Poverty and high death rates are not separate phenomena to be separately attacked. They are one comprehensive phenomenon which must be cured all together. A Central American medical doctor, who after studying in the United States went home to assist his people, offers a graphic example. So I tried to educate people about how to care for the children. But I had to learn to speak in nontechnical language and much of what I was trying to accomplish depended on working with literate people which wasn't the situation.
Successful development is the result of a comprehensive and dynamic process.
The complex inter-relatedness and mutual interdependence of the economic, social, technical, institutional, and cultural variables in a community require that they all be dealt with simultaneously. If effective change is to occur, no variable can be ignored and no variable can be dealt with separately. By attacking all the problems systematically, and by effectively dealing with all the barriers to development, the hope, confidence and motivation of local people can be unleashed and extraordinary results achieved. In many communities where Global Volunteers has been invited to work, volunteers are engaged in a variety of projects that address a wide range of issues. In other communities, we are only asked to work on one project, such as teaching English.