Between the care we give and the folks it assists often lies an ocean or two, our love passed hand-to-hand across the waters, traversing borders without visa or passport.  We all participate, you and I, in our different ways: folks fundraising, directors and donors, advocates, computer geniuses and cleaners keeping the offices of the local NGO ship-shape.  So many people, so many skills, most times unaware that we are actually one other’s co-worker.  And there’s those few, right at the end of the chain, who are truly walking with the poor; the staf lapangan, the field staff.  A whole lot of glory perhaps, but a whole lot of hard, gritty work.

Part of my role involves visiting these folks to see how they’re going, to see if the stories back at the office and across the waters haven’t had the truth bounced out of them on the long and pot-holed road home.  These staf lapangan do incredible work in difficult situations; living somewhere between the hopes and plans drawn up in the kantor pusat, the head office, and the hopes and plans of the folks they’re meant to help; attempting targets, goals, benchmarks, timelines and programs in complex cultural situations where due to their age, education or sex, they often hold little sway with the folks they hope to assist; working rural, living away from family and creature comforts so that they can live in and among the people they serve.  No easy job.  No easy job at all.

And so I visit for an hour or two, then retreat to the air-conditioned hotel and wifi and attempt a blogpost about the things I’ve seen, though an hour or two never made anyone an expert on anything.  And the staf lapangan return to where they came from and carry on with their job, memories of them quickly erased from the small minds of big picture people like myself.  Yet the entire success of our combined effort (yours and mine) hinges on these folks and the work that they do.

And so remind me often:

Jangan lupa orang kecil, Pak Klinton: Don’t forget the little people, Mr. Clinton.

They’re not that little.

And they’re people.