Jordan's Skepticim: a brief history (Introduction Part 2)

Now I’m into the thick of my course/programme, trying to read as much as I can on topics range from climate change to structural analysis of conflict, to social movement theory, to the debates over how to measure poverty. This post is all about the skepticism side of the White Man’s Paradox, the realization that I/we can’t save the world and the question: where my skepticism has come from? So as I read for my courses, I’m trying to evaluate the effect on my skepticism. At the end of one of my lectures last week (for a module/course called ‘Citizen-led Development’) I remarked to a colleague: out of my four modules, this is only one where we hear about things that work. And the White Man is notably absent from the picture that is being drawing in the lectures.

This seems to confirm my skepticism. When I look at some of the things the World Bank has done, all of what I know about the IMF (International Monetary Fiend?), the philosophy of USAID, the mammoth, sluggish, cobbled UN, I despair. After reading a lot last week about the politics of climate change, I am now down to zero hope that a global consensus will ever be reached in time to make any difference. The conclusion that I came to in the essay I handed in on Friday is that the poor in the Global South may have to help themselves. The White Men will not agree to cut emissions soon enough, maybe never (I fully acknowledge that countries in the Global South have to cut back as well, though I have no more hope that they will agree any sooner). And the mantra of economic growth only leads to development practices that increase the vulnerability of the very poorest to global climate shocks. Growth, growth, growth. If cancer had a motto, that would be it.

But I digress. I’m supposed to be a critical-thinking professional and avoid taking cheap shots…

Unlike Kurtis, my skepticism has formed after I left Pakistan upon graduation from high school. Growing up, I watched my father and two other White doctors start up a small community health programme in North-Western Pakistan. The project focused primarily on education – helping villagers help themselves with basic sanitation and with pre- and post-natal health and safe home deliveries. The overheads were small, the project was local and most of the staff were from the area. In many respects the project was a success in small scale, sustainable poverty reduction and capacity building (a lecturer recently told us that, under no circumstances, should we use terms without defining them: I just used two – sustainable and capacity building. In retrospect, I still see projects like that, as a beacon of hope, that development (yet to be defined in this blog, I know) can work and that my education may be of some use to someone else.

So what am I, skeptical or hopeful about the prospects for development to work? Ask me tomorrow, and I might know.

Jordan (Manchester)

The Gritty World of Development, Kurtis in Tanzania

I spent the first half of 2010 working on a water project. This was out of my comfort zone but really gave me an opportunity for some “classic” development work. The objective was to lay a foundation for a regional water project and there were two aspects towards that end. First, a learning tour where a group of us travelled around the region interviewing stakeholders from the village to the government level. The second component involved a hands-on project mainly as a way to provide some meat to all the talk that went on during the tour.

I'm not sure how I can phrase this best but in short: the tour was a who's who of water project failures and the small project, although good, was filled with all the classic development roadblocks that I had previously read about.

Driving around the Serengeti revealed failed project after failed project. Three out of 300 shallow boreholes still working after 10 years, hand pumps broken or stolen, a school water tank that had collapsed, a massive spring that was now harbouring more parasites in it's “protected” state than it ever had previously and I will stop there. Most painful were the projects that were in disrepair (and destined never to help the community) before they had even been completed!

It is tempting at this point to get into a critique of what exactly had failed and what should have been done differently but the point is simply that these projects had failed. We [development workers] have had 50 years to find the best way to bring clean water to communities in need (by modern standards) so there is not much more room for should haves and could haves.

I will not list the organizations behind these projects; they and their staff were all working out of the best of intentions. The one organization I will mention is Mennonite Central Committee. In the mid-nineties MCC protected a few natural springs (ie provided a way to harvest the water before it was contaminated) and 15 years later those protection mechanisms were still being used daily by hundreds of people.

My own small water project was extremely interesting. I do not have the time nor space to relate the whole project but in short, we tried to protect one spring to provide clean water to a small, rural community. It certainly wasn't a spectacular failure but in reality I do not feel as good about the process as I would have liked. The final product was good and I hope that it will still be going after 5 years but I am not so certain about 15. The main result for me was a very clear picture of what grass-roots development can look like and a lot of questions.

As for that regional project; we inundated the head office with ideas about what could be done and “how to” reports from all the lessons we had learned.

The truth is that I was left very hesitant about any outside initiated water project in the region but could not bring myself to voice that because it was so different from what the local people wanted & needed and what I, as a development worker, was sent to do.

So now you know a bit more where I am coming from,

Kurtis (Waterloo)

ps. For an example of a water provision technology that does seem to dodge the typical development short falls do some research on “sand dams”.

Where I Come From: Introducing Kurtis, Part 1

A significant part of my childhood was spent in Nairobi, Kenya. Like Jordan, I attended a school for missionary kids (Rosslyn Academy). It was during those formative years that I was exposed to Nairobi’s vast and permanent missionary and NGO expatriate community.

As such I saw missionaries and NGO workers living in the “wilds” of Africa with the latest in Home A/V technology and multiple SUV families. I have memories of my father ranting after reading “Lords of Poverty” (A scathing critique of the UN). So I learned the art of compartmentalization – where I lived I saw the isolated world of the expat but also, through the efforts of my parents, saw normal life in Africa. And somehow with the innocence of a child I was able to accept each for what they were in and of themselves.

