Making A World of Difference

To read an extract, visit Exisle’s Issuu bookshelf.

Every once in a while, a book comes around that reminds us of what is best about being human. This is one such book, and the stories will leave you crying, laughing, and ultimately moved to change your world and the world around you.

Many of us feel helpless when faced with the seemingly endless pain and poverty in the world. We want to help, yet are paralysed by the immensity of the problem, thinking, ‘What can I possibly do?’ Yet sometimes the smallest actions have the biggest consequences. Making a World of Difference tells the inspiring stories of heroic individuals the world over who are saving lives and solving problems. Within each of their communities, they saw a problem and with their own unique skills and perspectives, set about solving it. Their remarkable stories suggest that the act of giving takes many forms and emphasise that the simplest ideas, executed with commitment and compassion, can be just as important as contributions of money.

What unites the people in Making a World of Difference is their passion, compassion and integrity. They are problem solvers, revolutionaries and creatives – and they’re all real people, just like you or I. Their stories, as told by Miles Roston, tell of how they discovered their passion, what inspires them, their personal highs and lows and ultimately, why it is and how it came to be that they do what they do.

This is the perfect book for these times. Through sharing the stories of these incredible people, Miles reminds us all of the best of our  human nature, gently, with humour and absolute joy.

To buy, visit Exisle Publishing’s website (delivered to your door, with FREE shipping!) or your favourite bookstore.

Dreaming of shoes

Some 30 years ago, in Buriram, a province of Thailand, there was a little barefoot girl named Kwansiri Chanakiat, or Siri. She lived in a rice-farming village. On either side of the dirt road were mostly small shacks like the one belonging to her family. There were also a few old raised teak houses where more prosperous people lived. Behind walls, on quiet shaded grounds, rose the Buddhist temple, its patchy red pointed roof tipped with chofahs, thin gold bird-like decorations.

One day, as she trudged along the road, Siri found an old newspaper lying on the ground. She picked it up and sat in the shade of a tree not much bigger than she was. Unable to read, she turned the pages, until she came to a photograph. It showed people wearing beautiful shoes.

The little girl was transfixed. Siri ran home to her mother and father and begged them to get her shoes. Her parents gently reminded her that they were just poor farmers. They could not afford such things. For now, she would have to continue going barefoot.

But Siri would not let go of her dream of having shoes. One morning as she was playing out on the road she observed the older children going to school. She followed them past the temple, where those golden chofahs glittered. She noticed that like the people in the picture, the students too were wearing shoes. They were simple, sturdy and black, not so pretty or stylish, but they were shoes nonetheless. ‘When I was a child,’ Siri says today, ‘I didn’t know I wanted education. But I knew this: I saw nice shoes in a newspaper and I wanted to wear them too.’

Siri ran home and begged her mother and father to let her go to school. Though her parents were poor, they did support her desire for education. They saved money for the fees, and she finally entered school. When she first began to attend classes, she still had no shoes.

‘Then later, when I got mine, I hung them around my neck, because I was afraid they would hurt my feet.’ Like the other students, she later began to wear the shoes. Many years later, at university in Bangkok, a large city with far more footwear, Siri met her future husband. After they graduated as teachers and married, they returned to Siri’s home village and began to teach at Singhapittayakom School. One day, Siri paid special attention to a little girl in the class, Khanangnit. This young one always had a hard time concentrating, but Siri noticed too just how sad she seemed. Perhaps the girl reminded her of herself when very young. But even though she had been as poor as she suspected Khanangnit was, Siri at least had her dream, whereas, she says, ‘If a child is unhappy, she won’t even have a dream.’ Teaching is difficult enough, but Siri decided to take her work even further and pay a home visit to Khanangnit. When she went to see her in the nearby viliage, she was shocked at her living conditions.

The little girl lived with her grandfather, a gaunt man who suffered from schizophrenia, as her mother was in hospital. There was barely any furniture inside the shack, and it was also missing one wall. When Siri asked why, the grandfather explained that as they owed money for the mother’s medical bills, they were selling the house bit by bit. Siri asked where the girl slept, and Khanangnit said in the pavilion near the temple.

Then she asked Khanangnit what they had to eat. The little girl showed her an old sack of rice. Siri asked if there was anything else. ‘The girl pointed to a small jar of local Isaan fish soup we call plarah,’ Siri says. Plarah is fermented, and has a pungent smell; when left too long, worms also get in. ‘There was nothing else. I was embarrassed, as I thought immediately that would not be enough for me, but the girl said she had enough.’

Having come to see the little girl’s circumstances, Siri also took a hard look at her own. ‘We had more than her. We had much more, but we never felt it was enough.

