A sprinkling of insight

I have to teach a smattering of Asset-Based Community Development soon, and have started pouring over the relevant papers. You'd think that for an approach summarized as ABCD, there might be more colour and cartoons involved. But alas, no. ABCD is about a lot of things, premised on the idea that in development work you should really try and work with what you have, not with what you don't. Seems fairly intuitive that one.

Reading about it all reminds me of a conversation I had with Lulu a while back. Lulu is an aromatherapist at the Wellness Centre where I do my fieldwork. She is blind, and is perpetually being prayed for by people she meets on the taxi. According to her fellow commuters, God is punishing her with blindness because she doesn't pray enough. She shakes her head.
'You know what I tell them?'
'What?' I ask her.
'I say, even though I'm blind, I have a job and a house,' she pulls her face into a micro-expression of rebellion, 'I tell them they should save their prayers for themselves and their problems.'
I smile. 'You're right,' I say, 'you have a house and a job and they have neither. They should pray, not you.'
'And anyway,' she continues, 'what do they know? This one man told me to read Psalms. Obviously he doesn't know the Bible because there are no stories of blind people in Psalms.'
I start laughing. 'Wise words, Lulu.'

The commuters on the taxi look at Lulu and see her disability. They see blindness, weakness, punishment, need. Lulu, with her 'endogenous community knowledge', knows her assets, she knows her strengths. She also knows how to sass her way out of the victimization that others' throw on her, which is really just as valuable.