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177 On my previous trip to Salvador, I had gone to an exhibition put on by a local aid group. It featured lovely photos taken by street children and young people who worked on the streets. The aid group had given the children cameras and then presented the best, in middle-class terms, of what they shot. As I walked around this exhibit, I grew increasingly uncomfortable and wasn’t sure why. Only later did I understand. A middle-class aid agency had put on the exhibition. They kept all control firmly in their hands, hierarchies still in place. They gave middle-class tools (cameras) to children, adult to child, wealthy to poor. They taught the children to use these cameras just enough for the exhibition, but the real knowledge remained with the middleclass . The core message of the exhibition was, “My, how incredible it is that these poor children can use our middle class tools and make something lovely. Who would have expected that?” The smell of patronage was so thick I could taste it. I began to think about the giving away of power. Generosity in terms of the donation of material things is comparatively easy. We keep the power because we never give away things we really think we need, and because through giving we increase our social power. We do nothing to destabilize the status quo. Now that Bahia Street was more established (in other people’s eyes, at least), it seemed that everyone wanted to talk with me about their own project for social reform among some economically impoverished group of people. They all wanted to be directly involved in the project in the other country. This was, of course, the flashy, exciting part. It was also where they felt powerful. One woman came to talk with me about an education project she wanted to do in Ecuador. On a visit she’d made there, she had seen the hardship people suffered and wanted to help. Her plan was to go to Ecuador and write the curriculum for a school’s program—a school she would build and control. I suggested that she have people there write the curriculum, but she said she did not want to do that, as she had many ideas about what would work nineteen power and presence 178 dance lest we all fall down to educate the people there. I suggested that perhaps the people there understood what would work in the curriculum better than she did. She said she didn’t feel that to be true. Finally, I suggested that she could organize a forum where the people there, who were experts in the area, could give their ideas. She could offer suggestions for a curriculum that they would write.Then the local people would control it, being the teachers, etc. The woman said, no, she didn’t want to do that. Finally, she admitted that she wanted to control it because she wanted to write the curriculum and to set up the school because she thought this would be fun. And, after more conversation, she also realized and admitted that she did want to be known as the person doing this, to get the accolades for the project, and for people there to look up to her. In the end I said, well, at least she needed to be clear why she was doing what she was doing, that it was not really for others, but mostly for herself. This is a central difficulty: people start nonprofits for all kinds of reasons, and, generally, the primary reason is not that they want to change the world. Perhaps that is what they think they want to do when they start, but individual development aid projects have a great deal to do with personal insecurity and the desire for power. It is very clearly present in evangelical groups who go to areas, purporting to do “charitable” work, but who take with them a concrete vision of a world order that they want to impress upon those they encounter. Inherent in this approach is the desire for control. They want these people, who are of another religion and another lifestyle, to change their lifestyle and change their religion for one in which the evangelist has cultural— and spiritual—control. And, of course, the sources of power lie in the wealthy, and often white, first-class societies. For those participating in secular development aid projects, this centrality of control is not so...

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