What is something worth?

I had an interesting discussion with our Central African director yesterday. There is a phenomenon that takes places in the market place here, as in other countries, where by the colour of your skin determines the price you will pay. Call it the ‘foreigner’s tax’ or the ‘price of being white’, the foreigner will always pay more than the local, even when the foreigner knows the local price. This drives Benoit crazy, as I realized during our discussion. The fault, however, is not necessarily the merchants, as much as it is the fault of the foreigner. We are too soft, we don’t fight for the ‘right’ price and we are easily swayed by compassion. Or perhaps we should pay more; we have more money than most people we meet and perhaps it is part of our community service, our way of showing compassion. After all, how does one put a value to an avocado, a bolt of fabric or kilogram of fish?

Here is the catch though. What I pay, out of my apparent abundance of cash, will eventually come back to bite me, or at least the programs that we set up as foreigners, with the eventual desire to leave in the hands of the locals. Let me give an example. If a local NGO is established with the help of an American, and the American is the current director of the NGO and all of the funding comes from America, it looks, for all intents and purposes, as an American NGO. And, I suppose, it is in most senses. So when the NGO needs to buy building materials, or seeds or any other number of things, the American pays the foreigner price, which, the American concedes, he can afford. The long term goal of the NGO, however, is for it to become entirely run by Central Africans, including finding local sources of funding or self-funding through various enterprises of the NGO. The NGO though, has been set up for budgetary failure because it failed to assert itself as a local NGO from the start. The community has accepted that the NGO will pay higher than normal wages for labour and will pay more for any goods it needs to purchase. This will affect the NGO’s ability to serve the community as it will have fewer funds available for its activities as they get eaten up in other expenditures. Out of our compassion we have made it more difficult for those we sought to help in the first place.

I am convinced that if we spent more time thinking about the consequences of our actions and less time getting down to the business of doing, we would be able to foresee how some of our decisions can bring about more harm than good. If we do not learn from the mistakes of the past how can we expect anything different in the future?