Last day musings

Despite all the frustration that some of you may have noticed over the last few weeks, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have been here in Guatemala this summer. A lot of the learning and value has come from unmeasurable places, but I'm richer for having been here and have new relationships I’m proud to have made or strengthened. 

Some snippets of all this…

Stop doing things for people. Support and help them do them themselves. Charity and handouts create dependency. Empowerment should be the goal.

Making change has to be slow. If it’s not you’ll waste time and money by trying to move too quickly. Build trust, learn about the people, the history, the culture – social problems are probably more likely to sabotage a project than money. In places of poverty or with histories without reliability or transparency people and families are always watching their backs, always finding a way to capitalize when there’s a chance, and always worried that the person next to them is doing the same.

Language is the gateway to successful work. We all know what it’s like to stumble through another language to communicate – surface content, only getting near an idea but not getting exactly right, and the frustration of having so many thoughts locked away because you don’t know the words. That is what we earn when we fail to attempt the language spoken in the place we travel to.

Good intentions are not enough.

Poverty is not having information. Not having information is lacking control of your own life. This is what anchors poverty. Living in darkness keeps families from moving forward in any purposeful direction. This is the reason diseases like diarrhea and the flu kill so many each year; this is why corruption comes so easily – no one has all the information to confront the often not unique problems constantly invading and violating the life of a family in poverty.

If you’re going to have a career in the service business remind yourself each day what your purpose is – whether you are working for an organization, a family, a disease, a community. Remember to serve that purpose above the others when there comes a conflict. If serving a community means letting someone else takeover a project because they are better, do it. This work is not about putting your name on something, it’s not about making a profit, and it’s not about building a resume.

You can’t force change. It takes a long time. And you can’t know every nuance of the problem unless you’ve lived there, so don’t assume that your survey has armed you with infallible information – if a community doesn’t want something, you either have to put in the time to convince them or you have to change your plan. Make sure you spend time in the place you’re targeting:  eat their food, go to church with them, sit through classes with the kids – you can’t do the work properly from the corner office in the US.

It’s ok to make money. Just watch your thresholds. Watch where you draw the lines. Don’t yield on values for a few dollars. NGOs can be just as harmful as profit-seeking businesses, sometimes more – look at the ends AND the means before passing judgment.