N.B. This piece has been taken from my reflective writing journal and should be understood as tentative and incomplete :)
After our group session this morning [actually on October 28th], which surfaced many questions for me, I had a good long (much appreciated and really valuable) chat with one of my co-learners... It's hard to relate it all without the background so I won't try to get into the detail of it all... But the conversation also made it clear that I need to be more aware of and explicit about certain aspects of my own behaviour, thinking and worldview. It also generated a lot of conundrums for me. This is my attempt to make sense of it all!
Two main ones that stand out and perhaps permeated our whole conversation were (a) my desire to change people or want people to be a certain way or do a certain thing; and (b) my use of the word 'we' which taps into the bigger question of whether this is ok or not, why I do it and, ultimately, my sense of belonging in the world. I decided to ponder these ideas as I went out into the pastures and the forest of Stanmer Park. The walk led me up a hill, in the sunshine, to a little bench carved out of a tree trunk where I sat cross legged for some 15 minutes in contemplation. It then took me back through a little stretch of forest to my class, where I am sitting now.
I will start with a question around my sense of belonging. I came into this world as the product of two people from different cultures; a Jewish (culturally but not religiously) Tunisian mother who emigrated to France at the age of 18 to pursue her higher education in Paris, and an English father (from a down-to-earth middle class family) who had travelled to India by train in his early 20s. The two of them met while travelling in Greece. Various happenings led to my mother moving to England where my father was pursuing his Masters at the time and after some time they were married and my older brother was on the way. I came five and a half years later (during which time my parents and brother had visited India and lived in Hong Kong.
I was born in England in the Norfolk and Norwich hospital. Before turning one, I was in Qatar and Bahrein. My mothers parents and siblings had all moved to Paris and we would visit them once in a while. I was back in England until I was 4 when my family first moved to Hong Kong - where I stayed until I turned 8. During that time I visited Bali, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore - often more than once. I was studying in the English stream of the French International School.
By the time I was 8 and heading back to England, I had almost no recollection of what the place was or who my friends had been. My brother seemed shocked that I couldn't remember my childhood friends. Indeed, the whole house (where I had spent my first months and most of my first 4 years) seemed like a complete blur. It soon became normal. I completed primary school and then had my first two years of high school in England... By the time I was a teenager, I was headed back for Hong Kong where I spent the next 5 years. Again, plenty of travelling around South East Asia, this time adding Vietnam, Phillipines and China (proper) to the list. I remember during this time often being the one who was friends with everyone - including people who were not friends with each other... it was a fine line between belonging and not belonging. And I got that everywhere.
When I turned 18, I was headed for England for my undergraduate degree. I had chosen Environmental Policy with Economics at the LSE because it seemed to be the course that combined everything I was interested in. I already knew that I wanted to make positive change in the world. After the initial months in halls of residence I joined a group of friends that I clicked with. Only one of them was fully English. The rest? Turkish, Iranian, Singaporean-German, Korean-Irish, Indian, Mexican-Israeli, Luxembourg... And so it goes on... While there was a strong affinity on many levels, we were, I think, ideologically quite different. Nonetheless most of my undergraduate years were spent feeling that these people were as close to a family as I could have without actually being with my biological family.
When I finished my studies we all went to India together. I knew that I wanted to work for an NGO, to experience this 'development' thing first hand (as my course had seriously problematised it for me!). So we all went off together, they left one by one and I stayed for 5 years (that's how one of my friend's described their take on it). During that time I became part of the organisation where I was working, I lived-worked in a small town for one and a half years, dissolved whatever barriers existed between my life and my work, became almost fluent in Hindi... and here I am today.
Now. To what do I belong? How am I supposed to have a legitimate sense of belonging in the world? What am I a part of? Deep inside me, the overarching identity identity that really resonates with me is that of being part of the 'world family'; of being human. I am not English, or Tunisian; I am not a Hong-Konger; I am also not Indian, though there are many elements of all of these cultures and I do identify with each. Regardless of where you are from I look at you as a something much like a sibling; usually as a sister or a brother. When I speak of 'we' I speak as a self-proclaimed member of such a family attempting to establish such a relationship with those around me. I suppose it is a bit like a member of a regular family saying to another 'shall we go to the seaside?' or 'what have we done?' or 'we really know how to have a good time' or 'we've been through a tough time, lets put our heads and hearts together and try and sort this out'.
