LIFESAVING HEART SURGERIES FOR IRAQI CHILDREN IN PURSUIT OF PEACE BETWEEN COMMUNITIES AT ODDS.
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How I Blew It With Family Participation
December 22, 2009 by Jeremy
Photo: Matt Addington
The broader coalition of groups working to end this backlog of sick Iraqi children met today - and I blew it. In the meeting with international partners and local healthcare professionals I made a statement in my closing argument that I got totally wrong. The worst part is, because it was my closing argument, I ended with a particular oomfph that conveyed how I thought I had gotten it especially right.
Until our Family Services Director (and my wife, Jessica) corrected me over lunch.
I was making a case to the entire group for encouraging family participation financially. To drive my point home, I said “and by doing so, we will reduce our costs per child so that we can all send a lot more kids to surgery. And obviously, that’s the bottom line for all of us.”
I botched it! Sending more kids to surgery has never been our bottom line!
I stand by the mission of the Preemptive Love Coalition to eradicate the backlog of thousands of Iraqi children waiting in line for life-saving heart surgery, but sending more kids is not a singular bottom line. And, in spite of my rousing speech, hopefully it never will be.
My wife was right when she corrected me: You should have said that family participation subverts the Iraqi culture of dependence and creates buy-in among families so that they fully and meticulously participate in the after-care of their children per doctor’s orders.
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Photo: Matt Addington
The biggest challenges in Iraq are not financial or infrastructural. There is plenty of money available to create the infrastructure needed (excepting the crony-ism and embezzlement). The biggest challenge facing Iraq is one of vision and values; they are questions of personal and communal character.
If the money were released today into the society to solve all its woes, woes would likely proliferate. The character and values needed to handle such an influx of finances, technology, and education cannot be set up over night like so many mosques.
What I should have said in that meeting is that our bottom line is the development of character and the transformation of communal values. We don’t do it in an imperialistic “we know better than you” sort of way. But with every heart surgery we facilitate, there is an accompanying transformation for which we work: will the character of this family be significantly affected by cooperating with “The Other” to save their own child’s life? Will participating in the solution create a long-term legacy of change that out lives our own foreign presence here?
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“Family participation subverts cultures of dependence and creates buy-in, being the only system with the explosive potential to transform societies into communities who see life as an opportunity and a gift rather than a right and a given.” — Jessica Courtney |
If nothing else, this legacy of change is growing in the local employees we train and in whom we nurture the freedom to dream up and pursue “local solutions to local problems.”
Too often in Iraq people show up in any number of proverbial “bread lines” waiting for this month’s hand-out. The country is shackled by a dehumanizing form of socialism that parades itself around as government generosity.
So even though it is tremendously counter-cultural — both in Iraqi culture and often in the culture of charitable organizations — this is our bottom line for requiring family participation. It’s not primarily to send more kids to surgery, as though the development aid we seek to contribute was primarily an issue of goods and services. No, we require family participation because it has the explosive potential to transform societies from those who do not own their problems, their solutions, and the continual maintenance and upgrading of their systems into societies - even communities - who see life as an opportunity and a gift rather than a right and a given.
Requiring local participation (familial, communal, etc) has a way of taking foreigners off the High Horse of the Hero. People do not look at us as saviors or praise us as such. No, we’re probably seen more like parents making their kids eat broccoli because it’s “good for them.”
Developing “local solutions to local problems” will - without a doubt - create a more robust, technologically adept, and character-driven society than the dumbing down of import/export. So while we remain engaged in exporting children for life-saving surgeries outside the country, and while we seek to ramp up the importing of foreign health care professionals, we always do so with the long-term in view. And we do it so as to create local transformation and not merely the checking off of more boxes on our program report cards.
Yours,
Jeremy Courtney
Executive Director
Preemptive Love Coalition
See More on Our Local Solutions to Local Problems:
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @Jeremy_Courtney. |
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