The presentation below was delivered by Eric Hartman as part of Becker College’s Global Voices of Change Speaker Series on November 4 in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Thank you all for the opportunity to be here with you today. It is an honor and a privilege. I appreciate the work you’re putting into this Global Citizenship speaker series. And I very deeply appreciate the invitation to be part of this conversation. Thank you.

I’m going to start with a piece by the great Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

Human beings suffer
They torture one another
They get hurt and hard

No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together
The hunger strikers father
Stands in the graveyard dumb

The police widow in veils
Faints in the funeral home

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave of justice
Can rise up
And hope and history rhyme

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells

Call miracle self-healing
The utter self-revealing
Double take of feeling
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lighting and storm
And a God speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birthcry
Of new life at its term

I heard that poem over the radio sometime in the late 90s. It compelled me – it really required me – to stop. To pause and think, to wonder. One bold assertion I choose to believe is that everyone has their talent; everyone has their contribution. Seamus Heaney’s role was to write and to speak. His gift was to stir empathy and imagination with words. His art was lifting consciences to wonder why we do not do better.

How can you do that? How can I? How can we all be part of lifting one another to do better? These are the questions we must be asking. My own answer suggests combining ongoing efforts to achieve humility with any desire to be of service or to do good at home or abroad. Tonight I’m going to share a few stories from around the world that all employ listening and humility as routes toward cooperation and hope.

Before getting into stories, however, I think it’ s important to note that we most often come into community work and service upon a scar. Someone in the past has insisted they knew the right way of living and being, and it has caused literally centuries of harm, pain, death, and suffering. It’s always in the stream of that inequitable and unjust history that we act. The pain of history is tangible everywhere. Through the lenses of three places that have been important in my own life and to the development of the stories I’m about to share, here briefly is what I mean:

• In Northern Ireland the English Crown began the Plantations of Ireland in the 16^th Century. This meant they moved large numbers of English and Scottish Protestants into Ireland and confiscated the land of the people already living there. They colonized the space. A hundred and fifty years later the mostly Protestant English passed a set of laws specifically designed to move the predominately Catholic Irish deeper into poverty.  Known as the Penal Laws, these policies included stipulations like only Protestants were allowed to hold political positions, Catholics were prohibited from possessing arms, and – famously – no Catholic could own a horse worth more than five pounds. Upon reflection you’ll see the uniquely nefarious nature of this law – in that if an Irish Catholic were lucky enough and earnest enough to raise a strong and worthy horse, any English Protestant could simply offer him five pounds and a penny for it on the street, and he’d have to give it up there on the spot.
• Here in the United States, there is a Native Reservation in Northeast Arizona that we call the Navajo Nation. The people who live there are usually called Navajo, but they call themselves Diné. They, like other indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, suffered a litany of injustices at the hands of the US military before being forced onto their current lands, required to attend American schools, and – for many generations – required to give up their language and their spiritual practices.
• Tanzania, like most of Africa, was carved up and distributed among European Powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. That is, European individuals representing European powers organized themselves over a map and declared who would rule in what parts of Africa. Germany got Tanzania. They lost it to the British after World War I, but not before the Maji Maji rebellion against German colonial rule in East Africa left several hundred thousand dead. Formal independence came for Tanzania in 1961.

Anytime we go to serve – anywhere – whether that is around the corner or around the world, we go to serve in a context shaped by recent and distant histories. We act inside of political conversations – and how we are perceived is influenced by those who have acted arrogantly or unjustly before us.

Let me return to that Seamus Heaney poem and the Northern Irish effort to build a restorative society. I spent some time learning from some profoundly gifted peacemakers and community workers there – people who were working with their friends and families, pulling them from decades and centuries set on the knife’s edge of violence and asking them to enjoy common community together.

