Two years SAILing - a birthday reflection

I know that we assured you that the presentation at this point would be short. That was a white lie. Settle in. I want to steal your collective time to reflect on the SAIL journey and map out why I believe SAIL has made it to this milestone in such good health.

At this early stage I would also like to note that the bulk of this speech is also strongly linked to my own battered sense of pride. On our website, you see, there is a counter which only we can view which gives us the exact statistics of how many people hit on each page of our website. Tutor Resources always comes out on top, then what’s happening in Sudan and so on.

Needless to say, while the other sections enjoy about 300 hits a week the section which has our little manifesto about the motivations for us for SAILing receives a meezly five! So I am taking this chance to tell you why we do SAIL, since no-one ever seems to want to read about it?! Here goes….

The SAIL way of life began humbly. It began in the same place it is today minus the posters, the books, the pens and pencils, and almost all the furniture and minus all but 6 SAILors. In fact, to start, we had a chalk-board with no chalk, a makeshift classroom with no chairs or desks and a small collection of biblical books to work from.

I vividly recall staying up one night to make the first lot of worksheets for the kids. I also recall that Anna Grace liked the dog I had drawn on it… and made two spelling corrections of the words I had put on the spelling sheet I had so proudly made. I also remember the arrival of every one of the new families in the first months, each time Anna Grace and I would look to one another, shrug and try to appear calm and in control. It also began with a lot more junk in a lot more places.

The day we made the library was a significant one for us. This was the day on which SAIL was really given a pivot on which to turn. The day was, for the most part, spent removing the head high pile of rubbish which had been collected in there, putting in the very rudimentary shelves and arguing with Don as to which furniture we were and were not allowed to throw out. Needless to say, I have a beautiful couch sitting in my shed at home waiting for the day Don gives the all clear to move out that old desk!

This week we celebrate the second birthday of the SAIL Program. We decided to make this the week to mark SAIL's growth because it was at this time two years ago that Anna Grace and I gave SAIL a name, received our first ever funding and bought the first ever piece of SAIL property. The meeting at which the name was devised and the person from which the funding first came was from Fiona Young who was then the Welfare officer of Melbourne Uni. Student Union and is now one of the faithful tutors.

At this meeting Fiona asked us what we needed most. Extra people to help, we agreed. We both recall our first SAIL-related argument in which AG proposed that we would never be able to find a tutor for everyone of the twenty children and nor could we cope with any more. I thought we could. I think attendance this evening shows who was right!

This time last year, we recalled the first purchase we ever made for SAIL. We spent at least a week debating the pros and cons of making the plunge, lashing out and blowing some big bucks. We debated the needs and plans we had for “the Maidstone thing”, as we once called it. And finally, we decided we would purchase the first big plastic tub.

Together, at a pre-arranged time, AG and I trundled down to Office Works and joined the line nervously clutching our purchase. We decided we'd split the bill fifty-fifty. At the time, I was not sure. Would we ever have enough stuff to fill it? How many pencils and worksheets did our twenty students need after all? Needless to say, an entire library and storeroom packed full of SAIL stuff later, I am now confident that it was a worthwhile purchase.

From such humble beginnings SAIL has grown and grown at an unrelenting pace. We are so proud of what happens on a Saturday. Our baby is bigger and fatter than we ever imagined or planned. SAIL also now offers services that we had never imagined we would be able to provide. I am thinking especially of the Home Help service and the SAIL Xtend short courses we now run.

In numerical terms also we are now way beyond our expectations. This is exciting to me personally and this is what spurs me on on a daily basis.

We should perhaps let you know also that there is no sign that this is about to halt. We are, for the first time ever, talking seriously with people who have approached us from Dandenong about transporting SAIL out there for the Sudanese community based in Springvale. We have also been approached by a person in Sydney who wants to set up SAIL there too.

In line with these possible expansions, we are starting to consider a minor name change. At this stage, we are thinking that the name may need to be altered from the SAIL Program to the SAIL Empire. Of course, in keeping with this development we would no longer be called Co-ordinators but rather Supreme leaders and you would have a title change from Tutors to SAIL Empire cadets.

Of course these ideas are still all on the drawing board and may be amended. We will, as always, keep you posted! But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Tonight is about what has gone before, about the foundations, upon which SAIL has been built, about the SAIL way of life. So how does SAIL fit in to normal lives? What is its place?

