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)
