S1E3 - Chido Govera & Cultivating Change - MAD Talks

We grew up eating a lot of cool stuff, actually. Like what? Termites. How does termites taste? Meaty. Welcome. I'm Melina Shannon DiPietro, the executive director of MAD. This is our new podcast, MAD Talks. For our first season, our founder, René Redzepi, who is also the chef and owner of restaurant Noma, sits down each week with an iconic speaker from our signature event, MAD Symposium. Together, they talk about food, creativity, and the future we hope to build. In this episode, René speaks with Chido Govera, social entrepreneur and leader of the Future of Hope Foundation. Since we spoke last time, which is 12 years ago that I saw you last time, I'm now wearing glasses. A lot has changed. A lot has changed since we saw each other 12 years ago. That's true. Can you just explain a little bit about your background? Like where you born and… So, I was born in Mutare in Zimbabwe. And I grew up there in a village of Bemiwa. There, I had experiences that would later change my life. And part of that was really learning to become a head of a household when I was seven years old. And making a kind of resolve when I was seven… when I was eight years old to say, If I go through these things now in this village and I come out on the other side, I want to commit myself to working to help other people in this situation. So, the head of a household at age seven, what happened? Well, my mother died because of HIV and AIDS. Back then, people were not talking about it. People didn't know actually what they could do about it. And it was also typical that the mother is the main responsible person for a household. MAD And so, in the absence of a mother at seven years old, I had to just fill in that gap of the mother because I lived with a grandmother who was already over a hundred years old and I had a brother who was two years younger than me. None of them could do anything to help me. And I was old enough to just know by myself that I had to take care of everybody. It means you become the one who is responsible for the welfare of everybody. MAD That means you are the one who is responsible for working the fields, fetching the water, fetching firewood and going to work to do whatever work that you can do to put food on the table. The sense of responsibility… Yeah. It was really, really incredible that you felt that. I think for me at the time as a kid, there was also a sense of being let down by my mother when she passed on because as a kid, when she was ill, I waited for her to get better. And when she didn't get better, I felt a bit let down. And so stepping into this role of being responsible for these two people, I also had kind of some standard I had set for myself. I am not going to let them down. Which is also why at some point after I left school, when I was doing my daily effort to try and make it work, I was 10 years old. And someone came and say, we see that you're struggling. We can help you out of this situation. Who was this? This was a member of the extended family, a cousin's sister. She came, she said, we see that you're struggling, but we also understand in the situation where you are, you are not going to be able to leave this homestead, just living to go to work. The easiest exit card that you can take from here is if you marry, the head of the homestead receives some cows, and then you go, perhaps you negotiate with whoever you marry. This was at age 10. At 10 years old. You have a 10 year old, right? It's an impossible thought. It is impossible. Even for me, when I sit sometimes and I reflect on this, and I'm thinking, I could have been married when I was 10 years old. Marriage when you're older, even. It's hard. It's hard. And I'm thinking, what was I going to do there at 10? What would I have made of it? MAD And, and, but luckily, because I was so attached to my grandmother and to my brother, and I felt like I cannot let them down. I said, well, if I marry, I don't go with my grandmother and my brother. And, and who's to tell me that if I go, I would even be allowed to go and work and to be able to come back and to support them. MAD I told myself, look, the thing I can control is when I am here, if I'm gone, I don't know what that is. And I also, it didn't sit right with me to think that I have to buy myself out of one situation into another where I had no idea what to expect. MAD So I said, you know what, I'll pass. And then I let go of a guy who had a blue car and having a car in itself. At that age was like, it should, it should have excited me. And I think that's what that's also the reason why they made a point to clarify that this guy has a car. It's not just cows. It's not just a guy has a car. So how old was this guy? MAD He was around 40 or something like this. He was for sure around 30 years, 30 years older than me. And so I would identify him because when he would come, he would just drive. We lived very close to the road, he will drive, you will know him because his car is blue. And then when you see him drive back, then you can follow him and we can sit and talk about it. I was sitting there thinking, hmm, well, car is excited, but not enough. So at age 10, you make