namahatta.org - Congregational Development Ministry

This essay has originally been published at www.sitapati.info, the blog of Sitapati das, of ISKCON Brisbane, on July 18, 2005.

People are the Focus

Today managers are increasingly finding themselves having to do the same with less. A common scenario is for a manager in ISKCON to find himself in charge of a big facility which he has to maintain, with several programs and a handful of overworked devotees. Struggling to maintain the existing setup with great difficulty, frustration and despair set in, along with a resignation and nostalgic remembrance of the old days. Everyone agrees that things are not going right, but everyone has their own idea of the problem. The leadership is changed, or new devotees are shipped in from overseas, in the hopes that a change of personnel will acerbate the problems. For a while there is new hope, as fresh faces strike out with determination and enthusiasm, but after some time things return to the same situation. Still no-one can determine the cause of the malaise.

The nucleus of ISKCON Trujillo Renaissance.

A city founded one year after Lord Caitanya's disappearance from the planet, Trujillo at one point had a full-fledged ISKCON temple. It was closed. Eight hours by bus North of Lima, Trujillo has approximately one million people (the third largest city in Peru) but no preaching center and very few devotees. The only active initiated devotees aren't even from here: Krishna Kumara Prabhu is the official in-charge of ISKCON's activities in Trujillo. He lives with his family in Lima but plans to move here, to better concentrate in building the congregation. He is a dedicated Bhakti-vriksha preacher and has many good things to say about the Bhakti-vriksha method.

The other initiated devotee (initiated last month, during the Congregational Educational Festival), Hrisikesa Govinda Prabhu, is an ex-Gukukula student and studies architecture in a local university.

Also here I thought of focusing on Strategic Planning. The first of the three evenings we spent in Krishna-katha, discussing Bhagavad-gita 17.15 (the austerity of the word), so relevant to our community development: it's through speaking words that pierce the heart or agitate the mind that often conflicts and frictions spring and spread.

The Govinda Restaurant, venue of
productive strategic planning sessions.

Sri Radha Govinda Dasi and I were in Chiclayo, in the North of Peru, for the weekend of 19 and 20 December. It is a frontier-type yatra: a city of about 160,000 souls (in the human body), 10-12 hours by bus from Lima (10 hours if the ride is quick and smooth; in our case we had a couple of stops and it took 12 hours: someone threw a stone and broke a window and we had to stop for the hole to be fixed, and, second, the police stopped the bus to scrutinize the passengers' passports). There are 7-8 initiated devotees, including a couple of Srila Prabhupada's disciples. One of them, Payonidhi prabhu, is the natural local leader. He was born in Argentina, has been the first Temple President in the history of ISKCON Peru, and runs a Govinda Restaurant here.