Surgery and Healing in the Developing World - Dartmouth-Hitchcock

Treating Others: Human Sciences in Theory and Practice
445
This is called a “pipeline problem”, that there is an interruption of the outflow of
funds in aid utilization. I have encountered multiple projects, which should have
been interrupted on the basis of a decrease in the well being of the people treated,
but they would not be, since the aid project was a benefit program to the donors.
Examples of such “treatments to the First World donors” might be farm surplus
transshipment programs that are price support benefit programs to Iowa farmers;
infant formula donations that were a gift to Swiss Nestle; or the preposterous donation
of an MRI scanner in a Mozambican Hospital without Band-Aids, bed sheets
or penicillin—a gift from the German government to Siemens.
How Would the Other Treat Him or Herself, and How
Might He or She Treat Us as the Other?
44
I am quite literally an “ET” falling from another planet into the cultures I visit.
How am I treated? I am a resource to be exploited, to be “conned,” to be coopted,
ingratiated—in other words, exactly as I might treat them. After we have had a lot
more experience of each other, we each find that the rather direct and primitive
approach is ineffective—since we have both been around “others” before, and we
must try a bit more sophisticated approach through bargaining, barter, and arrive at
some sort of mutualism in a symbiotic relationship, recognizing that they are the
local experts and I am in their territory. They recognize that I must have the edge on
resources, since, after all, I got there from half a world away, and seem to have some
sort of outside world support system, in which they would like to share.
What would they want for themselves? They would like to have just a little of the
advantage that I apparently have had, since, if only they had, then they too, could be
like me—since I seem to be empowered, and capable enough to take care of most of
my problems and some of theirs as well. And how well might they do if this were an
opportunity given to them? If the entire gross national product of the USA, the
largest economy the world has ever seen, were dropped as a donation into Africa, it
would disappear without a ripple visible a generation hence. If they had just half the
opportunities I have had, of course, they would find their own voice, and not become
like me, but a better they. They would not need advocacy, except for opportunity.
That choice to be able to develop much more of their full human potential is
perhaps the most common of the human links that makes for understanding despite
wide inequalities among others.
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