This is a great phrase that I’ve heard in various places like India and Africa. (Interestingly, I’ve not heard it in North America.) When people say it, there’s a certain pleasure in it, a sort of learned wisdom that gets expressed, and everyone in the room implicitly agrees as they recall their own journeys.

When I first started managing large software projects, I made plenty of mistakes. One time I assigned someone the task of designing a forecasting system that I estimated would eventually take a team of five people a year to build. I gave him two weeks to get started and then we met to review his progress. He hadn’t done anything. Nothing. So I asked, “what’s the biggest project you’ve ever designed?” and he responded that he’d never designed anything, but once had a programming task that took 80 hours. Whose fault is it that he failed?

When we work with emerging village leaders, we can accidentally do this to them. Part of the problem is that the $100 we give them could be like half of what people there earn in a year. Imagine someone gives you half your annual salary. Or what if we gave them $2,000? What have you earned in total in the past 5 years? Imagine someone gives you that much and expects you to successfully run a project that wasn’t even your idea.

Giving them too much money for projects we invent can cripple them with unrealistic expectations both from us and their own people. And it’s hard to recover from those mistakes. Everyone knows they had the money and blew it. Another way is to let them come up with the projects.

My friend Reg was pastoring a small church in Haiti before the earthquake. About a third of his congregation was going to bed hungry every night, yet he wanted $200 to put together a church library. What was he thinking!?

His reasoning was that politicians were throwing money into the streets before elections, and people would vote for them without thought. If the people didn’t become educated, they were going to keep electing the wrong governments, and the country would never change.

We had a long talk as he showed me various sites where NGO’s were pouring millions of dollars into their projects, and what the results were.

Then he said he wanted $8,000 to help someone in his church start a van driving business. I asked him what he thought of the idea of us westerners funding lots of projects, but always limiting them to under $500. All afternoon he argued that was unfair, disrespectful and constraining their capacity to serve the poor.

Finally I asked him how much he would give the entrepreneur in question, if he had the money. Fifty bucks. And you want me to give him 160 times that?

He explained that they see westerners as people who need to give away money to feel better, not as people who love them and want to walk with them in their pain. So he was trying to serve my need.

We need to get close enough to people in need that we really know each other’s motives, strategy, abilities and limitations. One way of doing that is undertaking a series of small projects that they were going to do with or without us, minimizing embarrassing, potentially relationship-ending misunderstandings.

Slowly by slowly.