Now. My own family may ask me what right I have to use 'we' for extending my sense of what's going on, for making judgements about the situation or for making appeals. We are all individuals! Don't try to make a 'we' out of us as if we weren't unique individuals! Point taken. But how long would a family with no sense of 'we' actually hold out? Isn't this collective identity part of what gives us strength, what keeps us together and fills our lives with joy and meaning? Perhaps this is only my belief. My way of looking at it. At this point, I feel the need of putting in a disclaimer: I'm not saying I don't get joy from my own individuality, because I do. But my sense of belonging is important. Though I can't source the quote, someone said: "I am because we are". That's my point.
So I extend this 'we' to what I consider to be my extended family. People I have never met before. A bunch of 'total strangers'. Strangers? OK, I suppose that's a relative term, there are degrees of strangeness. But we all share the same home! We, effectively, eat from the same pot and drink the same water. We depend on the same biological or ecological life-support system (our environment). If some of us damage it for our own benefit at the expense of others, reality will pay us back - through terrorist attacks, through financial turmoil, through food crises, through water shortages and floods and countless other factors. We (oops, see how I have slipped into this 'we' thing?) are all in this together. Aren't we?
Now I recognise that not everyone might feel that they are part of the 'we' that I write about (it seems like a bit of a generalisation and could appear to lack respect for 'our' diversity). Does that mean that there is something not quite right about my usage of the word 'we'? Should I not be using 'we'? Perhaps I do not yet have an answer and this is something for me to contemplate. But do I plan to stop using it? Not yet. I do, however, feel that I can find ways of tempering my usage of 'we'. For example, I can weave in a little bit of 'I' to demonstrate that I see myself as an equally questionable part of 'we' not something above or separate from 'we'. I can also add a bit of 'you' to acknowledge the uniqueness of the reader. To invite them not only to engage with the ideas I put forth but also to challenge them.
The next question is about changing people - my desire to change people - what is it and is it ok? This is one of those awkward questions that tries to hide away most of the time because it's not an easy one to answer. Building upon some of the views that I have shared earlier about 'we', I do find myself feeling that a lot of change is needed in the world.
As a person studying development - whether I am for it or against it (whatever that means) - I clearly have some sense of what I value, what seems important to me and how I would like the world to be. Rather than seeing the world as immutable with myself merely as an entity that must adapt to it in order to attain some kind of ability to continue existing, I see the world as something subject to human influence, something we can act upon in ways that can be positive or negative from various stand-points. I, therefore, see that we all have a potential responsibility for influencing the world in ways that are positive - not just for ourselves, but for the 'we'. If I see people doing things that I see as being negative, then I will feel a sense of discomfort. A tension will emerge and I will want to see how such a situation can be transformed into something positive. For example, if I see someone beating another, I would want to step in. I would probably want to assess the situation first, however: after all it could be self-defence! So context does matter to me. Now, imagine I see people as being tangled up in a vicious cycle of conflict. I see suffering emerge as a result. I would like to find a way of addressing the issue. So I would come up with some kind of a strategy for engaging. I would want to talk to people about what was going on. About why there was a conflict. About how they felt about it. And if they both said there was no other option... would I simply walk away? Even if I knew that innocent children were dying? Even if I knew that the conflict was being fuelled by some external factor - for example, some unconnected geo-political concern?
Yes! I want to change people! I don't want to tell them what to do though! I want to invite them to inquire deeply, openly, honestly into themselves, into each other, into the systems of which they are a part; to gain and create knowledge about their realities that matter to them and that they can apply in order to live lives that are closer to what they want. But to engage in ernest, both individually and jointly, in a process of reflection and to act upon what emerges... this change I would love to bring! Does it make sense? I would like to help people who are locked in or trapped, in pain and discomfort, to break free from the shackles that oppress them, whether imposed by self, other or both.
And, of course, I know that I have much to learn. That I am probably still very naieve. That things are not so simple. That I will make many mistakes in my efforts to do this. That I will make judgements at times which later I see as wrong - or perhaps even regret. That I will have to change myself a great deal in order to be successful in fulfilling my aspirations. That it may not be possible. That I may be confused, or lost, or just plain wrong. But, and bearing all this in mind, I really believe right now, that this is OK. So long as I strive to be honest about it; so long as I continue to challenge my own ideas; so long as I invite others to challenge me and my views; and so long as I am respectful of the perspectives, experiences and opinions of those I interact with. So please help me to be helpful!
