Wisdom and Wit

Development and relief work is an intriguing mix of academic questions and applied learning. It’s not purely theoretical; it’s complex work that can have a real impact on people’s lives. The most challenging part is that you expect people to say thank you. You expect to see the best side of humanity. The reality is that you are dealing with people in dire situations—people who don’t have a lot of experience outside of civil war or conflict or poverty. These are people who need to get to the next day or the next week. There are no thank yous. It can take quite a toll emotionally.

One of the things I’ve said to myself is that I need to redefine what poverty means, because poverty is most definitely not just economic. It’s a poverty of experience, a poverty of perspective. Today the focus is less on giving aid than on how we can mentor and help and create that capacity, that ability, that desire to grow as a community or a society.

Before I take any action, I want to really understand the context and the environment that I’m working in culturally and politically. It’s important to understand that some cultures have not always been welcoming of foreigners, and to under- stand when I need to use someone as a proxy, because I won’t be listened to. It’s about recognizing the context that I’m working in and better using the tools that are available to me. I would rather not do anything than do the wrong thing.

I was amazed more by how similar things are than by how different they are, whether it was Malawi or Sudan or Nicaragua or Colombia or even Indonesia. HIV is HIV. Poverty is poverty. Lack of access to health care is lack of access to health care. That was a great foundation for me in terms of understanding the very real challenges that exist in the development world.

The hardest part about Sudan was that it was lonely. Even though there were a lot of people around, when you’re at that level of intensity for an extended period of time, you don’t necessarily have a close-knit group of friends and family. At one point I thought, “It doesn’t matter what I do or what we do, it’s not going to be enough.” As an aid worker, it’s scary to think that. It’s that feeling like sticking your finger in a dam.

In Colombia, we were working on some child-protection programs, and we’d been working in this one area where there’d been a lot of crime, a lot of delinquency. And a couple of kids came up to me and said, “Thank you. I can go to school now. I feel safer now. I’m not worried about gangs anymore.” We didn’t solve the gang problem. But in the one area where we were working, the teenagers felt safe, and they were grateful. And that thank you meant a lot; it’s very rare.

I was sitting down at a formal ceremony in a community in Indonesia, and as part of the ceremony, everybody had to chew a betel nut. It was expected of me as the country director and guest of honor. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and everyone’s eyes were on me. I put it in my mouth and immediately started to choke; it was kind of like chewing on a bunch of raw tobacco. I had red stuff all over my mouth and my cheeks and my lips, and everybody’s looking at me, and I didn’t realize that you’re culturally expected to spit everything out. I don’t know how they did it, but the Indonesians were able to spit it in these very delicate little drops, but when I spit, it was more like an eruption that came out of my mouth, this rain of red betel-nut juice.

You have to have the technical skills to do the job. But everything you do exists within the cultural context. The first time I was in Indonesia, I made a few people cry because I had been too direct. I said, “This doesn’t meet my expectations,” and, culturally, you just don’t do that. In Sudan, it was perfectly appropriate to yell at people; that’s what they were used to. In Asia, no way. In a lot of other cultures time is not measured the same way, or results are less concrete.

Knowing the language, just speaking a few key phrases if you’re going someplace where you’re not really expected to know the language, is huge. Understanding the language helps you understand the culture, which helps you understand the best way to work.

I feel like a citizen of the world. I feel like I could go pretty much anywhere and make it my home, which is both good and bad. I know people all over the world, which is exciting and rewarding, but I don’t necessarily feel anchored to one place. At a certain point, I think it’s really important to know where you’re from. When I come back to the States, a lot of people get upset about what I consider to be trivial things. When you’ve traveled all over the world, those kinds of things just aren’t important. The biggest adaptation is really being flexible. It’s recognizing there’s a lot I don’t know, that I’m going to make a lot of mistakes—just accepting that, knowing it’s going to happen. And trying to be humble and flexible.

When I went to MIIS, it put a real conceptual framework around everything that I had lived [in the Peace Corps]. It made me understand that what I had done before was just scratching the surface, and the classroom really propelled me to new depths of understanding and gave me the tools to do development work.

There’s more to life than a job. You can’t define yourself by what you do. It’s really important to have personal relationships, and to maintain them, because in this line of work, so many people come and go from one country to another every couple of years.

You can train and build capacity and coach and mentor and work as hard as you can, but ultimately development is not your decision. You create the environment and facilitate an environment where people can learn and grow and improve their lot in life, but the decision ultimately is theirs, not yours.