Here is a good email from a friend here illustrating how good intentions are not enough and how many community development programs actually perpetuate evil actions, local greed, patterns of laziness, etc. Churches are also guilty of initiating and proppping up some of these unhelpful programs.
Please make sure any donations or support you are sending overseas is actuallly helping and not hurting:
Please make sure any donations or support you are sending overseas is actuallly helping and not hurting:
The latest development project here in Bok is paying people $100 for 3 feet by 3feet of rocks stacked on top of each other to make a fence in their own front yards.
This “promotes cleanliness and instills pride” and probably 10 other really good sounding outcomes.
But it is like paying the average American $1,000 a day to mow their front lawn or clean up their house.
The reality is that perfectly healthy, strong, smart people who managed to survive on their own without any influence from the outside world for thousands of years are now being paid to put a fence around their own yard with their own rocks. So all the teachers, health care workers and other government employees are busy building stone walls while the government services stop completely. They get their regular salary plus they have just won the AID organization lottery of the week.
...Viv Grigg said that “if the poor could solve their own problems they would have done so long ago.” People who are economically poor are all of a sudden the experts in how cash should be used.
In this culture the decision to build stone walls makes perfect sense. For a man to become a leader he has to access wealth/resources to distribute among the clan. So he knows that these AID organizations aren’t just going to hand out money to everyone. So a “good leader” figures out how he can give the most money to his clan members with the least amount of effort on their part. His goal is to build a welfare state where he is the philanthropist dictator.
Whoever controls the cash controls.
The report that you will read in the west will talk about how this fence project was all local initiative with tremendous village support and enthusiasm, us outsiders just supported their vision with long term results in health, civic pride blah blah blah….
...
Soon people here are going to be saying, “I won’t plant anything unless you pay me to do it.” The next step will be, “I won’t eat unless you pay me.” And finally we will reach the stage where so many recipients of western philanthropy are now, “I won’t build a toilet unless you come and do it for me.” How about we ask ourselves, “why don’t these guys build their own toilet? After all, my cat builds his own toilet several times a day. If she can do it, why can’t they?
....They don’t want a wall to keep the pigs out of their yard, they have no value for it apart from winning the NGO lottery.
If beliefs don’t change then behavior will not change. This is the same reason why all of us non pregnant women in Bokondini are eating nutritional biscuits this week [they are handed out by the truckload by AID organizations].
But belief changes take a lifetime and we want quick fixes. ...
Beliefs change through discipleship. That is why Jesus gave us the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. If we would just do the two most basic commands of His we wouldn’t be wasting money and time on Community Destruction Projects and Programs. We would be making disciples as we love our neighbor as our self.