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Fragmentation and Healing
N.B. This piece has been taken from my reflective writing journal and should be understood as tentative and incomplete :)
It seems that we are all here in order to make sense of things. We look into books, we look into each other, searching for what is out there, what is right - and maybe also, who we are. Each of these is important. But it is often the last that is most neglected.
What we need now, is healing. Healing at so many levels. We need to reconcile our divergent worldviews, our pain, our joys and our shared destiny. We cannot exist the one without the other. The suffering that we continue to inflict upon our own family by thinking that we know best, that we have the answer, that it is this way not that way is causing such rotten damage that we are, in effect both the poisoner and the poisoned. The question before all of us now is how we can escape from this vicious cycle of harming others and harming ourselves. Where does the healing begin?
When I was working in a small town in India I became sensitised to the fragmentation that was all around me. The town where I have been working was populated by around 5,000 people belonging to over 25 identity groups - Hindus (over 20 castes), Jains, Muslims, tribals. That each community has its own neighbourhood - to this I am not opposed. However, that they should be pitted against each other? That they should be positioned in a hierarchical structure which exploits and results in suffering and pain? That politics and religion should be combined as a means to lash out, prevent progress or spread disharmony? That I cannot accept or tolerate - and am open and honest that this is where I am coming from - even if this makes me culturally insensitive! But then I ask, "What happened to vasudev kutumbh?" Where and when was that idea thrown out to rot? By whom? And how dig must the people of this planet dig into their souls to rediscover it?
So where does this loss take us? Youngsters - merely 10 years old will insult each other on the basis of their identity: Hindu dog! Muslim pig-fucker! For these youngsters it can be funny - or perhaps even grown-up seeming to engage in a testosterone, power-display with each other. But this is no small joke. When the right wing Hindu-ist BJP party stirred up a conflicy between the Tribals and the Muslims, threatening to destabilise an age-old and peaceful co-existence over something that was strictly a matter for the Tribals and Muslims to resolve amongst themselves rather than politicising it! I felt a great deal of fear at that time. Perhaps because I knew that we, as the implementers, had created the opening for such opportunistic communalism through our activities. It was not the first time we had done so either. I learned: never, never, never fail to do the communal calculations in any community development work. Make it an explicit part of the considerations of what is being done and make as sure as you can that you have left no little stone unturned. But how do we become immaculate? Not just as individuals able to be mid-wives to new and more harmonious realities, but as a collective; as an organisation?
So these little tensions erupt now and again. Perhaps that is a necessary or inevitable feature of what is, more or less, a state of peaceful co-existence. I would ask: where do we decide to place the bar of what wrong-doing we are ready to tolerate? How much pain and injustice can we tolerate? Can we really tolerate any? What are the world and its many people calling out for? Clamouring for?
Which takes me to the old man I met in the Muslim Mohalla. We sat down to have a group meeting. To talk about the new water tank that was being proposed and for me to get a chance to meet some of the people that I would be living with for the next year and a half. An old man, with greying hair, a weathered face and wearing dark-grey shirt and pajamas came toward me and slowly squatted down onto his haunches. I greeted him: "Salam alaykum!" "Alaykum Salam!" he replied. I asked him how he was. He asked "What can I answer?" I asked him what did he mean? He told me of his family. A broken family. Sons that didn't speak to him. It was heart wrenching to come close to understanding how he felt. The world was not like it used to be. Children used to respect their parents. Now all they wanted was to be free. To be apart. There was deep loneliness and pain emanating from the old man. And I said, "I'm sorry. I understand what you are saying."
And then there was the lady from the Meghwal community who burst into tears while one of our volunteers was out investigating the relationship between women and water in her community. After a semi-structured interview, in which a local youth (one of our hero's) was helping out as a translator, the woman began to cry. The questions had been probing the problems faced by women in collection and management of water and the idea was that some of these discussions would help to highlight some of the usually unspoken issues faced by the women. The volunteer and the local youth asked the woman what the matter was: "In all my life, my own sons have never asked me how I felt! Never asked me what difficulties I faced! Never offered to help me fetch the water! Never asked me what could be done. Today you two people, not of my own family are the first to ask me such a question!" So much pain - would it have ever surfaced without those questions.
