This post reminds me a little of an NYT editorial titled “Just Do Something”. Similarly, Bob Geldolf once said, “Something must be done; anything must be done, whether it works or not.” Anything, that is, to assuage the collective guilty conscience of celebrities and pop stars, right?

It’s tragic and heartbreaking to see the end product of the “something is better than nothing” fallacy you describe. I’ve witnessed it too many times both at the NGO I work with and elsewhere in Cameroon. It arrives in the form of old, broken equipment (PCs, printers, scanners, photocopiers) scraped up and shipped at great expense for a school computer lab. The school invests time and money building furniture for the lab, training/hiring a teacher only to discover that half of the PCs don’t work, and the remainder have failed within the first year. The majority of old, donated hardware like this end up as vast piles of e-waste, either gathered by a hopeful collector or discarded in gutters.

More recently, I saw what amounted to probably a literal ton of donated books for Cameroonian kids. Titles included tax code references from the 1980’s, books on weight loss and romance novels in Spanish. Thanks, but no thanks.

A lot of people and even programs go in assuming that they are going to be the hero in the story, which means that the work being done isn’t about the individuals that they claim to be serving, but really just another variation on narcissism.

You see it in disaster response work as well. Disaster response means inserting oneself into someone else’s tragedy. It becomes clear in a very short time who is there to fulfill an imaginary narrative taking place in their mine, and who realizes that they actually need to have no part in the story at all. Reach out, stabilize, listen, try to share the weight (though it’s impossible), show the steps to the path that will lead to restoration of the feeling that it is possible to feel normal amongst the living again.

You are a minor part of a much larger story, you are showing paths that may have seemed impossible to reach, you are letting people find their own way through the challenge being faced, you get out of their way and let them do it.