I’ve been thinking lately about stereotypes, and how it’s so easy to fall into using them, even when I try to stay on moral high ground. As a writer, it could even be said that I depend on them. If, say, I were to write, “The thin black man put a hand to his cheek and drew his fingers through a patchy beard. His nails were long and covered with what looked like motor oil,” I’m willing to bet you could envision the person. He would not be dressed in a suit.

The trick is to avoid snap judgments and prejudices based on appearance, class or race.

This is the story of how some unintended consequences helped a struggling charity grab hold and grow.

Mathius Craig had an idea, a good idea. A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had enrolled in a course called Engineering for Social Solutions. Students were asked to design a project that would help an impoverished community solve a pressing problem. Craig’s idea was to install wind turbines that would bring electricity to the most remote villages of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. He knew the region fairly well; he’d spent time there with his brother and his mother, who studied Amerindian languages

One spring several years ago, our wonderful adult Sunday school class read Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth.  I was intrigued by what it had to say about our inner character. Recently I’ve been thinking about how the lessons in the book apply to helping others. They reinforce two points I’ve come to believe with all my heart: As much as anything, service is a spiritual practice. And the journey—the approach you take when you help others—is every bit as important as the destination.

In my favorite chapter, Tolle writes about the social roles we take on and how tightly they constrict us, if we let them. Like it or not, our social standing largely determines how we move through the world, and how others orbit around us. “The way in which you speak to the chairman of the company might be different in subtle ways from how you speak to the janitor,” he writes. True, and I’m ashamed to admit it. Watch carefully, he writes, and you will detect this kind of performance first in others and then in yourself. Often it’s a formidable barrier to loving kindness.

But how do you not play a role? As soon as you try to be “just yourself,” Tolle notes, your mind creates a role for you, perhaps something like “wise one.”

Last week Jeff and I spent a couple of days in New York. I love the city and always try to save a little time for seeing art or music in out-of-the-way places. If you read my Facebook posts, you know that on this trip I made a point of noticing and trying to connect for a moment or two with folks who were outside the norm—street people and men and women who were acting a little different. Folks on the fringe. Outcasts.

Several times over the past year I’ve asked readers to take a chance and try smiling and maybe chatting with outcasts, just to see what happens.

“They arrive by the truckload in poor, waterside communities,” the New York Times reporter wrote. They’re bed nets to prevent the contraction of malaria—and they are considered a great gift.  But once the trucks leave, the nets may be put to a more pressing need: sewn together and used as giant sieves for fishing. Pulled through the water from shore, they can feed families that might otherwise starve.

As writer Jeffrey Gettleman noted, in the poorest parts of the world, “There is no fear but the fear of hunger.”

Thus begins the report from Zambia and other African countries that has badly rattled one of the largest, most efficient, and most reputable of humanitarian aid projects.