Four Trips Abroad

Since coming to Olin, I have been abroad four times.  The first was a month-long program during the summer before my sophomore year in Guatemala as a part of the “Social Entrepreneurship Corps”.  The second trip, two weeks in January of my sophomore year, was part of a Babson organizational consulting trip to Uganda.  The third was a personal return to Antigua, Guatemala to study Spanish for two weeks during my junior year.  The most recent trip brought me to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  This was a religious pilgrimage with a group of recently-graduated friends.  Instead of explaining each trip, I will describe the process of understanding effective community development as a result of my first two experiences abroad in college.

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Social Entrepreneurship

Before coming to Olin, I was deeply involved in a project with the small Russian town of Shchuchye, a town located 12 miles away from 6,000 tons of chemical weapons that were about to be disarmed in an American-built neutralization facility.  The project focused on a safety system for the community that would include warning sirens, an evacuation plan, protective equipment, and education for the citizens.  For a number of reasons, many parts of the project failed, but it left me with a strong desire to understand how to effectively make change abroad.

In my second semester at Olin, I took a Babson course called “Social Enterprise Management.”  SEM looked at the organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, that were well run and focused on carrying out a social mission.  Though stories and discussions, I broadened my understanding of social entrepreneurship and imagined the type of organization I would want to run to effect change in the world.  My initial idea was based on community technology infrastructure: provide small villages with a high-speed internet connection based in a school, and over time, generate revenue by selling bandwidth to local businesses whose employees had been trained in internet usage through education programs.  Most of my ideas at this time were far more focused on infrastructure, not on the people that used it.

Guatemala

Coming out of SEM, I was excited to actually get working on the ground with an effective organization.  On a recommendation of a friend, I signed up to spend a month in Guatemala during my first summer in college.  The itinerary included 10 days in the beautiful village of Antigua, 5 days in the very remote town of Nebaj, and multiple shorter visits in towns in between.  The longer stays were spent living with a local family.  Both families spoke no English and had young children (the language barrier often seemed non-existent when playing with the kids).  The first 10 days of the trip included 4 hours of one-on-one Spanish lessons every morning.  During these lessons, I learned at an incredible rate, probably learning in 40 hours what I had learned in my first two years of classroom French.  It was this awesome rate of learning that brought me back for two weeks during my junior year just to study Spanish.

Relief vs. Development

The organization behind the trip, “Community Enterprise Solutions”, trained local people to run their own businesses selling products that were beneficial to their communities.  Their primary product, reading glasses, were sold by groups of women that traveled between rural towns, setup events to give vision tests, and sold their product at a reasonable price.  The eye glasses were badly needed for sewing, reading, and working, and the proceeds from distributing the product supported the rural families doing the work.  Another major product, wood-burning stoves, offered health benefits and long-term cost savings to families while again supporting the entrepreneurs that sold, built, and serviced them.

This approach to community development seems straight-forward, but many Guatemalans grew up in a nation where dependence on foreign aid was normal.  Why would any poor person buy a stove when a foreign government might build them one for free in a couple years?  The mindset of depending on foreign relief not only hurt aspiring entrepreneurs, but it also led to a general feeling of helplessness.  Why work hard when you don’t control you own destiny?  Relief has a place, particularly in short-term disaster situations.  For long-term change, development work is supreme.  After being on the ground along-side these rural entrepreneurs, the differences between relief and long-term development became very clear.

Uganda

Shortly before I left the states for Guatemala, I committed to travel with a group of Babson students to Uganda for two weeks during my sophomore year.  Unlike the summer trip, the trip to Uganda was much more independently organized.  We had a contact on the ground that was helping to coordinate the trip, but all of the relationships were going to be new and short-term.  The mission of the trip was to learn about and provide business consulting for a non-profit organization during our short stay.  Fortunately, Uganda’s official language is English, which eliminated most of the language-induced communication barriers.  In groups of 2-3, we engaged with six different organizations.  My team worked with a residential trade school for girls without a place a live.

Expectations?

Upon arrival, I was very determined to learn a lot about the organization, how it operated, how they managed their finances, and what their technology system looked like.  They thought that we had come to help teach the girls.  We compromised and split our days between business discussions and lessons.  We designed our lesson for the first day in 30 minutes.

During the two weeks, we managed to gather a reasonable amount of data about the home and their catering business, but it was very difficult to offer insightful recommendations in such a short time.  Furthermore, since we left so quickly, we have no idea if any of the ideas we did provide were attempted or accomplished.

Our lessons seemed to gain more traction.  Our initial ideas focused on teaching problem solving and public presentation skills.  Many of these exercises seemed new to the students, but they were incredibly eager to learn.  One challenge we faced was the incredible variability in attendance.  On our first two days, there were 40+ students.  On the third day, there were less than 20.  According to the others, many of the girls had fallen sick or had to do work during the day.  Sure enough, many were back early the next week.  I couldn’t imagine being a classroom teacher knowing that, on any given day, half of my students may be ill and unable to learn.

One day, I brought my laptop and was playing through my music collection.  The girls knew a number of American artists (especially Michael Jackson) and wanted to listen to the music.  A large portion of the group really like R. Kelly’s “I believe I can fly”.  Instead of just trying to learn new skills, we built in time during each lesson to practice the lyrics.  At the end, the girls performed a couple songs for the elderly home that other students on the trip had been consulting with.  We came in with a lot of expectations about how we would spend our time.  After those were shattered, we had new expectations for how we would teach.  When those were also shattered, we gave up assuming for the rest of the trip.

Development Takes Time

My time in Uganda was very powerful and thought provoking for me.  However, my time in Guatemala actually accomplished something small but meaningful for the people I went to help.  The primary difference was amount of time that the primary organizers spent on the ground working.  In Guatemala, I worked with a community organization that had been in existence for over five years.  In Uganda, our group and our trip leaders didn’t have any roots in the area, though we worked with organizations that did provide on-the-ground services on a long-term basis.

Community development is community change.  People need to change their attitudes, learn new skills, and persevere through a shortage of resources on the road to long-term community improvement.  This type of change takes a significant amount of time and careful nurturing from the change agents.

Effective Community Development

From my classroom and travel experiences, I believe that effective community development requires a focus on long-term behavior and attitude change.  One of the best examples of this type of change is seen in poor entrepreneurs.  Once a person believes that they can honorably support their family by distributing products that other people need, they take the time and effort required to learn about the product, learn how to sell it, learn basic accounting, and learn how to interact with their supply chain.  Over time, they feel a greater sense of autonomy, no longer dependent on government aid programs or large corporations to support them.  They also bring about change in their customers.  Entrepreneurs educate their customer on the financial and health returns that come from investing in their product.  They provide payment plans that help their customers save money from the first day.  They encourage their customers to take immediate action to change their circumstances and provide ongoing service to these people to best fill their needs, earning them a profit and their customers an increased sense of empowerment over their lives.

Long-term change is facilitated by a focused, patient organization.  It may take multiple years to even identify the right problem to work on, let alone to begin to make an impact.  The people making this change need to be very observant and willing to listen.  They must also take immediate action in collaboration with the people they are serving, collectively designing the solutions.  This team also needs to root themselves in the local culture.  Many places in the world live at a very different pace than Americans.  They also hold a much higher bar for trust, trust that must be earned over time.  Fortunately many of these requirements can overlap, such as building trust by collaborating on new ideas with local people while carefully listening to their thoughts, feedback, and even body language during the process.

Interestingly, I believe that many of these same requirements hold true for the development of an individual going through school if that person is going to graduate with a sense of self-agency, a passion, a career path, and a set of useful skills.