Creating Something from Nothing

On our second day in Italy, our host RH was the mastermind of a 'day out' for the refugee boys. This entailed renting two coach buses and bringing all of the refugee boys out of the city from two different camps to a community gathering spot that one of the partnering churches had owned. After the boys arrived, a few different US based teams such as ours hosted some games and hung out with them. Lunch was served and after that, everyone got back in vehicles and went part way up Mount Etna. Dinner time was back at the gathering spot where this partner church's volunteers cooked brick oven pizzas - this is Italy after all - for everyone - about 100 people. Like the parade of American and refugee kids on the way to play football last summer, this was the first time this kind of thing had been done here.

In Warsaw, one of the things our team was asked to do was to conduct cultural surveys with Polish people. This survey included questions like "What do you like most about Warsaw?" and questions about priorities in life and if they were connected to a church. If you are like me, you basically push people running these surveys away like the plague. However in Warsaw, once you told them you were learning about Polish culture, they loved answering these questions and conversing about these kinds of topics. Our host TC was the instigator behind this because his startup church is English speaking and interested in what the younger generation thinks is important. To his knowledge, this was the first time any of this kind of data was ever collected in Warsaw.

These first time 'things' are important to The Ember Cast and are the basis for one of our distinctives when we run summer experiences - we want our high school teams to work side by side with people doing these kinds of things. There are a unique set of skills for a leader trying to execute something from nothing: raising money for the untested, embracing risk, building a network from scratch, logistics, budgets, casting vision, learning from failure, catalyzing others, etc. this list could go on and on and can be taught and modeled. This is where we bank our investment - the global leaders of tomorrow should be learning these skills today. RH and TC both embody these skills, they are creating something from nothing. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that our Italy team worked side by side with both of these men and their teams.