The Speed of CHE

Talk about a meeting that gave such obvious signs of God’s provision but also doses of sobering realities! We were so excited to discover a man from our partner church who has been using Community Health Evangelism (CHE) practices for the past 12 years. This is exactly the method that we’re trying to help the church use with its village evangelists, so now we have a great resource who has lots of training and a ton of experience in this exact context. When he had a chance to meet last week, we seized the opportunity to pick his brain for a day and a half. He’s also excited to help in any way he can because he’s seen the truth of the CHE principles and the lasting impact they can have. However, the dose of reality starts with the fact that there’s no money in CHE, and so he’s not actually practicing CHE right now because a man with his education and experience can get a good paying job with a big Christian NGO that works with government funding to do health education on a huge scale. But also he freely admits that there’s hardly any lasting impact to what he is doing now, whereas he can still see the fruit of what he did 10 years ago with CHE. And the success he has had in the mass health education he leads now is only localized to his area where he has borrowed the ideas of CHE as much as possible for a job that entails handing things out to people for free. 

The other dose of reality is the main theme that came out of our meeting. Slow down. The CHE method is all about giving people the training to figure out how to solve their own problems. But one of the key principles is that even in the training you don’t tell people what to do, you only ask the questions that can help them discover, "own" the ideas, and let them decide they really want to do the solutions they’ve come up with. Hence, you really have to move at the speed of the people in the village, how fast they are understanding things themselves, how fast they are interested in things no matter if you can see they’d really be helpful. The story that still blows me away is from one village this man visited early in his CHE work. He and a fellow CHE evangelists did one of the first CHE lessons that sets the groundwork and lets people understand what CHE is and why they would want to follow this way. It’s a story about two people trying to cross a river and then a stranger comes and tries different methods of helping. The CHE way is to then ask everyone what they heard, what they think about it, and what is means for them. But everyone in the village gave answers that showed they didn’t understand the fullness of the story. They only heard it telling that they needed someone to come and help them. So, the evangelists came back the next night and told the same story and asked again for more ideas. But they just heard the same answers again. This went on for three weeks of visiting and telling this story, waiting for someone to tell them the full meaning. Finally, an old man excitedly told them that he had been thinking about their story and had come to understand that it was like the Chinese proverb that giving a man a fish will only help him for one day but helping the man learn to fish will give him what he needs for a lifetime. Then other people in the village started coming up with similar proverbs and stories that show this truth. Afterward the evangelists knew this was a place they could go forward with CHE because the people had themselves discovered the key idea and gotten excited about how true it was. This was a very pure attempt to follow the slow, relational approach of CHE, which doesn’t necessarily follow a time-line on a project proposal…

-- El Padre