SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

After a rainy but action-packed orientation week, it’s time for the first week of class! The students came to class just on time, with their freshly ironed first day of school outfits, their brand new boxes of crayons and markers, their trapper keepers, and their cute lunch boxes with a sandwich and a hand written note on a napkin from mom. Well, not quite. This week is the first week of Sustainable Community Development and with us we have Dr. Robert Pelant from the Au Sable Institute in Whidbey Island. This week we studied the three words in the course title, what they mean and how they interact with one another. We studied the World Bank, IMF, UN, WTO to see what roles each play in the developing world. We talked about technology and how it relates (or doesn’t) to the Kingdom of God. We talked about ecological literacy and how that affects our understanding of the world. We visited a controversial hydroelectric dam facility to see if it is a good development strategy for Belize. We visited a Mennonite farmer and a Mennonite-run large-scale dairy processing facility to see how these people’s values shape the way they do business. Through guest speakers, class lectures, fieldtrips, and conversations with each other we learned much about how the world works, through various economic, social, and political systems, and reflected on what it means to be a Christian in a broken world, a world in need of prophetic imagination and redemption. Thanks for being with us this week Robert!