I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Maybe you heard it as you walked by the homeless man on a street corner and dropped change in his cup.Or, maybe you heard it when you saw an advertisement for an organization working in a developing country, which displayed statistics for infant mortality rates and malnutrition.
The voice of social justice burned within you and exclaimed, “Someone has got to do something to solve this, and it might as well be me.”
That voice has burned within me, too.
In high school I was part of a service trip to the tiny village of Tamahu, located in the mountains of Guatemala. During my junior and senior year spring breaks, my high school service team of about twenty-five students and I built three Guatemalan style houses for the locals in need. These trips built my character, because the organization delegated responsibility to the participants and put my team and me in difficult situations, which gave us opportunities to problem solve. The trips also allowed me to develop leadership skills by prompting me to reflect at the end of each day with my group and in my journal, as I fulfilled the organization’s vision and watched the community and myself develop.
However, through later investigation a disturbing reality was brought to my attention –
While I was able to develop as a leader and use my skills to impact a community, I actually robbed the locals of this opportunity. In fact, I most likely did more harm than good.
I’ll Explain.
Imagine you are a local in a remote village like Tamahu. One day, a bus of people your culture refers to as “gringos” arrives in your town to build houses for some of your neighbors. Here are the changes you begin to notice:
- You have been exposed to media in your culture that consistently displays the power, beauty, and wealth of this new people group. This causes your neighbors to hide in their homes and feel excited, yet, to see the gringos deeply insecure about their own bodies, clothes, and homes as the group strolls by.
- The father of the family next door has been home with his family less often because he feels ashamed that he was not able to provide a sturdy home for his family, while the gringos built his family a home in less than a week.
- When anyone in the village needs help, the expert gringos are there to save the day, and your neighbors no longer seem to need your talents because they have the gringos for support.
- The gringos begin to plunder your culture’s values in order to establish their own. For example, while your two sons are catching a hawk for dinner, one of the environmentally conscious gringos races over and reprimands them, demands that they release the hawk. This alarms you – how else are your kids supposed to eat? (I actually did this on a service trip once.)
- Your children cry because they hate to see their new friends and mentors leave. You wish they looked up to others in the village as much as the people getting back on their bus.
What if service trips looked different, and built community and leaders before houses and infrastructure? What if organizations began to do more good than harm? The problem is many well-intentioned groups fly to developing nations with little understanding of the root of poverty and the most effective way to solve it. I was one of them, and as I began to realize this I decided to do some research.
I spoke to the leader of a charitable organization on the phone who pointed me in the direction of the book, “When Helping Hurts – How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor, and Yourself” By Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. What I discovered completely changed the way I view poverty.
Poverty is more than infrastructural or material deficiency; in fact these are the result of a deeper struggle and brokenness. According to the research discussed in “When Helping Hurts” the root of poverty is actually spiritual and relational brokenness. Think about it, people groups in poverty typically exist under oppressive social and governing systems. They have been oppressed to the point where they believe they are of little value, and often struggle to maintain trusting relationships within their families and communities. As a result, many of them withdraw from community and become emotionally and relationally isolated, high crime rates and violence tend to follow. These factors, combined under an oppressive and greedy governing system, are typically what lead to material deficiency, malnutrition, high mortality rates, and other identifiable factors of poverty.
Since every community is different, there is no specific method for solving poverty that works for every people group. However, relational and spiritual healing are the first steps, which means encouraging members of the community to recognize their value and build trust again. Many successful initiators of poverty alleviation spent time meeting with community members for a number of months before the plans to build a single home were discussed. In these meetings, the initiators would develop the community members into agents of change through getting to know who they were, what they valued, what their pain and stories were, what they were gifted at, and what their visions were for the future of their community. Instead of casting their own vision onto the community, the initiators stepped back and asked the community what their vision was, and how they could help them accomplish it. This way, the community desired to reestablish trust with each other so they could collectively pour their heart and recourses into their vision and overcome the binds of poverty.