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.