such an incredible decision for yourself. What's the next big moment for you in your young life? What happens at age 11 or 12 or 13? MAD The next big moment for me was an invitation to go and learn to farm mushrooms, which came through the United Methodist Church at Marange High School. And in my community, there was a woman, her name is Loveness. And I like to share about her because I think this is also a first moment when a woman who was not related to me in any way, was standing up for me in a different way. There was my grandmother and then there was Loveness. And Loveness had a job where she had to keep track of all the orphans in the community, and all the old people in the community, so that when there was some help coming in the area, she could say, okay, in such and such a place, as a people who are in need of this support. MAD So when this message came through her church, when she was walking back from church, she comes past my homestead. And she said, we have an invitation to bring 15 girls to learn about mushroom farming at Africa University. We think, maybe you should go. And I said, of course, I want to go. I had never heard about mushroom farming. MAD And why did you say, of course, I want to go? What is, can you remember when they asked you, what was the thing where you knew, okay, I have to do this? MAD So for me, it was an opportunity to learn something. I remember I'd stopped going to school not because I wanted to. I stopped because I had to. So this was an opportunity to learn something. But also, I had experiences eating mushrooms, because I used to go foraging for mushrooms with my grandmother. And we would go every mushroom season, I go to the forest with my grandmother, who had to work with the help of a walking stick on one hand, and me holding her on the other hand. MAD She was not able to see that good anymore. And so I would bring her into the forest, I sit her down, and I collect different types of mushrooms and bring them to her. And she would break them up and smell them and tell me this mushroom is edible. This one is inedible. This one is poisonous, or this one is partially poisonous. MAD If we go with it home, we cook it and dry it, we can eat it. And the poison is out. So I had these experiences during the mushroom season in the forest. And it was also one of the easiest period for me to put food on the table. So to hear that I could actually have mushrooms when I want, even without knowing if I would be able to master this, given that not studied that much at the time. It was just because I knew mushrooms as food. And I said, let's go, let's go learn something. It's about mushrooms, and I can possibly do something with mushrooms, which I already knew how to do. So I was excited to go for this reason. And you went. And it changed your life. So I went to this training of one week at the university. I remember I had a little plastic bag with my clothes, and I was barefoot arriving into a university laboratory and learning about farming mushrooms there. Ten years old, correct? 11 years old. 11 years old. 11 years old, yes. And it was like, MAD It was magic. It was, you know, this is a girl whose grandmother said, when you go to the forest and you harvest mushrooms, don't be greedy. If you're greedy, the gods of the forest will not give you more mushrooms next year. MAD When you cook a mushroom in the house, don't close the pot because you closed the forest. And it was all these kinds of spirits things. And now in a laboratory, I mean, I haven't heard about the science of this. MAD But what was funny was that standing there in the laboratory and thinking about the experiences with my grandmother hearing the science, I was able to put the stories of my grandmother together with the science. And in that moment, I knew that it is possible to make this seemingly complicated science into a simple story, just like my grandmother used to tell. And what did you do then with all this knowledge? We came back to the village. We were growing and selling mushrooms. MAD Hang on one second, because growing and selling mushrooms. I mean, at seven, you're orphanaged. And then you live this life where you're half promised away to a 40 year old man. And how do you then start actually becoming a mushroom entrepreneur? What happened? How did you start growing and selling? MAD After the training, we came to the village, we had a starter kit that we could use to grow the first mushrooms. We cooked the first harvest for the local community, they tasted it. And they think it just tastes like mushrooms in the forest. So the one who tasted went to tell a friend who told a friend. And before we know it, everything that we were growing was being bought by people in the community. MAD And suddenly, I could have money in my hand, where I could choose. I want to go and buy something for myself. I remember buying myself a skirt for the first time, standing in a village shop, just behind the counter and looking at the skirts which are hanging there and say, give me that one, that one with the stripes. MAD It was, it was, it was, it was for me an exciting moment to be able to pay school fees for my grandmother, for my, sorry, for my