Manjusvara gently touches the back of my rucksack. This means, ‘It’s time to leave now. This woman is friendly but she’s saying ‘No’’. When we’re back on the pavement again he says, ‘There wasn’t anything you could have done differently’. He says, ‘We can’t make someone say ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Maybe’, we can only learn to recognize when they’re saying those things’.
I realize that I don’t think that the standing orders I’ve got already count because I got then too easily; they came from people who were just waiting to give. Manjusvara says, ‘You did do something; you were there.’ I’m not fully convinced. The more experienced fund-raisers who have visited us are full of anecdotes about how they’ve transformed the most unlikely of situations; converted the most unlikely people. I want to be like this; to be a REAL fundraiser.
