A Paper Anniversary

 

 

 

Keen readers will note this month marks the first anniversary of this column. And like a newborn in her first year of development and growth, I’ve been learning to focus my vision, reach out, explore and learn about the things around me (whee!).

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I’m also really good at putting things in a container and taking things out of a container. Kidding aside, you could say that’s the point of this column. I like to take things out of the humanitarian and development container in order to examine them more closely and perhaps even, discard. The past year has deconstructed celebrity rampages, narcissism, King Lear, eudaimonia, morality, frugality, genitalia, riots, rapacious benevolence, chewing gum, merry fraudsters, Johnnie Walker and neocolonialism, to name a few conversations.

 

But the one topic that seemed to—over the last year anyway—really float people’s boats was any time I touched on volunteering. Egregious NGOs abusing volunteers and odious volunteers loitering at NGOs touched nerves and filled my inbox. Good. That’s the container at work: put things in, take them out.

 

Ebb and Flow

 

That’s also the foundation this column rests on: conversation. Way back in 1997 development workers were rallying around a perverse idea for implementing projects called “start with the people’s knowledge as the basis for planning and change.” Yet that idea has been fantastically ignored pretty much ever since. Nearly two decades later and goals and a project’s indicators (evidence of the results) still tend to be determined before the project begins by those leading the intervention. Projects tend to be linear because they’re focused on the needs of donors, researchers in the field or even the organization that ‘represents’ the community it’s ‘helping’.

 

I say let’s move from monologue to dialogue and see how it goes. No predetermined outcomes here, please. Discovering the unexpected is the best part of my work in this field, and then being able to share that with you in this column. The presence of individuals able to pose and respond to a question, to engage in dialogic approaches, to create new meaning and understanding is essential in addressing what philosopher Cornel West (writing about African American cultural identity) has called the “problematic of invisibility and namelessness.”

 

So really, what those long ago aid workers were banging on about was empowerment through participation. Without it, silence.

 

Progressive NGOs refer to this as ‘voice’ and who has it (and uses it) and who doesn’t (thereby generating an invisibility or silence). This is powerful stuff because thinking about this isn’t just confined to touchy-feely nonprofits out saving the world. Is there room for this in other industries? Are we each doing this in our own spheres? In our relationships and interactions with our children, neighbours and co-workers? Who decides what is important? Whose truth and logic? By not predetermining the conversation, the outcomes or the impact, we are able to shift the contents of those containers. I believe it was another seriously ancient development worker who called all that “Be here now.”

 

Previous editions of the column are online at A World of Good in Word Vietnam magazine's online site. Your readership is valued; thank you. And hey, keep those cards and letters coming!

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Photo: Joanna Kosinska / pexels.com

 

This article originally appeared in Word Vietnam magazine and has been adapted. To view the magazine’s online version click here.

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