The indigenous staff in my organization lead weekly Bible studies with the children in low income communities. These Bible studies are just one aspect of my organization’s overall attempts to bring long-lasting development in these broken communities. After a short-term team conducts a Bible study in one of these communities, the children stop attending the Bible studies of my organization. Our indigenous staff tell me that the children stop coming because we do not have all the fancy materials and crafts that the short-term teams have, and we do not give away things like these teams do. The children have also come to believe that our staff are not as interesting or as creative as the Americans that come on these teams.
The authors describe poverty in terms of material shortages, but also in terms of broken relationships with other humans, with themselves, and with God.
Material shortages are easy to understand and measure, and easy to relieve. But what happens when that’s just a symptom? And what are the side effects when free outside money pours in? Inflation= savers lose; local suppliers go broke; local banks fail; local leaders lose face; recipients’ self-worth is lost if a man can’t provide for his family, what use is he?; and so on. But wait, there’s more! What about the giver? He gets to be superior, a kind of god to the pitiful inferiors. Paternalism is poisonous. You don't want to become that kind of person.
There’s a vicious cycle in poverty where being poor makes you feel inferior and worthless, and feeling inferior discourages you from taking risks in education or work, or encourages you to drown your sorrows with chemicals—which keeps you poor. So your relationship with yourself matters.
Your relationships with others matter too; who will help you if you get sick? If you lose your apartment, will your cousin take you in?
And your relationship with God orders these and much more.
The first rule of relieving poverty is that you are dealing with peers, not inferiors. And they know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t than you do.
The authors say poverty generally lands in one of three stages: needing relief (just after a tsunami, for example), needing rehabilitation, and needing development. Relief needs to be immediate and short-term. The other stages demand the participation of the needy in their planning and the implementation. There may be very good reasons the farmers plant low-yield crops year after year.
Legal and social structures matter. The US welfare system punishes anyone who tries to save. Loan sharks (payday lenders, rent-to-own, and their third world brothers) are ubiquitous, and in theft-prone slums in Africa some people have to deposit their money with "savings sharks" who charge interest (up to 80%!) for keeping your money safe for you.
I’d never heard of Asset Based Community Development before, but it sounds like an excellent approach; and not just for poverty relief. It starts by finding out what skills and resources the people have, and tries to look for solutions to problems using community resources, building/rebuilding relationships between people and local institutions and being careful not to bring in outside resources unless absolutely needed. Often the local resources are far larger than even the local people realize.
One of the authors describes how he gave \$8 to buy penicillin to save the life of Grace, an ex-witch doctor in Uganda. And in Chapter 5 he explains why that was stupid and probably did more harm than good. A little bit of his mea culpa:
The truth is that there was more than enough time to walk back to the church, where the small-business class was still assembled, and ask the participants what they could do to help Grace. While the refugees were extremely poor, they could have mustered the eight cents per person to pay for the penicillin.
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Why does all of this matter? Grace desperately needed relationships in the community in general and in St. Luke’s Church in particular. Her former way of life had created many enemies, and, being infected with HIV, Grace was going to need solid support structures as time wore on. In fact, Grace needed to have her poverty of community alleviated if she was going to have any chance for long-term survival.
What else? MicroLoan Institutions are nice, but not something that church missions should get involved in and not that useful in the countryside (they need a critical mass of customers). Financial education is often helpful. Hope and self-control are side-effects that are essential to climbing out of poverty.
When I went with a church group to help in New Orleans, we went under the auspices of a local church which gave us the assignments; and number one was "If someone wants to talk, drop the work and talk. You are here for relationships." We talked with the widow whose house we were rehabbing (she made us dinner), but there weren’t a lot of other people around most of the time—and the drug house lookout didn’t want to chat. A little, a little—who knows how useful it was.
The church has also sponsored wells in Liberia. The footage of people using the pumps is nice, but I never did get an answer to my question: Who has ownership, and how will they be repaired?
Read the book. And then ask some hard questions about how your aid money and effort gets used.
This post and the previous one are painful to read. I suspect that's a good thing.
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