GIVE THEM THE OPPORTUNITY TO SAY "NO"

A few years ago at my former job, when I was dealing with a particularly "interesting" client on a particularly thorny issue, I asked a mentor named Garland Rose what I should do to potentially resolve the issue.  What I needed to do was to ask them to do something that I figured they probably wouldn't do, so I was struggling with why I needed to ask them in the first place (by the way, I'm not purposefully being ambiguous here - I really don't remember all the specifics of the situation).  Garland's advice was simple: "You need to give them the opportunity to say No", and it was good advice.  The end result of that was that they did indeed say "no" and that was pretty much that, but the advice has stuck with me:  even if you expect someone to say "no", you at least need to give them that opportunity.  There is probably some spiritual application to this regarding prayer and petition and our ongoing conversation with God, but this post is about a meeting I had last night with the Benitzul Ulpan Water Committee.

Backing up a little, about two and a half years ago, the first project of any sort ever done as part of Project Ulpan was a water system for the village of Benitzul.  It was primarily a construction effort at the time, but as relationships grew and we learned more about the communities here, we grew with them.  And as one might guess, any water system - in Nashville or in Benitzul - is only as good as the people taking care of it.  A real problem in the developing world is that many well-intentioned people give money for a project - like a new well or a new school or a new hospital, but there is no follow-up for the training and the maintenance and eventual "ownership" of the project by the community.  It's a difficult line to walk between helping and enabling and I'm not sure there's a clear litmus test for when you're doing either.  But, at some point, the goal is to make the project sustainable and self-reliant, and last night was a big step in that direction.

Without boring anyone with the details (probably too late for that), the community approached us with a request to extend their water system a little farther to make it more accessible for a dozen or so more families.  Because of the generosity of www.thelivingwaterproject.us and several individuals, we have more than ample money to accomplish this extension.  But, we felt that this would be a good time to walk with the community through the process of collecting money from the "customers" and saving that money so they can pay a portion of the cost.  The portion we proposed to them was approximately 10%, which interestingly is analagous to the "match" portion many water systems in Tennessee must pay when applying for state or federal assistance for water projects (whether there is ample follow-up or training for those projects is a different set of opinions for a different time).  I really had no idea how this concept would be received, but I felt it was important to "give them the opportunity to say no".

It turned out that their reaction was one of thanks and of excitement and of total agreement.  I was really proud of how the Water Committee felt an eagerness to make an investment their system and in their community.  They said they would have their share of the money in the next couple of weeks.  I think this is a great precedent and a great sign that we are helping teach them how to develop their community.  It's easy to forget that most of us work in "community development" - that most of what we do (engineering, teaching, doctoring, preaching, making, selling, cleaning, etc.) is for other people and for the "good" of the community.  It's also easy to forget that everything we've accomplished thus far in the "developed" world has been the direct result of someone giving someone else the opportunity to say "no", because every now and then the answer is "yes", and that's when things move in the right direction.