What we need is already here

What is the one principle that has always been true at Kufunda?

I am beginning a journey of harvesting some of our underlying principles and practices — not to be copied, but perhaps to inspire. I am enjoying the inspiration I am finding in it for myself. I have several unpolished pieces beginnning to emerge. For now, let me begin with a core principle that has guided Kufunda for the past 24 years:

That the wealth and the wisdom we need are already here.

Kufunda began as a response to a belief in poverty that was never entirely true. A narrative that said: what you need is elsewhere. In money. In experts. In imported solutions.

We began with the opposite assumption:

There is wealth here.

There is wisdom here.

There are roots here.

This principle gave birth to Kufunda and it remains a principle for a good life wherever we find ourselves.

I notice it in small ways these days. Just the other day my husband joined me for a zoom call. I had been in another call and had not had time for a pause to make myself a cup of tea. I saw him arriving with his cup of tea, and asked him if he might make me one as well.

I didn’t see that he had already brought me mine...

What else is right in front of us that we do not see?

What else have we closed our eyes to?

This stance — that what we need is already here — is not naïve. I can say from years of experience that it takes will. It takes faith. It takes an active returning, over and over again, especially in the midst of financial strain, interpersonal difficulty, or global uncertainty.

Because we have been trained to look for the glass half empty. And some times we don't even see the glass!

We have been trained to believe that wealth is measured in US dollars and wisdom in materialistic science.

But the thing is, wealth also lives in community.

In unity

In healthy soil

In shared ritual

In song

In a grandmother’s round kitchen hut, built with beauty and care.

When I moved to Zimbabwe decades ago, rural beauty was natural. Round huts. Sacred cooking spaces. Something harmonious in the way things were made. Modern utilitarianism has flattened much of that beauty.

So we return. Not because the past was perfect. But because something there might remind us.

During our first youth programme 23 years ago, we sent youth to interview elders. We asked: How did the ancestors do it? Not to copy, but to remember.

Even in the body, this principle holds. In dance, when I meet tightness, I do not force it open. I expand where there is already movement. And gradually, health spreads.

There is already health in the system.

There is already movement in the body.

There is already wealth in the community.

What if we lived our whole lives from that place?

What if life became a search — not for what is missing — but for the magic, the mystery, the resource that is present?

This has always been part of the experiment of Kufunda.

To remember who we are.

To recognise what we already hold.

And to ask ourselves:

What of this do we wish to carry into the emerging future?

What might already be present in your life that you have not yet fully seen?