20 August 2021

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WHAT DO YOU NEED ?

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Recently I was remembering a story I was told years ago by an international aid project.

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They had gone into a third world country to want to help. 

 

An area where hunger was a problem. 

 

On arriving they could see that the village was struggling.  It was so tempting for them to want to hand out what they saw was in limited supply or missing – to save lives and help them flourish.

 

Yet, they had learnt to do something slightly different – to ask to find out what they needed.

 

So counter-belief it can feel.  As our first thought is often that if someone is failing, that they don’t know and don’t have the capacity to figure out what to do.  That when someone looks like things aren’t going smoothly that they need to be ‘dug out’ of their situation. That they have lost all sense of competency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘lend-the-right-hand’ technique is what I call they did next.

 

On asking the people – they found out that there used to be a bridge between their village, over some water and land that enabled them to take their creations to market which in turn sorted the needs of their village.

 

They no longer knew how to build the bridge.  It was built by others before them.

 

The aid project then sent in an engineer to teach the people how to build the bridge and to ensure the information was passed down the generations.

 

That’s it – they needed a bridge and then they could sort out the rest.  So simple.

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Believe in each others innate capability.

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Here’s to the wonderment of ‘lending-the-right-hand’ and building bridges.

 

Cheers, TS.

 

 

 

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