Trust as a Starting and Ending Point
The two most common questions or remarks I get when I travel to visit partners and projects are these: Are you going there to evaluate or monitor them? and Oh, how brave — isn’t it incredibly hard to travel through those countries and witness all that suffering?
The answers are: no, no, and yes.
Haella is built on one solid foundation: trust. I don’t need a theory of change or a five-year plan. I actually dislike the word impact, or worse, impact indicator. I believe in people who see a problem, observe it closely, and then take action. And in situations like those here at the borders (and elsewhere), you shouldn’t burden people with requests for detailed plans or only give money for activity X or Y. The situation literally changes every day. So what do we do? We simply give money because we believe in what people do. What we do here is mostly observe, listen, ask questions, and talk to a wide range of people — and then zoom out to ask: what does this mean for Haella? What more can we do to fill the gaps, to tell the world what’s happening here, and to support the people working in these organizations? A project doesn’t improve because I ask for long reports. On the contrary — bureaucracy has crushed many good plans. We truly try to be a partner. Trust is our starting point, and our end point.
Traveling isn’t hard — as long as you’re prepared for things to never go as planned. We’ve been stuck in a violent storm for days now. We were supposed to take the boat to Chios and then to Samos, but it was taken out of service. So we flew to Samos instead, which turned out to be quite a terrifying experience — landing in a storm with strong crosswinds… let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a soft landing. Lianne and I held on to each other for a moment.
Seeing suffering — that always hits you. Especially this kind, on the edges of Europe. It doesn’t have to be this way — no, it shouldn’t be this way — in fact, it must not be this way. And yet, it is. It’s a journey along barbed wire, police, military zones, and meetings with people in organizations who are incredibly brave — and sometimes just exhausted. They bring hope, but they often have to pull it up from the depths of their souls. We speak with people who have endured so much, who carry heavy sorrow behind their smiles. That means listening, feeling deeply, sometimes crying, and then moving forward with even more conviction. And knowing: there’s a huge group of people out there who really care. We want to stand with them. We want to support them. And we want to show the world that this is truly unacceptable — and that things can be different. In the end, it’s actually just that simple.
And would you like to join us?
You are more than welcome.