How often do you make mistakes? How often do you admit you’ve failed? Part one of last Sunday’s meeting was an imaginary “Choose Your Own Adventure” storyline, Global Brigades style. We started out with a community that’s facing a shortage of workers as a result of illness, and as well-intended foreign volunteers, we pondered two options-- in this hypothetical situation, should we send medical kits and supplies, or should we set up a temporary medical clinic in the area? Choose the kits full of medication, and you’ll find that the people who receive them don’t know what to do with them because they’re unfamiliar with the supplies. Instead, they sell them for money as a means of financial relief. What if you helped connect them with local doctors? Good idea, but spending money to travel to the city and make appointments still leaves people sick and in debt. The final alternative is to choose the other option, the temporary medical clinic, which works, but is only temporary, after all. As you progress through the story, you learn that the mysterious illness is due to poor water quality, and that the proposed solution to this problem is to set up public health and water projects in the community to improve the water filtration systems. Once again, you are faced with a decision: should you charge community members for the expenses associated with the projects? Your moral compass tells you no, because isn’t access to clean water a basic human right? You then learn that over time, since the community members have no reason to maintain these projects set up by foreigners, they have dug up the pipes and sold them. And so on and so forth. What’s interesting to note is that these complex issues are actually based on real-life problems that Global Brigades and other NGOs in the development sector have encountered in the communities we work with. For example, temporary medical clinics can’t be the end-all solutions to health problems. And people didn’t care about the water projects set up in their communities unless they were financially invested in it. We wrapped up the meeting by showing this TED Talk, What Happens When an NGO Admits Failure. It’s a compelling title, addressing something that we don’t often like to talk about but that more people really should. Development work is complex stuff-- how do we tackle all these questions, which decisions are the right ones, and how do we avoid making mistakes? When Pitt Business Brigades went to Panama a few springs ago, they found that the inventory and bookkeeping system implemented in the store of a small business owner wasn’t exactly the most efficient system. Working together, they devised a new system that was much more helpful in allowing her to keep track of the items sold in her store. Though this achievement was different from the project they had initially meant to pursue, by identifying a past failure, Business Brigades was able to rework a system to more effectively solve a crucial problem. So what is the role of failure in aid and development? Is it something we must avoid on an ethical basis as outsiders who are trying to “help?” Or is it necessary in order to improve our projects and strategies? As David Damberger suggests in his Ted Talk, have we simply “not failed enough?” There's not always a set, clear cut, right or wrong answer. And so we think about it, and we talk about it, and we learn.
To play our Choose Your Own Adventure game, click here.
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