Why go down in the first place

Below is a potential chapter to my ebook, let me know what you think!

Why should I go in the first place?

A few years ago my father read the book Mountains Beyond Mountains and was inspired to do more with his life. Mountains Beyond Mountains is an incredible story about Paul Farmer who come to Haiti and established Partners in Health, a health care organization aimed at being a “preferential option for the poor”[1]. My father had been (and still is) very successful in his professional career, but felt called devote more of his time to something like Partners in Health, something oriented to helping those in need. He began to investigate the work our church was doing in Haiti and in 2009 he travelled with a group of volunteers to the community our church supports in Haiti. The mission he went to (the same mission where I ended up completing my fellowship three years later) was known for doing some incredible work. They had set up a housing project, a school that taught over 3,500 students, and two medical clinics. He went down with a group of doctors and nurses, hoping to discover his own story in Haiti, and this mission seemed to be the perfect place to go. It was right in the middle of one of the poorest places on earth and it was intensively addressing the community’s most pressing needs. 

My father is a smart man, but he doesn’t have any skills that can be easily put to use in rural Haiti. He wasn’t able to contribute to the solutions the mission was providing because he didn’t really know how. He didn’t know how to fix a diesel generator or prescribe the correct prenatal treatment for an expecting mother in the rural highlands. He was in the midst of all these people doing such great work and he did not feel particularly useful. He was able to help the doctors organize some of their materials, but there was nothing truly unique that he could contribute to the mission. My father felt conflicted. He had found a great organization doing great work, but he had no skills that were particularly useful to the mission. He wasn’t as handy as the engineers who set up the solar panels or the doctors who went out into the community and healed all of the sick people. My dad was a successful salesman for small technology companies, but the community of La Croix didn’t need to figure out how to market their IT industry; La Croix needed electricians who could safely bring electricity out into the villages. The only productive thing he could contribute was money. 

When my father got back he was still inspired by Paul Farmer and all of the good work he had observed in La Croix, but he needed to figure out a better way to contribute. His whole trip had cost about $1,100 in total, and he was worried that the money could have been more productively used had he donated it directly to the mission. My father spent a week helping the doctors administer medicine, but with the money he spent going to Haiti he could have hired a nurse for over a month to go out. My father did a lot of thinking and began to worry that he had almost cheated the mission in a way. He went down because he was looking to fulfill something that he himself wanted to do, but the whole point of the trip was to serve the Haitian people, not to make himself feel better. If he was to really embrace the ethos of service that he found so inspiring, shouldn’t he not go to Haiti and donate money instead?

This is a very difficult dilemma and one that affects not only my father but many who work in development efforts across the world. How can we be most useful to countries like Haiti, how can we best help the poorest among us, especially if we don’t have any technical skills that can be useful? (I am willing to guess that one of the reasons you purchased this book was because a similar dilemma struck you) This is a question I’ve asked myself many times and is something I had to justify when I was planning to come to Haiti initially. The mission where I worked needed to devote a significant amount of resources to my coming here, how was I sure the investment would be worthwhile? How would I know that I would be productive and not deplete the few resources the mission has? The reality is much more complicated than what appears at first glance. Money and charitable contributions are an important piece to every development initiative, but short term trips of volunteers is also incredibly valuable, even when those trips are people like my dad who don’t have a specific set of skills.

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Is Our Money Being Spent Well?

Most economic institutions we interact with on a day-to-day basis have a natural incentive to do the work we want them to do. The grocery store selling food, the movie theatre showing movies, and the gas station selling gas all have to follow through on the services they claim to provide in order to stay in business. A gas station that sells watered down fuel or a grocery store that sells expired food will go out of business quickly because people will stop shopping there and will go other places for their fuel or food. This is the natural cycle of our economy, and it works relatively well, but that cycle does not extend to the administration of aid to developing countries. Bill Easterly, one of the premier development economists, described this as “One really unique thing about aid is that there is no way for the intended beneficiaries, the people we are trying to help, to give any feed back on whether its working for them or not”[2]. This is a problem that not only faces aid administered by large government organizations, but most all aid initiatives.

Since there is no natural feed back loop, since there is no mechanism to indicate if aid is being administered effectively, there has to be some other method of evaluating the aid’s effectiveness. The most efficient way to see if aid is being effective is to send a group of people to see everything that is going on, someone or some group of people has go and see that everything that is sent down is being administered effectively. This is the first and most valuable service of a short-term trip.

The La Croix Mission, the mission where I worked, has a network of over twenty us churches and non-profits that support it. Each of these churches sends money as well as people. Every organization that supports the mission has to justify its expenses and the best way to justify those expenses is to send someone to evaluate how the money is being spent. When corporations invest money overseas in new plants or factories, they always send a group to oversee the administration of the money being spent, why should we?

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[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1124311,00.html

[2] Econ talk podcast with Bill Easterly