What tomato-loving hippos can teach us about supporting fire-ravaged communities

If you’re about to load up your car with donated goods and head to somewhere you think needs you – please stop a moment and listen to my podcast with Gopinath Parayil.  Gopi knows a hell of a lot more about working with communities in distress than most people.  And we, as well as those heading up international development orgs, should hear his message loud and clear.

What assumptions are you making about the community?

Listening and asking (communities and yourself!) should always be your first step. Through this process, you might discover that staying home is actually more helpful than getting out there. That’s a tough thing to hear, especially when every instinct we have is telling us to be there, to help communities on the ground.

But sometimes this desire is more about what we need than what the community needs. There’s so much we can do without actually taking up space and resources on location – everything from raising much needed funds to knitting blankets for koalas.

With extensive experience in palliative care and natural disaster response, Gopi knows all about working with communities in need. And the lessons he’s learned along the way are valuable for all of us.

But first, to those tomato-loving hippos. Sustainable development expert Ernesto Sirolli tells a story on the TED stage about travelling to Zambia in the 1970s to teach locals about how to plant beautiful Italian tomatoes in a valley by the Zambezi river. Sirolli and his fellow development workers were astounded that these communities weren’t practicing agriculture on such fertile land and patted themselves on the back for imparting their wisdom on the community. They soon found out locals weren’t planting yummy fruits and veg. When the tomatoes were perfectly ripe, overnight they were visited by 200 hippos who scoffed the lot.

When the experts asked the community why they hadn’t been told about the hippos, the answer was very telling. “You never asked.”

Gopi tells us that effective leadership requires us to stop thinking of ourselves as community leaders and thinking of ourselves as co-creators. Listening should be the first thing you do. It’s an important part of making sure we don’t undermine the people we are trying to support. This idea is backed up by diversity and inclusion expert Sheree Atcheson who reminds us that ‘recognising privilege and [using] it to amplify underrepresented voices’ is something we can all do to make our communities more inclusive.

The hungry hippo story brings us nicely to another Gopi passion – storytelling.

Humans are hardwired to love stories, and as public policy professors Deserai Crow and Michael Jones tell us, stories are how we ‘understand the world’. We can even track the impact of stories in the human brain.

Behavioural psychologist Dr Susan Weinschenk has demonstrated when we are presented with raw facts, only the word-processing and listening centres of our brains are activated. However, when we hear a story we experience additional brain activity in the areas we’d expect to be activated if we were actually living the experience ourselves.

I think we all recognise that it can be hard to stay awake during a slide show of pure dot points and data. But if you tell a good story, your audience won’t just stay awake, they’ll be much more likely to remember what you’ve told them! It’s ‘sticky’ information, and valuable because of its longevity.

But we need to ensure that we are sharing the right stories.  Those which empower communities and show them at their best even in during times of adversity.  Novelist Chimamanda Adichie warns us that there is a danger in the stereotypes that a single story can create.  Adichie cautions that when we only tell stories of catastrophe, we limit our capacity for empathy. She and Gopi both believe in the importance of telling stories that communicate the tenacity and innovation of communities who, historically, have been associated with stories of disaster and helplessness.  This is another part of that whole don’t-accidentally-undermine-communities-by trying-to-help-them thing.

My final takeaway from Gopi is around resilience and how to cultivate, not stifle, it.

Taking a paternalistic approach is not only unhelpful, but can be damaging when working with communities.

When Gopi talks about building communities’ capacity to adapt positively to challenges, hes talking about community resilience. Degan Ali, head of development agency Adeso and advocate for communities driving their own development, tells us that local communities have the understanding and lived experience to bring about sustainable change. She urges us to remember that when we are trying to help communities, we need to put local knowledge first and build, not bar, community resilience.

If outsiders act in a parental role - or act as an authority as Ernesto initially did with his tomatoes- when it comes to communities they want to serve by making assumptions about what’s best for them, it might do more harm than good. Much better to focus on supporting (and funding) community led initiatives to build creative and sustainable solutions initiated by the communities themselves, who can then tackle problems based on local knowledge and needs.

When I spoke to Gopi, the worst of the bushfires hadn’t happened. As I watched the disaster unfold, our conversation resonated so much with me, and I hope in some small way we can help those communities move forward, and learn from their resilience.

So, delving into what I found fascinating in this podcast, here are my three community-building takeaways from Gopi.

1.     Beware of the hippos - what assumptions are you making about the community? Listening and asking questions should always be the first step and might help you save your tomatoes!

2.     Spin a good yarn - finding a powerful and empowering story is a great way to tap into empathy by communicating the full picture.

3.     Focus on community-led initiatives - building long term resilience supports creative and sustainable communities who are then better able to tackle problems based on local knowledge and needs.

This is all information I’m using on a daily basis to help build the communities within UNSW, because #belonging is better. 

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