So the fragmentation - that we see on the news at the international level, that we see in our big cities, that we see in our small towns, that we see in our communities, that we see in our families - how deep down does this fragmentation permeate? I have come to locate it within the individual. I am fragmented, you are fragmented he/she is fragmented. Our minds are fragmented. Our souls are fragmented. We are full of contradictions. Our very process of perceiving is, the vast majority of the time, is fragmentary in nature. Our relationships with everything around us rise up out of us, connect to that which is around us, and feed back into us. Just like a loop. On the one hand we see ourselves as victims of the outer world. But why do we not also see ourselves as victims of the inner world? Why do we not see that it is our own way of being in the world that we have control over? That it is the harmony that we can cultivate within ourselves that will enable us to bring harmony into the outer world?
And this is why I believe that what we need now is healing and not 'development'. If we were to focus our collective energies on healing the people, healing the families, the communities, the Tribes, what would be the need for anyone to 'do' development? If people were living in harmony, helping each other to live; co-existing, co-learning and co-creating, then what would be the need for projects and institutions? We need to redefine what we call a vibrant economy. We need to redefine what we call politics. We need to redefine our very own selves and become part of a living process in which there are not people doing things to other people; only people doing things, for each other, together.
This line of reasoning led me to wonder. Could we have created the world we have today, with its various crises, without injustice. Injustice is what has enabled us to produce this mess. And it is the ceaseless denial of injustice that allows us to perpetuate it. But how does one remove injustice? What is the process to be followed? Yesterday I watched a movie about samurai. In it one of them said: you cannot kill the weeds that choke the flowers by poisoning them, for you will then kill the flowers too. But you can plant flowers that draw their energy from the weeds, causing them to wither and vanish. Does this work for our approach? It makes me think of appreciative inquiry!
It seems that we are all here in order to make sense of things. We look into books, we look into each other, searching for what is out there, what is right - and maybe also, who we are. Each of these is important. But it is often the last that is most neglected.
What we need now, is healing. Healing at so many levels. We need to reconcile our divergent worldviews, our pain, our joys and our shared destiny. We cannot exist the one without the other. The suffering that we continue to inflict upon our own family by thinking that we know best, that we have the answer, that it is this way not that way is causing such rotten damage that we are, in effect both the poisoner and the poisoned. The question before all of us now is how we can escape from this vicious cycle of harming others and harming ourselves. Where does the healing begin?
When I was working in a small town in India I became sensitised to the fragmentation that was all around me. The town where I have been working was populated by around 5,000 people belonging to over 25 identity groups - Hindus (over 20 castes), Jains, Muslims, tribals. That each community has its own neighbourhood - to this I am not opposed. However, that they should be pitted against each other? That they should be positioned in a hierarchical structure which exploits and results in suffering and pain? That politics and religion should be combined as a means to lash out, prevent progress or spread disharmony? That I cannot accept or tolerate - and am open and honest that this is where I am coming from - even if this makes me culturally insensitive! But then I ask, "What happened to vasudev kutumbh?" Where and when was that idea thrown out to rot? By whom? And how dig must the people of this planet dig into their souls to rediscover it?
So where does this loss take us? Youngsters - merely 10 years old will insult each other on the basis of their identity: Hindu dog! Muslim pig-fucker! For these youngsters it can be funny - or perhaps even grown-up seeming to engage in a testosterone, power-display with each other. But this is no small joke. When the right wing Hindu-ist BJP party stirred up a conflicy between the Tribals and the Muslims, threatening to destabilise an age-old and peaceful co-existence over something that was strictly a matter for the Tribals and Muslims to resolve amongst themselves rather than politicising it! I felt a great deal of fear at that time. Perhaps because I knew that we, as the implementers, had created the opening for such opportunistic communalism through our activities. It was not the first time we had done so either. I learned: never, never, never fail to do the communal calculations in any community development work. Make it an explicit part of the considerations of what is being done and make as sure as you can that you have left no little stone unturned. But how do we become immaculate? Not just as individuals able to be mid-wives to new and more harmonious realities, but as a collective; as an organisation?
So these little tensions erupt now and again. Perhaps that is a necessary or inevitable feature of what is, more or less, a state of peaceful co-existence. I would ask: where do we decide to place the bar of what wrong-doing we are ready to tolerate? How much pain and injustice can we tolerate? Can we really tolerate any? What are the world and its many people calling out for? Clamouring for?
