Yesterday I did field work. It was amazing, since almost all of my work over the past two months has been in the office. Bernard (check out my new Recurring Characters page) was leading the expedition and I was on the back of the motorcycle. We were conducting some village interviews for a project that we're cooking up involving designing a mobile workshop that we could bring to villages (more details and a link coming very soon hopefully).
The first village (called Mkonoo) went really well and everyone was really engaged in the discussion. We had twenty people come to meet with us, from different ages and professions. Unfortunately, every single attendee was male, so we missed out on the perspective for a demographic that makes up half of the community. We talked about some of the issues and challenges they face, and people seemed pretty energetic about our project, though one gentleman in the front left after ten minutes when he realized that the white man hadn't come with money or other handouts (I wish I was joking about this). However, the rest of the session went very well and I met a nice gentleman afterward who started talking about building a rainwater harvesting system and a bio-digester.
After that, Bernard and I headed further afield to the village of Terrat. Unfortunately, most people in the village were at the market (apparently Friday is the wrong day to conduct interviews in Terrat). As we waited, we surveyed the area a bit. One villager pointed out the house of a Dutch man on a hill. Suddenly the rest of the survey made sense. There was an unmaintained pipe from the gutters on school's roof (at this point, only about 50% of the pipe remained, while the rest had been completely corroded). When we followed it down to the underground tank, Bernard and I saw that it had an impressive capacity and was lined with expensive plastic and was filled with garbage. Though there were certainly merits to the project, it was clearly not what the village wanted, so they had no interest in maintaining it or putting it towards its original use. I guess in this case, it's not really the thought that counts.
So yeah, this is my spiel that every jaded volunteer puts up on their blog about the uselessness of people who drop out of the sky and decide that they know what is best for a community that has been carrying on by itself for decades or centuries. Come on out here and you'll encounter plenty of these folks. To be fair, this project wasn't actually counterproductive, unlike some of the other programs I've seen where outsiders decide that they know better than the people on the ground. It's condescending and wasteful.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
It's a spiel that every jaded volunteer puts on their blog (some more than others, for which I am a major culprit) but also one I think is absolutely necessary. Because despite numerous failed case studies and a growing realization in the development community (I think) of these failures, nothing has changed. That to me says that even if the people with the decision-making power hear you, they are not listening. I want to know what it will take to make them listen, and I will keep posting my "jaded volunteer" spiels until then.
(As a caveat, I think that such spiels also require proposed solutions to go along with them. There's no point in dwelling on a problem if you've got nothing to offer in return. Personally, this is something I'm working at being better at.)
You're definitely right, Muff. And I do have a solution in mind. The idea is still evolving, so once things are more crystallized, I will rectify this. It's really easy to criticize a lot of the work in this sector, but much harder to come up with workable solutions. Thanks for keeping me honest!
Post a Comment