SAIL, as we all know, comes right at the end of the week. In my view, there is something very simple and intuitively right about this. It almost feels natural that weeks should end and rest should begin with such an uplifting celebration as SAIL inevitably is. I don’t think it is any coincidence that almost every religion I know celebrates and remembers what is truly important over what has become the weekend.

Coming at the end of the week as it does means, for us, there is something to head for and also something to rely upon. Heaven knows that we need some time to watch construction after we spend the week bombarded by the media with stories of destruction. Heaven also knows that, for me at least, SAIL is that release. But SAIL is a lot more than that.

While the rest of the week is spent watching people damn each other, SAIL means seeing people give a damn about one another. I think of the time when one tutor arrived at SAIL in a flood of tears after a horrendous week. And I think of the concerned way her 11 year old student ran towards her, hugged her and consoled her for the next hour.

While the rest of the week is spent watching people be poised and held together, SAIL is invariably spent in part trying to find Abiol's clothes as she, as reliably as the sun coming up, takes all her clothes off.

For the Sudanese community members, while the rest of the week they spend, crossing back and forth from being Sudanese sometimes and Australian at others, SAIL means they can all be Sudanese and Australian, both or either, and no-one will know the difference.

While the rest of the week is spent discussing Marx's influence on post-apocolyptic, neo- classic forms of the meta-narrative, SAIL is spent watching people be people and talk about things that matter in a world that is more real than any Marx influenced post-apocolyptic, neo- classic, meta-narrative.

While the rest of the week is spent with people studying the same course or doing a similar line of work, Saturday is spent with people from every walk of life. I think it is worth noting the incredible calibre of people who also call themselves SAIL tutors. Although you'd never notice it from the low key dress and relaxed manner in which every SAILor carries themselves at SAIL, the SAILor community has many people from notably impressive walks of life.

Among the SAILor population are, to name but a few, school principals and teachers, factory managers, government officials, journalists, corporate executives, marketing personnel, top financial advisers, engineers, priests, script writers, editors, doctors, a token surgeon and an unhealthy sprinkling of lawyers, law students and professional actors from shows such as Secret Life of Us, Stingers and Thunderstone – all of whom shall remain nameless.

While the rest of the week is spent watching people watch what they say, SAIL is watching people say what they need or want to say. I think of, and who could forget, Ebtihal asking the local policemen, in front of 200 of us, "Why police shot people and if they knew where the Victoria Market was?' I think also of the tutor who rang us in the week in a panic that his student had wanted to discuss sex with him the week before, the tutor had put him off for the week and what was he to say now?

While it is true that Anna Grace and I would love to have our own students, ones who looked to us for advice as we see so many of them doing to each one of you every week, there are many unique pleasures of overseeing the phenomenal work of so many wonderful people.

I want to pause briefly here to make a few personal thank you's on behalf of SAIL.
To Don, who has been such a remarkable leader of the community that congregate at All Saints. It will be a great loss when you leave and are husband-napped to Sydney next year Don. We and the community are in awe of your undying dedication, your commitment and unending ability to listen, really listen, to the multitude of differing views that are hurtled your way.

To Akon, the person who donates more time to the Sudanese community than anyone. Akon, you are, in every way, a driving force.

I also want to take this chance to thank all those who work behind the scenes; those who SAIL solely because they believe in what SAIL does and not because they believe in what it does and get hugs or smiles at the end of every week. These generous people spend ours of their week preparing over 300 lunches every single week, creating and maintaining our brilliant website, organising guest speakers to come and speak to tutors and the Sudanese community, writing letters to obtain donations, administer the arrival of new tutors, and photocopy mountains of work sheets for use on Saturdays. Without these kind souls, SAIL, at the size it is today, simply would not function.

I think at this point it should also be acknowledged that there are so many people who make weighty personal sacrifices to come to SAIL every week. I don't want to name anyone here but will note the situations of certain people whose extra effort is worthy of note. There is the SAILor who, despite what cannot possibly be a substantial income and a family of her own to provide for, and despite our insistence that she stops, puts aside $30 a month to buy for SAIL the most basic supplies we need at the time such as toilet paper or pencils.

There are all those SAILors who travel immense distances every single week to come; places like Berwick, Kilsyth, Ringwood, Mt Eliza, Wangaratta and Ocean Grove. There are also those SAILors who came to SAIL in the first instance with their partner of the time, have gone through the torment of a split up and yet continue to both come week in, week out.

