A Child's Car Seat and My Morning!

Let me just start by saying that it has been one heck of a day and it is currently 9:09 am. The morning started off well, the kids slept through the night for the first time in like a week and a half, I was able to get up, get a new solar unit I just bought ready to take to a pastor who is going to use it to start a business charging mobile phones, have some prayer time, shave my head, and get ready for the day. It didn’t last long. I walked out with the kids to get in the car and head to school when I found out that the tire I fixed yesterday was flat again. This put us 20 minutes behind schedule, but that was recoverable, which is important since I am spending part of this week as a solo parent and am also flooded with school work, proposals, liturgy to prepare to consecrate the church in Gamasara on Sunday, and all on top of the normal work load. We were almost back on schedule when one of the kids I take to nursery school as part of a carpool group vomited all over the front seat. I am now sitting sipping on coffee and waiting for the car to be cleaned. Back to square one with little chance of getting the tablet fixed and ready for a volunteer coming in two weeks to work with churches on communication technology or visiting Vulnerable Children, a group here in Mwanza that works with street children whom I am hoping can help us take our parent training and reintegration ministry in Tarime a step further, and no time to meet with Tunza and set up a meeting space for the writer’s workshop that will be here in three more weeks (one week of which I will be in Nairobi). For those of you wondering, you may also be getting a glimpse of why I don’t blog much anymore.

All of that though (and you can call it whining if you want to because it probably is), to lead up to my main point. Since we got to nursery school late I left at the same time as a nanny that was dropping a child off and I gave her a lift back to her house (running late or not we still have to take time to help others out)…and she sat in the car seat. Granted the front of the car was still full of vomit so she couldn’t sit there and there was only a small space between the two car seats in the back, but, I just…Why? This has happened to me a lot actually, and while I understand that most of the people who choose to sit in the car seat have never probably used one themselves for their kids and understandably should question what it is, but why squeeze an adult body in a kid’s space in the first place? It brought to mind a conversation I had with a friend at the end of February. He told me that the poor pick the best, worst choice. He didn’t mean that they make bad choices, just that they are often only presented with bad choices and therefore try to pick the best, worst choice. Sitting in the car seat is preferable to walking…they have conditioned themselves to be resigned to the best, worst choice. It is a pattern of survival of mental and emotional health that the world around them tries to daily grind into dust.

This is why Amartya Sen wrote Development as Freedom, because while poverty is an economic state it is also about the freedom of choices, not the best, worst choice, but real choices about good education, good health care, and a life that gives a person more dignity than sitting in the child’s car seat, which in all reality is an apt metaphor for any development work done that treats the recipients as children to be cared for instead of adults to participate in the growth and flourishing of their own lives. This is why, even though most of my day looks like it will be spent playing catch up and deciding what can be moved back a week or two so that the essentials can be completed, I am excited beyond belief that this morning I plugged in and tested a solar unit that will go to help a pastor start a business. It is not a gift, this is the second round of money donors have given us as small loans. It has already been paid back once and is now going to someone else, who will have to use this new business tool to pay back an interest free loan as well. But having that choice, being an active participant in the development of himself and his family…that is what development is about.

How Bad Indicators Put Joy in My Heart

One of my classmates has put up a countdown on-line to encourage us as we get close to finishing up our master’s program. We are now in the double digits and it is pretty exciting to be coming close to the end. I will have to say that I have learned so much about development, its real implementation in the world, and how development and faith intersect in people’s lives. That last one has come largely from the lives and testimonies of fellow classmates, professors, and others practitioners I have met along the way. I have also learned that sometimes the textbook way of doing things isn’t necessarily the most faithful.

The first class we ever took was on project planning and management. We learned how to write a good indicator, something that was specific, time bound, and measurable. Indicators are the targets that you have to meet that tell you whether or not your program is being carried out successfully. Indicators let us know whether or not we are doing a good job. Earlier this week during a meeting with the Emmanuel Center Executive Committee I heard an indicator of our work in Gamasara in trying to change the attitudes of the community in regards to women’s and children’s rights. It was not specific, time bound, or measurable, yet it filled my heart with joy as if we had passed a major milestone, and I guess in some ways we have.

A woman said that she had attended a church activity, returned home after dark and her husband had not beat her…First of all we need to pause there and look at the fact that this was something worth mentioning, which means that most other times that is exactly what he would have done. It is also worth observing that the woman expected to get beat when she reached home after dark and yet still found church a worthwhile place to be. However, what I am most excited about is that she was not beat by her husband, specifically because he had seen the benefit of the church and the benefit of the Emmanuel Center, and what these places had done for her life. His respect for the changes taking place as a result of the church and this program was enough to change his behavior and he is not even directly involved.

When we first started even we ourselves felt like we were taking the long way around the issue of women’s and children’s rights, but instead of rushing headlong into something that complicated we decided to take the slow path. We decided to economically empower women, then educate them, and lastly start working with the community only after our heart for them became evident. While we still have a long ways to go and while my trained mind knows that this is a bad indicator in that it is not transferable to others, meaning we don’t know if we have affected this kind of change on anyone outside of this one family, it still feels like a huge victory and something to praise God for.