‘Seeing this girl was just like a slap in the face. Until then,’ she says, ‘I’d believed money was the most important thing. But even having money still hadn’t made me happy. And from what she said, I realised that whether one has enough or not is in the heart.’

On her way home, Siri could not help thinking about Khanangnit and weeping. But later, when she was in bed, unable to sleep and staring up at the ceiling, she says she realised that either she could cry – or she could help. She started by giving Khanangnit and her grandfather some money. She brought some extra clothes from her family, and food from her well-tended garden. She also taught the two how to grow a wider variety of vegetables. She negotiated with the money-lender, and arranged for the missing side of the shack to be rebuilt. Not only did Khanangnit’s home life grow happier, but so did  her days at school, and her performance there improved. Feeling better, she was able to dream again. This, most of all, pleased Siri.

Siri began to visit other children in their homes – those she noticed were doing badly in class. Often they were poor, and their families were in distress. With Siri’s help, their lives at home and school improved too. Then she began to share her simple and direct method with teachers from other classes and their students. Over the next ten years, with her husband Teacher Chai, Siri organised 50 schools in the region to work with her, setting up a community-based organisation whose name translates as ‘The Network for Local Teachers’. She encouraged the teachers to make home visits, to see directly the situations of the children who lived in poverty. With no government or outside funding, her network helped thousands upon thousands of children, with their own and community contributions of second-hand clothing, food and money. But they also taught families to farm new varieties of crops and become more self-sufficient. Not only did Siri and her network support the children in their daily lives but, more importantly, they encouraged their dreams, whether they wanted to be rice farmers, teachers, doctors or astronauts. ‘I had a dream when I was young that I wanted to have education, so that I could wear shoes,’ Siri says. ‘It was a child’s dream. But this sort of dream is serious for young children. Even though it seemed as if it was nonsense, it served as a drive as well. I want to help every child to have a dream.’

Siri had the courage to want shoes and get them, and that meant going to school. But unlike many who achieve their own personal goals, she has spent a lifetime inspiring other children to fulfil their dreams too. At first, she and the teachers in her network relied only on their own resources. Now the government and outside organisations have begun to notice the extraordinary results they are getting and are bringing their simple method of care to ever more people in other districts of Thailand.

This is a book about Siri, and people like her, who better the lives of others, sometimes in their own communities, and sometimes thousands of miles away. People like a working-class couple who built an animal farm for children in a slum in Amsterdam. Or a renowned architect who builds houses for the wealthy and environmentally responsible resorts in China but who feels his creative challenge is to fix bathrooms for the health of thousands of Aboriginal people in Australia. There is an event planner from South Africa who organises weddings, corporate events and bar mitzvahs, and feeds homeless and low-income communities with fresh leftovers like fruit and yoghurt, smoked salmon or beluga caviar. And a Catholic priest from Binghamton, New York, who found his joy and calling in easing the way of the dying in a Buddhist hospice in Thailand. A man in Kenya helps glue-sniffing street children achieve their dreams too, even taking 20 years with on who eventually became a teacher. Another man leaves a job at L’Oréal in Paris to start a restaurant and beauty salon staff ed by former street kids, giving them skills so that they can change their lives. And a man in China who helps thousands of children who were orphaned after the government allowed the blood supply to be contaminated with AIDS.

There is an Aboriginal nurse, who ensured the members of her community controlled their own medical clinics. And an African Methodist minister in a devastated section of Pittsburgh, who founded a Montessori preschool for poor children and healthcare centres for their parents. Thre is also the first sex worker – commonly termed a prostitute – to be the keynote speaker at a major human rights conference in Poland. And a former criminal turned social worker in a Moroccan ghetto in the Netherlands. Th ere is the man in the UK who took his love of football and used it to change the lives of the homeless, worldwide. And an exiled rebel from Darfur who, unlike so many revolutionaries, listened to his people, rather than urging them to listen to him.

This book is not just about what these people and others have done, but what they have learned through improving the lives of their fellow human beings. It is also about what works if one wants to offer help. Although these people come from a wide variety of cultures and countries, they all share certain key principles.

But ultimately the book is about their secret. It is what Siri calls ‘the contentment of giving’: that helping others gives one’s own life happiness and meaning.

It is widely believed that to do good in the world demands sufferring and sacrifice, and that the only reward may be in some sort of afterlife, such as heaven or reincarnation. Another myth is that the problems of the world are so insurmountable that anything one does feels futile and in vain.

But what scientists are now starting to learn, through studies in Canada, the US, the UK and other countries, Siri and the others discovered through experience: doing good for others on one’s chosen scale, whether for one person or for thousands of people, can do oneself good. Here and now. That by being unselfish each of us can, in a sense selfishly, have a life full of meaning and contentment.

That is the true dream of getting shoes for Siri. To get our own shoes. And shoes for those in the world around us.