Lessons from When Helping Hurts and Brando Akoto, Concluded

I have already pointed out one of the key points made in When Helping Hurts by Corbett and Fikkert: We all need help.  Hence comfortable Americans who head off determined "to help poor people" often discover their own poverty of relationships and resilience, for example.  A slogan that quickly emerged from Peace Corps veterans sums this realization up nicely: "I got much more than I gave."  Giving and receiving often unfold in surprising ways, and material goods are shown to be but one part of a rich life.

A second key realization that often emerges from working in impoverished areas is the intractability of problems.  Distributing food or building buildings is easy enough.  But doing so in a way that ensures that local people benefit in the long run is much more difficult and requires a great deal of patience and listening and, above all, collaboration.

In other words, development work done right leads to and requires sustained and meaningful relationships.

When Mr. Brando talked about relationships during our September 2014 journeys to Yo Ghana's Ghanaian schools I enjoyed watching how community and school leaders responded to his words.  Some expected--and hoped--that we would act like a "Western NGO" was supposed to act: build classrooms and distribute school buses and computers. But most responded very positiviley once Brando explained that: 1) We didn't have that sort of money; 2) The community already had resources to start improving its schools without our help; 3) That we hoped to be their partners and friends for years, even decades to come; 4) That the letters, the warmth and knowledge, that their students shared with their friends in Oregon and Washington was a great gift that we could work on right now.

"If you take care of relationships," Brando likes to say, "everything else will follow."  When Helping Hurts can be read as an exposition of that truth.

Lessons from When Helping Hurts, Part II

Last week I wrote about how this fine book by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert underscores the importance of humility in relief work, not simply because humility is some sort of abstract virtue but because humility prompts people with money to realize that financial wealth is often accompanied by poverty in other important aspects of life, such as friendships and resilience, and that possessing money does not magically give one the wisdom required to use it effectively to help without hurting.

That said, people who have more than enough wealth should not be discouraged from helping those who lack things like sufficient food, safe water, and access to education, for example.  But how does one help without hurting?

One cardinal rule that the authors repeatedly emphasize is the importance of respecting local people, organizations, and solutions that are already sustaining communities that might look poor from a western perspective.  Those of us with money are often too quick to rush in with solutions to problems that were not necessarily problems--or to problems that local people could or would have solved without outside intervention.  One of Yo Ghana's strongest supporters likes to remark that the West African community in which he grew up was much better off several decades ago than it is today because western NGOs had not yet discovered it.  The residents knew that they had to meet their own needs, and they did so.  Now the temptation is to wait for a western NGO to take care of everything, an expectation that undercuts the work ethic and determination needed to succeed in any society.

Indeed, a growing number of people from diverse backgrounds point out the problems that commonly ensue when outsiders come in and simply start building schools, hospitals, wells or providing other materials or services:
1) Local leaders feel undercut and undervalued.  If food is being given away, for example, how will local farmers make a living?  A local pastor may take days to gather money to help a church member in need finds that a stranger visiting from the U.S. will provide the funds instantly.
2) Local elites and local and national governments conclude that they are not responsible for helping the less fortunate, as western donors are taking care of that.  A local wealthy person may feel no responsibility for helping neighbors.
3) Spending money quickly and in large amounts attracts and rewards corruption.

Next week we'll look at the key solution Corbett and Fikkert recommend for how to help without hurting.

Wonderful Book: When Helping Hurts, Part I

I recently read a book I had skimmed a few months ago: When Helping Hurts, by Steve Corbett and

Brian Fikkert.  It's the most sensible book I know of on the role of privileged people in poverty alleviation and feels a lot like being inside the head of my dear friend and fellow Yo Ghana! board member Mr. Brando Akoto.

When Helping Hurts is written from a Christian perspective, so one of their central concepts is that everyone is broken and poor in some respect.

This brokenness or poverty has two major consequences for development work.

Since one aspect of our brokenness is arrogance, particularly if we have reason to think that we are powerful or superior, many of us are unaware of our poverty and brokenness.  We are apt to think of our material wealth as a manifestation of superiority.  More tellingly, perhaps, we are often unprepared to recognize and deal with our blind spots and limitations.  Our lack of humility is often crippling, because it keeps us from being able to recognize and address our weaknesses.

Second, a broad definition of poverty helps one to see that wealthy people can be poor.  Part of what intrigued me right away about Ghanaian schools was their richness in resiliency and relationships.  I discerned those same strengths among ordinary Ghanaians in all walks of life; their determination and social skills were, by American standards, extraordinary and, for me, inspiring.  

Before well-meaning people try to help those with far fewer material resources, then, we are well advised to: 1) Bear in mind our limitations and lack of knowledge--and to remember that the more we learn, the more we will learn about what we don't know; 2) That, as many Peace Corps Volunteers like to say, we are likely to gain more than we receive, that people who are poor in material goods are often, perhaps by necessity, rich in social skills and moral character.

Post Defeat, Part III

Yesterday I visited Astoria to meet with one of the fine teachers Yo Ghana! works with and to have lunch with some old friends.

On the way home I took a quick detour in St. Helens to visit their high school track, a place where I have some vivid memories.  The cinder track has been replaced by an all-weather one, and I wasn't altogether clear that the new one was in the same spot.  But walking across the parking lot and athletic fields awakened some flickers of recognition from the spring of 1974 and 1975, times in which shaving a few seconds off a personal best or beating a rival seemed like the beginning and end of life.

It's hard to recapture that feeling these days.  I run occasionally but have gained a lot of weight in recent years.  Even a few years ago, when I was lighter and training pretty hard, I couldn't even manage to run six miles at 7:00 a mile, a pace once reserved for long recovery runs.  I could barely run a half mile or so at my former marathon (26.2 miles) pace.

More telling are the weight of responsibilities.  Mike and I had talked about how to more fully engage his students and their partners in Ghana.  My old classmates had moved on from athletics to being focused on work and family and how to be good friends with people like Bill, who passed away last year.  Back in Portland I met with a close friend who is battling a daunting illness with tremendous grace and shared time with him with other friends.

For several years, running trumped everything, and I was sure that happiness would come with achievement.  And certainly there were moments of euphoria, like that afternoon in St. Helens when I broke 10:00 in the 2-mile for the first time and got second place in an invitational.  But the memory of that triumphant day seemed small yesterday, an interlude dwarfed by even ordinary meetings and developments, for extraordinary people reside in those places.

Are athletics a bridge that carries us across the troubled water of adolescence, or a distraction from what we should care more deeply about?