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The Includer can't work simply as a device. We can write, but whose heart will leap to respond? We learn from Wendi Losha Bernadette of Actwid Kongadzem, a women's organization in Cameroon:
We all wish to thank Janet for her wonderful contribution written out on our behalf which first read exactly as if she was writing from our minds eyes. It is wonderful that you could read our minds directly as if you were here with us. We all read through your letter and that of Andrius and others but we were really moved from the bottom of our hearts that you understood our problems and have the know-how and an inside into our NGOs works here with all its challenges.
Janet Feldman is a social networker of contagious empathy. A respiratory ailment ended her career in the US State Department. As she cares for her own life, she cares for others. She's the founder of Kenya AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group, and the international arts coalition ActALIVE. At home, in Rhode Island, she cares for her father.
I would like to learn how to balance caregiving for an aging parent with time spent on my own work.
The Includer is about feeling the presence of another, their mind, soul, heart, so vividly so that we grow strong to respond. Wendi:
I have my life's dreams that I started nursing from childhood as I was growing and witnessing my mother and her eight mates all suffering in my fathers house as we are from a polygamous home. ... I am the first child and being a girl, I was discriminated upon not to go to school but to grow up quickly and get married. So from that time I developed a likeness for education of a girl child as well as education of rural women. I saw education now as a means to get rid of a forceful marriage, and making a choice of a husband etc for myself.
In 2005, Janet agreed to lead our Minciu Sodas working group Holistic Helping, which is her deepest value in life. (Join us!) She monitors sixty discussion groups and she ever wonders whether she has time for this. She asks:
How can I help those individuals who are coming to me, while also taking care myself, and generate a ripple effect into a wider community?
I ever argue that her group Holistic Helping, working openly, allows others to jump in and learn to help each other by her example. Janet:
I believe that creativity and all forms of communication will truly help to save the world, one painting or radio program or email at a time!
Janet lavishes love on the weakest people with the smallest projects. This can't make sense in a world that optimizes resources, which is to say, acknowledged resources. Janet makes a new world. She values every seed and every soil. Janet is an Includer.
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