Despite its numerous examples of the American Foreign Service’s failures, The Ugly American also provides models for how Americans Foreign Service workers can succeed. After the engineer Homer Atkins and his wife Emma realize that Vietnam does not need massive roads and dams—as the American government asked him to build—they move to Sarkhan to figure out how to help the people who need it most. In doing so, Homer and Emma model how to live alongside people in poverty, build relationships with them, and create practical, sustainable change. Through Homer and Emma, the book emphasizes how grassroots development—meaning development that’s focused around individual communities and local projects—is often far more impactful and welcomed than impressive large-scale development.
Homer and Emma move into a rural village and live exactly as the Sarkhanese peasants do. Living amidst the community allows them to understand the daily lives and needs of the people they want to help. Homer and Emma move into a small, earthen-floored hut and adopt the villagers’ lifestyle. They learn the language so that they can communicate with their neighbors. This helps Homer and Emma integrate themselves into village life and helps the Sarkhanese to understand that they are different from most foreigners, who live in luxurious homes in the city. When Homer introduces himself to the village headman, the Sarkhanese leader is touched that Homer speaks to him in his own language and hears him out, which is a clear example of how living amidst a community and adopting its language and lifestyle helps build trust with the local people.
Homer and Emma’s daily proximity to other villagers also helps them to recognize legitimate needs that they can address to improve the villagers’ quality of life. Homer observes that the villagers, living on hillside paddies, struggle to produce food because they must haul water up the hillside from the river, which is slow and exhausting work. Similarly, Emma realizes that all the elderly people in the village have painfully bent backs due to spending their days sweeping the village with short-handled brooms made of palm fronds, which require them to constantly bend over to reach the ground. These observations inspire Homer to design a bicycle-powered water pump and Emma to design a long-handled broom as practical solutions to the villagers’ everyday problems. It is living amidst the community—not functioning as some far-off benefactors—that allows Homer and Emma to affect change.
Besides simply living among the villagers, Homer and Emma also set an example for positive grassroots development by treating the villagers as equals, which in turn encourages the villagers to make their own contributions to new developments. When Homer wants to prototype his water pump, he explains his idea to the village headman. The headman introduces him to a strong-willed and capable Sarkhanese mechanic named Jeepo, who makes several improvements to Homer’s design, specifically to make it more affordable and practical for farming. Homer and Jeepo become equal business partners and launch their new endeavor together, and Homer benefits from Jeepo’s mechanical skill and insight. The villagers enjoy seeing a white man and a Sarkhanese man working as equal partners, especially when Jeepo and Homer erupt in shouting matches over new changes to their designs. They’ve never seen a Sarkhanese person fully express themselves toward a white person without fear of recompense. Thus, not only do both parties benefit from an equal relationship, but long-standing tensions between groups—such as between white foreigners and local villagers—can begin to heal through equal collaboration.
Like Homer, Emma is careful to maintain an equal relationship with the elderly people as she tries to introduce her long-handled broom. When the elderly Sarkhanese tell her that their bent backs are simply due to old age, she does not argue with them but respects their view. Instead, Emma sweeps her own hut with her long-handled broom each day, demonstrating that she is able to stand straight and preserve her back. Rather than just telling the elderly people what she thinks they ought to do, Emma leaves the choice up to them. When they do adopt Emma’s long-handled broom, they do so of their own free will. By showing rather than telling, a foreign developer can help local people maintain their own agency, treating them as equals rather than as subordinates and encouraging them to make their own contributions to each development as well.
