Dear readers, friends, co-travellers and anyone else who may chance upon this blog. It is with some sadness that I am shifting my blog to wordpress. Sadness because this is the place where I started blogging; the place where I started my process of sharing my journey of learning and change with the world. I remember the first little bubbles of excitement when I discovered that someone had actually visited my blog. I remember the even greater excitement when I received a comment on something I had written. Not that I've received a huge number of visits... But then, for whom does the songbird sing? I suppose it's for whoever is around to hear!
So, enough emotionalising this transition. Instead, simply come and visit my new blog over at http://andreling.wordpress.com. I look forward to seeing you there soon!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
What I've been doing
The way that can be described is not the absolute way...
-- Lao Tse
It's been a while since I last posted and so I feel the need to explain my absence from the blogosphere to the world. The basic justification is that I have been immersing myself in my MA in Participation Power and Social Change and, more specifically, the preparation of my Analytical Paper. The Analytical Paper is, essentially, supposed to be a kind of concept paper that can be used to frame the work I will be doing when I return to Seva Mandir. It will combine a contextual analysis, a conceptual framework and an overview of how I plan to go about addressing the questions that I intend to ask.
I won't go into the context just here, but the conceptual framework seems worth sharing. Essentially, I will be locating my action research project at the theoretical intersection of three main domains: complexity, power and learning.
There are plenty of theories related to each of these domains and I have been seeking out the particular ones where they converge. This has led me to a number of texts that have quite significantly contributed to the way that I think about my participation in the universe - and particularly in social life.So far my learning journey here at IDS seems to have given me a much more solid understanding of the more philosophical dimensions of the work that I am involved in. In particular, I have come to gain a more solid understanding of the idea of 'epistemology' - a word I had often heard, sometimes used but whose definition (and importance) I had never understood so completely. I have also manged to explore the linkages between knowledge and power and understand how participatory action research serves to transform power relations by engaging people in the creation of new knowledge.
I have also had the opportunity to explore Mezirow's work on Transformative Learning:
"the emancipatory process of becoming critically aware of how and why the structure of psycho-cultural assumptions has come to constrain the way we see ourselves and our relationships, reconstituting this structure to permit a more inclusive and discriminating integration of experience and acting upon these new understandings."Combined with Hayward's (2000) reconceptualisation of power as 'the network of social boundaries to action' and the very important observation that the very idea of negative freedom is absurd (she argues instead for a positive and political form of freedom), all this has amounted to a rather powerful set of concepts that have been making me continuously rethink the nature of and my engagement in the world.
On top of all this, I have been trying to familiarise myself with Ralph Stacey and the idea of complex responsive processes. Stacey has perhaps provided me with the most radical worldview of all. Three papers, all available for free, can be downloaded from his university website:
- The Emergence of Knowledge in Organisations
- Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People
- Affects and Cognition in a Social Theory of Unconscious Processes
In that fuzzy space where complexity theory, power theory and learning theory intersect, I will be conducting my action research; exploring the ways in which I can engage in conversations that bring about positive transformation in human organisations (both Seva Mandir and the communities). I think it's going to be a lot of fun! The essay, however, which will only be 5,000 words, is going to be a bit of a challenge. So much to say, and so little space!
On a somewhat different note, I have been having a lot of really great conversations. Feedback - and the need for it - has been one of the recurring themes, as has the need to explore power relations within our learning group, and my Analytical Paper (of course)... Tomorrow will be the second complexity world cafe in which we will recap the last session, go over the concepts that had not been covered previously and then have some further conversations to explore what some of this might mean for practice... It will be interesting to see what kind of energy is present in the room as it will probably be my last opportunity to participate in one of these sessions for sometime :) I can't help but hope that this process of exploring complexity gets the wind under its wings!
It is now way past my bedtime! Sweet dreams!
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Complexity World Cafe
On a radically different note from the previous post...
I co-hosted the first of what may be many sessions on complexity at IDS today! After extensive brain-scratching and chatting with colleagues and co-learners a World Cafe format was developed and we got a good mix of students - including some new faces from outside IDS - talking, sharing and co-creating knowledge!
I must admit that I was a little bit nervous before hand. I know the limits of my own knowledge and wondered what would happen if we didn't get the energy in the room that we needed (it was my first world cafe of this sort!). But we did! And after some initial concern that danced across the faces of people who felt like they didn't know much (most probably including my own!) once the process took off there were people buzzing around the big boards we had put up with marker pens in hand adding all kinds of wonderful ideas to the key-words that we had put up.
