NZ Freephone It is now eighty years since a team of New Zealand medical volunteers arrived in a small Greek village to discover a pile of NZ dairy milk powder dumped and going to waste in the village square.
The milk powder had arrived as a result of the generosity of New Zealanders who thought they were doing the right thing.
However, the local villagers could not make sense of adding water to powder t
o make milk. Also, most of the people in that village drank only goats’ milk and could not tolerate cow’s milk. What the medical team from New Zealand had encountered was a cultural food clash.
A local Greek Orthodox priest who had lived in the village with the people before and throughout the war explained this to the team. The lesson the New Zealand medical volunteers took away was, before assuming to help, consult the locals and take your lead from them.
It was a lesson reinforced hundreds of times by returning New Zealand soldiers.
That lesson has been at the core of our mission in Christian World Service since our founding eighty years ago in 1945. Now days it’s often referred to as the “partner-led” approach to aid and development, or even more trendy at the current time is the phrase, “localisation”.
It was we in CWS who pioneered this model across New Zealand. In fact our former Prime Minister and leader of the United Nations Development Programme, Helen Clark, said of CWS.
“Its [CWS’s] formation was a response by New Zealanders offering concrete, local and practical assistance to help reconstruct the lives of those devastated by that cataclysm … This model of partnership is now accepted as good development practice and one of the underlying values of the United Nations Development Programme. CWS was a pioneer in this partner-led approach.”
This high praise from our former national leader speaks to the wonderful generosity of all kiwis, specifically those of Christian faith and especially to the wonderful community that is Christian World Service. We are very proudly one of the longest running international aid and development services in Aotearoa New Zealand – certainly the oldest faith-based agency. Our longevity can be attributed exclusively to the overwhelming Biblical values of compassion, kindness, and justice that manifest themselves in the faith we ascribe to.
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