Now the extent of the division is almost impossible to understand in the United States. Curbs are painted blue and white for Protestantism and British identity; orange and green for Catholicism and Irish identity; so-called “Peace Walls” criss-cross Belfast, nearly everyone in the North of Ireland knows someone who has been hurt, tortured, or killed in what this region of the world euphemistically calls “the Troubles”

Into this very volatile mix the organization I’ve worked with in one capacity or another for many years, Amizade Global Service-Learning, was sending students for service and learning experiences. It was pretty clear from the outset – the Northern Irish would say so very directly – that our college students did not have the backgrounds necessary to do counseling interventions or peace negotiations at the center of this conflict. But our Northern Irish partners were interested in the desire for connection and service, they liked the idea of youth connecting across cultures, and they thought our college students could play roles in their summer youth camps, where kids from Protestant areas come together with kids from Catholic areas during school vacations.

And once we began trying this – they reported that it created a special space: a space for dialogue, sharing, and reconsidering. Our college students’ general shock at the notion of protracted struggle over these two predominately white Northern Irish identities brought the Northern Irish youth into a safe space for sharing how and why they identified as they did. And then they considered how they could healthily develop their own identities. Who am I, when I am all of myself at my best? Not against anyone else; not who am I not? But who am I at my best? This is a question we should all continuously drive toward, by the way, and the Northern Irish youth were asking it anew once their dialogue community gathered.

This was not, of course, bricks and mortar service. Indeed it was far more important. It was working in the architecture of the mind to expand spaces for Love and Community. Not that we had the insight to plan that specifically, but we did have commitments to listening and humility. And when our Northern Irish partners said come work in youth camps, listen, be part of our community, we did so.

Here in the United States, in the Northeast Corner of Arizona, lies the shockingly beautiful Native American reservation that we know as the Navajo Nation . As I mentioned earlier, the Navajo refer to themselves as Diné, the people, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with them as well.

Things are different there. The landscape is open, almost everyone is native, they see themselves as part of the environment rather than as existing above it or separate from it.

They have been recent and frequent victims of US government oppression – I met and talked with a woman my mother’s age who was involuntarily sterilized as part of a US government program that did simply that through the seventies. And here again I’ve seen many people visit this community with a desire to serve. They look in from outside and see comparatively high rates of poverty, diabetes, illiteracy, and other social ills. So they want to do something about it. They want to address it. They want to fix it. The Diné – The Navajo – have experienced a lot of so-called help from outsiders. This desire to help was the impulse that informed that sterilization policy I just mentioned.

More recently, groups have come past to offer to fix the doors on their Hogans. A Hogan is a traditional Diné building that does not have a door on the East Side, which is where the sun comes in. That’s deliberate. And though many Navajo still have Hogans most also have what you might think of as a modern American home. They are, in this way and many others, continuously negotiating between worlds. They are doing in a deep and profound way something that all of us are asked to do in some ways – and that is to choose carefully between and among traditions or worldviews. To preserve those things worth preserving, to adapt in ways worth adapting. Many Diné look at the dominant US culture and wonder why we call it progress when people work more and more, old folks end up in nursing homes, and the environment is regularly used and abused. So progress may not be the right word, but choosing among traditions is something they engage with regularly.

Some Diné are interested in preserving and reinvigorating traditional ways of living and being, while others are interested in more clearly connecting with the dominant US American Ways —- many, many, perhaps most, are interested in some of both. Preserving tradition AND embracing change. So as we worked in the Diné nation, the primary purpose of our presence steadily focused more and more on learning. This focus developed through conversations with community leaders and elders. When you and your students come here, don’t simply bungle into our community and start nailing on roofing shingles or putting together fences. We, after all, are pretty good at those things. Instead come to listen and learn. Hear about our experience of US History: Kit Carson, the Long Walk, boarding schools, Americanization, the prohibition of our language, the denial of our spiritual practices, involuntary sterilization, extractive mining – unfortunately the list goes on and on. But hear about it. And hear about the beauty of our ways: long introductions that share our location in extended family networks, deep appreciation for the earth and everything on it, quietness, depth, resilience, and ingenuity. Come learn to simply say hello – Ya Ta Hey – in our Diné language. And after you have done these things, and seen some of our sacred lands: visited Canyon de Chelley or Chaco Canyon or simply walked over the beautiful and protected space that is nestled within the four sacred mountains.