When designing their new developments, Homer and Emma ensure that all the required pieces will be easily available to villagers so that the villagers can recreate such developments themselves, demonstrating the need for sustainability in any new development. Although Homer could import the pieces to build new water pumps, he understands that it would keep the villagers dependent on foreigners, leaving them no better off. Together, Homer and Jeepo modify their water pump design until every piece can be salvaged from old jeeps and bicycles, which are plentiful. They hire several villagers, teach them how to build the pumps, and then send them out to sell the pumps and show the design to other villages. They choose not to patent their design so that any village can manufacture the pumps for themselves, making the advantages of the water pump accessible to the greatest number of people. Similarly, although Emma could purchase broom handles from the U.S. and import them, she recognizes that that would be an unsustainable development. Instead, she hunts around until she finds naturally growing long, firm reeds that can be transplanted and grown in the village and then harvested to work as suitable broom handles, creating an endless supply of new handles. Homer and Emma’s focus on sustainability demonstrates how sustainable grassroots development can have benefits that endure far longer than the developers themselves, thus creating lasting and tangible change in a community. In this way, grassroots developments can be carried on by the local people and grow far beyond their initial target.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Grassroots Development ThemeTracker
Grassroots Development Quotes in The Ugly American
“Look, John, I told you milk is part of history. If you get this crazy milk and cattle scheme of yours going, it could in time change the economic balance in Sarkhan.”
“What’s wrong with that? That’s what I want to do.”
“Nothing. It’s a good idea. Out in the bush we’ve talked it over a lot. But you’re the wrong person to be permitted to do it. If it succeeded, the Sarkhanese would believe that America was their savior.”
“It is not for me to say […] It is for all of us. It is your country, your souls, your lives. I will do what we agree upon.” […] This was, [Finian] was sure, the first time that these men had ever been told by a white man that a big and important decision was entirely their own… and would be followed by the white man.
“Vinich had made elaborate plans before he smuggled himself into Anthkata. He had developed a thorough plan for the extermination of the Communist Farmer. And he took steps to assure that his presence in Anthkata would not be known. He had discovered ling ago that natives should do their own political work… foreigners should come in only as a last resort, and then always as quietly as possible.”
“In this section of the Shan States, everyone is pro-American because of the Martins. They came to Burma to help us, not to improve their own standard of living.
You don’t need publicity if the results of what you are doing are visible and valuable to the people. The steam from a good pot of soup is its best advertisement.
You asked me what I would do if I were the President of the United States. This is would I would do: I would send more people like the Martins to Burma. That’s all you’d need. You could forget about the hordes of executives, PX’s, commissaries, and service forces which are now needed to support the Americans abroad.”
To [Tom’s] astonishment Cambodia seemed a long, long time away, and glazed over with wonderful memories. These were not so much memories of the village life, as of the generous and courteous attentions he had been given by so many Cambodians on his trip home. The anger, which in Cambodia had seemed so sure and honest a weapon, in his suite on the Liberté seemed somehow almost ridiculous.
[Atkins’s] hands were laced with big, liverish freckles. His fingernails were black with grease. His fingers bore the tiny nicks and scars of a lifetime of practical engineering. The palms of his hands were calloused. Homer Atkins was worth three million dollars, every dime of which he had earned by his own efforts; but he was most proud and confident of his ugly strong hands. Atkins knew he could always make a living with them.
“You don’t need dams and roads […] Maybe later, but right now you need to concentrate on first things—largely things that your own people can manufacture and use. I don’t know much about farming or city planning or that kind of thing; but I can tell you that your people need other things besides military roads. You ever hear of a food shortage being solved by people building a military highway designed to carry tanks and trucks?”
Mr. Atkins, […] you may not know it, but a French firm has a concession to handle the production of building materials in this country. If everyone started forming brick and quarry companies, it would ruin our relationship.
“Why don’t you just send off to the States for a lot of hand pumps like they use on those little cars the men run up and down the railroads?” [Emma] asked one day.
“Now, look, dammit, I’ve explained to you before,” Atkins said. It’s got to be something they use out here. It’s no good if I go spending a hundred thousand dollars bringing in something. It has to be something right here, something the natives understand.”
[Atkins and Jeepo’s] arguments, for some reason, caused the Sarkhanese workmen a great deal of pleasure, and it was not until several months had passed that Atkins realized why—they were the only times that the Sarkhanese had ever seen one of their own kind arguing fairly and honestly, with a chance of success, against a white man.
