A letter from Carl Agsten in Nicaragua
July 2012
Dear Friends,
Our family is about to begin Year #4 in Nicaragua. We cannot believe the time has passed so quickly! We also cannot believe that we are still not fluent in Spanish. Despite our handicap, we have managed to form wonderful bonds of friendship and solidarity. Our friends have been so patient and forgiving with our choppy Spanish. We love them dearly, and we know that we are blessed with many lifetime friendships in Nicaragua.
One issue keeps returning over and over again when Leslie and I talk about our experience here. More times than you can imagine, we talk about a certain aphorism and try to lock on to why it bothers us even though we agree with its logic. The saying goes:
Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime.
Come here with a Big Fish attitude and you might end up looking like this!
What could be wrong with this idea? Is it the fish? Have we eaten too many whole fish dinners, with one eyeball staring up from the platter? We hadn’t been able to pinpoint our complaint until recently, and only after three years of humbling experience.
First, here is a story to preface our frustration with the famous fish quote.
The late 1980s were the last years of Nicaragua’s Contra Wars, and a large-scale humanitarian crisis was unfolding. Our partner organization, CEPAD (a Spanish acronym for the Council of Churches), was working nationwide for peace and reconciliation and partnering with rural communities to relieve suffering. The crisis was most intense on Nicaragua’s northeast coast, where many indigenous Miskito families lost their homes in the violence and destruction.
Anita Taylor, director of the Nehemiah Cultural Exchange Program, was coordinating efforts in the northeast. She remembers the projects rebuilding homes in the area. It involved partnership, as most CEPAD programs do. The families provided their own rough lumber for the projects, sawing them from fallen trees. It was a slow process.
Anita told me a story about those days that has stuck in my mind: “An organization from Europe came into town. The leader was a Frenchman. I cannot remember his name. The program was called Rapid Impact, or something like that. They came in with plenty of money, and I remember that the lumber they obtained was all even and perfect, because it had been cut by a machine. The leader had a plan for building all of the new houses along a straight new street, so that the people could be organized into neighborhoods. This looked strange to me! I told him to talk with the Miskito community and see if they liked the plan. But he was certain this would be an improvement, and proceeded to build all of the houses at once.
“There was a big ceremony on the day that the houses were given to the families, with lots of gracious words of solidarity and thanks. Two weeks later I went to the community and it looked like a storm had hit! All of that nice straight lumber was on the floor in a pile. And the men were hauling it off to build the houses where they wanted them.
“They should have asked the people,” Anita concluded. “Their culture is used to lots of room, with land all around to build another little house for their son or daughter.”
What does this have to do with fishing? Well, Leslie and I finally realize that the troubling piece for us in the famous fish advice is that that the receiver is passive. He is being fed; he is being taught. What if he doesn’t like to eat fish?
We came up with one possible corollary that goes like this:
If you see a man by the riverbank, don’t assume that he wants to learn to fish. And don’t assume that he doesn’t already know how to fish.
I don’t think that our alternative will one day be in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but it works for us as we try to learn the partnership model for accompanying poor communities. The Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole put it this way in a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly:
There is much more to doing good work than ‘making a difference.’ There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.
Our favorite antidote to the fish story is this great quote from Lila Watson, indigenous Australian artist and activist:
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Many blessings from Nicaragua!
When we set out to change the world, or even just to make a difference, we must first be self-aware about our own cultural baggage. We are changing the world into what? Have we asked the people we are working with about their hopes and their goals? As Christians we are rooted in Jesus’ call to love our neighbor as ourselves, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. If I were struggling, I would want help. But I would want to be respected, and I would want to be consulted about what matters to me.
So you are visiting this wonderful person from another culture for the first time. She has offered you a seat and a cup of delicious coffee. You marvel at her hospitality and grace. But you came here to make a difference, so you:
- Feed her a fish.
- Teach her to fish.
- Practice your Spanish by talking about fish.
- Sit, drink your coffee, listen, enjoy. Ask her if she would like to go fishing together. You might learn something.
Carl, Leslie, Kai & Ella
The 2012 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 11
