A CASE FOR DOING SOMETHING

I found myself in an interesting converstaion a few weeks ago with the executive director of a certain international organization being asked what action should be taken to alleviate poverty in Haiti-a heavy question with seemimgly complex answers that have not been anwsered in over 200 years.

As I began to mull over my answer, another converstation came to mind-one that I had several years ago in the hallowed halls of the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris with a professor of African Studies. This professor, a child of the south, had been born in Central Africa and had made it to the upper echelons of European academia.

During our discussion, the professor had asked me"What is development, anyway?" and had gone on to explain that it is a waste of time to theorize how to build schools for children, expand access to clean water and medical care. In essence, there is no formula to it, it's just a matter of doing. If there is a village without water and there is water underground, you build a well. His explanation was not what I had expected from an academic, but it is what makes absolute sense now.

Sure, the size, scale, and scope of what is done can vary extensively. Doing something can mean anything form helping a family rebuild a hurricane hit home, teaching a health class at a village grade school, to handing out seedlings and solar ovens in rural communties. With enough resources, it can even mean building a transnational highway. Indeed each of these acts, however great or small, will have an impact.

As proof of this, I would just have to ask the many people I came in contact with during my time in West Africa. So many of them could not say enough about how the course of their lives had been changed so profoundly for the better by just one person who chose to do something.