By THIRA SCHMID
Every summer, when Harrison Luvai left Nairobi to stay at his grandmother’s farm in Kegoye, a small village in Kenya, he experienced the challenges of village people in his native country.
Luvai’s father had the chance to get a university education and moved to Nairobi because of the better job market in the city. The rest of his father’s family stayed in the village and still faces the daily struggle to survive.
The people who live in these rural areas in Kenya or other developing countries have challenges they cannot overcome easily by themselves, said Luvai, who is now a sophomore at BYU, majoring in microbiology.
“Organizations and corporations used to come and give relief to the people by providing them temporarily with what they needed without using the potential that was already there. This made and kept the villages very dependent on aid from outside the village,” Luvai said.
He said today many of those organizations understand that these people have a lot of potential to help themselves but they need to be sustained in their willingness to learn, their efforts and their abilities.
Sustaining people in developing countries is also the goal of Ted Lyon, acting director of the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at BYU.
“Our motto is ‘Come along with us, but tell us how to help you,’ because the local people usually know best what kind of help they need,” Lyon said.
The Kennedy Center sends students to countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Kenya and India. The people in the villages decide what they need help with.
“The interns do whatever the local people request, and we use mostly local material for our projects,” Lyon said.
Ann Hinckley, a junior from Minnesota, majoring in anthropology, volunteered in villages in Mexico and Costa Rica for three summers.
In Mexico she taught community sanitation and helped build housing for local school teachers. In Costa Rica she taught dental hygiene.
“Usually two volunteers like me work in one community. These volunteers try to train a motivated, young, local person to become a representative so the village can become independent,” Hinckley said.
She said she learned from these people because they know much better how to work in their environment.
“We often tried to teach them something we thought was very smart, but they soon told us how to do it much better,” Hinckley said. “We would be much less helpful if we went there with a condescending attitude, thinking we know what is best for them.”
Hinckley said she had been taught to build latrines a certain way, but when she started teaching the people in a Mexican village, she soon learned a much better way to do it — from the locals.
The bricks for the latrines were bought from local brickmakers so the money would stay in the community.
Shahrma Paksami, a senior from San Diego, majoring in public policy, and a facilitator for international internships with the Kennedy Center, did an internship in Eastern Jerusalem where he set up peace camps and promoted peaceful, non-violent communication for Palestinians.
“With all we do, it is important to utilize the local resources and the local strengths,” Paksami said.
He said we should not think one country is better than the other, because every country has its unique strengths and weaknesses that should be shared with each other.
Sometimes people may be happy momentarily if they get help with something without having to do something themselves, but in the long run, they will only become dependent and their agency will be taken away more and more, he said.