The key-words were: systems, self-organisation, emergence, chaos, non-linearity and attractors. We also had blank sheets up for people to add whatever concepts they might want. Everything got completely filled up and the curiosity and eagerness to share ideas felt almost electric!
The wrap up was a little rushed (and couldn't be finished) but it was really good to have Rosalind Eyben, a fellow(ess) here, to do some of the wrap up and guide the reflection on what had emerged. We ended with declarations of a desire to take the work forward, people volunteered to help out, suggestions rolled forth and I wondered how so much happened without my really doing anything. Quite remarkable!!!
Big thanks to Agnes for the photos ;)
I co-hosted the first of what may be many sessions on complexity at IDS today! After extensive brain-scratching and chatting with colleagues and co-learners a World Cafe format was developed and we got a good mix of students - including some new faces from outside IDS - talking, sharing and co-creating knowledge!
I must admit that I was a little bit nervous before hand. I know the limits of my own knowledge and wondered what would happen if we didn't get the energy in the room that we needed (it was my first world cafe of this sort!). But we did! And after some initial concern that danced across the faces of people who felt like they didn't know much (most probably including my own!) once the process took off there were people buzzing around the big boards we had put up with marker pens in hand adding all kinds of wonderful ideas to the key-words that we had put up.
The key-words were: systems, self-organisation, emergence, chaos, non-linearity and attractors. We also had blank sheets up for people to add whatever concepts they might want. Everything got completely filled up and the curiosity and eagerness to share ideas felt almost electric!
The wrap up was a little rushed (and couldn't be finished) but it was really good to have Rosalind Eyben, a fellow(ess) here, to do some of the wrap up and guide the reflection on what had emerged. We ended with declarations of a desire to take the work forward, people volunteered to help out, suggestions rolled forth and I wondered how so much happened without my really doing anything. Quite remarkable!!!
Big thanks to Agnes for the photos ;)
rights or responsibilities
Well, miraculously the essay slipped out without too much anguish :) Actually, the writing process was a really good exercise for helping me to digest a whole load of reading materials that I have found rather insightful. Now with that behind me I have got my senses set on the upcoming 'Analytical Paper' that I will need to have ready by December 10th. This will be the place in which I present the conceptual and contextual framing of the work that I will be doing when I return to India. Fortunately, it has been taking shape quite nicely thanks to some good discussions with fellows, researchers, students and myself ;) I will, however, need a designated supervisor (and don't have one yet!)...
The emerging framework for my action inquiry is one that uses complexity, learning and power lenses to study processes of facilitating learning for change at multiple levels including (1) myself (as a reflective facilitator); (2) individuals in the organisation; (3) the organisation as a whole; (4) the communities with whom the organisation works.
Otherwise I experienced a rather wonderful sense of joy recently as our class had a kind of epiphany about its responsibility for actively shaping its own learning process. I've been fascinated with the way the course is unfolding. Simply observing and reflecting on this has made for a very profound learning process indeed! I also believe that it has reinforced some of my thinking about the rights-responsibilities debate that surfaces quite often back at Seva Mandir. Knowing that we had the right to shape the process and realising that it was our responsibility to shape our process; how do these two ideas complement each other? Does the one need the other? What is a right that is not realised?
I read something today that talked of the right of people to create "...authentic, caring, sustainable communities, to control their resources, to govern themselves, and guide their own evolution..." In what way is this not the people's responsibility? Claiming rights or taking responsibility? Is there any difference? Rights only become realised when people take responsibility. But does the process of claiming rights somehow short-circuit the deeper cultural change that occurs when people frame their process as one of taking individual and collective responsibility for co-creating a different reality? Is it merely some combination of the two? Why am I so much more concerned with responsibilities than rights? Is it because responsibility implies rights but rights don't imply responsibilities? If I have a right but don't make any effort to claim it, whose fault is that? Perhaps this seems decontextualised!?
Back to our class, if we had the right to shape our learning process but didn't take the responsibility, then what would it mean? And if we were not told that we had the right to shape our learning process but were only told that we had the responsibility for shaping it - then might that have triggered a more pro-active reaction from the outset? I recently posted the following on a new wordpress blog that I am experimenting with (exploring the added functionality that might prove useful for my documenting my learning journey!) as part of my wonderings:
I think that this is something we all need to think about very seriously: what is our responsibility in the world and are we honoring it?
The emerging framework for my action inquiry is one that uses complexity, learning and power lenses to study processes of facilitating learning for change at multiple levels including (1) myself (as a reflective facilitator); (2) individuals in the organisation; (3) the organisation as a whole; (4) the communities with whom the organisation works.