Later, in 2007, I returned to East Africa to do ICT development work with Mennonite Central Committee in Mugumu, Tanzania. This time things were much different as I had a family of my own, we lived three hours from the nearest paved road and were the only foreigners living in our town. I was forced to turn my cynicism inward and critique my work and reasons for being there.

Our work was with a grassroots community development program which mainly supported people living with HIV/AIDS. My tasks included computer maintenance (virus’s are incredibly prevalent in those kinds of settings), improving access to the internet, moving financial and client records to electronic systems as well as developing a web presence for the program.

So over the course of our three years I managed to tackle most of those tasks. I had got the computer virus situation under control, set up an couple of WAN/LAN’s, put up www.imaratz.org and even a VSAT connection by our final year thanks to my MCC supervisor who secured the large amount of funds needed. I never did implement electronic records but I think my successor might concentrate on that.

It is very difficult to describe these conditions to anyone who has never worked in development. Accomplishing the most basic task can be thwarted by anything from looking for a key, to a power outage, to lack of credit or charge on a cell-phone to a funeral. Listing off my work in a single paragraph completely disregards the incredible range of circumstances that I encountered while doing this work.

So although my time in the Serengeti was somewhat frustrating at times, it was for the most part incredibly rich. The here & now attitude of life in rural Africa is surprisingly refreshing for those used to constantly living in the future. The people I worked with were extremely dedicated to their work but approached it through different set of priorities and expectations.

Interestingly the word for outsider, mzungu, in Kiswahili has the same root “zungu” as spin, confused and drunk. The hope for this blog is that as we begin to spin our way through our Master’s courses we will find some clearer vision for how our education and experiences can be resolved.

Kurtis (Waterloo)

Introducing Jordan, part 1

In 2006 I spent two months in Gilgit, Pakistan working for an NGO on a small hydro project. While there I received an e-mail from another white man of similar heritage and small town Manitoba origins. He signed his e-mail something like: take care, Mennonite boy. And I looked at the salutation in surprise wondering to whom he could possibly be referring. Outside that context, I had subconsciously slipped into a new-old identity, the one I wore as a child growing up in Pakistan where my father worked as a medical doctor in a mission hospital and then in a community health project in villages in the Himalayan foothills. Although I look Germanic with blue eyes, blonde hair and white skin, I’ve spent my life more at home wandering the world than in any one place.

How is it that I’ve ended up in Manchester enrolled in a Master’s degree in International Development for 2010-2011? These are the facts: After graduating from Murree Christian School in Pakistan and saying good-bye to my 17 classmates (representing 10 different nationalities), I moved to the wide open prairie of central Canada and studied mechanical engineering. Two years into the program I thought I might have picked the wrong one. But I finished it and spent 4 years working in Winnipeg designing brackets (oops, I mean buses) before taking 4 months out to work in Gilgit with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme. On that same trip I met up with one of my 17 classmates (she of English and Finnish extraction) in Kabul and a little less than two years later we were married. At that time I had already started applying to Master’s programmes in the UK and she was finishing an MA from a university in Finland. In August we moved here to a small flat in central Manchester.

I should mention that while studying engineering at the University of Manitoba I met another white man of similarly ambiguous identity – he just arrived from Kenya. And two weeks ago I found myself playing Lego with his son and then talking long into the night about why we still want to save the world, how we plan to self-publish our experiences this year for the edification of our many readers, and how we’ll handle the book deal offers that are sure to come in response to these excellent tales of graduate studies in Green Energy and International Development at Waterloo and Manchester respectively.

Jordan (Manchester)

The White Man's Paradox

Kurt Unger and I (Jordan Fast) are two white men with burdens. We want to save poor people in developing countries. That’s one burden. Another burden we carry is that we know we can’t, in fact we are deeply cynical of so many attempts to do that. We know that just to state our goal in that way is predisposing us to repeat the failures of countless white men before us. So let me start again.

After three years working with the Mennonite Central Committee in Tanzania, together with his wife (and now three kids) Kurt met up with me in Winnipeg at a great Thai restaurant. Kurt had spent the day helping me build a crate to ship stuff from Winnipeg to Manchester. I had spent the last three years working for New Flyer Industries as a product development engineer and plotting my return to university and then onward to a new career in development. Kurt and I were both moving to the places where we would start Master’s programmes (or courses, if you’re British). And Kurt said (at least that’s how I remember it): “we should start a blog”. I bit into a chop stick full of delicious Pad Thai and said (after swallowing the food, of course): “great idea”. The only remaining question was: what about?

During that same conversation Kurt recommended William Easterly’s book “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good.” And later on, when we hashed out the details for the blog we decided we would use it to explore this paradox in our lives: we have deep cynicism about the development effort – we are taking a year or two of our lives, at significant expense to ourselves and our families, to better prepare for careers in development.
We will begin, over the next 4 posts, by introducing ourselves, our experiences with development to date, our cynicism and why we have hope that development can work.

As we document our experiences this year at two different universities studying two different programmes we will try to answer the following three questions:

1. What is development?

2. Why should I be involved in development?

3. What is our hope for development – what to we think can be accomplished, what is our ideal outcome of development?

And likely, we will revise or add to this list of questions during the year. This is as much about constructing our own realities and taking charge of our own learning as about enlightening anyone else. In fact, we have no pretenses of enlightening anyone else, but we hope you’ll keep reading if you got this far.

Jordan (Manchester)