brother, to be able to also have the money that we raised from selling mushrooms, being put aside to pay school fees for other orphans who were supported by this group of women in my community. MAD I was like, I was like, this is something. But more what was a big inspiration for me was how mushrooms were growing on waste. Now, I am a girl who had understood that my highest achievement for the people in my household is to marry so they get some kettle. MAD I had already failed at that. So I was thinking, if I might have failed here, but perhaps I could turn myself into something else. That I failed. You saw it as a failure. Because for them, it was a failure. Yeah. But did you deep down think of it as failure? For me, it was not. For me, it was, it was perhaps my first action of standing up for myself. MAD There were no campaigns which teach a girl to stand up for herself in that time, at least not none that were available to me. But for me to just quietly say no, to just choose not to show up and to just believe that perhaps there's another way. And with converting waste to mushrooms, it was for me a nice metaphor of saying, there is another way. And then I may not know it now, but there is another way. And so I really remember thinking, of waste that I had in my fields and I could not eat can turn into money and money that I can do so many things with, then I think Chido can also become somebody. Yeah. If I look at this situation, you're 11, 12 years old at this point. You're selling mushrooms. Yeah. And I guess business is kind of booming, if we can say it like that, in the village at least. I think in the village, it was indeed business was booming. But also what was funny is I was one of 15 girls at the time. It was not just business booming, but we were the most attractive little people in the village for their husbands. Because it was like magic for us to grow mushrooms in a place where people have never heard about this. And what was funny is that out of the 15 girls in less than six months, 13 of them got married. MAD Because suddenly, the boys who never used to look at us were like, hey. And of course, me being stubborn, I'm thinking, yeah, business is booming. This is my way out of here. And so I saw really this as an opportunity for me and connecting the dots from really the simple stories of my grandmother that helped me to understand the science of mushroom farming. I say to myself, I want to work to simplify mushroom farming so I can take this to as many people who are in my situation. I got a chance to speak publicly for the first time. So I was preparing for my exam, but I was preparing for my first speech. Where was this then? Where I would speak to around 2,000 people in Kenya at the Youth Employment Summit. Had you ever been outside the country? I had never been outside the country. Did you have to fly there? I had to. What was on your mind? What did you want to? We were 19 at this point. At the conference. I think what was on my mind then was to say, we are not the things that happened to us. And this was a message that I wanted to put forward. I think one of my major points that I put forward was, we want to be able to do something to help ourselves. We don't want to wait until someone comes to help us. What did you want to do with your life at that point? To go and help people with the skills that I already had in my hand. To go and teach people about growing their own food as a way of demanding their freedom, as a way of liberating themselves from difficult situations, just like I was then. Wow. And especially young girls. I think the thoughts of saying, I would have been married off at 10 to get food on my plate was like sitting very strongly with me. MAD But also because I had experienced that. Before I was farming mushrooms, I had nothing to my name in a way. People responsible for the homestead where I was living, they always say, if you tell that this happened, we send you out of this homestead. We send you to find your father. That was always a kind of threat which was always there for me. But when I was able to bring something to the table, the threat of sending me away was not there anymore. So somehow, I had a space in this homestead. I was not free in it, but the space was there. MAD I didn't live anymore with the threat of being sent away when I didn't know where I would go. So a sense of belonging. And so I already see that there was a reduction in some of the things that I struggled with as a child. However, I needed to be able to actually get out of there. And in a way, I bought my freedom. And so I'm thinking, if I can buy my freedom to be able to rewrite my life, then I want that. And I want other people to be able to afford that. MAD I mean, that's one of the most amazing things about you, Chito. And when I saw your talk that many, so many years ago, it was a feeling of resilience. The thing that you spoke about just now where you say, we are not the ones that we were created to be. We can be who we want to be. We can take action ourselves. And you have incredible power in you. MAD Most people would crumble if they experienced 10% of what you experienced. And I think that's why we wanted to have you