- Notes from Canada's Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up for Change
- Greystone Books (2007)
[Editor's note: The following is excerpted from Notes from Canada's Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up for Change, a new book published by Greystone that tells 25 stories of how ordinary young people have gone on to do extraordinary things. In this chapter, George Roter, co-founder of Engineers without Borders, talks about a defining moment a Pentecostal church in Zambia.]
And then there was that all-important cup of coffee, over which I decided to translate my values into action. Ironically enough, I was at a coffee shop -- Timothy's -- in one of Toronto's poshest neighbourhoods. My good friend Parker and I were catching up for the first time in four months. We told stories of our respective cycling adventures, his in South America and mine in Europe. Then Parker asked me, "Do you remember that idea we had in undergrad, Engineers Without Borders?"
Suddenly excited, we started talking about an organization that would get Canadians involved in reducing poverty around the world. Within minutes, we'd borrowed a pen from the cashier and started scribbling our first business plan on a napkin. By the time Timothy's had closed and kicked us out, we'd both implicitly made a commitment to carry this idea through.
'White mans' tech'
Initially we believed EWB should provide communities with simple technologies, like latrines, grain mills, and irrigation pumps that could help people in developing countries meet their basic needs. Latrines could help stop the spread of disease; grain mills and irrigation pumps could help feed families and generate the extra income needed to pay for education and child care.
I knew Canadian engineers had the skills and knowledge to help design and install these tools. And I quickly discovered that many were eager to. Our first volunteers were university students -- young, enthusiastic, and inexperienced. We thought the technologies were simple enough that even volunteers with limited expertise could make a substantial difference on the ground.
That was the model, until we started questioning ourselves.
When Parker returned from a stint in Ghana, a democratic West African nation that was a magnet for development workers, we talked about the northern communities he'd visited there. They were all remarkably similar. Between five hundred and one thousand people lived in them, mostly subsistence farmers who grew just enough on their parched land to feed their families. Money was scarce. So was fresh water -- those communities were stocked with hand-pumps, but the devices had rusted and no longer worked.
I asked Parker to explain this vast supply of useless hand-pumps. It turned out that during the 1970s and '80s, teams of engineers from Western countries had travelled to the region to install wells and hand-pumps, inspired by a model similar to our own. They would spend half a day per village, testing the ground, drilling a borehole, and installing a hand-pump. They measured success by the number of working pumps they'd installed by the end of each day.
Villagers would use the pumps for a couple of years until, not unexpectedly, a valve would seize or a piston would break, and nobody in the village would know how to fix the foreign technology. There were no local, trained technicians they could summon. Villagers lost trust in the "white man's" technology and left the pumps to sit and rust.
Skill sets
We asked ourselves if our model would repeat the problems of the past. We pushed ourselves to learn more about what we were doing and find better ways of making a sustainable, lasting difference. We realized it was necessary to train our volunteers extensively here at home, before they left. And when they got to one of the African countries where we work, and after earning the trust of local partners over the course of one to two years, they would contribute to building local capacity -- that is, they would use their expertise to improve the ability of our partner organizations to help communities long after our volunteers leave. In practice, this process could entail something as simple as teaching field workers how to use a spreadsheet to improve reporting processes, to something as complex as helping to plan, from scratch, a water, sanitation, and hygiene education program to reach 500,000 people country-wide.
Constant questioning of ourselves has become a core value of EWB. Early on it taught us that concentrating on the technology itself was not the solution, and it has allowed us to understand the wisdom of something one of our Ghanaian partners recently told us: "You should measure your success not by the number of hand-pumps, but by the number of skilled technicians you leave behind."
We'd learned that being motivated to live up to one's ideals and give back to the community isn't enough. EWB's numbers are impressive -- over 250 volunteers overseas and over twenty thousand members in Canada -- but it's our core values that define us. Every volunteer we send overseas has heard me talk about these values; I consider them the organization's calling card: focusing on people, not problems, openly questioning ourselves, being entrepreneurial, and most important of all, remembering to remain humble. Starting and sustaining an organization like EWB certainly requires a lot of self-confidence, but its success on the ground depends on an extraordinary amount of humility -- the recognition that leadership is about service and the vast amount we must learn from others. This combination of self-propulsion and modesty is what I now call humble entrepreneurialism.
Yet, discovering the importance of being humble is a long way from truly experiencing it.
Chisamba Pentecostal
That Sunday morning in Lusaka I decided it was time to finally meet the people I was working for. I spread out a large map of Zambia on the floor and looked for the smallest town I could travel to in a day: Chisamba. I knew nothing about the place. I hitchhiked a ride there on the back of a pickup truck.
Since Zambians are very pious I decided my best bet to meet people on a Sunday would be the local church. There I was, a pale, naive Jewish Torontonian wandering through a small African village looking for a church service to crash. As I approached a large, baked-mud, thatch-roofed hut, the Chisamba Pentecostal Holiness Church, I caught the sound of melodious singing and rhythmic clapping. I ducked in the door. My attempt to remain invisible was laughable. Immediately becoming the special guest, I was quickly led through the pews -- shin-high wooden planks, really -- to take a front-row seat.
Mostly, though, we were on our feet. Two hours of singing and dancing were punctuated by vigorous sermons in the local dialect of Njanja; the other congregants passed me simultaneous English translations on scraps of paper. The unbelievable service ended with a sermon the congregation urged me to give. I was hesitant to start, but I gradually gained confidence as I wove my way through the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours and as the congregation encouraged me with enthusiastic shouts of "Amen!" after each sentence.
Keys to the village
What happened afterwards made an even more profound impression on me. Eustace, a congregant who has since become a friend, invited me into the lives of the people of Chisamba.
Eustace allowed me to listen and learn about the people behind the statistics. Joseph, a farmer, told me about the challenges of feeding his family. He's just one of 314 million sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day. I met Anne, whose son died before his fifth birthday. He's one of the 192 out of every 1,000 children in Zambia who die of a preventable illness before the age of five. I also met Kelvim, a young entrepreneur who saved up for years to buy a single computer and who now runs computer training courses from the town hall. I met Eustace's aunt, who has managed to organize okra farmers in the area to pool their crops for sale in Lusaka.
These people are innovating and working hard to find a path out of poverty and to make their lives more comfortable. These are the people I work for.
I told Eustace the essentials of my life and my work with EWB. But mostly I listened to him talk about his life. As the day was ending, I asked him a question, the answer to which I'll never forget.
"What do you dream of?"
"A better life for my children than I had."
I realized then how alike we were. We parted with a typically long African handshake.
Six weeks later, back in my pleasant Toronto office, I received a letter from Eustace. He'd spent a day's pay to send me a note, which ended, "Your humbleness really touched our community and changed my wrong perceptions about whites, especially those from the West. I want you to continue your work."
I didn't install a pump, train a technician, or help coordinate a local development initiative in Chisamba. But I did meet my boss. Face to face with the people EWB serves, I was profoundly humbled in a way I had so often spoken about but never truly lived. I finally fully grasped the core values that I espoused. And I have a letter of reference I carry with me everywhere.
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