Capacity Building

This is the best thing I've heard on development in a long time...

capacity building - an excerpt from "This American Life" episode, "Island Time"

ACT TWO. COMPOUND FRACTURE.

Apricot Irving grew up on a missionary compound in Limbe, in the north of Haiti, and visits the missionary hospital there. It's pretty well stocked and staffed but, oddly, kind of a ghost town. Meanwhile, a rural Haitian-run clinic 5 miles away, without anywhere near the resources of the missionary hospital, is packed with people. Apricot spends time with the American doctor [Steve] who used to head the missionary hospital but left in order to help foster a "new" Haiti at the Haitian-run clinic.Apricot Irving is writing a memoir about her experiences growing up on the missionary compound. She's currently looking for a publisher. (13 minutes)

Irving: "building community - if you want haitians to create and sustain their own institutions this is what it looks like - slow, and sometimes cumbersome. but steve knows the pitfalls of the other model. when he was in charge of the old missionary hospital, he found the job so stressful that he even considered leaving medicine. he came to a kind of crossroads and had to make a hard choice. we talked about it in the car.

Steve: "the choice really is...it became for me an either/or. on the one hand, in the face of dysfunction and in the face of extreme human need, what was required of me was to build a citadel, to become a dictator. and in that dictatorship, benevolent dictatorship, i could be the cowboy to fix the problems that would bring efficiency, service, and security. what's wrong with that? why not become a benevolent dictator? the problem that i found with that is that that model creates, in a way, a new slave plantation mentality, where the slaves become dependent on the slave master. and in the end, one reaps the fruit of slavery: discontent, anger, violence. the choice to then go to the other extreme - to purposely work hard at not becoming a dictator, for the sake of building community, means that people are going to suffer, people are going to die. good will not be provided. goods will not be rendered. here we are, praying, when there's someone who needs a c-section and we can't get it for her. there's a terrible choice."

Irving: "and why is it that, in choosing community, there are these added costs? why do people die? why are goods not distributed?"

Steve: "because community takes time, perseverance, and relationship building. yeah, [it] drives Americans crazy. we're a fix-it culture. it's the hight of evil, probably, from an american cultural point of view, to not fix a problem when it's right there to fix. what's the problem? fix it!"