Notes About Foreign Assistance
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009The following is an quoted from the book “Mountain Beyond Mountains:”
“Farmer (Paul) was learning about the great importance of water to public health, and he was conceiving a great fondness for technology in general, also scorn for ‘the Luddite trap.’ He liked to illustrate the meaning of that phrase with the story of the time when he came back to Cange (Haiti) from Harvard and found that Pere Lafontant had overseen the construction of thirty fine-looking concrete latrines, scattered through the village. ‘But,’ Farmer asked, ‘are they appropriate technology?’ He’d picked up the term in a class at the Harvard School of Public Health. As a rule, it meant that one should use only the simplest technologies required to do a job.
