This thought was inspired by part of the conversation in a preliminary meeting, ahead of the start of next week’s Nutrition course.
A colleague was discussing the course contents, resources and so on with a local leader and some local volunteers, who will become part of the core team delivering the course.
The point had just been made that one of the recipes (bubur ayam) that will be tried out could be cooked in a rice cooker. Or, as commonly referred to here, magicom. – Based on one of the more commonly used brands, or potentially the 1st major brand to be sold here.
In the communities that we work with, there can be significant numbers of people who do not have a kitchen. This can be due to a lack of space, but can also be because landlords have said tenants cannot cook (on a stove top) on their premises. In some materially deprived areas, the overcrowding, materials homes are built with/made of, and creative electrical wiring, can mean fires are a major and regular hazard. Fires, that when they happen, spread quickly. Influencing, I’m sure, some landlords’ “no cooking” rule.
With this being the case, our team had to:
- Think of healthier versions or alternatives to the current weekly diet
- Think of what can be cooked within the confines of some of the participants’ households.
So this mention of a rice cooker prompted the local leader’s recollection of her days working in an office. She told us how she and her colleagues used to cook their lunch in the rice cooker, as it was cheaper than buying from a Warung, even though food in a warung is already generally cheap. They’d pool their ingredients, rice, tofu, some vegetables, etc. and cook it all in the rice cooker. Doing so in stages by using the steamer tray that came with it.
They used what they had at their disposal. Based on the local leader’s animated remembrance, there was no sense of lack or missing out.
When working towards change, be it encouraging a healthier diet, stepping out into a new career/ business, desiring some self-development or personal change within yourself, start with what you have.
We are generally inclined to start by focusing on what we lack, seeing and counting our limitations. The money and other resources we don’t have and feel we need before we can start anything.
We could benefit from using a rice cooker approach, thinking creatively about what we can do with what we have, and exploring the most effective ways to use them.
In the future, we may need more resources (material and otherwise), but presently, we can use what we have to get us headed in the right direction, or at the very least, to the baseline.