17957: Corbett replies to Burnham on visitor's work in Haiti

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Greetings Thor,

So good to hear from you.  Wish we were carrying on this discussion on the
veranda of the Oloffson as we did so often last October, but alas....

The list has heard my argument on this a number of times, but, I will
detail it once again.

I took more than 30 groups to Haiti between the years of 1983-1994.  More
than 500 people went on those trips.  So, I have a good deal of
experience.  We never built schools, but did similar sorts of work, having
group members volunteer to work with the Missionary of Charity sisters and
such things as that.  Some medical groups ran clinics and so on.

I always thought the primary benefit of the trips themselves were the
benefits that the foreigners got by visiting Haiti, seeing a world very
different from their own and beginning to confront the meaning and sources
of such misery and suffering.

However, it was in the aftermath that benefits began to accrue to Haiti.
Many, many of those folks would go through some major life shock and be
changed (at least for a time) in their fundamental meaning of life.  Often
they would raise funds for the organization which I head, People to
People, Inc., and it was the funds raised by these "alums" of these trips
which provided the overwhelming bulks of funds I was then able to use in
Haiti for small economic development projects which were, in the main, run
100% by Haiti community organizations.

Thus my judgment was, at least within my own experience, that the
volunteer labor projects were, themselves, primarily of use to the
visitors, yet doing relatively little harm that I could see, in Haiti.
But, the in the aftermath, the motivation which these people gained
EXCLUSIVELY because of their visit, brought significant benefits to Haiti.

I had a magazine in which I advertised these trips.  I remember a farmer
in North Dakota once writing me a critical letter in which he said that it
would be much better to have people donate $1000 (rough cost of a three
week trip on my trips) directly to People to People, and not waste the
money on the trip.  That may be.  But, 500 + people did in fact go on
those trips and many, many THEN, after that experience, raised funds,
norally a good deal more than they had spent on the trip, and donated that
to PTP.  Never once in all my years of fund raising, did a single person
give me the equivalent of $1,000 INSTEAD of going on a trip, though some
did fund OTHER people, particular young folks, to go on such a trip.

Thus I think at just the very practical economically level, these
experience trips are a benefit to Haiti.  I know for sure they are a
benefit to the overwhelming number of the trip members themselves.

While you asked about the benefits to Haiti, I would add one addendum.
This concerns not Haiti, but my own work with, primarily, U.S. citizens,
often relative young ones.  One of the things I wanted very much to do
with my life was to challenge other people to make more space in their
lives for those other humans in need and who suffered.

I chose to do some of that work as a professor of philosophy, offering
many courses in moral philosophy, social and political philosophy and even
courses in simple life style, just to bring that challenge to students in
the class room.

However, that never seemed a terribly effective tool -- the university
classroom.

Then, in the 1960s I began to take leadership roles in both political
activism and in basic charitable services (food pantries, homeless
shelters and such) and to work hard to bring NEW FOLKS into those
experience with me in order to introduce them to life challenging
experiences and challenge them face to face with both political obstacles
to equality, and the hard reality of that suffering.

Those expeiences seemed to me much more powerful that my classroom work in
their effects, but still unsatisfactory.

Thus, when, sort of on a lark, I took the first group to Haiti in 1983, I
was trying to expand that challenge.  Nothing I had ever done before (or
since) was as powerful a motivating tool as were those trips.

I think, then, that both Haiti and the foreign visitors received
significant value in the long-term, and overall I there was virtually no
serious harm done at all.

Bob Corbett