Monday, July 18, 2005

A view on development

The following short essay was written by a good friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer, Jeanah Lacey. I thought you might enjoy it.

Rectifying the White Man’s Burden
by Jeanah Lacey
RPCV Babadjou, Cameroon


Take up the White Man’s Burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of famine
And bid the sickness cease.

And when your goal is nearest
The end for other’s sought
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to naught.

– Rudyard Kipling


Perhaps it seems offensive to begin a discussion on sustainability by invoking memories of past arrogance. However, I believe that history—particularly its darkest moments—should not be glazed over, but examined. Because when one truly weighs one’s motivations for joining the Peace Corps, somewhere in there lays Kipling’s idea that we have the capacity to assuage wars, heal the sick, and spawn change based on an antidote we call development.

The thoughts that I’m about to share with you are not all my own. They come from two years of discussions over shared beers with my fellow PCVs. Mostly we would end these conversations feeling unsatisfied because there seemed no clean answer to the issues we were encountering in our daily lives as volunteers. My aim here is not to discourage, but instead to help you avoid the undertow of helplessness that can sometimes envelope the volunteer. As one of my colleagues often says, “Development takes decades; we only have two years.”

When talking about sustainable development, I think that it is important to first view it at the macro level. One cannot determine what is sustainable without first having an understanding of development. There are scores of books about development and even more definitions. One that I like, comes from Joseph E. Stiglitz’s book, Globalization and its Discontents: “Development is the transforming of societies, improving the lives of the poor and enabling everyone access to success, health, and education.” I like this definition because it most correlates with the grass-roots approach that Peace Corps advances. Our job is to help others help themselves; this is a simple, yet daunting task. For the most part, we are posted in smaller villages so that we have the opportunity to really understand poverty – its mentality, its hang-ups, its challenges. This is the core of the Peace Corps experience and if you leave here with nothing more than that, you have succeeded because the process of acculturation catapults you – almost involuntarily—into the global community. Your worldview will never be the same.

So that is the good news. No matter what your experience, whether it is good, bad or ugly, you will get something out of the Peace Corps that no other experience can offer. But to most of us, myself included, this doesn’t seem enough. We want to leave legacies and herein lies the relevance of sustainability. During a training session my colleague and I came up with the following definition:

“Sustainable development involves activities that can be maintained long-term with available resources. Further, sustainable projects must: 1) fill a need express by the community, 2) involve the participation of host country nationals (HCNs) from the planning stage to the project’s completion, and 3) involve community leaders who are willing to contribute resources such as raw materials, labor, or money.”

Now this may sound like a simple undertaking, but it isn’t and most of the fault lies in our American drive for deliverables. Americans often make lists of daily activities and check them off as proof of our usefulness. We are an active people and because of this, it is difficult not to simply role-up-our-sleeves and do it ourselves. But when we do this, not only are we not doing our job (e.g. transferring technical skills to HCNs), but also we are causing damage to the communities we are trying to help.

At this juncture of your sojourn in Africa, you may be confused by my last point. How can building a well or paving a road hurt my community? They need that well. They need that road. And this may be true. When I first got here, the economist in me believed that the major obstacle in development was a lack of investment in public goods such as roads, education, and available health care. I still believe this, but I’ve also learned that governments, even in poor countries, are perfectly capable of building their own infrastructure. They don’t because we give them an incentive not to; we do it for them.

But let me take this phenomena one level down; let’s bring the discussion back to you and your legacy to your community. When you plan a project, providing all needed materials and money, you are teaching your community that they are inept. You are imparting to them a legacy of helplessness.

In the opening poem, Kipling ascribed failure in these “savage wars of peace” due to “sloth and heathen folly.” I’ve heard many volunteers make similar comments; I am as guilt as the rest. And it’s tempting because it is true. Africans can be lazy and their priorities seem strange to us. However, the answer to the riddle of the said “white man’s burden” lies in the last verse of Kipling’s poem. I wonder if he even grasped the significance of his own words. He states, almost sorrowfully, that in spite of all your efforts and goodwill, the savage will inevitably “bring all your hopes to naught.” What Kipling failed to see was that in the end, development cannot be successful unless their hopes become our priority. We, as development works, need to learn to lose our egotism and let community heads lead. Only then, will developing countries have a vested interest in their own development and this development will be sustainable.