Conservation in many cultures

A Rocha national organisations are now firmly established on five continents, and groups in another four or five countries are laying their plans for getting started. In one sense all of this goes back to a meeting in 1993, when forty people who had been involved in different ways with the original work in Portugal decided we should respond to requests for help and new ideas from other countries. They could not have foreseen how far and how fast that would take forward the A Rocha vision, but they did know that from then onwards everyone involved needed to be clear what that vision was, and what would make a new A Rocha project - wherever it was - distinctive.

A Rocha centres are usually run by team members from several different countries. Here, Patricia Rumboll from Argentina serves lunch to the Portuguese team and their guests.

The result was the now-famous five "C"s: we described A Rocha as a CHRISTIAN charity, committed to CONSERVATION, to CAMPAIGNING for the care of God's world, to drawing on the CROSS-CULTURAL strength of the world-wide church, and to each project having a distinctive COMMUNITY emphasis. The yeast in the bread of this Christian conservation movement was the commitment to being a cross-cultural organisation, and it is this commitment, more than any other, that has caused A Rocha to grow so fast, and if we can be allowed to say so, to take such unique and innovative directions.

In contrast to a typical multi-national organisation, we have no central culture, and in fact no central headquarters at all. The International Trustees are drawn from six different countries, and the International Team live in local communities in four countries. We believe strongly that it is God who is stirring people all over the world to begin to care in practical ways for his whole creation which is currently under such tremendous and destructive pressure. Although as an organisation we have a bias for a Latin culture from our beginnings in Portugal (we are highly relational, celebratory, and with a strong preference for meals over meetings, even if we arrive for them late...) yet no-one believes that God is Portuguese, and so we don't expect the work in India, or the Czech Republic, or Ghana to develop the same way as it did at Cruzinha. People live their understanding of the A Rocha vision within their own culture, and see their working priorities according to their own local situations. We are convinced that these roots in particular places and particular times are the cause of a kind of organisational bio-diversity which is as valuable as the biological version we are working to protect, and to make this happen in practice we all have a role to play in forming our organisational identity. So at the Leaders' Conference in July the delegates from twenty countries discussed and prayed and debated the commitments we are taking on within the A Rocha family; the latest version of the five "Commitments," which we hope will last another five years or so, is on this page: http://en.arocha.org/about/index5.html.

The A Rocha International team all work cross-culturally. A Rocha International's Scientific Director, Will Simonson, is English but lives in the Algarve as part of the Portuguese team. Here he and Pavel Svetlik of A Rocha Czech study plants together.

The fourth commitment, to being Cross-cultural, now says "We draw on the insights and skills of people from diverse cultures, both locally and around the world." It is this commitment that led Dave and Anne Bookless to establish the first A Rocha UK centre in Southall, the most ethnically diverse community in the country. A Rocha France is led by Canadians, and A Rocha Canada's Markku Kostamo is well equipped for a role in helping A Rocha Finland to get established. The new group in Ghana will benefit from the advice of our new International Trustee, Bihini Won wa Musiti, when he visits them from Cameroon in October. And if I can write more personally, the twelve years we spent as a family in Portugal have shaped us all (maybe I can blame the Portuguese travelling gene for the fact that currently only one of our four kids is in Europe...). Of course it isn't always easy - an A Rocha leader from the Middle East told me of his distress at hearing the words Arab and Muslim used interchangeably, and there is little common ground between New York and Nairobi views of time. But this profoundly Christian commitment to diversity takes us a long way beyond the constraints of an organisation that is typically rooted in the culture of its major donors, who are frequently from the Northern Hemisphere. It equips us to find local solutions rather than reaching for multi-national blueprints, and we will happily give the long-term commitment needed to find a way through the difficulties.

Around the world there are increasing confusions about how to live our differences which are creating disastrous and damaging fault lines in human society. At one end of the spectrum are those who believe implicitly in the superiority of their own culture, and at the other, those who claim that any way of understanding the world is fine. These fault lines affect how we treat the world around us, and the way we live these differences of belief has profound ecological consequences. Where our commitment to community affects our commitment to working cross-culturally is that we are drawn into personal relationship with those who are very different, and we can no longer demonise at a distance those who don't see the world our way.

So A Rocha's aim is to continue to develop the practical contribution of Christians who are glad to believe that prior to any differences with others, we share a fundamental created identity with people of all beliefs, and who know that we share the creation in the midst of many cultures.

- Peter Harris, Director, A Rocha International
From A Rocha International News, October 2003