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I’m now in my ninety-third year and having survived a war and a dozen trips to distant places, I pause to review some of what I’ve learned about solving other peoples problems. Here are a couple of examples.

In Manaus, Brazil I was tasked with aiding 4,200 Lepers who, I was told, were so poor that they were reduced to eating garbage. A charitable organization in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota had been raising money for them for years, and a benevolent group in Bar Harbor, Maine enlisted me to perhaps establish an aquaculture program to alleviate their grinding poverty. So I went to Florida to board a once weekly airplane flight to Manaus, Brasil. There I would actually visit the Leper Colony on the Rio Negro, 800 miles up the mighty Amazon from the Atlantic Ocean. I found it to be as it was described, precisely located exactly where I had been told it was. The only snag was that in the seven days that I was allocated, even with the help of officials and academia and taxi drivers, I could find only two Lepers. The other 4,198 Lepers were completely and absolutely missing. They had been gone from the “colony” for forty or so years I was told. It seems that Leprosy is not contagious when treated with a modern drug, and so these people were no longer a vector for the disease. As a result, they were no longer isolated, but were accepted back into society.

Make no mistake, in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota that charitable organization was still collecting money for a non-functioning Leper Colony in Manaus, Brazil. The buildings were still there, but the Lepers were all gone. Oh yes, those two Lepers that I did find; one was driving a school bus and the other was at his home tending his garden. I spoke cordially with both. It was difficult because I spoke only Spanish and they both spoke only Portuguese – but I did verify – they both had been patients there long ago.

For another example, a Roman Catholic Bishop half a world away in Kerala, India, was visiting the United States to raise funds to help his people in a small city on the shore of the Arabian Sea. The rice, fish and coconuts that these people had relied on for centuries had all failed and the community was really and truly destitute. As in Brazil, I was enlisted to try to alleviate poverty. The Bishop had been advised by some laymen in his council that the solution would be found by getting funding from Americans for the purchase of a mangrove swamp that could be made into a shrimp grow-out farm. The trouble with the plan is that very poor people can’t afford to buy shrimp. So the farmed shrimp would be marketed. Sadly, in that part of the world, the market was the domain of the men, and the value of the product would be greatly diluted by alcohol, drugs and electronic novelties. Not much benefit would trickle down to feed hungry children. This is not something spelled out in aquaculture texts, but it is a fact. It took about a week there for me to also realize that the shrimp scheme was really a scam to use American money to buy mangrove swamps to the profit of some Indian businessmen. Also there would be the environmental loss to all the people who lived near the shore. The mangroves protected the shore from storms and flooding. Later, I learned that the only continuous source for the baby shrimp – the only available hatchery – was not operating and might not ever operate. Without a constant supply of baby shrimp, no intensive grow-out aquaculture of shrimp is possible. Even the Bishop didn’t know any of that. It took someone with the knowledge and without bias or financial stake to see the whole picture, before proposing a solution. In this case, I chose tilapia to be raised by the women in backyard ponds, and fed to the children without the overhead costs inherent in an Indian small town market economy.

Again, the problem could not possibly be solved by a think tank thousands of miles away from the tangled details and ramifications of an ancient culture that was set in its ways. It needed someone knowledgable with mud between their toes. I’ve come to conclude that money alone will alleviate a problem like a train wreck or a fire, or a sudden epidemic, but chronic disease, poverty, long term cultural strictures or oppression needs a long term commitment with human relationships. Money alone won’t do the job.

M F Roberts