International volunteers : 21st Century Imperialists?

by "Christine"

I heard a story about a returned Peace Corps volunteer and the time he spent in a rural village in Africa. He showed up in the village full of enthusiasm, education, and the American Affinity for Efficiency. He spent the first few months assessing the needs of the village, like any good volunteer should, and he ultimately decided that the women spent far too much time and energy making the long trek to the river for water, which was dirty anyway. He gathered resources, and within a year had built a pump right outside the village which brought clean water quickly and easily. He built it...and they did not come.

For months he watched as the women continued past the pump, walking miles to the river for water. He tried making them taste the water, so they knew it was clean; he drank it himself so that they could see he didn’t get sick from it. Still, nobody used the pump. It wasn’t until mere weeks before he left the village that someone finally confided in him why they didn’t use the pump : in a patriarchal society in which husbands were not unknown to physically abuse their wives often, the long trek to the river was often the only relief the women had. It was a time for bonding in a safe place where no men would ever bother to come. By asking them to use the pump, the volunteer had essentially been asking them to surrender their daily support network.

Stories like this really aren’t uncommon in places where daily life differs greatly from the one we all grew up in and understand. No doubt, most of us would have applauded the idea of accessible, clean drinking water. It’s not that the volunteers are ill-intentioned or even ill-educated. It’s that our world view is completely dominant in our own perceptions. We live in a society of the Scientific Method, one that is ultimately built on the foundation of creating more tangible output with less input. Obviously, it’s a successful model here. But if we are going to take it upon ourselves to be involved with and assist in places that exist outside that world view, we need to be willing to accept new ideas which exist outside that world view as well. When Europeans came to the shores of present-day America in the 1400s, they intended to, in their words, civilize the savages. Replace “Europeans” with “Americans”, “civilize” with “democratize”, and “savages” with...hell, I don’t know. The communists? The terrorists? Or here’s one for the PC crowd : the “developing.” It doesn’t matter how you word it, the truth is, we’re imposing our beliefs onto those we consider inferior.

Last quarter I was studying in Cape Town, South Africa. A professor I had there explained “development” to me as “a kind of knowledge/power dichotomy by which control is exercised over the Third World”. When we go build a house in a poor town, we have the knowledge of how to build a house. Thus, we hold the power to provide houses. The town does not become developed, it becomes dependent. Once again people are placed into a hierarchical power structure, and not at the top.

Within the development discourse, “sustainability” is a word that’s easy to throw around these days. If development is good, sustainable development is better. If they have agriculture, we’re going to give them sustainable agriculture. Rarely do we really question what sustainability means as a volunteer. In its most basic form, it means that the growth which is created will exist in a region long after the organizations and volunteers and the western world views that they bring with them have left, and that eventually those organizations can and will leave. It means that every development initiative we put into place must not only account for but maximize the characteristics of that place. It means that fifty years of failed foreign aid initiatives have taught us that what works in one place may not, and probably will not, work in another.

There’s a new catchphrase floating around the development world: capacitating. The opposite of this, of course, is disabling. When a team of volunteers shows up in a village, builds a house in a week and leaves, what have they given that village? A house, yes, but they took away an opportunity for the community to come together and build their own house, using their own materials, and paying their own workers. An even worse example is the dumping of some lump sum of money into a community periodically for them to distribute as they wish. Sometimes the money is spent well, but usually it is not. In either case, the local economy suffers.

On the other side of the spectrum, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was given to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank. Without getting technical, what the bank does is gives out very small loans to people in Bangladesh considered too high-risk by the big banks (generally, poor women). These loans are a payback rate of over 90%. Ninety percent of those women are taking those loans and generating something more. The model is working, and nobody is giving them anything but a chance. That is capacitating.

I’m not the first one to suggest that current styles of volunteerism are the newest form of imperialism, nor the most overt. The Peace Corps itself was explicitly created as a tool against communism - volunteers were the new soldiers in a cold war.

So I challenge you to think about this : what are our international volunteers fighting for now? At the risk of sounding naive, I do have suggestions. Or rather, I have one suggestion. We can learn. Learn from the community you want to help more than they learn from you. Give them the space and enable them to teach you. You have to trust that these communities have their own world views, different from your own, and that they already possess the capabilities to achieve what they define as success. It may not be a global answer, but it’s a local start.

http://cmc421.blogspot.com/2007/03/international-volunteers-21st-century.html