After you have done that too, then come talk with us about service and partnership. When you know who we are and where we are coming from. When you can share our story and something about our reality with your East Coast friends and families well – That is when you are starting to do service. Just by knowing and sharing our stories. That to us is more important than your limited ability to swing a hammer. But once you can do this first service of listening carefully, waiting patiently, engaging softly and slowly, retelling our story to those you know; Once you have done that first service well, then, if you like, we can talk about how your skills can help with tutoring in our schools, or stacking wood for elders, or repairing fences, or maybe you’ll be fortunate enough that we will teach you how to shear a sheep. All of these things are important, but they must come in the context of a larger conversation and community.

Speaking of larger and long conversations. In 2006 I went to East Africa for the first time. I was fortunate enough to have saved a bit of money and I therefore took the opportunity to simply visit community organizations that I was somehow connected to through friends in the states.  I landed in Dar es Salaam, traveled north to Nairobi and Kenya, and then continued by bus to Kampala and Gulu Uganda before visiting the rural Northwestern district of Karagwe, Tanzania. At the time I was a doctoral student, and I was visiting this Amizade site in part with the thought that I might return there one day with students in a service-learning program, but I was really most focused on seeing, listening, and trying to understand. And that was a tall order. It was tough.

When I arrived in Karagwe I quite frankly saw a fairly inefficient partnership in place. Amizade had partnered with the Lutheran Diocese in the area – which ran the hospital and provided numerous social services and was otherwise a major regional player. Through the partnership there was an agreement to build a children’s home together. This was to be an extension of the hospital – and the leaders in the Diocese suggested it would expand the hospital’s capacity to care for children in the area who needed medical and social support. So a few years before my arrival the Amizade Executive Director and the Bishop for that region signed an agreement that indicated Amizade and the Diocese would both equally provide materials and labor to support the construction of this building – this children’s home. And when I visited what I saw was a small handful of skilled Tanzanian laborers slowly working toward the completion of the building, complemented by an eager but uncertain group of American students who were trying to figure out where to step in and help on this 2 story cinderblock construction project.

And some of those students found good ways to help. They put their best feet forward and connected with the local workers and found a task. But they were rare, at least in the group I observed, and in any case I was struck by the juxtaposition of the presence of these students and the massive availability of relatively affordable semi-skilled labor throughout the region. In other words, there were a lot of people nearby who knew more about physical labor and building projects who would have gladly become part of the project for literally dollars a day.

So I had some conversations with community leaders while I was there, working to understand why the children’s home* project was taking so long on the one hand, but on the other hand trying to be imaginative about how we might all better work together. I was looking for ways in which our presence might serve the community more considerably than we were able to do through construction labor.

I had conversation after conversation after conversation. Community members might have reasonably concluded, boy that mzungu (white person) really likes to have meetings with people. I was getting to know the work of the Anglicans, the Catholics, and the Lutherans in the area. I was hearing about the outreach of the AIDS Control Office, the small community NGOs, the British Voluntary Service worker, and the role the schools played. I got to know FADECO and WOMEDA but not yet Mavuno – all of which would come to play key roles in Amizade’s growing relationships in the region.

One day a year later I was there with students. We had plans to cooperate with FADECO – the Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation – on a series of projects, including brochure and website development for this local nonprofit. That was all going fine enough, but there were a few bumps and snags. As I was walking down the red-dirt street one day, the director of the women’s emancipation and development agency, WOMEDA, approached me with excitement and said, “Eric – do you know how to do evaluation!?” I was just finishing up a doctorate that focused on applied development studies so, indeed I did, I told him.

