Action: Service and Purpose

By the time I finished college, I was a significantly different person than when I entered. I had largely whittled down most of my Christian faith to Jesus’ teachings on social justice – which themselves are largely amplifications of what Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah had said before. And whereas I started college with the dream of becoming a Constitutional lawyer and arguing cases before the Supreme Court, by my senior year, I was thinking more about becoming an inner-city school teacher, and eventually opening a boarding school to holistically support underprivileged (and, frankly, oppressed) children.

My plans took a sharp turn when I was offered a job at Citibank’s hedge fund group. On the one hand, it was a dream job – much more money than I could expect to make any other legitimate way, in a highly intellectually stimulating environment. It was also a job I had little qualification for and was extremely lucky to be offered. But could I really square my intention to help those less fortunate with this new career path?

In the end, I took the job. But I made a revised commitment that came from understanding that, in our world, might often makes right. In other words, having money and/or power gives you a lot of leverage to affect change that is different from the impact a teacher can have on a student (remember Mama Saw), but also important. Perhaps more of a systems-level change than a series of profound, individual changes.

So I vowed I would invest as much as possible in causes that were working to help the poor and oppressed, that I would try to influence others along the way to do the same, and that I would do anything else that I could to help.

During the early part of my career, this certainly looked much more like action than financial investment. For example, I ran a Bible study for gay students at Berkeley, aimed at helping them defend themselves from Christian bigotry using the Bible itself. This, despite the fact that I had little affinity with the gay community. I just saw that they were being bullied and that I might be able to help.

One evening, I was set to host a 7pm meeting of this Bible study at my apartment. By the time I had to leave to get home, I had not finished all of my work for that day, but nothing I was leaving behind was so urgent that it could not wait until the next. I knew it was not ideal to leave work behind. But this was in 1996, years before ordinary people had cell phones. There would have been no way to communicate with the students about my not being able to show up. And my apartment in Oakland was not in the very safest neighborhood – not ideal to have students standing around in the dark waiting for me. Most of all, I would have been violating my commitment, so I elected to take my chances and stick to it.

I walked into my supervisor’s office to let her know that I was leaving, because I had this 7pm commitment. She was furious. She told me that I was acting entitled, that, if she had pulled a stunt like this early in her career, she would have been fired on the spot, and that she was tempted to fire me right then and there. In the end, I left with my job, but I was badly shaken.

Almost 30 years have passed since then. While I don’t hold Bible studies anymore, I still try to engage in acts of service. Increasingly, this is by finding causes I believe in and supporting them. The one I’m most involved with is called Village Health Works (VHW) and was started by Deogratias Niyizonkiza (an incredible, bestselling biography of him called The Strength in What Remains is well worth a read). VHW is having a massive impact in a rural part of Burundi, among the very poorest countries on Earth, addressing the problem of extreme, multigenerational poverty that I brought up in Chapter One. They do so in a way that is community-led, allowing the population they serve both to take ownership of their own uplifting, and to help heal the devastating wounds from that country’s bloody civil war. Their impact on Burundi has been real and measurable, and visiting their campus in Kigutu was a life-changing experience for me. Moreover, their model is eminently translatable to virtually any severely impoverished community in the world, which gives me a great deal of hope in the face of an extremely difficult challenge.

Deo himself started VHW after visiting Burundi for the first time since escaping death in that civil war and seeing patients held prisoner in the hospital that treated them for being unable to pay their bills. He saw the extreme poverty, which is largely unnecessary in a country with such good farming conditions. He saw schools that continued the Belgian tradition of rote learning – children were not allowed to ask questions in class. He saw neighbors remain violently divided against each other, despite having no actual reason to hate. He decided that he could not abide his countrymen suffering in this kind of indignity, and that he must do something about it. He returned to America, dropped out of medical school at Dartmouth, and launched VHW in 2007.

Local villagers donated land and contributed intense labor – making and maintaining the road connecting this remote village to the main highway, firing bricks and building the original health clinic. Hutus and Tutsis, the opposing sides, worked shoulder to shoulder to improve and give hope to their community. Today, that exact same health clinic treats hundreds of patients every day with quality health care and dignity. In 2023, they opened a new teaching hospital, which performs critical surgeries and offers mothers a safe place to deliver and have c-sections. Crucially, it also builds capacity for other medical facilities.

One of the most major medical issues Burundians face is malnutrition. So, VHW employed agronomists to help surrounding communities learn to farm a much wider variety of fruits and vegetables (FOOTNOTE: another vestige of Belgian colonization is that the vast majority of farming focused only on cassava and oil palms, not because these are especially useful, but because that’s what Belgium decided it needed out of Burundi). Malnutrition in their catchment area has declined substantially.

This realization was a major one. It turns out that many problems faced by the poorest populations have their roots in a lack of education. VHW took over the local K-12 school, overhauling the curriculum to emphasize critical thinking, among other improvements. Literacy and academic performance levels skyrocketed. In 2020, VHW launched the Kigutu International Academy (KIA), a boarding high school focused on developing the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders. Though too early to say whether KIA will ultimately achieve its objective, it’s off to a great start, with students gaining admission and winning scholarships to elite universities in America and beyond. But more to the point, I have had the great pleasure of getting to know some of these kids, and I can tell you they’re remarkable. Intelligent, confident, talented and ambitious.

All of this good has come from one seed of Deo’s intention, embodied through relentless action and supported by millions of dollars of philanthropic investment and countless hours of community labor. Imagine if Deo had returned to Burundi, seen the suffering, shared his vision, and simply stopped there. Just saying what he intended would have changed him—it already had. And no one would blame him for letting that vision fade as he returned to a comfortable life in America, on track to earn an Ivy League medical degree. But that’s not what he did. He acted. At enormous personal cost, he transformed his intention into reality.⁴⁶

Having said all of this, it is important to distinguish action from result. Actions should be judged by their alignment to a well-considered intention. The result is often out of your control. If VHW fails, in the end, to eradicate malnutrition and build generations of capacity in education and medicine, and to provide a model for suffering communities around the world, this would be a sad outcome, but besides the point. VHW have remained steadfast in continuing to act on their intentions, and thus the intentions are fulfilled, whether or not the ultimate goals are achieved. Focusing on what you can control is also a core tenet of both Stoic philosophy and Karma Yoga – this is not at all a new concept.

As with thought, attention, intention and speech, most action is habitual, automatic or conditioned. Attuned action is, in a sense, slower, because it requires observing one’s automatic response and overcoming that reaction with an aligned response. It is liberating to know that you can introduce choice and free will, where there is none by default. In cultivating this slower, more deliberate way of acting, you are effectively reclaiming your autonomy—moving from automatic reactivity toward authentic, conscious agency. But this is not just a theoretical nicety. It is a collection of choices to act, made every day, that has powerful repercussions in boardrooms and warzones, in classrooms and kitchens, in Kigutu and everywhere else.