lessons from mombachito

“This is going to be a very serious trip,” Darling told me as we headed northeast last Thursday into the mountains of Boaco.

Our ultimate destination? Mombachito, a small rural community where after 2 years, the community health evangelism program (CHE) was still struggling.

The problem(s)? To make a long story short, lots of miscommunication, misunderstanding, mistrust, and misgivings.

The mission? To get to the root of these issues, and figure out if the community still wanted to pursue this program, which develops local leaders to promote preventative health alongside the gospel, with the ultimate goal of achieving an organized community with a vision for its future and the will to act.

Time allotted? 48 hours.

Sounds like mission impossible, right? I thought so too, but God often does more than we ask or even imagine. And so it was through a series of meetings with community leaders, members, home visits, Bible study, and open dialogue, old grievances were aired and forgiven, leaders (old and new) united with renewed energy to work toward CHE’s continued development, and that allusive term “development” happened.

Not wanting to be perceived as the “know-it-all outsider”, I tried to keep my comments to a minimum in meetings and opted much more for extended discussions with Darling about what I was seeing. Above all, I saw a team fractured by accusations of favoritism, with a healthy dose of jealousy to boot. (This situation, by the way, had some external factors which I can’t specifically explain in this context.)

Suddenly, everything I learned in my speech communication classes and years of team management experience came back to me. (Somewhere, Dr. Hill is nodding and saying, “Didn’t I tell you?”.) And as I watched Darling utilize some of the information, analysis, and suggestions I gave her through our 2 days, I found myself humbled and grateful to be able to facilitate, in a small way, the interpersonal and small group development of the (very capable) community leadership team we met with.

I was equally grateful for the warmth, hospitality, and knowledge they shared with me. On this last point—knowledge—I owe a great debt to the farmers there who taught me about birds, crop seasons, water sources, well construction, and trees. I may have a college education, but my friends in Mombachito have an equally important education, gained through many years of living off the land, building houses from scratch, and creating their own local economy with little outside help.

Which brings home a point stressed again and again in development work—every community (even the “poorest”) has knowledge, resources, and a wealth of experiences within them, assets that must be identified and utilized if it is going to grow and develop. Otherwise, we’re talking about beneficencia, where one person gives to another expecting nothing in return, and that person over times begins to believe that a handout is all that is needed to solve his/her problems.

It’s just not so. What is needed is support, accompaniment, and tools that facilitate sustainable development, development that can continue without dependence.

There are no cookie-cutter models of how this is accomplished. But the kind of intercultural exchange I was part of this past week is a good start.