And finally there are those who, because of their boundless talent and good fortune, turn away or reject work on Saturdays so that they can continue to provide the consistency that is so vitally important for the Sudanese SAILors. To these and other SAILors who put in that extra effort to donate their time to such a worthy community, we say thank-you on their behalf.

On a personal level too, SAIL has been a sustaining force in my life. The reason it has been a sustaining force is that, quite simply, I think SAIL has its priorities exactly right. Relationships that are here and now are what are truly important. This year especially I have been reminded of this. In February of this year I lost my last grandparent. What is perhaps worst about it is that it is only her mind which has gone, it seems her body is stronger, too strong. This experience which I am sure is shared with many others here, has taught me that the value of anything is temporal, it is now, it is here and it is only now and it is only here.

When we turn up on a Saturday and another SAILor benefits from it, whether they be Sudanese or not, that is, in my view, the most important thing in the world. We, as people, reach our fullest capacity only when, right at that point in time we are making a difference by enriching the life of another. These priorities were exemplified by one of the many phenomonal responses we got from the question asked of so many of you, why do you SAIL?

Lindy quoted Thomas Merton who said this; "Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on...you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for a specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but itgets more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

SAIL is, in its own kooky, chaotic way, a vessel for just this. Where else do you see 300 people gather week in week out just to be together and just to be friends? Where else do you get a sense that difference in religion, creed and colour mean absolutely nought? When else do you see the number of hugs being given and received as freely as they are at SAIL?

Where else are fundamental human rights to education, benefits of culture and technology, freedom and dignity so obvious and yet so unspoken of? And why, oh why, could this not work everywhere? Some people would say that all of this rant is youthful and naïve idealism. (And here comes the quote for the night…) My response is that the idealism of today, is, if we work for it, the realism of tomorrow.
Without wanting to sound like a Britney Spears song, a better tomorrow is what SAIL is all about.

Look no further than the potential we are fostering in the kids. The child SAILors are, on the whole, an untapped supply of inspiration. On Saturdays, we look around and see the next Australia. We look at Manyok and see a great community leader, a priest maybe? We look to Jou jou or Fifi or Afaf for that matter and see the first of the great Sudanese comedians. We look to Ruai or Dhal and see a great writer of the Sudanese refugee experience. Or we look to Agok, divine Agok, as we often do, and see the possibility of the first black, refugee, immigrant, female Australian prime minister or even president.

It has always been and continues to be our view that SAIL is not working to help refugees, not working to help the Sudanese people, not working only to appease hardship. In this way, SAIL, in our view, is a construction site for the new Australia, an engine room for a better sense of global understanding and in turn, a better world. Yes, this is a big goal to be heading for but it is one to which we are solely committed and one which we share with like-minded people the world over.

As we have said publicly before, we SAIL in the hope and expectation that if, through no fault of our own, we were made to leave our country, our family, our house or our community that we too would be cared for and educated in the place that received us. When it comes down to it, we SAIL for one overriding reason, because we believe that the Sudanese community, every member of it, do not deserve better than what they have got.

In our view the Sudanese community deserve the best of we have got, as free people, as Australians and as very lucky human beings. And this last characteristic is the most important. Sudanese SAILors deserve the best because, although they have not always been treated as such, they are human. There is no other reason.
To us, SAIL and the SAIL way of life is a very real case of people sharing their humanity, searching for sameness and feeding on commonality. And it is with our deepest thanks to every single SAILor, for the privilege we get of witnessing what amounts to a celebration of the human spirit every week.

Finally, I want to make use of another of the many overwhelming responses we got to the tutor survey asking why people SAILed with us. Jane wrote the following:
Everyone's at SAIL for the same reason - and I love looking up every so often from my tutoring and gazing around the hall - and all you see is this great group of people caught up in a mutual effort - people of every kind of race and colour, people of different ages, and you see that on this micro level, people have such an amazing capacity to understand each other (or to want to try to understand each other) and I start getting caught up wondering how the world would be if this were just expanded to some macro level - and then some [ratty] little kid breaks the moment by attempting chopsticks on the piano.
I mean SAIL's not perfect - nothing is, & I'm not trying to gloss over the chaos and the difficulties, but SAIL has a good heart.

Anna Grace and I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for donating your time, donating your energy and your kindness and your empathy, and for joining us and believing in the SAIL way of life.

back