At the end of May I spent a week in Malawi attending a training seminar for a community development tool known as PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal). I, along with forty other Malawian and Mozambican community development facilitators working for CRWRC partners, spent a week learning how to use this helpful tool to engage communities in a discussion about their past, present and future. When skillfully facilitated, PRA techniques can significantly boost community mobilization in development efforts, not only by recognizing their potential and current situation, but by recognizing their previous achievements. This tool integrates nicely with AI (Appreciative Inquiry) principles, which seek to initiate positive change by uncovering potential to promote instead of highlighting problems to fix. Amidst the many acronyms of development tools and organizations, PRA and AI can easily sink into the alphabet soup of the development enterprise. Yet the technical names and their theoretical underpinnings are lesser importance on the ground, where true change occurs—where development workers seek to transform these acronyms into meaningful processes for every villager willing to share his or her time, experiences and dreams. While participating in the practical simulation training done in rural Malawian communities, I came to appreciate not only the power of these tools, but also the skill needed by facilitators to use and adapt them in the delicate and complex process of community development.