And Howe

My hero is Samuel Gridley Howe.  He was a 19th century doctor who went to Greece in 1824 to help with the Greek War of Independence.  He had peculiar notions of how to help the Greek people whom he found living in caves after their villages had been destroyed in battles. Rather than just distribute money, he wanted to use it to employ people.  He experimented with ways to give people food and begin to rebuild the war-ravaged country while recognizing that people would need to reassert their independence by working rather than just receiving handouts.

His letters are compiled in a biography by his daughter in 1935.  In Aegina, he reports, he decided "to build a solid wall around the border of the port, reinforced with stones and earth ; to dredge the mud from the port within the wall, and cover the whole with stones ; here was work for all...the poor can do the filling, and will work for the same bread which otherwise I should be obliged to give them to eat in idleness. I have resolved, therefore, with the advice and at the earnest request of all the men of information and of the Government, thus to employ them, instead of distributing to them, as all the agents have done heretofore, without reaping any advantage to the public. . . ."  He employed 100 men and 200 women and paid them in food.  He was able to hire ordinary people (including so many women) because he had them "dig on the site of the Temple of Venus, heaving up the great foundation stones which were to make the wall."  He reused ancient stones, privileging the living people over the ancient past, though is daughter notes, "The foundation only remained ; the temple had long disappeared, all but a single column, which my father scrupulously respected. He used every possible precaution to prevent injuring any part of the temple which may be useful or agreeable to have left, being too great an admirer of antiquities to commit any sacrilege upon them."

His interest in the psychological well-being of the refugees is clear in the text.  He noted that in addition to feeding them, he saw a tremendous change in their bearing and attitude:  "Instead of, as formerly, humbly and tremblingly addressing me and begging for assistance, they look up brightly and confidently and cry out, "Welcome among us, sir!"  In about 3 months his workers had grown to more than 600 and "the American Mole" was finished.  His daughter writes in the 1930s that the mole still stood.  I believe that it still stands today.  When he finished it, he was 23 years old.

Colonna, the one column that Howe respected.  The foundation blocks he used might be the ones stacked up here.

Colonna is at the far right of this photo, and it is hard to see, but there is a line of rocks from the point that is Howe's mole.

A closer view of the other side of the mole.

He then went on to found an "American village," called Washingtonia, on the Isthmus (Hexamilia) using a similar set of principles... he reused materials allowing unskilled workers to build their own town, and used his money to procure seed and help them plant crops to feed themselves.  What impresses me is that he was able to realize his own idealism, and create lasting impacts on both the landscape and the people he tried to help.  He didn't stop with these successes in Greece, either. He went on to found a school for the blind, he convinced the state of Massachusetts to create a school for the mentally disabled, he was an abolitionist, he fought for school reform, arguing that teachers should use "sympathetic guidance" instead of corporal punishment to teach children, and then he returned to Greece in the 1860s to help the Cretans gain independence from the Ottoman Turks.  He was successful as a very young man and then never lost his confidence in his ability to effect change for the sake of others.