Tag Archives: for discussion

All I Wanna Do

16 Nov

Day three of this week’s Tales From the Hood rock ‘n’ roll marathon.

Here’s the third tune in the playlist:

This ain’t no disco
It ain’t no country club either
This is LA!

Articles like this one used to annoy me for reasons that I couldn’t quite pin down and articulate well. Now I’m in touch with my reasons, and articles like this just make me chuckle:

Getting involved in aid and development: Businesses can do much to aid development but approaches should be carefully considered before jumping in.

It’s not than anything harmful is being proposed. It’s not that the suggestions are wrong or bad (they’re actually pretty sensible, mostly). And in this rare instance, it’s not even aid elitism (which, as you know by now, I very cheerfully embrace . This is a profession, not a hobby.. don’t get me started…).

But all I wanna say is, guys, have some fun. It’s good.. great.. awesome, even, that you want to “tune into local realities”, or provide a “retail/charity option that allows consumers to do something positive while going about their daily lives…”

But let’s be very clear: this is not aid. It is not development. You are not alleviating poverty in the third world or mitigating the effects of conflict or natural disaster. You are simply being a responsible citizen. In today’s hyper-aware, cause-marketed, extreme-emotional-need-for-politically-correct-expression world, we’re too often too quick to conflate “not raping the helpless” with “making the world a better place.”

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard 

There are many, many good things that you can do. You can recycle. You can learn another language. You can invite your neighbor of another socio-cultural and/or ethno-linguistic demographic over for lunch. You can offer to babysit the child of the single mom next door so she can run errands. You can drink only free-trade coffee. You can give $5.00 to the homeless person you pass in the tube station every day on the way to work. You can own a hybrid car. You can slap a “COEXIST” bumper sticker on your hybrid car. You can ride a bicycle to work. You can eat less meat. You can wear less leather. You can burn your Justin Timberlake CDs and only ever listen to Indie bands.

All good things to do.

But some of you need to relax a little. Relief and development work are actual professions. Don’t try to do them in your spare time. And perhaps even more importantly, don’t feel as if you have to. It’s okay to just live your life in a simply responsible manner without trying to spin a contorted and over-the-top theory of how you’re “supporting aid work” or “making the world more equitable.” Do driving the speed limit, parking legally and not shoplifting make you “part of law enforcement”? Of course not. They simply make you a law-abiding citizen.

Or do you feel the need to spend your summer vacation volunteering at a gynecological clinic? Or at Legal Aid? No? Exactly.

It’s okay to spend your vacation abroad as responsible tourist. And I mean real tourist, not voluntourist. Have fun. Don’t try to play aid worker for two weeks or two months. Just go and have fun. The world is an interesting place, filled with interesting people. Enjoy it. Enjoy it without the burden of feeling like you have to do something that you’re not qualified to do (seriously – you’re not qualified).

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

If humanitarian aid or development work are what you really want to do with your life, fine – make the commitments and investments necessary to make this your career, your life. Otherwise, seriously, just go have fun. Responsibly.

I like a good beer buzz early in the morning…

Sheryl Crow is a total aid worker…

Tags: , , ,

Calling All Aid Bloggers

15 Sep

I’m going to try something new, here at Tales From the Hood.

Mark your calendars, because starting on Monday, 19 September, I will begin what I hope will become a recurring tradition of throwing a topic of consequence out to The Aid Blogosphere for comment and discussion. I encourage everyone who’s interested to blog on the topic over the following week and simply enter the URL information for their post into the space provided on the post here (you’ll understand what I mean when it publishes). You’ll get a visible link on my blog which will drive traffic to yours.

The rules of engagement:

1) Anyone with a blog can participate. You don’t have to be an aid blogger and you don’t have to have an aid-related blog. You only need a blog and an opinion on the aid-related topic that I post.

2) All opinions are welcome. You don’t have to agree with me or my perspective on the issue. The point is to generate “buzz” and discussion around an issue or topic and find out what a wide range of people think, not to build consensus.

3) Feel free to suggest topics for discussion (note that I don’t promise to run with every suggestion). Suggestions can come from anyone, blogger or not, aid worker or not. Post them in the comments thread here, DM me, post them on the Tales From the Hood Facebook wall, or send them by email (my email in the “About” link above).

4) Have fun! This is your chance to speak out on issues that matter in the context of a focused internet-wide discussion.

Hope to see all of you next week!

Tags: , , ,

The arse-end of nowhere

30 May

Some days I think NGOs are the bane of the aid world.