Which takes me to the old man I met in the Muslim Mohalla. We sat down to have a group meeting. To talk about the new water tank that was being proposed and for me to get a chance to meet some of the people that I would be living with for the next year and a half. An old man, with greying hair, a weathered face and wearing dark-grey shirt and pajamas came toward me and slowly squatted down onto his haunches. I greeted him: "Salam alaykum!" "Alaykum Salam!" he replied. I asked him how he was. He asked "What can I answer?" I asked him what did he mean? He told me of his family. A broken family. Sons that didn't speak to him. It was heart wrenching to come close to understanding how he felt. The world was not like it used to be. Children used to respect their parents. Now all they wanted was to be free. To be apart. There was deep loneliness and pain emanating from the old man. And I said, "I'm sorry. I understand what you are saying."
And then there was the lady from the Meghwal community who burst into tears while one of our volunteers was out investigating the relationship between women and water in her community. After a semi-structured interview, in which a local youth (one of our hero's) was helping out as a translator, the woman began to cry. The questions had been probing the problems faced by women in collection and management of water and the idea was that some of these discussions would help to highlight some of the usually unspoken issues faced by the women. The volunteer and the local youth asked the woman what the matter was: "In all my life, my own sons have never asked me how I felt! Never asked me what difficulties I faced! Never offered to help me fetch the water! Never asked me what could be done. Today you two people, not of my own family are the first to ask me such a question!" So much pain - would it have ever surfaced without those questions.
So the fragmentation - that we see on the news at the international level, that we see in our big cities, that we see in our small towns, that we see in our communities, that we see in our families - how deep down does this fragmentation permeate? I have come to locate it within the individual. I am fragmented, you are fragmented he/she is fragmented. Our minds are fragmented. Our souls are fragmented. We are full of contradictions. Our very process of perceiving is, the vast majority of the time, is fragmentary in nature. Our relationships with everything around us rise up out of us, connect to that which is around us, and feed back into us. Just like a loop. On the one hand we see ourselves as victims of the outer world. But why do we not also see ourselves as victims of the inner world? Why do we not see that it is our own way of being in the world that we have control over? That it is the harmony that we can cultivate within ourselves that will enable us to bring harmony into the outer world?
And this is why I believe that what we need now is healing and not 'development'. If we were to focus our collective energies on healing the people, healing the families, the communities, the Tribes, what would be the need for anyone to 'do' development? If people were living in harmony, helping each other to live; co-existing, co-learning and co-creating, then what would be the need for projects and institutions? We need to redefine what we call a vibrant economy. We need to redefine what we call politics. We need to redefine our very own selves and become part of a living process in which there are not people doing things to other people; only people doing things, for each other, together.
This line of reasoning led me to wonder. Could we have created the world we have today, with its various crises, without injustice. Injustice is what has enabled us to produce this mess. And it is the ceaseless denial of injustice that allows us to perpetuate it. But how does one remove injustice? What is the process to be followed? Yesterday I watched a movie about samurai. In it one of them said: you cannot kill the weeds that choke the flowers by poisoning them, for you will then kill the flowers too. But you can plant flowers that draw their energy from the weeds, causing them to wither and vanish. Does this work for our approach? It makes me think of appreciative inquiry!
As the dust settles...
Well, it has been a while now since I posted here! The dust is finally settling a little here at IDS and I feel that I have reached a comfort level where I can return to my blog!
I have not been inactive at all during this time! I have been furiously conversing, reflecting and also writing - it's just that none of it has found its way onto this blog. And there doesn't seem to be much of a way that I can do justice to the experience I have been having. I have started maintaining a journal using Tomboy on Linux, which allows me to link up all my reflections, reading notes, class/lecture notes, daily to do lists and so on with each other.
I have also set up a ning platform for our class (presently limited to just the 9 of us) after everyone agreed on it and have made a couple of posts up there as part of my reflective practice and also as part of the effort to get it up and running properly. There is much to learn about how my co-learners and I can and will function in this virtual space... There is, of course, at least as much to be learned about how we function in the real spaces that we share together...
In any case, this posting is merely to explain the absence and to point out that some slightly more consistent blogging can be expected here. I was thinking that, amongst other things, I could use this space for my meta-reflections - reflections on how I have been reflecting, learning and changing as part of the course. In the meanwhile, however, I will follow up with a few posts from the ning platform.
