The challenge today is no longer that of doing great works in favour of the poor, but the more demanding one of helping the poor to fight their own poverty doing the works they can do with their own hands, in their own time, with their own priorities … and to the extent that is possible, also with the financial resources they can gather. (Fr Fernando Domingues, MCCJ)
I found this statement at the end of a document about poverty and missions that someone here in the SIL mission community linked to, but it seems like a good mission statement for a lot of the NGO work we participate in here as well. Partnership and accompaniment, rather than patronage and handouts. Helping people to build their own solutions instead of solving their problems for them. And finding ways to be effective and useful in the face of enormous difficulties. I find this enormously appealing. But it's on the largest scale possible, and leaves me with questions about how to live this way from day to day.
Cameroonians we know here (not our coworkers) ask us for money and favors on a fairly regular basis. And while we certainly have far more resources than they do, I always wonder whether I'm being played. But then, even if I am being played, a friend once mentioned to me, here it just means someone is probably covering up a real and more embarrassing need with something else that seems more likely to produce the desired results.
Throw into this mix the fact that local culture dictates that people with resources share them liberally, and that there is no shame in asking someone for something that they have that you do not, and I'm left with a lot to think about.
1 comment:
I can understand why this different philosophy of resource allocation would give you pause. It sounds like, unlike the American ethos of acquisition, you're in a place where the paradigm is distribution based on scarcity. This may be a factor of moving from a society where the standard is one of "wanting" and into a society where it is one of "needing". In America, at least in the society that we inhabit, if people don't have what they need, it is assumed it is because of some fault of theirs (and if it is something they want, but don't need, then they need to find a way to earn their own toys). In Camaroon, I gather, if they don't have what they need, it's because it's simply not available.
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