at MAD, to show this type of resilience. People that can go through this adversity are the most powerful people and most inspiring people for me. Yeah. MAD And so now you're at MAD, and you're speaking, and it was very emotional. People who were at the tent back then, they still remember it. Actually, people that has been to all the symposiums, your talk is still their favorite, if you were in the tent, because everyone could totally sense you and your story. It's so real and authentic. What happened afterwards now? Now you're in your 20s, you go to MAD, you're actually speaking around the world. People are taking note of you. Yes. So a whole world starts opening up for me. And what I kept, I think, very close to my heart is that I don't want to forget. I will forgive all the things that happened, but I don't want to forget because I really wanted to do something. And so I started to do my community work, traveling and sharing about my dream. And I think when I was at MAD event, I share about wanting to create the Future of Hope Foundation. It was actually just in the beginning, because I had written a story about the things that I experienced as a way of processing everything that I went through. Life was rough, yes. But I told myself, I want to heal from this. I want to put this behind me, but at the same time, take the lessons from it and make something good out of it. I said, I want to do something practical. I want to build an organization that shows that even after you've gone through all of this, you can still pick yourself up. You can rebuild yourself. It doesn't matter how justified it is for you to sit in the corner and feel sorry for yourself and to lick your wounds, as I call it. I am not going to sit here and lick my wounds and just pity myself. I want to stand up and do something. I want to share this with as many people as possible. So people, regardless of what it is you go through, we all end up in some situations where things have happened to us and we feel a certain way. MAD Life We feel a little less than we should feel and sometimes, yeah, it can be easy to resign and sit in a corner and say, poor me. I'm not going to say, poor me. So I created the foundation. Or you're angry at everyone. You can be angry at everyone and it's justifiable. And it's justifiable. But I think we should not look just for justification. For, you know, doing nothing. We should just put ourselves out there. As long as we are alive, we should stand up and do something about the situation that we find ourselves in. And you did that with the foundation. And I do that with the foundation. So what is the foundation today? The foundation today is operating in Zimbabwe. We work with vulnerable communities. And the whole idea behind it is that we want to capacitate communities Using food, using innovative ideas to address issues of food and nutrition insecurity and to raise income for communities who don't have many opportunities using food production. ´And food production, of course, with a focus on mushrooms. And today we have reached over 10,000 households in Zimbabwe. And I think what is nice is that… It's unbelievable. MAD Life It is. It is indeed. I don't see… I mean, I used to say a lot of people, as many people as possible. I don't think I had counted 10,000 households at the time when I was thinking about it when I was eight. But I also think if you connect the story I told you earlier to say, I have always depended on the grace of the people that I know. And one person taking one action and that action having an effect that goes far. Actually, I think me attending MAD helped me actually to connect to an organization here in Denmark. There's this organization called Dan Church Aid. MAD Life And they said, I think you should listen also to, you know, the work that they do. So we went to that event. And they say, oh, yeah, we work in Zimbabwe. And there's a new country director who's being posted to Zimbabwe. You should go and say hello to them. And maybe you can do something. And I have worked with DCA since 2017. I think we've implemented projects of around, I think, a million euros or something like this by now. MAD Life And so I think these kind of opportunities to share, for me, I look at them as planting seeds. I think with the foundation, we are also planting seeds in the communities where we make seeds that we hope that will also grow and have an impact that is more than what we have expected. And what about yourself? How are you today? If you look back at the 10-year-old. MAD Life If I look back at the 10-year-old, I think I have a lot to be grateful for. I have a lot of gratitude for all the challenges and all the opportunities that I have had. And I do hope that in some way, I can help to create the same for somebody, that they can be able to do. MAD Life If I look back at the 10-year-old, I can be able to be on the other side and say, hey, it's possible. If it is possible for me, it can be possible for other people. I have grown a lot. I've learned a lot of things. I've made my fair share of mistakes as well and learned from that. And I look at what I've been able to do and I think this is a story that I want to keep sharing. I