Hard questions: Sowing dependence

This week I had a visit from a fellow volunteer who has built a beautiful, fully stocked and staffed library in her community. It´s a truly incredible project that will provide an opportunity for youth in her town for years and years, no doubt. But it also highlighted for me another of the tough questions I´ve struggled with through Peace Corps — the question of creating projects that depend on foreign funds.

Peace Corps celebrates how much money volunteers bring in for their projects through grant money. They use it to build acqueducts, teach classes, build libraries, fund field trips, run youth leadership conferences, construct latrines, build more efficient wood stoves, etc. I´ve received grant money to do activities for my sex ed group, to implement a study hall program in one of my labs, and to buy digital cameras for a journalism club and to recognize student achievement. Compared to what other volunteers have done, they´re small grants for minor projects.

Grants are extremely easy to get. I have another volunteer friend who said she came into the country believing she would never apply for a grant, because she didn´t believe in it, but then found out how easy it was to get money and went ahead and raked in the dough. Depending on the kind of grant, the money comes from several sources, including US nonprofits dedicated to children or mothers, from friends and family back home, and US government funds earmarked for HIV prevention. So it´s hard to say no to the temptation to fund projects with foreign money, especially considering how often we volunteers feel like we need some evidence of the work we´ve done at the end of our two years. But it also makes me wonder what the community learns from having a big beautiful park built in their community thanks to the folks pa´lla (over there, the US). I remember once having a conversation with an old man who is a leader in the Catholic church. It was shortly after I managed to get electricity at the two schools in town. I told him, because by this time I had realized that most people in town didn´t know anything about the problem, that we had recently gotten the schools hooked up to the power grid. I said it was a struggle, but I couldn´t believe that the community had let two years go by with their brand new schools in the dark. His response was that I as a foreigner was able to get things like that done, whereas the local people cannot. That´s the message that I´m afraid we sometimes unintentionally send when we build big beautiful projects with outside money. Grants are not accessible to Dominicans; it´s as Peace Corps volunteers that we can bring in money. I´m afraid this just teaches the locals that if they want something done, they should solicit a foreigner.

For those concerned about the vast inequality between rich and poor people and nations, it can be hard to see why witholding money is the best thing to do. After all, we spend ridiculous sums of money on luxury items every day in the US while most people in the world live in poverty, barely scraping together what they need to feed their families every day. But the reality is that transferring this money directly from rich nations to poor ones would not solve the problems. The economic reality is much more complex than that, and policy always creates unintended consequences.

I recently had a conversation about this with David, who is working with a microfinance organization in Haiti. I told him that I feel that in development, money can´t be just given to people, because it reinforces their powerlessness and teaches them to expect a giveaway instead of trying to resolve their own way out of the problem. Instead, they need to be able to do something in exchange for the money, so that their own power to change their lives is reinforced. It´s not that what´s missing in these countries is a will to work. What´s missing is the work. So to teach people that their own actions can bring positive results to their life is maybe the most important lesson of all. David said that he has seen people so poor in Haiti that he thinks they can only be given money. But overall, the purpose of micro-finance is to show people how much they can do if given access to work – in the case of that type of organization, by giving them credit to get access to capital to start businesses. What´s really impressed me hearing about micro-finance from David is how it builds people´s confidence, which transforms their lives. For so long, the desperately poor live without any opportunities to get out of their situation. When they are offered credit to start their own business, they start to feel more capable, and then dedicate themselves to other things, like learning to read, getting a better education for their children, etc. The projects that Peace Corps volunteers build don´t create a continuing dependence on the United States; They are paid for through grants, and then left for the community to take care of. It´s not the kind of neo-imperialism you see, for example, when a multinational agriculture corporation gives seeds for non-reproducing crops to Haiti, making sure they have to buy from them in the future. But it does reinforce the belief that foreigners can get things done, and that the only way to accomplish things is through help from the US. The issue is mirrored within the DR, where politicians give away money to earn people´s votes, which makes citizens feel entitled to asking for things when they need them, instead of trying to mobilize the community. At a recent meeting with the Office of the First Lady, the governmental agency that pays for one of the community computer labs where I work, the Dominican man who heads the education program for Peace Corps made an impassioned speech against this kind of dependence on the central government. He believes the community should be responsible for the computer labs, instead of expecting the first lady´s office to send replacements for parts, pay for the salaries of the employees, and manage the project. As he said, this country has a long history of dependence on foreign powers. Depending on the national government is no different. The community has to learn to fight for its own.

Another good example of this is what I heard on a This American Life podcast about Haiti. They talked to a doctor who has been working in Haiti with an organization that used to provide medical care from foreigners, completely funded and staffed from abroad. But after many years, he concluded that he would take the risk of a patient death in exchange for the care being provided by Haitians, because the other scenario was just more of the same — dependence.