Poverty Cure: Jerry Sternin's Switchheath, Chip

The practical insights that I gathered after watching, Poverty Cure ( ) are: giving free resources to fix poverty is not effective, it is a Band-Aid and poverty is not solved by an outside entity telling people what to do, the solution comes from within the affected culture.
In the book SwitchHeath,Chip, the authors tell a story about the journey Jerry Sternin, took as he tried to fight malnutrition in Vietnam with the organization, Save the Children. (Heath,Chip, Heath, Dan, 2010). Sternin received no money to fix the malnutrition problem. He decided to start meeting with mothers in the communities and then had them go out and collect data on weight and height of the children. From that data, he and a team of local mothers

began to talk to the mothers who had children that appeared to be the most healthy to find out what they were doing to keep their children nourished.

They discovered that the nourished kids were fed the same amount of food, but four times a day, whereas the malnourished kids were only eating twice a day. They also discovered that the mothers were hand feeding the nourished kids versus communal style eating that the malnourished children were experiencing. That was not all, the better-nourished kids " mothers were collecting tiny shrimp and crabs from the rice paddies and mixing them in with their kid’s rice” and “tossed in sweet-potato greens, which were considered a low-class food” (Heath, Heath, 2010, p. 30). Jerry Sternin didn't share the results with the entire community but instead encouraged the local community to come up with a program that taught the people how to make the healthy food and how to space out meals. The health of the community began to change, and children soon became nourished. The important lessons of this story are that

nothing was given to these people to fix malnutrition and “most important, it was their change, something that arose from the local wisdom of the village. Sternin’s role was only to help them see that they could do it, that they could conquer malnutrition on their own” (Heath, Heath, 2010, p. 31).
As a dietitian, I see free food being given to the poor constantly, yet as the article, The Child and Adult Care Food Program: Nutrition for Both ends of the Life Cycle States, "between 2001 and 2011, the number of food-insecure seniors in America doubled to 8.4%, according to Feeding America, an anti-hunger advocacy group" (2016, p. 36). This article also states, “every day, approximately 3.3 million children and 120,000 adults consume meals and snacks funded by the Child and Adult Care Food Program, a federal nutrition assistance program administered by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service” (2016, p. 36) I think both statistics demonstrate that giving free food to people is not helping to decrease the food insecurity issue that is prevalent in our country as we watch the participation rate in these programs increase each year. We are indeed placing a Band-Aid on the real problem. Perhaps providing all these free meals and snack is hurting our youth and elderly in our country and we need to reconsider our approach to truly solving food insecurity in the United States. I often wonder if our education system offered classes in cooking, menu writing, budgeting, food safety, and how to decrease food waste could we begin to create a society that didn’t have food insecurity?
The example in the Poverty Cure ( ) that involved the eggs was the story that most caught my attention as a program that had unintended consequences.

I would guess that the people who came up with the idea had great intentions sending these people a protein source that would not cost a lot and didn’t have too many food safety issues. As an outsider, it would be hard to see that an innocent egg donation could completely dissolve the jobs of many and eliminate an entire industry. The same holds true for the second-hand clothing donations; it is almost unimaginable that giving clothes to a country would shut down their current clothing industry.
Like with the free eggs, free medical supplies appear to be a wonderful gift for people in need. As an outsider, we see an unmet demand for medical help and are eager to jump in and fix the deficit. The problem with outsiders intervening to solve a perceived the problem is that we end up hurting the people who already have a business in that community. Although the current business may not be able to keep up with all the demand, the free medical supplies that the outsider provides disrupts the good that the current vendor is doing for the country’s economy and its

people.
Often, governmental business deals are not aimed to help the little people in the country; they aim for much bigger gains for the country. The scenario presented by Hesse demonstrates that when his country had the option to receive free money from another country, his proposed service to the country wasn't attractive anymore. The result was that his company was no longer able to profit and ended up doing the work. As Hesse points out, “that’s not assistance. That’s thuggery” (2012, Poverty Cure).
The scenarios presented in the Poverty Cure did impact the way that I see humanitarian aid. I never thought about the inconsistency of donations and services. Now that I reflect, every time my church participated in a program to help a group in need, it was only for a short duration of time and the amount of the donation was not consistent. I believe that the church was told the perceived needs of the effected people, but I’m not positive that those were the real needs of the people. As this video pointed out, clothes, food and medical supplies aren’t really what the people need.
As a human resource executive, the lessons that I have learned in this assignment that would help better local communities, decrease poverty, and improve community relations is that I need to be a facilitator of change. Where ever I am, I need to let the people who are involved in the actual situation develop the solutions to their problems with me as the encourager and the one that gives them the confidence to believe in what they are about to accomplish.