Thread

I delivered the keynote at the UGM Annual Lecture, Nobel Laureate Series, at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. During the Q&A, a professor asked, “During our community work, it is difficult to connect and engage with people. What should we do?” I told him: before you enter a community, leave your baggage at home. Leave behind your degrees, positions, expertise, jargon, language, and even the logic of your urban life. If you enter as a giver, preacher, teacher, guide or instructor, it will always be difficult to truly connect. But when you see them as your own, and feel that you are one of them, everything changes. That is where trust and partnership begins. That is where compassion comes alive, and where compassion transforms communities.