He grabbed my hand with excitement. And I really mean that – in Tanzania and through much of East Africa and the Middle East men who are friends hold hands. It is a completely platonic and masculine gesture. So he grabbed my hand and we began walking down the street toward his office. US AID – this is the US Agency for International Development – had told him they had heard good things about WOMEDA’s work, but they could not fund WOMEDA with a grant unless it could show that it did evaluation. And so in that July of 2007 I worked with my students and we reorganized our class and time around how to evaluate WOMEDA’s work.

First, we needed to better understand what WOMEDA did for women’s and children’s rights, and why. We arranged a number of open-ended interviews with the women they represented. These women talked about their husbands kicking them off their land as they went after more and younger wives, about being literally pushed out of the home and away from shared resources, and about abuse. Everyone we talked with – and that summer we talked with more than 30 individual women – everyone spoke about being hit in their homes. And they would come to WOMEDA because they heard WOMEDA would help them represent their cases before the Tanzanian courts. The Tanzanian constitution does recognize women’s equal standing and women’s right to hold property, but that equality before the law is often only enforced if someone explicitly fights for it.

We were compelled by these stories, but still uncertain whether USAID would count this considerable qualitative data as the kind of evaluation it needed. And then one of my students made a brilliant connection. She heard someone – in an interview – mention signing in at the sign-in book. AHA! – she thought – there’s a sign-in book. In other words, data. For four years the women visiting WOMEDA had signed-in with their name, their home village, and the reason they were visiting. And here’s the real shocker, in an area where most people walk, some people have bikes, many people hitch rides, but very, very few people have cars, the AVERAGE distance that a woman traveled to reach WOMEDA was 23 miles. So in a space where the only transit you can truly count on is your own legs, these women made the decision that rights representation was important enough to cover an average of 23 miles to arrive at WOMEDA.

This made it into our evaluation, along with the women’s stories. WOMEDA used the evaluation as part of their grant application. They got funding for the next three years as a direct result.

As you may have noticed, this last story has a somewhat different shape than the preceding two. In Northern Ireland the mere presence of people who wished to serve created a different kind of dialogue space – and in the Diné Nation a desire to serve is turned toward an effort to hear, to listen, and to be. Now in each of those two stories the listening does turn toward service. Listening and humility turn experiences toward reconciliation in Northern Ireland and opportunities to cooperate directly with Diné families and communities in the Southwest.  Yet in Tanzania the service provided looks much more like a conventional product of service and community development.

This points toward what might be – at least in our fast and hurried culture – what might be one of the most surprising results of working into humility, listening, and deliberate slowing down. And that result is effectiveness.

Listening humbly makes you more empathic, it makes you more engaged, and importantly it also makes you more EFFECTIVE.

This is not simply me talking from a place of my own stories. This is prominent Development Theorist and activist Michael Edwards’ call for personal revolution to feed social transformation. It comes in a long tradition of visionary leaders – Freire, Gandhi, King, and others – who show us that we must change ourselves if we wish to achieve greater justice in our communities. If we cannot see, hear, and understand the strengths in communities where we wish to serve, we do no service. If we cannot hear community members’ prescriptions for how they wish to see their communities develop, we do no service. But we can be of service when we transform ourselves into humble listeners and partners in community-driven change.

I opened with a poem that suggested,

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

There are historic – absolutely historic – shifts that have come about because people listened and cooperated. But there are also many wretched examples of people – even people working to “do good” who have not taken the time to listen, to sink into a space of humility, and to see others as the full humans that they are. As I draw near closing I’m going to now share a poem that paints an all-too-vivid picture of that world in which we do not take the time to see the full humanity and possibility in every human with whom we interact. It’s by the Uruguayan Poet Eduardo Galeano and it’s called The Nobodies.

