We Have Not Come to Save Anyone

“Perhaps the poorest person in this world is the one who has everything and is still waiting for someone to save them.”

There is a very great difference.

We claim to save no one who is deprived. The world has waited for a savior for years, and perhaps that very waiting is the greatest tragedy in human history.

Everyone is waiting. The poor wait for the rich, the rich wait for the state, the state waits for organizations, organizations wait for investors, and investors wait for security. Everyone points a finger at someone else.

But perhaps we have forgotten something: the world was not ruined only by those who had power; it was also ruined by those who sat and waited for someone else to build it.

We have not come to save people who are deprived.

We have come to remind you that perhaps, for years, you have been waiting for someone who looks at you in the mirror every day.

You are not deprived simply because you have no money. You become deprived when you believe you have no part in bringing about change.

And a rich person is not simply someone who owns more. A rich person is someone who can create hope; someone who can catch a dream and turn hope into conviction.

Power is not only what sits behind government desks. Sometimes power is the very moment a person decides no longer to be a victim of the mindset of need.

Many of our needs are creations of our own minds. People may need far less than they have been taught. We call many things “needs” that others have made, defined, advertised, and then told us we are incomplete without.

And it is here, little by little, that the structures of human captivity have taken shape.

We do not regard states as ill-wishers of the people, because no nation can endure without structure.

Nor do we regard benefactors as heroes, because giving from a position of superiority is merely another form of pride.

And we do not consider people who are deprived weak, because many of them have borne burdens that even the most powerful men in the world might not be able to bear.

We do not seek to build an army of dependants. We seek to build a generation of builders: a generation that one day will no longer need foundations; a generation that will no longer wait for someone to decide for them, lift them up, or build their future for them.

If one day all our institutions close, but the people who once came to us can stand on their own feet, we will not have failed that day.

That day, we will have won.

For the aim of this service is not to make an organization eternal. Our aim is not to make the directors of an organization superstars. The aim is not to leave our name above the doors of buildings forever.

The aim of our service is to set the human being free: free from chains woven by people themselves, wound by their own hands around their wrists and ankles, while they remain captive to those same chains and wait for a savior.

Perhaps the world's greatest poverty is not the absence of bread; perhaps it is the absence of meaning.

Perhaps the world's greatest illness is not a disease of the body; perhaps it is forgetting one's own worth.

Perhaps the world's greatest prison has no walls at all; perhaps it is made of fear.

Perhaps we were not blind. Perhaps the images we had been shown were simply fabricated.

And then, from those very images, fears were born. A fear that taught us: wait. Wait for the state. Wait for a savior. Wait for the rich. Wait for an investor. Wait for a miracle.

But history has not been made by those who waited.

History has been made by those who rose: not when everything was ready, nor when they were certain they would win, but when nothing was certain.

We have come to build a bridge: between the state and the people, between wealth and deprivation, between knowledge and ignorance, and between despair and hope.

But a bridge has meaning only when someone decides to cross it.

No bridge saves anyone.

A bridge only makes a way possible.

Crossing is a person's own decision.

Today we invite everyone: states, benefactors, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, people who are deprived, those who have been forgotten, and even those who no longer believe in anything.

Let us build something greater than ourselves.

Not for fame, not for power, and not so our names will remain in history, but for people who have not yet been born.

For a child who may never hear our names. For a child who will never know us, but will live with the consequences of the decisions we make today.

Perhaps that child will never know who built the bridge they crossed.

It does not matter.

What matters is that the bridge is there.

And if one day we are asked, “What did you do in the age of collapse?”

We will say: we did not wait.

We saw an illusion as a dream, caught the dream with hope, and with that hope bought a lamp.

Then, in the darkness of night, instead of looking only for a rescuer outside ourselves, we turned toward ourselves.

We searched within ourselves, struggled with ourselves, and within ourselves overcame ourselves.

And perhaps that was the day we first became revolutionaries of our own selves.

One day you will ask us, “How did you survive?”

And we will say: like that silkworm, that small creature that climbed to the top of the tree in the hope of flying, however briefly.

On the way, its chest split open. It grew tired. It was wounded.

But there, in a grave called a silk cocoon, it buried itself.

Not in the hope of dying.

In the hope that a hero not yet born would live.

In the hope of a creature that wanted to fly; wanted it so much that it was willing to leave its old form behind, to kill its weaker self so that its better self could experience flight, if only once.

Perhaps everyone outside that cocoon thought it had died.

But inside that little grave, something was being born.

Something that was no longer made to crawl.

It had wings.

And today we too live with that same hope: the hope that a butterfly's life is not short, the hope that the value of life cannot always be measured by the number of days.

And perhaps for years we have remained alive by that hope alone.

By the hope that change is possible.

By the hope that a person can go beyond themself.

By the hope that the end of one form of life is not always the end of life.

Sometimes it is the beginning of flight.

And if we are asked why we still believe, perhaps our answer will be very simple:

Because our father said: butterflies are eternal.