Share the fire.

You think you can share your fire? I mean real fire, burning wood and glowing coals?

Two years ago I was in Africa with my daughter, Botswana and Namibia. I had been living in South Africa when I was 16 years old, and I wanted her to experience Africa and its ways. On our trip through Botswana we met a group of two incredibly friendly Dutch families. They welcomed us into their midst and we shared a fantastic time together.?

And one evening, we even shared our fire with a stranger.?

That evening, we were sitting around the fireplace, looking into the flames of the obligatory open campfire. We were talking and laughing and feeling very comfortable. Suddenly, out of the dark a man appeared with a shovel. Very politely, he inquired whether we had enough and he could have some.

Some fire.

We were completely taken by surprise and totally not-understanding, but we agreed. And then we watched with rising amazement while the friendly stranger very carefully took a part of our fire onto his shovel, thanked us and vanished back into the dark, carefully balancing part of our fire on his shovel.

He used our fire to easily kindle his fire.?

After our surprise subsided we started laughing, incredulous of what had just happened.?

“Imagine in Europe, you barbeque in your garden and the neighbor arrives with a shovel to share the fire!” We were laughing hard.

Needless to say that we talked about this the rest of the night and in fact the rest of the holidays. We agreed we wanted to take some of this African positivity, togetherness and welcoming attitude back to Europe. Our Whatsapp-group is called “share the fire”.

Since 2019, a lot of things have changed. Our Dutch friends invited us to share help and support of a village in Zimbabwe (https://binga-support.nl/). Together with colleague scientists I share our experience as researchers with other fellow-scientists around the world, also with Africa! (www.scientistsneedmore.de). We also online distribute and share tools and protocols for getting scientific information across (https://bit.ly/edurational_scientific_writing) and we discuss with guests and share with listeners the soft skills that changed the way we work as scientists (https://anchor.fm/theimperfectscientist).?

Because as we saw that evening, sharing is caring. And for many things, after sharing you don′t have less: experience, joy, knowledge, advice, support, friendship, laughter, enthusiasm, empathy and even things like leadership or energy do not need to become less when you share them. When I was younger, I was posessively guarding many of these things to myself, scared that they would become less when I shared them. Now that I am older and thankfully a wee bit wiser, I realized that frequently these things become more when you share them.

So if you have some fire, go ahead and share it.?

Share the fire.