Otherwise I experienced a rather wonderful sense of joy recently as our class had a kind of epiphany about its responsibility for actively shaping its own learning process. I've been fascinated with the way the course is unfolding. Simply observing and reflecting on this has made for a very profound learning process indeed! I also believe that it has reinforced some of my thinking about the rights-responsibilities debate that surfaces quite often back at Seva Mandir. Knowing that we had the right to shape the process and realising that it was our responsibility to shape our process; how do these two ideas complement each other? Does the one need the other? What is a right that is not realised?
I read something today that talked of the right of people to create "...authentic, caring, sustainable communities, to control their resources, to govern themselves, and guide their own evolution..." In what way is this not the people's responsibility? Claiming rights or taking responsibility? Is there any difference? Rights only become realised when people take responsibility. But does the process of claiming rights somehow short-circuit the deeper cultural change that occurs when people frame their process as one of taking individual and collective responsibility for co-creating a different reality? Is it merely some combination of the two? Why am I so much more concerned with responsibilities than rights? Is it because responsibility implies rights but rights don't imply responsibilities? If I have a right but don't make any effort to claim it, whose fault is that? Perhaps this seems decontextualised!?
Back to our class, if we had the right to shape our learning process but didn't take the responsibility, then what would it mean? And if we were not told that we had the right to shape our learning process but were only told that we had the responsibility for shaping it - then might that have triggered a more pro-active reaction from the outset? I recently posted the following on a new wordpress blog that I am experimenting with (exploring the added functionality that might prove useful for my documenting my learning journey!) as part of my wonderings:
Is the language of responsibilities more powerful than the language of rights? Does it invoke more action on behalf of the would-be ‘right-claimers’? Is the whole ‘rights’ framework a ‘Northern’ construction that is being pushed on the rest of the world (along with so much else, like the modern Nation State) because asking the poor and marginal to take ‘responsibility’ for solving their problems sounds embarrassing when it is known that so many of their problems are perpetuated by the ‘North’? Are these questions harsh or unfair or am I onto something here?
I think that this is something we all need to think about very seriously: what is our responsibility in the world and are we honoring it?
Sunday, November 9, 2008
essay writing
Right now I am supposed to be writing my first assessed essay of the term. It's Sunday afternoon and the essay is due at 8.45 on Monday morning. Go figure!
Well, in any case, the title is: "Contribution of an inter-disciplinary approach to studying and/or practicing development."
It's quite an experience putting together my first assessed essay in years. I have written countless reports and documents over the last 5 + years since I arrived in India to do 'real' work but none of them really had any references. Exploring how to manage multiple data sources, to extract the key arguments that diverse authors are making, find suitable quotes, weave them all together and ensure that my own voice and thinking finds its space - and, that at the end of it all, the whole thing actually forms a coherent whole, is quite a fascinating process.
I have already made three mind-maps. The first one was supposed to be the overall structure of the essay. The second one I had to produce when I realised that I had underestimated the depth that would be required for the second half of my paper (which only became obvious after completion of the third half) but ended up just revealing the need for restructuring of the first half before being able to figure out how to proceed. The third was for the second half of the essay, laying out the key themes that would need to be addressed on the way to the conclusion. Wow! Last time I really used mind-maps in such a systematic manner was for revision guides back in my undergraduate days.
Anyway, here's something that doesn't fit anywhere in my essay. Some food for thought, I suppose:
Well, in any case, the title is: "Contribution of an inter-disciplinary approach to studying and/or practicing development."
It's quite an experience putting together my first assessed essay in years. I have written countless reports and documents over the last 5 + years since I arrived in India to do 'real' work but none of them really had any references. Exploring how to manage multiple data sources, to extract the key arguments that diverse authors are making, find suitable quotes, weave them all together and ensure that my own voice and thinking finds its space - and, that at the end of it all, the whole thing actually forms a coherent whole, is quite a fascinating process.
I have already made three mind-maps. The first one was supposed to be the overall structure of the essay. The second one I had to produce when I realised that I had underestimated the depth that would be required for the second half of my paper (which only became obvious after completion of the third half) but ended up just revealing the need for restructuring of the first half before being able to figure out how to proceed. The third was for the second half of the essay, laying out the key themes that would need to be addressed on the way to the conclusion. Wow! Last time I really used mind-maps in such a systematic manner was for revision guides back in my undergraduate days.
Anyway, here's something that doesn't fit anywhere in my essay. Some food for thought, I suppose:
I am calling for a confluence of worldviews... not a dismantling of diversity, but a kaleidascopic harmonisation of what we know and how we know to vastly expand the range of present and future worlds that we can perceive, experience and co-create!Thank you and please mind your epistemology!
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A sense of belonging
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!
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!
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!
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