want to keep using my experience to inspire hope, not just in Zimbabwe, but in every part of the world where I find myself in. I have grown a lot of people in Zimbabwe. MAD Life I want to keep living in what I'm Um, my dreams, well, I have many. I have been a foster mother. And I have one girl at home who wants to be a chef. Amazing. My dream is that she gets her dream to come true. And I hope that the work that we started doing together, the work that I do with DCA, the connection with you, that we can grow that into something. Because I think there's also something cool to open the door and people say, oh, she knows the people from Norma. And they say, oh, we want to hear more about that. So I hope that together we can help to open more doors for other people who need it. Of course. And, um, I am curious, uh, I mean, to also see how can I continue to also input into your dreams? I think one of the powerful things about, well, all the work you do and just the fact that you're a foster mother, how many kids are you fostering? I have been fostering in total around eight children. Now a lot of them have become adults and they're out of the house. I have only this one chef who's still sticking around until they become the chef that they want to be. But I have fostered around eight children in total. That's unbelievable. Yeah. And she was very inspired by when your team was in Zimbabwe and she worked with them and she thinks, I want to be cool like this. Wow. We should have her here in the kitchen. I hope so. I hope we can do that. Yes. How old is she now? She's 24. Oh, there's time. Yeah. You should definitely bring her to know mom. Yeah. One thing I actually haven't spoken about at all, which surprises myself that I didn't ask you, what is food in Zimbabwe? Like, what do you grow up eating? Oh, we grew up eating a lot of cool stuff, actually. But I think in the name of civilization, we try to move away from that. Like what? What do you mean? If I tell you, when I was in the village, I used to go and harvest termites and I can do that like a pro. So termites, wild vegetables, all kinds of wild insects. How does termites taste? Meaty. How many termites is a portion? A bowl full. It's a whole bowl. And I find this also now I moved from Zimb since two years ago. And when I live here and I think about home, these are actually the kinds of foods that I think about. I think we have a lot of vegetables from the wild. We have a lot of different kinds of edible insects. We have things like the mupane worms. I was just telling to Mark every time when we travel to Zimbabwe, I always make sure that the connection that we make to go home brings me to an airport where I can buy all these worms and all kinds of things that remind me of home. And I think there's a lot of effort today that is going into reactivating our traditional foods that we had forgotten because we are thinking we are becoming more sophisticated. We eat only white rice and all these overly processed things. And what I think would be interesting is to actually see how we could look at the work that we are doing with DCA. For example, we are promoting the cultivation of small grains. Small grains are what we were eating when I was in the village. But if you really look from when I left the village, you can count on one hand the times I actually really went in the shop and was able to buy something from these small grains. It was not possible. So part of our work actually is to also bring back some of these things that used to thrive in our environment that were forgotten and we went to cultivate things which were more commercial, which don't make sense anymore to cultivate at the moment because of climate change and everything. So we are making efforts to try and find drought resistant crops that we can bring back that can survive. That also means that the kitchen is also changing because of this. We're going away from the borrowed kitchen where things were just, you know, the commercial stuff and it has to be the same in every kitchen. And then we ignore the muine, munyeve and all these wild vegetables we used to eat. Yeah, it would be. The sad thing is it seems to be disappearing everywhere, all this knowledge and all this energy and all this cooking. We eat more and more the same everywhere. And that's sad. That's sad and we have to fix it. And I think there's a lot of roles that can be played by a person such as yourself, persons like us who are doing work in this area where we are saying, if you're working to empower people through food, then we really have to integrate all the indigenous knowledge about food that we were forgetting in the last years. We have to bring that to the center because when we bring that to the center, it is amazing what we can discover. I want to live long like my grandmother did. And I think I have to eat like my grandmother used to eat. I have to at least try. Did she eat a lot of meat? No, actually, we didn't eat that much meat. At least in the time when I stayed with her, like I told you, the easiest time for us to find food was during the rain season. And in the rain season, it was a lot of mushrooms. We used to go to the mountains to harvest the