i remember someone who did a lot of aid work in africa said something similar - various ngo's would come to a village and build stuff and the locals weren't int

i remember someone who did a lot of aid work in africa said something similar - various ngo's would come to a village and build stuff and the locals weren't interested - have heard similar in the amazon. for instance someone had built communal latrines which were unused. his starting point was asking the villagers what they wanted to do they said "the chiefs house is a mess" - so they worked on that first, then built individual latrines for each house and made other improvements - they were able to do this by finding out what the locals wanted and working on that, if he'd just gone and built a bunch of stuff that he wanted to he would have been much less successful.