September 01, 2001
Reconciliation trip finds servant leadership in Bolivia
Each day, the principles of servant leadership greet me as I enter my office. A simple piece of white paper hangs on my bulletin board, reminding me of them: Listening. Empathy. Commitment to the growth of people. Building Community. Awareness. And the list goes on. In my work with the Ethics and Servant Leadership program, I am often in conversation with students about these principles—their meanings, their applications, their limitations. While we try to ground these principles in concrete examples from all sectors of professional life, we rarely have the opportunity to observe first-hand situations in which servant leadership is practiced.
Earlier this summer, I witnessed servant leadership in action. In May, I had the distinct privilege of helping to lead a group of 12 Emory students, faculty, and staff on a two-week trip to Bolivia. Our trip was one of this summer’s “Journeys of Reconciliation,” a program sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Chapel and Religious Life at Emory. The mission of the Journeys program is “to provide members of the Emory community the opportunity to cultivate relationships of education, partnership, service, and friendship with communities around the world.” In Bolivia, we did exactly that.
Our team worked with Andean Rural Health Care (ARHC), a non-profit organization that provides preventative and curative health care to the underserved in various global communities, including Bolivia. With a commitment to enabling and empowering those they serve, ARHC takes a community-based approach in which all projects are headed by local doctors and staffed by local health care workers. In Bolivia, this local group is the Consejo de Salud Rural Andino (CSRA). CSRA focuses on those with the highest priority needs in the communities they serve, and in Bolivia this means pregnant women, children, and the elderly. Working together, CSRA and ARHC “bring hope through health, working through self-sustaining local partnerships in communities lacking access to basic services,” a goal outlined in ARHC’s mission statement. Ambana, the small village we visited, is one of those communities.
Nestled high in the altiplano region of the Andes, Ambana is a village with one telephone, one school, and lots of hills. People from surrounding villages walk over three hours to arrive at CSRA’s health clinic in Ambana, a journey that takes only twenty minutes by jeep. During our time there, the Emory group helped tear down an existing building at the clinic (which CSRA had outgrown) and set the foundation for a larger building. The new facility will serve as a meeting hall for educating community members on basic health issues, including water purification and nutrition. In addition to the demolition/construction work, each day several members of our group accompanied the Bolivian doctors on their home health visits in the area. On these visits, doctors weigh and measure young children, describe “home remedies” for diarrhea, and spend time getting to know their patients.
On the day I accompanied Don Ramon on his route, I was moved to see how warmly and eagerly he is received. Mothers know Don Ramon will need the large index card he has given them, the one on which he charts the progress of their children’s growth. At one home, a child has dropped below a healthy weight, so Don Ramon carefully demonstrates how much food the child should be given at each meal. Not just telling but showing, he instructs the mother using her bowl, her spoon, and in her language, Aymara, the language of the indigenous people of this area. Then, he pauses to tell us—in Spanish—what he has just told her. And so we continue in this rhythm, from household to household, observing this devoted servant leader.
Like the other doctors who work with CSRA, Don Ramon could earn more money practicing medicine in La Paz. But he and the other CSRA staff are committed to something much larger than their own financial success. They have a vision of a world in which everyone has access to health care, regardless of wealth, education, or occupation. And each day, they devote themselves to creating that world. Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” In Ambana, I saw those words come to life.
During our time in Bolivia, our Emory team embodied servant leadership as well. Unlike the other Journeys of Reconciliation, our trip included a substantial work component. The manual labor was difficult—we stacked adobe bricks, mixed cement, and unloaded truckloads of supplies and rocks. As the week progressed, more and more members of the local community joined us at the site. Working side by side, we were astutely aware of the limitations of our skills. But as the CSRA staff explained to us, it wasn’t the quality of our work that helped them most. Instead, it was our presence at the site, morning after morning, that inspired the community to participate in the project, an investment that continues long after our departure.
Over the last few years, I have come to appreciate the model of servant leadership more each day. It goes beyond a mere leadership style—it’s a way of life, a commitment to serving the highest priority needs of others, to encouraging and enabling the growth of individuals, communities, and ourselves. And, as I discovered in Bolivia, people everywhere embody its principles, even if they’ve never heard its name.
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