Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!
When most well-intentioned aid workers hear of a problem they think they can fix, they go to work. This, Ernesto Sirolli suggests, is naïve. In this funny and ...
========== Translator: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Morton Bast Everything I do, and everything I do professionally -- my life -- has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. From 1971 to 1977 -- I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) -- I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries. I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. And I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed. Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. ...