Less is more – In Favour of the Smaller Picture

Brian Munene, 13 years, is mentally handicapped and epileptic; the first born of two. His mother is single, unemployed and unable to cater for the needs of her children. His brother is blind.

Enough has been said about thinking big and aiming for great things, reaching for the sky, achieving great dreams. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture can be paralyzing!

I was recently asked to play a bigger role in the running and management of a home for children with mental and physical disabilities. While I know that the founding of this home is a very noble and caters for a very forgotten yet special group of abandoned children, I balked at the idea of being held accountable for making the "bigger picture" happen!

The home has 30 children living on rented premises and has no steady source of income. Being part of the team means that I accept the responsibility of seeing to it that these children have a roof over their heads, food to eat, someone to care for them and clothes to wear. It means that I have to see to it that they receive physiotherapy, get basic schooling, learn a skill (for those that are able to) and generally feel that they do belong to this society despite the fact that a number of them were abandoned and even left to die due to the extreme nature of their disabilities.

Yet, when I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a person who dedicated her entire life to making other people's lives count and who even after her death continues to inspire me, I do not see her "reaching for the sky" or "achieving great dreams". Rather, I see someone who was focused on doing whatever little she could using whatever little she had and as she did so, all her small acts of compassion formed the magnificent quilt of love, devotion and dedication that spans decades and encompasses continents!
Less is more! I am going to focus on my little piece of patchwork for the moment, and who knows what kind of a quilt I will make?!

As Marian Wright Edelman puts it:

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”