TRANSITION NOTES
12 March 2009; Kepong, Kuala Lumpur
For the past three weeks or so, this word transition has figured quite prominently in my vocabulary. I remember emailing everyone I had met in the course of a a 9-month assignment in Malaysia that I transitioned out of my role as Interim National Director of Habitat Malaysia last 03 Feb when a Malaysian was appointed, as planned, for the post.
I promptly applied for leave and left for the Philippines on 08 Feb to take a much-needed transition from this rather tough assignment. As usual, in an organization dedicated to the proposition that good intentions could triumph over evil, I found my time spent mostly in trying to decipher impure motives that pollute good intentions now and then. In this assignment, I believe I have been able to grow up or wizened up a little bit more to the obvious fact that character transformation is quite an uneven process.
But it is as though I had not known this fact about human nature before. It is just that when you enter an organization, the assumption somehow that you automatically make is that everyone there breathes the same air as to ideals and is walking the talk about noble mission and goals. I forgot what I learned ages ago that we are not perfect and it is through our imperfections that we can glimpse through the vast possibility of our own perfections.
This transition is devoutly to be wished, and worked for. That again is an old lesson that I have learned again and again during the past 9 months. No easy way out of it. We need to purify ourselves and others not in isolation, but in the company of fellow human beings equally caught in the trap of defining perfection in terms of some ideals, but remained hopelessly trapped in the contradictions of the flesh and the spirit.
I guess to be sane, one has to go back to the worn-out example of the glass: you either look at it as half full or half empty and that defines, according to psychologists or philosophers, whether you are pessimistic or optimistic.
Which brings us again to Habitat Malaysia: either you get dismayed that the average number of houses it is building per year is quite low compared to the average in nearby countries which are not so prosperous, or you get optimistic that knowing its constraints, it is able to build and repair houses in recent months more than the monthly average over the ten-year period.
The fact is that Habitat operations has been run largely through volunteers, from family selection to raising funds to the actual building of houses. There is a clear need to transition from this mode of operations to one that will blend professional work with volunteerism if we want to build more houses in such numbers that will impact on the local poverty housing situation.
Ah, transition, thy name is patience.
