Biz and Buzz

In case you didn’t know, there is an entire industry dedicated to those who say they’ve dedicated themselves to helping others. It’s called Development, and its world is comprised of charities, foundations, schools, NGOs, churches, research bodies, government councils, individuals. It’s a strange, surprising world that I knew nothing about until I came to Hands at Work.

The book The Bottom Billion (it’s great) helped me understand a few things about this world. To understand it, he said, you have to understand Development “Biz” and Development “Buzz”.

Development Bizz is basically the internal, administrative, bureaucratic, institutional layers of the Development world; it’s the internal wheels of the big Development machine that need to be greased to keep the thing going. That topic’s a book itself, but it’s not what I want to talk about here.

Development Buzz is something like trends or ideas that become popular in these circles. I guess there have been many over the years, but a few current Buzz concepts would be “sustainability,” “local ownership” or even “income-generating activity.” Once an idea becomes Buzz it’s nearly impossible to operate within the Development world without associating yourself with it.

Nearly every idea that eventually becomes Buzz begins as a good one with great effects, but once it becomes buzz it’s by definition applied unthinkingly to any and every situation and inevitably results in some measure of its failure. So it is cyclical and ever-changing. But if you want to operate in this Development world, if you want to access its undeniable experience, its nearly limitless resources, then you need to speak its language and prove that you adhere and belong.

So what’s my point?

Hands at Work fits awkwardly with this world. Hands’ true identity, from its initial vision to today’s battle to maintain it, is one of servanthood, of sacrificial compassion by individuals not institutions, of commitment to the poorest of the poor; it is a challenge to the dominant way of our societies; it believes the church is the chosen means of God to embody a radical way of life bringing justice and love to the poor and the broken. This identity is often a strong departure from the Buzz.

Yet we overlap in ways too: our concern for the health, education, and nutritional needs of African children, our desire to engage the Western world. The Development world has technical ability(like surveying water wells in the Nigerian desert, or conducting multi-year research trials on the effectiveness of Phase 3 vaccine in keeping HIV+ mothers alive) that we’ll never have, but to which we need access. They even recognize that we bring something to the table, especially as people mobilizing the church to care for children and in catalysing community ownership to care for children.

So we can’t just avoid the Development world, but neither can we exactly be part of it. There are people around us pushing us both closer and farther from it. This is part of finding our way.