In Service to Love & Life
by Zane Wilemon
And just like that I was buck naked, in the middle of the night, running through a train station in Zurich, Switzerland. My two best friends and I had been betting with one another who could take the BEST photo of the day, so when the Swiss train company went on strike and we were left stranded, three Texas college kids with nowhere to go – but a bet on the line – well…inspiration struck when I saw a piece of artwork, a plastic mold of an abstract cow in the middle of the station.
This whole thing happened over 20 years ago, and the photo still makes me laugh. It was a time in life when I was more free, less burdened by responsibilities, and completely filled with the possibilities of what this life could and would be.
It was also this same trip that I first journaled my experiences, started tracking my thoughts and feelings, and began to open my mind to a life of meaning. Of course it wasn’t a lightening-striking-naked-on-top-of-a-plastic-bull-in-the-middle-of-atrain-station kind of inspiration; it was a subtle nudging throughout that summer of 1998. And that subtle nudging, which lingered as we made out way back home to Texas, honestly continues to this day.
A constant has been hunger and desire for purpose held within a tension of having fun, making money, and serving those on the margins of society
After that first experience abroad, the hunger to see more and be more and a yearning to pursue a higher purpose took root in my soul.
The year that followed was a struggle. It was a struggle between the life I had known of forming and molding to the social norms around me, and the tension of that seed that was taking root within me to break out and follow an inner voice hungry for purpose. It took me another two years before that hunger became a famine, and I acted on it by buying a one-way ticket to Africa.
On October 18, 2000, I landed for the very first time in Nairobi, Kenya and drove an hour and a half down into the Great Rift Valley where I would center and focus my next two decades of life into the town of Maai Mahiu.
At the time, Maai Mahiu had a population of only about 15,000 people and no running water or electricity. It was a transit stop along what was and is still known as the AIDS Highway that runs from Mombasa, Kenya to Kampala, Uganda. Of course, I had no idea of its strategic location at the time, but it was here that I met my new co-founder and lifetime friend, Jeremiah Kuria.
When I first met Jeremiah, he was running an orphanage of 140 children in Maai Mahiu, running a local church and raising three children with his wife Mary. I later learning he was doing this for a staggering $50/month, all while smiling and living a life of immense purpose like none I had ever witnessed before.
Jeremiah’s life was an enigma to me. I was raised a middle-class Texas kid, with no need unmet and basically any desire filled by my family. And now, here I stood in the middle of Kenya with a man who received his first pair of shoes at the age of 15, a man who could barely make ends meet but who was raising an amazingly happy family in the midst of what appeared to me to be an impoverished town with little to no hope.
And that is where God met me. That is where my heart was ripped open. There I would dedicate the focus of my life to serve, to love, and to walk alongside my good friend Jeremiah Kuria to discover our purpose and meaning in life…together.
credit: Erin Outdoors
Together we have served the Maai Mahiu community for almost 20 years. We started the very first school for children with special needs in the Rift Valley region and have created hundreds of jobs for the local community. We are actually proud to say that we are Maai Mahiu’s largest employer and growing. We have scaled alongside great companies like Whole Foods Market, American Eagle Outfitters, and Zazzle, producing handmade products by our Maker Mums who didn’t even know how to sew ten years ago.
A constant has bee hunger and desire for purpose held within a tension of having fun, making money, and serving those on the margins of society. How does one healthfully live in this tension?
As Ubuntu Life enters its 20th year as an organization, I am starting to reflect more on what I have learned, where we are heading, and how I would like to shape those learnings into resources for others along their journeys of purpose, of impact, of business.
As an Episcopal priest who runs a non-profit, that is a business, I am constantly intrigued with this concept of the spirituality of business. I am interested in how we tend to separate the two, placing our business life into one compartment of making profits at all costs and reserving our spiritual bucket on the side for when we have time to practice.
Why is this so? Why can we not foster a harmonizing of our corporate life with our spiritual life? The reality that I have witnessed by starting a non-profit charity that is morphing into a self-sustaining business is that there is no separation. They are one and the same. We pray together, we sing together, we make money together, we lead business strategy together.
credit: Hanna Cofer
I am still formulating these ideas, but in doing so, I hop to discover greater clarity as I have in so many other aspects along this journey. What once seemed distant and far off – like our Maker Mums learning to sew, or finding ourselves on the shelves in Whole Foods Market, or designing custom Disney shoes with Zazzle – this too will bring clarity simply by outwardly living the question.
And just like that I continue charging ahead buck naked, vulnerable, enthusiastically running towards the next abstract plastic cow and purpose to discover!