On a recent trip to Haiti as part of a four-person team aimed at helping better irrigate a farm of plantains, I realized five important cross-cultural truths. Even if you’re no stranger to living globally, these are great reminders.

1. Listen and observe before speaking. When faced with a challenging problem, sometimes I suggested an idea or asked why too quickly. The Haitian workers received the question much better when I said, “How do you go about irrigating this row of plantains?” rather than, “Why do you send the water that way?” To build relationships, we needed to listen and learn before we could make suggestions.

2. Change does not come easily or quickly. I went to Haiti ready to give advice and training for starting a profitable and sustainable business. However, three days of observation showed me that certain things must come first, and they take time. Infrastructure, education and community development are necessary pieces of the puzzle. A well-designed business may be useless if there is no road to it or its electrical grid is unpredictable. Transformation does not usually happen in one fell swoop, nor in a wrenching revolution or a lucky break. In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins calls change an “organic, cumulative process.” When working with people who have done things a certain way for generations, I needed to first demonstrate the benefit of doing something in a different way, and then do it with humility.

3. Just because it is different, it is not wrong. In our world of financial models and spreadsheets, we often rely on technology unnecessarily. Sometimes we can learn the most from generations of experience. In a simple economy, change begins at the bottom with the often mundane details of life before it happens on a higher, conceptual level. Possibly, our Haitian plantain farmer ran the same calculations in his head that we would have done on a spreadsheet!

4. Relationships are more important than we realize. From time to time, I glimpsed how little I knew. I spent the most beneficial time of the whole trip walking around the plantation talking to farmers who lived and worked on the land. They told us about their families, about their lives, about growing plantains. As I listened to the stories of their lives, I gained a richer understanding of how much providing consistent water to the plantain farms will mean to them.

5. Faith is a team sport. As four of us worked together to bring some help to the irrigation project, we realized our skills, experiences and knowledge were complementary. We were a team; as we honored and respected that, we coalesced to provide a good result. Author Robert Fulghum, in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, shares one of the most important lessons he learned in kindergarten: “When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.”

Larry Sharp served 21 years with Crossworld in Brazil as teacher and principal of Amazon Valley Academy and president of Missão Cristã Evangélica do Brasil. He returned to the U.S. in 1993 to become vice president at Crossworld’s home office. After 20 years as an executive, he is now Vice President Emeritus and a business consultant for Crossworld.