist missionaries in Africa, Sam and Melody’s foundational insight is that CARING FOR OTHERS means: listening, noticing, and being empathetic before acting. AfricaExchange helps communities build upward-spiraling personal and collective assets which benefit the whole community and their local biosphere. AE is exemplar in their work. This podcast is worth multiple listenings for those interested in “learning the lessons that will propel us forward.” (Sam Harrell)
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About our guests
• Melody Harrell, spiritual director, AfricaExchange.org
• Sam Harrell, executive director, AfricaExchange.org
• Rev. Jimi Calhoun, pastor, BridgingAustin.org, author/musician, JimiCalhoun.com
• Rev. Julaine Calhoun, pastor, BridgingAustin.org
• Chris Searles, director, BioIntegrity.net, exec. editor, AllCreation.org
About this series
In this time of polarizations and extremes we seem to be going to our Media for answers, and yet our Media is not designed or intended to give us answers. Media is a business (not a healer). Looking honestly at today’s shared social challenges, all indicators indicate it is Care through kinship, attention, gentleness, safety, honesty, support, process, nurturing, love, detail, nutrition, structure, generosity, time, etc. — that humans today need most to overcome our current complex, human-made crises.
What can More CARE do for modern people? Our guests are asked to share about the effectiveness of greater care for all in the living Creation through greater empathy, mutuality, relationship, conversation, listening, hearing, seeing, connecting, processing, balancing, healing, and nurturing of ourselves, each other, Earth’s biodiversity, and “the environment.”
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REFERENCES
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PROGRAM
I. 0:00 WELCOME
II. 2:00 INTRODUCTIONS
III. 6:30 INVOCATION, Melody Harrell
• “I love the concept of being called to care. It feels like an invitation and it feels like something I already have tools and capacity-for."
• RD Lang reading.
12:00 Sam, Real-life story
• “We were building an integrated child development center on the side of a mountain in Northwest Kenya…”
18:30 Rev. Calhoun
• “…Now I go out of my way to make sure they know I’m aware of them and they matter and they count.”
IV. 23:00 METHODOLOGY
24:30 Values
• S- “Melody and I are the product of missionary parents”
• M- “God had already been there… He or She didn’t have to be brought from America”
• S- “The example of Jesus (is) our motivating factor, but that does not mean you come into an empty slate. People already have an experience of God”
30:30 Kutana
• “KUTANA means to meet and exchange profound mutuality... so that we can love according to the way that love should be”
• “You won’t discover what a need is, unless you have dialogue and interaction… And that takes time and context and interaction and mutuality."
• Melody, “The beautiful practice of story-telling takes time and being close and the space
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