Sitting On My Hands

My morning plans have been thwarted. I was planning on going with Samuel and Mario to a series of meetings with important people in Khongolote, where they are implementing the first village-based savings and loan program. Mario and Samuel have been making their rounds, going from government office to government office, trying to get approvals here and permits there.

In Mozambique, it's a bad idea to begin any project without the knowledge and support of each community's government leaders.

Samuel and Mario have been surprised by the amount of bureaucratic red tape, but the area administrators have been receiving them well. One administrator told them of some people who started "a development project" in their community a couple of months ago: in that case, the good Samaritan went from door to door collecting money ostensibly to start a loan portfolio, but trousered the money and vanished. Past experience has proven that the government is right to be cautious.

Back on the subject of these important meetings, it would have been good stroking for my ego to be able to go. Meeting with government leaders would have made me feel important, even valuable. I am, like most people, just insecure enough that I need to define myself by what I do. But yesterday, Mario suggested that he and Samuel should go to the meetings without me.

Some part of me -- that little good angel sitting over my right shoulder -- was quite pleased. I want them to risk being independent, to have the courage to work on their own. They'll need to once I'm gone, so it's great that they want to start now.

Just underneath Mario's bravery, he's timid. He's not entirely convinced that he's up to the job, and would like Glenn or I to be there for support; to be there to answer difficult questions. But he also had the insight to recognize that the belligerent response that we have received from community and church leaders at past meetings is a function of our presence. He believes that, because Westerners have come with pockets overflowing with money in the past, perpetuating the culture of dependency, that the community won't be happy with anything less than a handout this time as well -- as long as I'm sitting in the meeting as a symbol of that dependency.

"When they see Samuel and I," he said by contrast, "they don't see money, they see reality. They see that we [Mozambicans] need to work to get what we want."

For the sake of the program's success, Mario wanted to take a risk. To remove the safety net. Just like he'll be forced to in two months from now, when Glenn and I have returned home.

I want the program to be successful too, but that little red devil sitting over my left shoulder is busy pitching coal into the furnace, stoking the fire of my ego. If I'm not there, nobody will know that it's my project. Nobody will understand the valuable contribution that I made, or give me the respect that I deserve. Nobody will...

But it's their project, not mine. I have been temporarily inserted into their story to light a fire, but it's their fire to maintain. It's their story. I will soon exit, and they will continue to live it.

The challenge with my empowerment approach is that making myself dispensable means that I'm, well, dispensable. I am successful if I am not needed. The more successful Glenn and I are at mentoring and advising Mario and Samuel, the more I am forced to sit on my hands.

That's not an easy thing to do for those of us who find identity in hard work. But we must acknowledge that our Western results-orientation is, at times, bordering on idolatrous. I'm practicing idolatry when I act not in order to help, but to make myself feel important, or less guilty, or useful. In these situations, my work has become my god: that thing above which there is nothing else.

I could be sitting in another meeting, dragging it along, forcing my opinion, influencing the direction of thought. Making myself busy. In the great words of Paul, such people "are not busy; they are busybodies." (2 Thessalonians 3:11).

So today I'm sitting on my hands, not doing anything to advance this project. And if I want this project to outlive my stay in Mozambique, to build something truly lasting in only a year, sitting on my hands is exactly what I need to be doing.

Mario and Samuel will do a great job without me.