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream
of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will
suddenly rain down on them- will rain down in buckets. But
good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter
how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is
tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or
start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The
nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits,
dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the
police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them

Our first step, in any effort to make the world more just – to start walking this path toward an as-yet-unimagined tomorrow, is to see the full humanity in every person and – especially if we try to serve – to listen carefully to them, to be humble in relation to them, and to act only after hearing from them that these actions are desired and will help build the capacity of their communities.

Humility does not mean complete relativity. It suggests an ongoing acknowledgement that I have something to learn from everyone around me. Our culture has done so much to prop up experts and expertise, so much to say that formal education makes people smarter than experience alone. This means that particularly people who are coming from educated spaces must be vigilant about listening and humility as first steps toward anything that could approach service or positive community contribution.

I have given you three of my own experiences – from Northern Ireland, The Navajo Nation, and Tanzania – to illustrate the role of humble listening in positive change and global development. And I’ll offer just one more, not my own. It’s amply documented so you can literally go read the book if you’re interested. This is the story of Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti and elsewhere around the world.

Farmer is a medical doctor and anthropologist who was working in Haiti in the 90s and noticed that the medical establishment kept blaming Haitians for failing to complete their Tuberculosis treatment regiments. They said the Haitians were too ignorant or too superstitious. They said they believed in voodoo and black magic and didn’t understand western medicine. Farmer decided to ask the Haitians why they didn’t complete their treatment regiments.

I want to pause to share just how radical this was. All of the wisdom of Western Medicine had a solution, it worked elsewhere, and it didn’t work for Haitians. So clearly – it was the Haitians fault! That is, at least, what everyone saw. Farmer wondered if there was more to it.

And so Farmer organized health workers to go out into rural villages and ask Haitians about these treatment regiments. What they said was simple and shocking. They were frequently the sole providers for their families. They were so precariously perched on the edge of hunger that when they did not work their families would not eat. So as soon as they felt better after the first or second round of treatments, they would go back to work.

Their treatments could often be completed after three clinic visits, but they had to choose – complete the regiment or feed the kids. They often fed the kids. And, having taken a risk, they often then died. About 45% of patients were successfully overcoming the disease at that point.

So Farmer went straight at the problem. He told patients his clinic would cover the cost of transportation to the clinic and labor time lost if they came for the final treatments. They did. In the first trial of this commitment, they had a 100% recovery rate. Since then, literally millions of lives have been saved rather than lost as this approach to treatment – which recognizes and addresses structural economic pressures patients face – has spread beyond Haiti and around the world. And this is not a reflection of Farmer’s medical genius. It is a reflection of his genius as a listener.

When you see injustice, your heart cries out. You want the world to be better. And it can be. But our social improvements, which we so often attribute to major actions, much more frequently come through the eloquence of listening well.

So listen to what your heart is telling you about needing to do something.

Then look at history – see the shambles left by so many people attempting good action. And start a conversation. Listen to people in situations that concern you. Look at your own life and heart and work.

Don’t use examples of bad philanthropy as an excuse not to engage. Use them as a motivator to engage thoughtfully.

I have yet to meet a person who does not wish to create a more beautiful tomorrow. We simply must get better at listening to one another as we engage that process.

Thank you for listening to these three stories – and what I think is the lesson from them – tonight.

*As a vitally important aside, since 2006, I have become – along with the rest of the international development community – increasingly aware of the perverse incentives relating to such orphanage projects in particular, so I’m especially pleased that the partnership-oriented development projects shared above emerged as they did.

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Eric Hartman is Co-founder and Editor of criticalservicelearning.org. He recently received the Early Career Research Award from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. He was also awarded the 4 under 40 Impact Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, recognizing his work developing evidence-based curricula to advance global citizenship and for his leadership as Executive Director of Amizade Global Service-Learning from 2007-10. Through Amizade, where he currently serves on the Board of Directors, he has been fortunate to support community-driven development in Bolivia, Jamaica, the Navajo Nation, Tanzania, and several other locations around the world. This work has led his research to focus on Fair Trade Learning, a conceptualization of educational exchange that prioritizes partnership, reciprocity, and transparency.