I came to love these one-on-one times in the car with this young brilliant person. First, he would sleep for an hour, but after that, I could count on him for some great conversation. So I got to where I would pull out my phone and ask,

Is it ok for me to record our conversation?

Then I hit record when he started talking.

On this day, as we were driving along, he said to me: 

“Mk, do you know how to keep poor people poor?” 

“No, Benson, I don’t. I can’t say I have ever had a reason to think about that question. How do you keep poor people poor?”

“Give them everything they need.”

I thought to myself: This is going to be interesting. He continued: 

“Give them food and clothes and houses. Give it to them and never ask them to do anything for it. Do this for a long time. Year after year. That way they never develop their own capacity. That way they never grow and they will always need you. They will stay dependent on you.” 

I thought to myself, I’m sure glad I am recording this right now. He was in full teacher mode and I didn’t want to miss a thing. 

“Mk, do you realize that when you met me as a young man, you saw that I came from a poor family with many brothers and sisters. You could have decided to help me by bringing us clothes and food and paying our bills each month. You could have just seen our lack, instead of seeing me as a young man with great capacity. If you had done that, where would I be today?  

Where would I be today? He asked again. I would not know my capacity to build a company and make beautiful products like this, (pointing to the Leather Bags in the back seat.) I would not be who I am today, a leader in my community and a provider for my family.”

The day I met him he had approached me on the salt flats. By this time word was getting around that there was a Blan (foreigner) in the area looking for things to be made here. He approached me respectfully and said, 

“Madam, I would like to show you something.”

Thank Heaven I didn’t blow him off. Thank Heaven I paused long enough to see. Thank heaven this time I did that. 

He then reached into his backpack and pulled out a black vinyl-covered book. The outside had designs made with rhinestones and an inlaid picture of the palace in Port Au Prince. I opened it up to see what sort of book he had recovered. It was a journal of empty pages. And the pages were sewn into the binder with great care. It was perfect and marketable, except for the rhinestones and picture of the palace part. 

So I asked him where he got it. He said he made it. I looked at the careful binding again. “You MADE this? You sewed these papers together like this.”

“Yes. Yes, I did. Would you like to buy it? Or buy many of them?”

I paused a minute and asked where he lived. Close by, two streets over, he said. 

“Can you teach others to do this?” I asked.

We gathered up money and created a small contract to have him teach an 8-week class to some of the women in the community. I also enrolled in that first class. I too wanted to learn the art of journal making. It was fascinating and really hard. There are a lot of fractions involved! 

I loved watching him one day trying to convey the idea of fractions to women who had missed that part of school. They could not imagine something smaller than one whole. I watched him pause and think. 

And then he turned the whole thing into a money problem using the local currency, which every woman in the class had been handling one way or another since childhood. They instantly got it! 

I wrote in my journal that day, real big: THIS KID IS BRILLIANT.

I still believe it.

MK

The above is Chapter 17, How to Keep Poor People Poor, from our founders book Painfully Honest The Tale of a Recovering Helper.