Yeast

d. My stomach was already turning at the show of power on the main road. Now I was confronted with utter weakness and poverty. How do the two connect?
A letter in the New York Review earlier this year neatly scuppers the belief that aid from abroad can solve Africa’s problems. The writer, William Easterly, contests the view of a colleague that poverty could be abolished if donors were to pump in $75 billion annually using “proven technologies” to empower people.
“This reveals a remarkable naiveté,” Easterly responds, “about the roots of poverty. Poverty in Africa is the outcome of much deeper factors such as political elites who seek mainly to protect their own position, dysfunctional institutions like corruption and lack of property rights and a long history of exploitation and meddling from abroad (the slave trade, colonial depredations, the creation of artificial states, military interventions). It takes breathtaking hubris to assert that this mess can be fixed for the tidy sum of $75 billion. …
Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or foreign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by homegrown political, economic and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of democracy and free markets.”
We can be appalled by the images of wealth and power, as well as those of poverty, that we see every day. They can induce a paralysis in us where we do not know what to think or do. We might wish for speedy solutions; experts from outside with money and know-how. It is good to be reminded that at the end of the day we cannot look to foreign aid or proven strategies to extricate us from the mess we are in. We ourselves will have to sweat to create solutions. And these solutions will be ‘homegrown’ here as they have been everywhere else.
It is interesting to observe the struggles of civil society in Zambia and Kenya, countries that had a fifteen year start on us. Democracy is not yet fully in place, corruption is still a yoke on the shoulders of the poor. Yet there are real signs of an engagement in fashioning a new society in both countries. With us it is much more hidden because the political environment discourages engagement and creativity. But the people are there among us, rattling their needles like Madame Desfarge in A Tale of Two Cities, waiting for the moment to contribute their ideas and skills to forge the solutions.
It is also interesting to note that Jesus never had any solutions to the oppression of the Romans or for that matter the Jewish leaders themselves. All he offered were the parables; for example, that of the yeast (Matt 13:33). Human society would be changed and healed by forces within it – forces coming from the hearts of individuals.