Also for an update, I have initiated a long with some co-learners a process for establishing a 'complexity' group. The remit is appropriately fuzzy at the time being but it is essentially supposed to function as a kind of platform for all those interested in and/or working with 'complexity' in any of its various guises to engage in dialogue and learning together... hopefully in order to figure out new ways of translating whatever emerges into new and more effective ways of being and doing... This should be most interesting (even though I won't be around to see it directly)!
Aside from that there is a 'Questioning Development' group (funny how that's been one of the labels I've been using in this blog for some time now!) set up by some co-learners that has started meeting regularly and this is generating some hot stuff for everyone to sink their teeth, minds and souls into. We seem to have quickly entered difficult terrain here; with one of the key subjects for discussion being around the need for deeper acknowledgement of historicity in development interventions and also the need for a deeper acknowledgement of the pain and injustice that has been (and still is being) meted out in much of the non-Western world as part a process that supports Western lifestyle and consumption patterns. Great. We will continue to delve into this, with all the pain and difficulty that it entails. There is much space to be held as we question the very notion of 'development'...
Which reminds me of what triggered me to return to this blog... I read just now, the following quote in a review of World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent Times by Joanna Macy (2007) on Amazon (see here) and thought it was really rather worth sharing with the wider world. It also makes me think I should be reading this book!
On that note, following are two posts that I had shared on the ning platform... Not perfect pieces, very much raw and unedited, but I've decided to share them nonetheless! So here goes...
I have not been inactive at all during this time! I have been furiously conversing, reflecting and also writing - it's just that none of it has found its way onto this blog. And there doesn't seem to be much of a way that I can do justice to the experience I have been having. I have started maintaining a journal using Tomboy on Linux, which allows me to link up all my reflections, reading notes, class/lecture notes, daily to do lists and so on with each other.
I have also set up a ning platform for our class (presently limited to just the 9 of us) after everyone agreed on it and have made a couple of posts up there as part of my reflective practice and also as part of the effort to get it up and running properly. There is much to learn about how my co-learners and I can and will function in this virtual space... There is, of course, at least as much to be learned about how we function in the real spaces that we share together...
In any case, this posting is merely to explain the absence and to point out that some slightly more consistent blogging can be expected here. I was thinking that, amongst other things, I could use this space for my meta-reflections - reflections on how I have been reflecting, learning and changing as part of the course. In the meanwhile, however, I will follow up with a few posts from the ning platform.
Also for an update, I have initiated a long with some co-learners a process for establishing a 'complexity' group. The remit is appropriately fuzzy at the time being but it is essentially supposed to function as a kind of platform for all those interested in and/or working with 'complexity' in any of its various guises to engage in dialogue and learning together... hopefully in order to figure out new ways of translating whatever emerges into new and more effective ways of being and doing... This should be most interesting (even though I won't be around to see it directly)!
Aside from that there is a 'Questioning Development' group (funny how that's been one of the labels I've been using in this blog for some time now!) set up by some co-learners that has started meeting regularly and this is generating some hot stuff for everyone to sink their teeth, minds and souls into. We seem to have quickly entered difficult terrain here; with one of the key subjects for discussion being around the need for deeper acknowledgement of historicity in development interventions and also the need for a deeper acknowledgement of the pain and injustice that has been (and still is being) meted out in much of the non-Western world as part a process that supports Western lifestyle and consumption patterns. Great. We will continue to delve into this, with all the pain and difficulty that it entails. There is much space to be held as we question the very notion of 'development'...
Which reminds me of what triggered me to return to this blog... I read just now, the following quote in a review of World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent Times by Joanna Macy (2007) on Amazon (see here) and thought it was really rather worth sharing with the wider world. It also makes me think I should be reading this book!
"Development is not imitating the West. Development is not high-cost industrial complexes, chemical fertilizers and mammoth hydro-electric dams. It is not selling your soul for unnecessary consumer items or schemes to get rich quick. Development is waking up - waking up our true potential as persons and as a society." (p. 132)
On that note, following are two posts that I had shared on the ning platform... Not perfect pieces, very much raw and unedited, but I've decided to share them nonetheless! So here goes...
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Back to school!
After 5 years of living in the 'wilderness', of gathering experience and of learning from the immediate reality, I am finally back to 'school'. School, in this case, is the Institute of Development Studies located at Sussex University. My course, for those who don't yet know, is the MA in Participation Power and Social Change. I have blogged earlier about the questions I had on whether to go back to school? so I won't give more of that here... Instead, my take on what I've experienced so far.
