Honest Abe and behavior change

One of the aims of the Peace Corps volunteer is to facilitate, broadly put, behavior change. This ranges from things like teaching practices to healthy living (specifically, in Lesotho, with respect to HIV/AIDS). I think that people can sometimes forget just how slow behavior change happens, and get frustrated when education doesn’t immediately correct the problem. When you know which lifestyle changes are required to avoid a major health problem and see that these changes are, in your opinion, self-evidently in the target group’s best interests, it’s difficult to recognize that information is almost never, in and of itself, enough.

Think how long it took for percentages of people who smoke cigarettes after the Surgeon General provided irrefutable proof that smoking causes lung cancer. Think how many people still smoke. Think about the resistance to wearing seat belts, and think about the fact that residents of New Hampshire are not required to wear them after the age of 18.

Despite overwhelming statistical evidence that these things (smoking, not wearing seat-belts, risky sexual behaviors) can lead to death, people still do them. This is because while statistics and facts and figures can provide a very useful framework for understanding the world, they are not a part of day-to-day life. You don’t sit next to a percentage in the front seat of your car and you don’t share a pack of cigarettes with a bar graph.

Real behavior change happens when you notice a difference of behavior between you and your friends, you and your family members, you and a person you admire. Seeing the statistic that around 23% of adults in Lesotho have HIV/AIDS? Fine. Hearing your teacher tell you the ABCs (Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise)? Good. Having a frank talk with a parent, or an older brother or sister, about your future and how that might be affected by contracting AIDS? Great. Hearing your best friend say that he would never have unprotected sex, or would never have multiple partners? Terrific.

This, I think, can be one of the real strengths of Peace Corps Volunteers; the mission of Peace Corps has always been to promote friendship and peace. Provided you are not constantly heckling people with facts about HIV and AIDS, or shooting judgmental looks at people who drink beer and smoke cigarettes, your community will be able to see you as what you are: just another person. Eventually, these topics will come up on their own, and when or if people do ask your opinion, they will ask it not looking for your view as a Peace Corps Volunteer or a development worker or a foreigner, but as the person they’ve seen lugging water buckets back from the tap, or the person they know is teaching their children, or perhaps even the person they’ve checked in on while he was too sick to leave his rondavel and was probably not too fun to be around. Or maybe not. Behavior change is very, very slow.

I have been reading a book called The Essential Abraham Lincoln (published in a series called “Library of Freedom,” which raises several important questions. Chief among them: should I start referring to my rondavel as the Library of Freedom and see if it sticks?). This is a collection of speeches, letters, and proclamations, and I am enjoying it a lot and may be including a few quotations from Mr. Lincoln in my coming blog posts. For now, I want to leave you with a quote from a speech he gave to a Temperance Society early in his career back in Springfield.

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and though you throw it with more than herculean force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a  rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interests.