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DiggInternational Listening
Michael Gecan answers a few questions about the challenges of listening to our neighbors on the other side of the world.
How can parishes and other groups go about listening to and establishing relationships with partners in other countries?
If the relationship is thin, or new, then the most important thing that can be done is to spend more time face-to-face, preferably overseas. How do you know how to be useful to someone if you don’t know the various pressures and opportunities and dynamics that they’re experiencing in their everyday lives? You want to be there in what I call normal life. You want to see normal challenges, the struggles. That is usually best done by a few people, then those people come back and share with others what they’ve seen.
Can the relationship and the listening be continued remotely, via email and phone?
If you are in a very deep and reciprocal relationship, and you know the ever-evolving context in the other country, then you can ask better questions about what’s needed going forward. Regular reports — short emails, updates, thoughts from the partner can be very helpful here and are very possible due to modern communications systems — are crucial. With regular updates, you can start right in the middle of the current reality. Without them, you can’t.
I don’t think ease of communication is helpful, unless it’s preceded by this building of the relationships and this learning of the environment, learning of the context.
There are many groups who can’t afford to go overseas and establish one-to-one relationships, but there are larger organizations that are doing a great deal of international work that these groups could work with. What kinds of questions would you ask such an organization, if you were considering giving your time or money to them?
What’s the ratio of people on the ground doing direct
relational work in foreign countries versus people in offices
or people in administration? What’s the ratio of money
going toward direct interactions, again, on the ground in
foreign countries versus fundraising, administration, headquarters?
And if you know people in the countries that
they’re in, any kind of feedback you can get from people on
the ground or people near the ground would be helpful.