leaves from the baobab tree to use those as relish. We used to harvest, you know, in the spring when you have the first weeds kind of growing, different kinds of weeds we could eat because that's what we could afford. From time to time, maybe they went hunting and they killed a deer of some sort and there was meat. And during the harvest period, we went to harvest locusts and crickets and all those kinds of things. And that was we ate different kinds of things which we could find in nature because it was not so easy to just go into a shop and buy something. And for me personally, now these are things that I look back to with a kind of excitement. But really, I have to admit that as a kid, I was thinking, oh, I wish I could have something else. But now when I have what I have, I'm thinking, but I actually miss that. There was something about it where there are flavors that I experienced in my childhood that I can't find anywhere. And sometimes when I'm sitting and I'm getting homesick, this is what I think about. You think about the food. Yeah. Wow. And my grandmother used to make a special wild mushroom, a dried one with peanut butter. Mmm. Mmm. Hey, this year at MADD, we are looking into the future. Mm-hmm. And we're hoping to inspire people to think long term. Mm-hmm. Like, is there an end game for everyone? Do people even think of that? I know for myself at NOMA, it's a recent thing that I try to envision 20, 30 years into the future and then plan for it already now. How do you see your future? If we're doing a podcast 10, 20 years from now, where would you like to be? Oh. How do I see the future? Yeah. I would like to be able to grow my work, to reach more people, to do more activities than what I currently do now. I still would like to bring you to Zimbabwe. I'll come one time with my kids. I want to have impacted perhaps 10 times more the number of people that we've impacted now. Mm-hmm. And I think I also want to be able to learn to live better. I think we are in a world where we are always chasing the next thing. And there's a lot of challenges in our world today that we don't have time for. There's a lot of things we don't have time to process. I would like perhaps to also adopt a pace where I can process all the things in our world today and really do something to change it. I think we are entering a phase. If you look at the politics in the world at large, we're entering a phase where we really need to take more responsibility as individuals. Because the responsibility that we didn't take as individuals because we place that on government, it is coming back to bite us. Mm-hmm. I want that also through my work, I can work to address this. Mm-hmm. What we built as a system that is democracy and the big powers that we looked up to for democracy, what they are doing now raises a lot of questions. And I am from a part of the world where we've always looked to the West as an example of what democracy can be. We've looked to such a power as America for what democracy can be and should be. And I think for us, this raises a big question. We're, as a people still struggling for everyday survival, we're chasing to become democratic using examples where things are already going in a way where you think, is this what we want for humanity? Where is the spirit of Ubuntu that we cry for as Africans? Mm-hmm. And I think we have a big challenge. Can you just explain what the spirit of Ubuntu is? A person is a person because of others. I am because you are. Mm-hmm. What is happening to that today? And I think doing the work that we are doing, we also have to put more attention on this. Because it is kind of falling through our fingers. Mm-hmm. And we can't wait for the system to fix itself. Mm-hmm. We need to take more responsibility. And we need to look at the responsibility that we have as individuals who have an influence on the households where we live in, the communities that we work with locally and globally. I think we really have to take more responsibility to bring people back in the right order. No, Chido. I mean, honestly, the way you speak now, you are transcending a mushroom farmer right now. You are stepping into the UN. I think we are all much more than the things that we do every day. And I think we need to tap into that more. No, but it resonates with me what you're saying. Absolutely it does. Take charge yourself. Change what you want to change. Don't wait. No. Just do it. Yeah. You know, Ubuntu, there was a restaurant in California many, many years ago. Yeah. It's one of my top three meals of my life. It was a vegetarian restaurant called Ubuntu. Yeah. It's closed now. Mm-hmm. But I had a vegetarian meal at Ubuntu, which was incredible. Maybe you tell me how you feel about it. Well. How do you feel about the world now? Yes. The world we are bombarded with stuff constantly. You are very quick to think that everything is just falling apart. But is it? Is everything always falling apart? Or are we just so focused on everything that's bad all the time that that becomes our world? I think a lot is happening in our world. Mm. And there's also a lot that is difficult to digest. Mm. We have to rethink a lot of things with all the