And she RAMBLES!...

This week, Orphanage Outreach put on a camp in “Batey Isabella” each afternoon. A batey is a gated farming community, usually very poverty-stricken, with little access to good drinking water and almost no contact with the outside world.

I got an opportunity to train a group of volunteers how to run the English station, which—out of all the things I’ve seen here—may have been the most interesting experience I’ve encountered yet in the Dominican Republic. Volunteers come in all shapes and sizes, both literally and figuratively. Everyone is coming from a different perspective, a different frame of reference. Different ideas, different opinions, different personalities, different leadership styles, different motivations and/or incentives to do a week-long trip like this, and vastly different styles of communication. The four volunteers I worked with all had incredibly strong personalities. Muy muy muy fuerte. All, very passionate people: enthusiastic, excited, wanting to make a difference. At first, I thought planning for camp would be a breeze.

Let’s just say…I thought wrong.

On Monday, we basically fell flat on our faces. Like hard-core, bombed it. Because our personalities clashed so much, we couldn’t plan anything to save our lives. Haha, it’s almost funny in retrospect to think how horribly that first day went. I was going through any and every excuse that could possibly get me out of this particular group.

Well, today is Thursday. To everyone’s shock and amazement, we successfully completed this week of camp alive, with just a few scratches and bruises (not to mention 17 brand-new mosquito bites…). I really got an incredible opportunity to see change and growth in group dynamics in a way that highlighted each person’s strengths. Monday night after camp, we re-grouped to address the conflict and re-organize the structure of our station. By God’s grace (no joke) we learned how to work together, and I was able to learn the difference between enabling people and being lazy or apathetic. Let me explain. Because it was so difficult at times, I really just wanted to throw the towel in and let these four volunteers literally slit each other’s throats. But I just couldn’t do that at the expense of the kids who could truly benefit from this camp. On the other hand, it was also easy for me to just do everything myself. I’ve done it before; I know what’s best, so I can do it better, right?

Wrong again.

Empowerment is such a fragile balance. It is an important concept when doing social work, business, ministry, teaching, and even raising children. Helping a person or group of people in a way (or to the extent) that it cripples them in the long-run is not good. It forces a life-long dependency of this person or these people on you, meanwhile making yourself feel good. This is what we call in social work, enabling someone. However, you cannot then, go to the other extreme and provide zero guidance, zero instruction, zero tools, and expect this person or people to flourish; it’s simply not realistic. Empowerment is that fine line somewhere between enablement and apathy.

This past week, let’s just say I got plenty of practice with this concept.