What kind of people should AT work with? An obvious priority is to try working with the very poor. But we find out that it is difficult to communicate with them, especially in short-term assignments. Moreover, I learned in AT not to select a poor person solely because (s)he is poor, but because (s)he has some potential or human quality to offer.

Somewhere I learned about "triage," a first selection criterion used by Red Cross workers on the battlefield. Medical personnel do not touch victims who can take care of themselves, nor do they touch victims who will not make it anyway. They focus on those victims who, if taken care of, can make it to a hospital and survive. This is the only one valid criterion for AT. A second criterion for selection is the predominant commercial or political screening which is presented to us through press agents on television, radio and in newspapers, overemphasizing the opposing elements of conflict, and making us believe that entire cities or countries consist of rock-throwing young men confronting riot police.

These approaches are valid only together with a third criterion as I indicated before: AT is for creative people with a vision for a world, culture and society that places spiritual, physical and community satisfaction at the center of the universe, instead of themselves. Their attitude brings them into conflict with public opinion and even with legal systems, but that does not discourage them from going carefully ahead. When I started my Guatemalan assignment the country was torn apart by war and terror. I was encouraged to support these people and to help them to keep their visions alive. At a given time they themselves then take care of the interest of their community; they will have to be seen as the community's most valuable natural resource. Community AT workers may say "if we get persecuted and eventually killed we have to be able to say to the Lord that we did what we could."

These people helped me to see how inefficient it is, for example, to overemphasize production of fresh vegetables for consumption in wealthy North America and Europe, while their own people are suffering from malnutrition. They made me see how inefficient it is to produce and distribute drinking water and then use it for flushing urine and feces away to rivers and seas instead of returning to the soil where they come from, meanwhile buying chemical fertilizer from North America and Europe. (See also Appendix 2, B and Ref 1) Such people have become my friends and I have found them all over the globe. Caring and questioning people who understand AT as a way of life; whether rich or poor in a material sense, consider the human critical, creative mind their best natural resource.

Rich as well as poor families, for example, applied for technical assistance in constructing dry composting latrines. Some programs wanted to donate money to be used for installation of such latrines for poor families. We were not very willing to consider such programs if their donors did not see these latrines as a viable option for themselves, but only as an intermediate step for the poor, on their way to the inefficient but modern flush toilet. We tried to select the future users not by their actual state of material wealth or poverty, but by little signs in their lifestyles.

For example, guisquil is a fruit that grows on a vine over roofs and into trees. But such a vine will never make it through its first growth if not properly protected from chickens, which love to eat its young sprouts. This requires careful attention which is determined by the personal interest people pay to their daily environment. Even in the most miserable conditions, such examples of care (and ownership) can be obvious and are worth encouraging, though it apparently only favors one individual, "insignificant to the big need." These people know that they will be judged by how they cared, not by what they owned. We should not be afraid to focus more on individual potential than on collective misery. Jesus also sometimes let big crowds wait in order to relate to one single but faithful individual.