ABSTRACT
Westerners, even those who have some familiarity with the peoples of Asia and Africa, are often prone to underestimate the resistant powers of the rural peasant. Also, Westerners and members of the ruling elite in the nonindustrialized countries tend to equate power with strength. There is one kind of strength, however, which does not require overt power. Programs of technical assistance and community development create culture contact conditions which are particularly well suited to the study of change. The contact situation is narrowly delimited and it is easier to identify the agents of change, the pressures for change and the results of the contact. Field surveys showed that in some areas up to forty percent of the people had the disease. The basic problem was that, although there were effective curative drugs, they did little good as long as reinfection from tsetse fly bites was inevitable.