* * *

Back when I was first starting my career in humanitarian work, I spent what felt at the time like an eternity living in and going to some of the most out-of-the-way, infested, grimy, uncomfortable, downtrodden, and generally impoverished places you can imagine. Once during that period, I ran into in a British guy passing through the town where I was living at the time. It was small, dusty settlement in the bend of a dirty, slow-moving river. He described that place as “the arse-end of nowhere.”

For humanitarian workers, it is almost a point of pride to say that we log our share of time at the arse-end of nowhere. Whether the arse-end of nowhere is an urban center recently decimated by a huge natural disaster, a high altitude community with no access or services, or a tiny island with no airstrip or harbor. We love to tell ourselves that we love to suffer in those obscure places where the power always goes out, where there’s no water and we get sick from the food, where dogs yap all night.

The arse-end of nowhere is those remote places where life is tough, where progress is hard to achieve and see, and where even the smallest gains are incredibly fragile and can evaporate in a split second over issues that would be nothing in the “outside world.” At the arse-end of nowhere information about the external context is hard to get. When you’re at the arse-end of nowhere things that seem straightforward and obvious from the outside, suddenly become entangled and messy. Logic and reason go out the window at the arse-end of nowhere: people from there, with little or no external worldview, frequently make ludicrous assumptions about how things are or jump to wild conclusions about causes and effect.

Everything takes longer, too. Tasks that an outsider might think should be simple can in reality take all day, or maybe even longer, at the arse-end of nowhere. And there’s sometimes danger. Sometimes just getting through the day without being kidnapped, shot at, driving on a landmine, or falling over the edge of a cliff can be an accomplishment of significance at the arse-end of nowhere.

When you’re at the arse-end of nowhere you have to consciously lock yourself into a mode of thinking which says approximately, “I will do what I have to do to get by, to survive, to function effectively in this environment.” Maybe you have to dress differently in order to accommodate local sensitivities. Maybe you have to eat different food, because that’s all there is. Maybe you have to summon every ounce of patience that you possibly can when working with local staff and partners – not that they’re not nice people, and not that you dislike them as people, but because their core beliefs about what you’re all there to accomplish and what your respective roles in that process of accomplishment are so vastly different from your own that there is almost no common point of reference. Sometimes the only thing that you have when it comes to local working relationships at the arse-end of nowhere is a shared meal and maybe a cold beer at the end of the day.

Working at the arse-end of nowhere can sometimes feel like an endless string of capitulations in an apparent total vacuum of logic and reason. You can spend an awful lot of time not really knowing what’s going on at the arse-end of nowhere. It can feel like – and often is – a seemingly endless cycle of returning to square one, re-establishing basic consensus, laboriously moving on to square two, establishing basic consensus, putting a tentative toe ever so lightly onto square three… and… it all crumbles.

And… you’re back square one.

Again.

There are reasons why the arse-end of nowhere is the arse-end of nowhere.

* * *

Don’t get me wrong. I love aid work, and I get that that – almost by definition – includes NGOs. But as I look at how hard it is for aid organziations to stay on track, or by contrast, how easily we get distracted, entangled, and muddled it becomes tougher to fight a growing sense of despair with the system.

And yet, in an odd way, at the same time, when I look at the amount of energy and effort that goes into just keeping the machine chugging along; when I consider the amount of angst, drama and dumbassery involved in simply keeping the ship steered in one direction; when I look at the amount of work that it takes to achieve consensus on even the basic, no-brainer kinds of decisions, even before one piece of relief has reached even one disaster survivor; when I look at the number of life-saving meetings that have to be not just attended, but called, I begin to feel… nostalgic. I feel nostalgia for times and places where I could at least claim a little street cred for having survived a supposedly difficult environment.

Because as I think about it, the substance of what it takes to “make progress” in the field is almost point-by-point identical to the substance of what it takes to “make progress” in an NGO context. It’s the same battles, the same painful processes that derail in the end, the same boondoggle, the same sidetracking of meaningful discussion about what needs to happen with utterly illogical and very often self-imposed restrictions in the name of corporate culture or identity. We’re so wrapped up in our own spin on reality, so closed off from external conversation, so unable (or unwilling) to consider substantive change at a paradigmatic level, that we really might just as well be in an inaccessible mountain village with no electricity or water.

Working for an aid NGO, whether at HQ or in the field is an awful lot like being at…

the arse-end of nowhere.

Tags: , ,

← Older Entries

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 672 other followers