Why It is Easier to Share Our Toys Than It Is to Help Build the Sand Castle

*The first part is easier to read because it is hard hitting and we can get righteously stirred up. Development is often not fun, it is boring, and it takes a lot of time (something most of us don’t like). But if we pinpoint an issue of poverty and don't take the time to learn more or do more to fix it, we will never move forward.

It may not be a good metaphor, but I think many of us are good at sharing our toys. We are good at saying, “I have ten cars to play with. You have no cars to play with. I will play with 8 and you can have 2.” Many of us are good at this, and there are times when someone simply needs a car to play with. However, we are not as good at helping someone else to build a sand castle. Building a sand castle takes time. In order to build a sand castle with someone else we have to work together, we have to share our tools, we have to take the time to get to know someone else and how they want the sand castle to look, and we have to trust them not to knock it down at we used OUR time and OUR resources to build it. Many of us are not very good at doing this. We often approach development like we do a child trying to build a sand castle. Many of us are willing to share a little shovel if we have several of our own. Some of us are willing to give suggestions, but we usually wonder away before the sand castle is finished. A few of us will be very well meaning, stay and help, and decide that we know a better way to build the sand castle, and before long the sand castle starts to look like our vision of a sand castle instead of the child’s. I have done this before with my five year old son. Now this is not a great way to build up his confidence, our relationship, or his ability to build his own sand castle, but it is fairly harmless. However, when we start talking about development it is no longer harmless.

There are three (for this article) types of help we provide to people in tough situations.

Charity - Is giving because you have and they don't without a care for trying to reverse the situation in which you have and they don't. Giving money to a homeless person as you drive on by.

Relief work - What you do when someone has tried, but their circumstances are too overwhelming and they need help to continue meeting their basic needs. A great example is assisting with the recovery after natural disasters.

Development - The slow work of moving people out of poverty to a place where they can rely  on their own efforts and understanding to continue to improve their living conditions. Teaching someone a skill and job interview skills so that they become employable.

I think we often approach poverty reduction with a charity mind set. We are not looking at what will really help their situation we are looking at what will make us feel better. When we try to help so that we feel better, we are not targeted on solutions we are targeted on problems, because the problems are what make us feel bad. When we target problems instead of solutions we many times reward people for suffering instead of rewarding their effort. We are saying, because I feel for you (different from with you) I will help until I feel better. This is means that I stop helping, not when a solution has been reached or when you can do for yourself, but when I start feeling better.

A step up from this is relief work. Relief work has its own time and place. It is needed when the situation has either overwhelmed or eliminated the ability of someone to help themselves. Tornadoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes are all good examples. Sometimes people just need help. However, relief work is never meant to be long term. When it stretches out for years, and especially decades it is often times no longer relief work. We are now helping to maintain those in poverty. We want to help because of their suffering, because of their overwhelming situation, but we are not helping them increase their own abilities. We are not helping them move the necessary markers of development closer we are just helping them survive their suffering. We are not helping them rise above it. It shows how we feel like their suffering is important, but their ability to work is not. We would rather provide charity than development and reward their continued suffering instead of their work.

So how do we go from one to the other? How do we get from valuing suffering to valuing work and contributions to the larger community?

Making bricks for the church building

We do have to first recognize their pain. However, recognizing pain is different from rewarding it. In one of the communities we work with you could hear the pain of the grandparents as they talked about their often orphaned grandchildren. It was good to recognize that what we were hearing was pain. It is good to know that their grandchildren are important to these people. However, giving them all some money would have only prolonged certain situations. Providing them with a flour mill and training them in business is a much better idea (and incidentally is what we are trying to do). That is the difference between relief and development, short term fixes and long term success.

I know that if you have reached here then you must either love the people writing this or are truly interested because this is not an interesting treatment of poverty. I have not given a lot of tear jerking stories (though they are there in my mind, heart, and prayers). What I really want though is for us to start thinking about this, and start rewarding efforts and providing hope. The suffering of people in our lives is great, but giving to make myself feel better doesn’t help. I have been here long enough to know that. What needs to be done is to help THEM build what THEY need for THEIR future. Let us reward their efforts, hopes, and dreams by moving the goals posts one step closer.

Clearing land for the future church site

As you are gearing up for Christmas giving this is an important thing to think about. As we start to write checks for our favorite charities in honor of our loved ones, let us put a little more thought into it. Heifer International with their training programs and the requirement to pass off-spring onto another family is a great example. Here in the Mara District we try to do the same thing as we work on training and development with everything that we do. In the new year we will start a revolving fund for churches to receive money from in order to start development projects that will allow them to pay the funds back later. We are working with congregations to build churches, but each church is making bricks, collecting stones, digging foundations in order to contribute to their own church building. We will never ask for you to contribute to the picture of suffering we see here, but we will welcome your help in building the hope that we see during this Christmas season or any other time of the year.

Hope, not because of OUR efforts to stop people’s suffering, but hope because of THEIR efforts and THEIR faith to improve THEIR own lives and communities as part of God’s light in the world.