Principals of Development Talk

Alice (C0-Director A) & Ben Teisan (Co-Director B)

Since 2007 I have had the opportunity to speak in Dr. Evvy Campbell's, Principal's of Development graduate class at Wheaton College. This year I audited the class. As I was reading the text by Bryant L. Myers, he said many things that caused me to stop and think about. One of the things he said was,

“There are critical voices that sometimes are not heard. Ignoring the voice of women is now known to work against positive social change as well as sustainability. I go on to suggest that children are not only not heard but are also invisible and that this is a mistake,” (Pg. 17 Walking with the Poor).

Afterwards I called Ben my eleven year old nephew to interview him about his contributions to HWI. Back in 2005 when I began HWI, Ben was five. At our first event Ben said, Aunt Alice you aren't in charge of HWI. I said, okay. Who is? Ben said, God is in charge and you and I are co-directors. As Ben says, “well it’s not that way on paper, but you and I we know how it really is.” So, not to confuse things I’m (Co-Director Alice) CDA and Ben is CDB. This also plays off the fact that Ben's dad, Dan and I are twins. I am twin A and Dan is twin B.

I learned so much from the questions I asked Ben that my brother's family and I arranged for Ben to be at Wheaton College with me yesterday so I could interview him in front of the graduate class. Here are a couple questions I asked Ben.

Interview CDB:

1. In your 5-year-old mind, how did you realize we were to be Co-directors and I wasn’t to be the Executive Director of HWI, in charge alone?

Ben said, “See, when I was a little tike I realized if it was going to be His Wheels it couldn’t be just your wheels Aunt Alice (AA). I think at the time I was a little closer to God in prayer and thinking about God and so I realized if you were going to name something to be His, you had to be true to the name, or not use it.

Ben went on to say, AA I really haven’t had a big role in HWI.” Through this conversation I was able to point out to him that if I’d said, no, you can’t be CDB, I would have been saying, God doesn’t need your tender faith filled heart.

2. Do you think Myers is right that children are an important part of ministry? Ben said, yes because God said let the little children come to me.

3. What makes you encourage me to write my book

There are not many people in the world that have encountered this thing with God. Where you discover a relationship with God because of something bad happening to you. I’d be surprised if there were 5 people in the world who had the same problem as you. I doubt they would do the same thing as you have done.

What do you think they would do? They would make sure they stopped doing anything with their lives. They would say I have nothing left in the world to do. They would sit on the couch and become a couch potato, or they’d do something worse, if you know what I mean.

People all over the world have adversity. Your life basically tells them to do something about it. Don’t moan about it saying Why God, Why God, Why God. Just say yes God, yes God, yes God. Because he’s showing you something. It isn’t like he punishes that free hand if you know what I mean. (Ben told me this as he was sitting in an orthopedics office, for the final check to see if his broken right arm was healed).

Up until I asked Ben this question on Sept. 20, 2010, I had wrongly assumed that my 5 y.o. nephew wanted a part of the fame. Do you see what type of brain I was looking at the situation through, my convoluted adult brain. That wasn’t Ben’s thought at all. He wanted to make sure we stayed true to God.