changes that are coming. There's a lot of rethinking. I look at what is happening in politics, for example. And the thought that comes to my mind all the time is that we advocated sometimes too much for freedom without advocating for responsibility. Mm. And sometimes we are bombarded with an exercise of the freedom but without the responsibility. And I think it would be careless to not think about it. We need to change this new world that we created where we think as politicians we can take the freedom to speak how we want, to do whatever we want without taking the responsibility of what that means, how that shapes the world. What is happening to democracy today, it scares me. It scares me because it is happening to examples that we looked up to. Mm-hmm. If you see people who advocated for human rights had some examples of where they set to be. Mm-hmm. And those examples are not showing up as they should today in many ways. Mm-hmm. What I referred to earlier about Ubuntu. Mm-hmm. This is also the essence, I think, that tells you that if I am because you are, I cannot achieve my being while tramping all over you. Mm-hmm. So I cannot exercise my freedom while infringing on your freedom. Mm-hmm. And the only thing that stands in the middle is that because I know I am because you are, I take responsibility that I do not get my freedom by ruining yours, by hurting you, by breaking you. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I cannot win by breaking the other person or the other persons, the other nations. I should learn to win while letting others win as well. I should learn to shine while letting others shine as well. So I think if you think about it like this, in terms of taking responsibility for not hurting others while we get our victory, our world is in a difficult place. Mm-hmm. And we do have to think about it. Now, how do we think about it without... How do you think about it? Exactly. How to think about this without losing it, without getting overwhelmed? Because today when you read the news, it's like every day it hits you in your face. How do you... How to manage personally? I look at the things that I can do to change what is happening, starting to change in my surrounding. I think if every one of us looks to see how am I showing up in my household, how am I showing up in my workplace, how am I showing up in my community? And if we start to cultivate the values that we want to have in the world, in the small spaces where we have control, that change that you can do in these small spaces where you have influence will affect the global. I married an artist who has a special quote that I like. He says, the global only exists from the generosity of the local. What we see on a world scale can also be changed from the change that we start making in ourselves, in the groups that we have an influence on, even starting with our own households. How we are showing up there is going to change the problems that we have. But if we approach this thinking that it is the responsibility of the system to change itself, well, then we make the world a very dark place. By doing nothing, we will make the world a dark place. And I think to survive it, we have to start doing everything that we think should be done to make things better. And I think that's a great point because I think sometimes it's overwhelming. Where do you start? You know, if you want to focus on the environment, like what can I do? Or, and the fact that you can actually do something in your near surroundings, you can start by just looking at that. And that's a good enough place to start. And that in itself can potentially be something that inspires. Can grow. Like a mushroom. Yeah. It mushrooms. Let's change this situation in our world like mushrooms. Yeah. It's a metaphor. Change everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One mushroom at a time. I'm sure we can do this. Oh, my God. Chido, I think we're going to stop on this one because it's, it's, your message is loud and clear and it's full of hope. And it's full of all, it's just so much full of hope. And I think you live your ideology, your foundation, you're an inspiration to me. Yeah. You're an inspiration to me when I sometimes feel exhausted or I myself feel like, oh, that is something is unfair. You know, I tell myself, no. Just keep going. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Let's do this. And when you feel exhausted, I'm not far away from you. I can come to Genk. You can come to Genk. I will encourage you. And come to Zimbabwe. And let's do something together and give hope. By giving hope, we also get hope. Wow. And with those words, thank you so much, Chido. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Renee. That is the power of a mushroom in the hands of one very determined and visionary woman. Thanks for listening to Mad Talks. And please come back next week for a new episode with another fascinating speaker from MAD Symposium. This podcast was produced by Sidsel Kaae Nørgaard and made by MAD. To learn more about us and our work within hospitality, make sure to follow us on socials @themadfeed. Sign up for our newsletter or check us out at madfeed.co. See you next time.