As everybody knows, I guess, I work with a small school in Tela, Honduras. I have my own non-profit organization (if you can call anything somebody with ADD runs an “organization”) to raise money so I can pay English speaking teachers to work there. For every teacher I can pay, the school has that much money freed up to put toward other things. I’ve been through this before, I know.
Anyway, running things is something I have a hard time with. Asking people for money is something I have a hard time with. Anything other than dealing with the teachers and the school is hard for me. Handling money is hard for me. And, sad to say, running things, asking for money and handling money are big parts of having a non-profit organization.
All this has kept me from getting as far as I’d like to, and the underlying problem or problems are hard to put into words. I’ll try to begin by telling about something that happened when I was in graduate school. I came to Washington when I was 30 so I could get a degree in international affairs, specifically Latin America.
I knew already I wanted to do something in Tela, but I didn’t know what, and, though I knew a lot about Honduras from having lived there two years, it was all firsthand stuff, and only about Honduras. I knew little of the history or politics or economics or the sociology of the rest of Latin America. I didn’t even know much about the other Central American countries. So I went to graduate school, and hoped that I’d work out just what my calling was while I was there, or not long after.
The summer between my two years at school, I got an unpaid internship at the Organization of American States, the O.A.S. There was a department they’d set up called the Trust for the Americas, and it was set up to do anti-corruption work, and that’s where I was going to be working. I was thrilled. I thought I could do something to help.
It wasn’t long before I found out that I was wrong. I can kind of wrap up the whole experience of my time there with one story. Most of the other interns were undergraduates. I think I was the only graduate student, at least in the Trust. We would often go next door to the World Bank cafeteria for lunch, since our badges would get us in there, and they had good, cheap food.
One day, I went with about four other interns. We were working on setting up an anti corruption conference in Ecuador at the time, and everybody was talking about it. I’d already shown that pretty much all I could do was type in names and addresses and telephone numbers and e-mails of the people who were going to the conference into a spreadsheet.
The other interns were all 20, 21, 22 year old undergraduates, and they all sat there, talking about how they were going to do things, they were setting things up, they were going to call people, and talk to people, and make things happen, and I remember sitting there, listening to them, feeling like a loser, because these kids were all so much younger than I was, and they knew how to make things happen, and I couldn’t even really understand what the hell they were talking about.
That’s what it’s like for me with this non-profit. I know what I want to do with it; I know that this is a wonderful idea, that could help any school in Honduras, and that, if I could really get this thing working well, I could do wonders for the Kawas School, for other schools in Tela, for other schools in other Honduran towns, and I could even work with and help schools in other countries.
But I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to make things happen. It takes something that my brain just lacks to understand how to get things done.
Here’s something I saw on Facebook this evening:
It’s on a page called “facebook [sic] for nonprofits”. It has about ten links like the three above, telling how to put Facebook to work for your non-profit. So I read a bunch of the links, and I’m sure they make a lot of great points, but there’s something missing in my brain, and I read them, and I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t know how to make any of the shit they’re talking about—and I know the shit they’re talking about is great shit, and it would help me immeasurably—happen.
That’s my problem kind of wrapped up in a neat little box with a lovely bow on it: I can think of great ideas. To paraphrase Donald Trump, I have ideas, I have the best ideas; but I have no fucking clue how to make them happen. I don’t know how making things happen works. I don’t know how to get the ideas out of my head and into the world where they can happen.
If you know anybody who has ADD, and this is even more important if they’re young, believe me (as Donald Trump would also say), they have wonderful ideas. They can come up with crazy, amazing, sublime shit that nobody but one of us would ever think of. But they might not know how to make them happen. Their ideas might change the world, but they’ll never be worth anything unless they happen. So, I guess what I’m telling all of you here is that it’s up to you, the normals, to help these kids get these ideas out of their heads and into the world where they can do some good. Find out what these children are thinking, and help them do it. Be patient. Be understanding. Be willing to get frustrated when they can’t always find the words to tell you what they’ve come up with. But if you help them, they’ll help all of us, in ways we can’t even—well, you can’t ’cause you non-ADDled folk are all so much less awesome than we are—dream of.
