Developing the Developing

I used to work in community development in the developing world. My friend Joe and I spent 5 years in one of the poorest countries in the world. Joe was from there so he knew the language and the culture. He also had a masters degree in development (the actual name of his degree was much more complicated than that so I don’t remember what it was for sure) from an ivy league school and is quite a bit smarter than me. We had both learned from our training that effective development isn’t easy but we were determined to be different. We had both grown up seeing the wreckage of development projects gone bad and wanted to do something that would actually work.

In spite of knowing the difficulties we soon fell into the same trap as most other programs. There is great pressure to do something very visible not only from the bosses and donors but also from those we went to help. The latter know all about development projects and are experts at playing them for whatever can be had. We were cured, however, by a couple of experiences that still influence how I go about initiating change today.

Joe and I used to travel by motorcycle quite often and one day we set off for an initial meeting with a village we wanted to work with. We both had our backpacks and thermoses. The thermoses were important because the water quality in the village was bad and so we always brought our own. Mine was a beat up Stanley stainless steel one. We also went armed with surveys that had been completed by another organization of the village. We went in knowing what a lot of the problems were.

When we got there we all gathered in the schoolhouse. The chief and tribal elders were there along with just about everyone else in the village. Joe and I went into our presentation. Joe could talk in the native language and he would interpret for me when it was my turn. We discussed the problems of water quality, latrines and other health issues. We rambled on about finance systems, agriculture development and even the diamond mining that was taking place near by.

After about an hour we stopped for comments and questions. Things had gone well with a lot of people nodding their heads in agreement with what we were saying. We felt like we had hit a homerun because we had been talking about things that would have profound positive impact on the quality of life for the people in the room. There was silence for a few minutes and then the chief rose to speak. He was very serious and several people were nodding and adding their own comments. About then I noticed that Joe, who was sitting next to me at the front of the room, dropped his head and kind of chuckled to himself. I asked him what they were talking about. Joe pointed to my thermos that was sitting on the table in front of us and said that they wanted to know why the “glass” in my thermos didn’t break.

You see, where we were they didn’t have stainless steel thermoses. They all have those glass insides that break if they get banged around a lot. My thermos had dents in the side but didn’t break because the inside was made out of stainless steel instead of glass.

I was dumbfounded. We had been talking about the major problems in the village and were offering hope that a solution could be found and the only question that was asked was about my thermos. What fools. Of course by fools I’m referring to Joe and I.

We tried one more time. The processing of palm kernels into palm oil is a big business where we were. The process is labor intensive and not quite as efficient as it could be. Joe and I knew that an oil press would do a much more efficient job so we went about designing and building one. It worked too. It was very efficient at rendering the oil and took much less labor. It was a complete failure though.

In the traditional way the women and children provide most of the labor. After the oil has been rendered from the kernels the women go back and rewash the kernels to get out some of the left over oil. The use this oil to make soap which they sell. This money from the sale of the soap is theirs to keep. Our oil press was too efficient and the women couldn’t get enough extra oil out to make any money for themselves. As a result the whole project was rejected.

Our approach changed dramatically after that. Our first step became developing authentic relationships with those we were working with. By authentic I mean that these were strong relationships that were not simply established to accomplish an objective but because both parties grew to really care for each other.

Step two was to encourage dialogue about the issues they faced. There were always lots of opinions and it was interesting to discover so much of the history that those villages had with the problems they faced. It also allowed them to work through the social impacts that we were clueless about.

Step three was to point to options. These were options not solutions and we tried to be as careful as we could not to provide answers for them. For example, one of the questions they had was why the palm plantations they planted were not as productive as the ones planted by a development program that had long since disappeared. We knew that it was because they were planting seeds from hybrid trees which doesn’t work genetically but we simply asked them where they thought they might be able to find the answer to that question. The following discussion resulted in a field trip to the nearby agriculture university were all was explained.

Of course this approach doesn’t bring about flashy results and is much more of a long term process. Our bosses didn’t understand it so we shut down our work. There are many in the development field who disagree with this approach and so we still see people running around the developing world digging latrines and drilling water wells. Of course, they are not phased one bit by the fact that people having doing that for nearly a hundred years now with very little to show for it.

I had a guy from well known development organization visit me while I was there who was visiting the area to see the work they were doing. We got to talking about a village where we both had been working and he was bragging about the latrines they had built there the previous year. They had dug the pits, put on the slab and built a brick chimney for about 50 latrines around the town. All the people had to do was build the walls and put on a roof. I offered to take him to see his latrines and he was shocked to find that only a handful had ever been completed. Unfortunately I’m sure the report shows that they had built 50 latrines and the donors loved it.

I have written all this to say that it is extremely difficult for people from developed countries to work in developing countries. The issues are extremely complex and what seems like an obvious solution to those from the developed world often fails miserably in the developing world. It might not be popular but I still maintain that the best way to approach this work is with relationship, dialogue and exposure to options. It must be kept that simple.

I also think the same formula applies when people who come out of healthy churches try to help those in unhealthy churches.