A Helping Hand

This past winter I was state side, between two China trips, when two of my buddies hit a bad spot on the pathway of life. They had hardily recovered from a previous bad section and now they find themselves laying on the pathway bleeding to death: one needing throat surgery for cancer and the other needing surgery for spinal cord damage in his neck, resulting from an accident caused by a patch of ice on the road from a lawn sprinkler left running during a winter freeze.

Relief was critical in both cases and without immediate surgery life could be much shorter than planned or at least very different. Surgery took place and the cancer was removed causing considerable damage to the throat; surgery also removed bone chips from the spinal cord and wires were attached to stabilize the fractured area. For both, relief came in the form of specialized surgery, but further surgery would be of little value. The work of relief was done, now both needed to spend a long time in rehabilitation.

Compared to relief, rehabilitation is usually long term and requires a different type of resource. Their condition needed to be analyzed and a program established by trained practitioners that they must follow to insure further recovery. This was a time of diligence on the part of the patient and the helper. It was also a time of meeting needs beyond just the physical. If rehabilitation was to be successful there were many parameters to consider and considerable effort and cost required.

During the rehabilitation process it would be good to look ahead to see how time spent with the patient now could be leveraged into a development time when the patient could be brought to a higher level of life than before the bad spot on the pathway was encountered.

Being away from my two friends on my trip to China, I have had time to chew on this and as I travel here in China and recently in India I began to see an application to how we help the poor, let’s say in times of disaster from some blow of nature. At first, immediate help in needed to stop the fatal bleeding. This relief period is usually short and has specific requirements of need. After a short time things change; either the bleeding is stopped or the person has died. At this point I think it is wrong, in fact it is very wrong, to keep throwing money and materials at the situation. That would be like continual surgery on my two friends. We must understand that relief is always followed by rehabilitation, but it seems that the American government and many mission efforts just don’t understand the application from my two friends.

As in the case of my two friends, rehabilitation from a disaster of nature requires analyses and a special program. Rehabilitation must take into account how the local area can help and in the process result in the growth of their infrastructure just as the families of my two friends are involved in their recovery. Simply providing help without involving local resources will in the end produce more damage than it will good. This damage results from not developing the ability of local people, business, and maybe local government to care for themselves. Money and materials may be necessary to initially stop the bleeding, but now money and materials should only supplement local resources. The main efforts should now be in helping them become more effective in helping themselves. I see this principle at work in the rehabilitation of my two friends.

The problem we are facing is that relief is short term, attracts money and people, produces temporary results, makes great headlines, and satisfies the donor. It also fits the time frame of short term missions, but by the time the missionary team reaches the field, most of the bleeding is done and rehabilitation should be in full effect. In many cases the short term team goes in and does more surgery when rehabilitation is needed. The intended help can then cause more damage than it does good, but once the team has left they don’t look back to see what they actually accomplished or harm they actually did. They go home and talk about the great experience they had on the trip. I confess that I am guilty of the same thing, but as I spend time here in the field I am beginning to see how too much American wealth has either been horded and even increased with credit or donated in an inappropriate manner at the eventual harm of the recipient.

I may not be able to report on many project results from this trip, but I sure have done a lot of thinking and learning about God’s heart and seeing myself more clearly as the broken person I am. I find that I am growing very tired of projects and trying to produce results. What I find myself being drawn to are people and their needs and the importance of prayer to accomplish God’s work. I find this is more clearly understood in eastern cultures than it is in our individualistic western culture.