One learns many lessons living and working in Haiti where daily life
is filled with a poverty as defined by the West. One foundational truth is brought into focus
if we begin to approach international aid in terms of relationship, not aid.
Much can be said about foreign aid workers and recipients. In the best intentioned scenarios it is as if
a script is written. Participants are
cast/thrust into predetermined roles of victim and rescuer, giver and taker.
The taker and victim sacrifice their dignity to a spirit of
entitlement. The giver and rescuer
react, become resentful, and give themselves over to indignation and
discouragement.
Unsuspectingly, everyone loses.
Such is the way of all relationships built on the inadequate
foundation of good intentions. How can
any relationship built on good intentions survive, much less thrive? Many failed marriages begin with good
intentions…
Pope Francis addressed this when he said, “Without evangelization, you
become just another NGO.”
How does all this possibly relate? What is evangelization?
I understand evangelization to be the invitation to enter into a
relationship beyond the physical (with God, a Higher Power, whatever your
spiritual inkling). This creates new
relationships for us, relationships with those who have entered that same
relationship. We then have a new family
in the metaphysical as well as physical.
It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone.
Or we might say, there is neither giver nor taker, neither victim nor
rescuer. In the case here in Haiti,
neither Westerner nor Haitien. These new
relationships are not built on a foundation of good intentions, but a new foundation
of love. Families do not survive operating on good intentions, either.
How, then, are we who are here to “help the poor” proceed?
We change our view of the people we work with as a victim. We reject old roles and embrace relationships
before us with true charity, love, new heart and through new eyes. If not, we are left to continue victim/giver
relationships where there are always easy solutions to every human problem--neat,
plausible and wrong.
“Though I should give away to the poor all that I possess, and even
give up my body to be burned--if I am without love, it will do me no good
whatever” (1 Corinthians, 13:3) comes to mind.
The idea is that our peace, i.e., success, comes to those who have destroyed
the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, abolished outdated norms and
customs--to create one new person out of the two--thus making peace (or a
successful project if one is accountable to the System). Success, then, is to find the best in others;
to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy
child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition.
“…to create one new person from the two, thus making peace." It is easy to be drawn into thinking that, the
poor, unconverted or person to whom we are giving our ‘aid,’ (in contrast to
us), is that person whom will be brought up to speed, brought up to the same
level as us. This is not what is being
said here.
It is saying this: we are BOTH brought together, BOTH melted down, BOTH
remixed together because neither is any good.
We must approach our international assignments from that standpoint to
succeed and/or have peace in what we do. One might think Westerners should have an
advantage because of education, wealth, power, etc. Those advantages are squandered when we focus
on our cultural experiences for solutions. We are just as impoverished and no better able
to serve the constituency we came to “save” than if we were not here.
When both melt and create one new person, it is a blend into the image
of all we have in common. We change, not
into Westerner or Haitien, but into a world in us not born until they
arrive. It is only by this melting that
a new world is born. As a result, we
don’t drop our ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry
out. We keep them in spite of
everything.
