FORGING AHEAD
Why a Critic of International Aid Thinks We Should Keep Trying
by Jen Steele C 34 iAM
OULD IT BE POSSIBLE THAT I AM AT ONCE AN EMERGING VOICE, A VETERAN VOICE, AND AN OPPOSING VOICE IN THE FIELD OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE? May I add to this juxtaposing of identities by stating that I
am a ‘Westerner’ who works on behalf of those from the ‘South’, absent of their request and without any practical understanding of what it means to go hungry, to be truly afraid for my life or to want for opportunity or choice?
And yet such is the case for many of us in this
profession, however defined and in whatever sub- sector we have organized ourselves. We are, most of us, bleeding hearts who claim to identify, in our souls, with those whose experiences we actually do not and will likely never know. We move overseas with the intention of ‘experiencing their cultures’ and learning to ‘understand their needs’. We use terms like ‘participatory engagement’ and ‘stakeholders’, while making sure that our contracts include sufficient R&R and a good housing allowance. So who are we really? And what is it that we think we are doing? I lay claim in this paragraph to a voice that seemingly captures the experience of others, but, truly, I can only speak for myself. I hope to explain the process I have gone through
in my engagement with development work, to describe the tensions and contradictions that define it, and how I engage with these factors. The path I have taken as a development and humanitarian aid practitioner has required trying to reconcile the promotion of what I characterize as Western constructions of appropriate interventions with the idea of simply and purposefully doing well by others.
I believe that it is my duty and privilege to help
others. I have come to define this to mean service to those living in lower income countries, and within such countries, to children and youth who are affected by crises, be they man-made, natural, structural or temporary. I believe that such persons deserve access to some ‘basic’ conditions of well-being: health care, food, water, sanitation, shelter and - my area of focus - education. When I started out, I saw education as a panacea −
a way to help people respect one another more and to create a more peaceful world. Education became my calling, and I entered a well-respected graduate school to study human rights education. And yet it was during these studies that the irony
of our work hit me full force. Education became an exercise by Westerners like myself who took the theory of modernization, with its standard Western based constructions of development, to its pinnacle in which ‘our’ type of education was what everyone ‘needed’. Halfway through my degree program, I began to feel that those of us trying to do the most good were only tipping the natural order of things. Would the people we were supplying ‘assistance’ to actually demand it if
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