Reflection-Accompaniment As Policy

Dr. Paul Farmer's Harvard commencement speech concerns the relevance of his experience with a nonprofit association to graduate students who would likely come to associate with more who are to/should reap the benefits that nonprofits give. These students would surround themselves with those who have experienced life in circumstances that people have a history of misinterpreting and sometimes not wanting to understand. The lessons that Farmer provides are to help these students to consider how to best associate with them.

In my first training sessions with The Borgen Project, there was a short video concerning one of the first set of points that he brings up. While there exists the resources to come up with better solutions to existing problems (specifically poverty), responses are not usually the most appropriate. Rather, they are possibly the least expensive. Perhaps those who have the resources do not know the full potential of what they have and are equally not well informed about the situation that those tools need to be used to combat. Perhaps people want to come up with a quick "silver bullet" solution in a matter of minutes or days when what is truly needed is a long-term result that could take years to formulate. Every now and then, a so-called "silver bullet" answer can become part of a problem or create a vicious cycle of new problems.

As such, one of the first things a volunteer for The Borgen Project must learn is that we are not experts on the lives and cultures of everyone in the world who might benefit from our help and that finding long terms solutions to the problems that they face would mean actively educating ourselves on those cultures.

When discussing the logistics of how a nonprofit operates [as we as a class have done] and then zooming out to the "practice" of those logistics, Farmer advocates accompaniment as the ideal position to be in. This means actively working with others as opposed to preaching to them what we think is the "correct" way of living. Throughout history and in all disciplines, cultural groups have fallen into the trap of assuming answers that don't exist. For example, telling someone with clinical depression to "just cheer up" is just dismissive and ill-informed. It can be equally as offensive and unrealistic to tell someone to "just get a job and they'll be fine." The truth is, not everyone has the assets to do that. So, the ideal solution that Farmer proposes is accompaniment. One way this can be achieved through education and the knowledge that we are not experts on other people's lives.