18. The Oasis Theory
A New Perspective on a Life-Long Dream
Perhaps I’m a product of a wave of young adult fiction where young girls were the heroines and the predicters of their fates and those of their societies. Perhaps I was taken in by the call of adventure and the pull of long multi-novel series where the adventures just keep going on and on and on. Or perhaps due to being raised in my faith and the perspective of right and wrong that I feel driven by the idea of bringing more “right” into this world.
Whatever the case may be, I have a feeling that OLA is just the beginning for me.
Prof (my co-founder) and I were sitting in the upstairs office of a well-accomplished businessman in Victoria Island. The man was of Prof’s generation, but her senior, his head of neatly cut and tightly curled white hair offset by his blue designer glasses and dark, weathered face. After explaining our objective and the reason for our visit, he considered us silently for a moment with his intelligent eyes, particularly me — the novelty in the room — before responding with his own stories.
“I consider myself a creator of oases.”
This country has been reduced to chaos and frustration, he told us. What drives him is his capacity to influence different places in order to create what he calls “spaces of sanity.” There, things work as they should. You’re able to escape the madness for a moment, recover, then enter back into the chaos at your discretion. Make enough of these oases and you can connect them in order to make a bigger oasis. Create a big enough oasis and it becomes an ocean. The land around it grows green and it begins to expand of its own accord. Before long it is not an oasis; it’s a nation.
Idyllic? Yes. Perhaps this is why it resonated in my heart.
“Build it and they will come,” has been Prof’s mantra, and it took on new meaning after that conversation. The shift in my mindset was subtle, but expansive. I began thinking less about the programs, the services, the “stuff.” Now I’m focusing on the space, the experience — the goal is to create a center of peace and rest, and the possibilities are nearly endless.
I want to use the rest of my life to explore my capacity to create oases. As with most things, I’m assuming that it needs to start from within. Perhaps one must first be an oasis in order to create oases. It’s a practice that needs to be evidenced in one’s life, in one’s home, in the way one interacts with others. From there it has the capacity to expand to programs and initatives and organizations.
And what better place to start this process than in Nigeria?