Firstly, I have no regrets about coming here. It is proving to be everything I could have hoped for and more.
Academically, we've had a very light first week. Most of the time has gone into dealing with all of the formalities and getting us introduced to our courses. More importantly, than this, though, it has focused on getting us to know each other. For example, Robert Chambers' (of PRA fame) introductory workshop enabled us to meet all the 130 or so students, break the ice and lay the foundations for a real state of community! The sheer diversity that is present is something to be happy about - and not just nationality but background, past employment, experience, knowledge, sector, interests... Wow!
So with the ice broken, the first week has involved lots and lots of conversing with as many people as possible on as many subjects as possible. Wonderful! Everyone is interesting. No one has been boring or arrogant or offensive in any way whatsoever! Quite amazing! And the conversations range from:
Though I have only had one day actually focusing on my particular course, it seems like just what I wanted. We have started using participatory methods and reflecting on them, we have explored different modes or ways of learning (playing, gardening, reading, collaborating... and many more), we have divided into reflection groups, we have set up an inquiry to explore how gender may influence our learning processes, we have shared our life stories (visually and orally) and explained how this led us to IDS. We shared our hopes and fears and talked about them openly, offering each other support and expressing our common desire for solidarity within the group. The idea of forming an on-line learning group (e.g. through ning or perhaps through the ids intranet) that can be used while we are away to enable a continuous sharing of knowledge and experience has been floated and enthusiastically welcomed by the group. I am really quite excited by all of this!
As part of my course I will be maintaining a journal. This will involve actually writing with a pen so I am quite curious to see how this will compare and contrast with the writing that I do on this blog.
In the meanwhile, I am writing an essay today critiquing various definitions of development and will also be doing some further editing work for Seva Mandir's 6th Comprehensive Plan document. I also have plenty of reading to busy myself with. As the weeks roll on I will continue blogging my experiences here at IDS.
Firstly, I have no regrets about coming here. It is proving to be everything I could have hoped for and more.
Academically, we've had a very light first week. Most of the time has gone into dealing with all of the formalities and getting us introduced to our courses. More importantly, than this, though, it has focused on getting us to know each other. For example, Robert Chambers' (of PRA fame) introductory workshop enabled us to meet all the 130 or so students, break the ice and lay the foundations for a real state of community! The sheer diversity that is present is something to be happy about - and not just nationality but background, past employment, experience, knowledge, sector, interests... Wow!
So with the ice broken, the first week has involved lots and lots of conversing with as many people as possible on as many subjects as possible. Wonderful! Everyone is interesting. No one has been boring or arrogant or offensive in any way whatsoever! Quite amazing! And the conversations range from:
- Trenchant critiques of development - like the wonderful conversation with someone from Kenya about the loss of traditional cultural values that were more participatory and inclusive than any modern democratic state structures, which left us with the question of why there is so little mention of 'love' in the development discourse... My thoughts drifted toward Arturo Maturana... to
- Sharing of knowledge on development practice, within organisations, working at the field level - what's working, what isn't, where we're confused, where we're on the right track and where we aren't, drawing on our diverse experiences and backgrounds...
Though I have only had one day actually focusing on my particular course, it seems like just what I wanted. We have started using participatory methods and reflecting on them, we have explored different modes or ways of learning (playing, gardening, reading, collaborating... and many more), we have divided into reflection groups, we have set up an inquiry to explore how gender may influence our learning processes, we have shared our life stories (visually and orally) and explained how this led us to IDS. We shared our hopes and fears and talked about them openly, offering each other support and expressing our common desire for solidarity within the group. The idea of forming an on-line learning group (e.g. through ning or perhaps through the ids intranet) that can be used while we are away to enable a continuous sharing of knowledge and experience has been floated and enthusiastically welcomed by the group. I am really quite excited by all of this!
As part of my course I will be maintaining a journal. This will involve actually writing with a pen so I am quite curious to see how this will compare and contrast with the writing that I do on this blog.
In the meanwhile, I am writing an essay today critiquing various definitions of development and will also be doing some further editing work for Seva Mandir's 6th Comprehensive Plan document. I also have plenty of reading to busy myself with. As the weeks roll on I will continue blogging my experiences here at IDS.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Future Uncertain 2
After many months I made a return visit to www.opendemocracy.net and read this, an article by Paul Rogers presenting two scenarios for 2020.
The first is based on a business-as-usual kind of a story. To read it is to wonder whether bringing children into this world is the right thing to do. It is so horrific and yet so possible, that it hardly bears thinking about - except that if we don't acknowledge the risk, we might forget to do what we need to do to avoid it.
The second imagines that we really get our act together and a commitment to positive change at a global level is fulfilled by leaders. It seems just about liveable - but not easy - and can be thought as 'just about making it'... The contrast between the two, with the former seeming so upsettingly more likely than the latter, left me mind-blown.
I still have no idea where we are really headed and what that means for the lives of common people. All I know is that I want to be ready for anything, holding within me hope and love and the readiness to help humanity create a new reality that is fresh, liberating and wholesome - whether radically, out of the ashes of what we leave behind or as a gentle transformation of our existing systems. But really, now is a time to think and to act like never before.
Meanwhile, I thought I would share this resource (yet to be fully developed and populated!) that I came across (hat tip to Michael Bauwens of Peer-to-Peer Foundation - see many of their posts in my shared items box on the right - for this post, itself a great read) that might end up yielding some fruits in the quest for a better, more sustainable world :) Clearly just sitting around thinking will not get us very far!
The first is based on a business-as-usual kind of a story. To read it is to wonder whether bringing children into this world is the right thing to do. It is so horrific and yet so possible, that it hardly bears thinking about - except that if we don't acknowledge the risk, we might forget to do what we need to do to avoid it.
The second imagines that we really get our act together and a commitment to positive change at a global level is fulfilled by leaders. It seems just about liveable - but not easy - and can be thought as 'just about making it'... The contrast between the two, with the former seeming so upsettingly more likely than the latter, left me mind-blown.
I still have no idea where we are really headed and what that means for the lives of common people. All I know is that I want to be ready for anything, holding within me hope and love and the readiness to help humanity create a new reality that is fresh, liberating and wholesome - whether radically, out of the ashes of what we leave behind or as a gentle transformation of our existing systems. But really, now is a time to think and to act like never before.
Meanwhile, I thought I would share this resource (yet to be fully developed and populated!) that I came across (hat tip to Michael Bauwens of Peer-to-Peer Foundation - see many of their posts in my shared items box on the right - for this post, itself a great read) that might end up yielding some fruits in the quest for a better, more sustainable world :) Clearly just sitting around thinking will not get us very far!
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
protecting the ethnosphere
The dilemma of what to do about 'uncontacted tribes' or, for that matter, indigenous peoples the world over has been a theme in some of my earlier blog posts. The real issue is the shattering of their worldviews and culture that 'development' almost inevitably brings. I ended my last post on the subject by saying that:
But this would suggest that there isn't even a role to play in helping them to exist... Though I still have no idea what to do, this wonderful video from the TED talks by Wade Davis (from National Geographic), warmed my heart and, despite the tragic undertones, left me with a small ray of hope:
The idea of there being an ethnosphere that is undervalued (I am trying to imagine, somewhat unsuccessfully, an ethnological economics, like environmental economics, that may offer us ways of protecting it) and, it would seem, whose destruction is considered to be an indication of development itself is really disturbing.
As Wade Davis says in this passage based on his time with aboriginees in northern australia:
This seems like the deepest recognition of everything being one that is conceivable: a life based on it rather than a life spent trying to grasp it. And how different a world this would produce.
So what do we do now?
Perhaps, I should just stay well away and avoid even thinking about polluting them with my own confusion!
But this would suggest that there isn't even a role to play in helping them to exist... Though I still have no idea what to do, this wonderful video from the TED talks by Wade Davis (from National Geographic), warmed my heart and, despite the tragic undertones, left me with a small ray of hope:
The idea of there being an ethnosphere that is undervalued (I am trying to imagine, somewhat unsuccessfully, an ethnological economics, like environmental economics, that may offer us ways of protecting it) and, it would seem, whose destruction is considered to be an indication of development itself is really disturbing.
As Wade Davis says in this passage based on his time with aboriginees in northern australia:
...in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning.
This seems like the deepest recognition of everything being one that is conceivable: a life based on it rather than a life spent trying to grasp it. And how different a world this would produce.
So what do we do now?
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