In the context of Peace Corps service, development can entail so many different perspectives and opinions. What does it mean to develop as a country? What role does the U.S. and/or other Western, liberal democracies have to play? Are there really only two types of development: top-down and bottom-up? Does the Peace Corps program serve as an interface between the two, and if so, how?
Opinion piece in The Daily Monitor on 29 Dec. 2016, No. 362
To choose not to wrangle with these conscious and subconscious cultural narratives would be a travesty. But, how do we, as PCT's, even begin to make sense out of what we've always taken for granted? For example, our service here will be a struggle for us, but the "inconveniences" that we labor under are not merely inconvenient for those we claim to serve, but part and parcel of their way of life. And furthermore, do these "inconveniences" have any moral value apart from the Western label of development that we export to their (by our definition) less-developed societies?
It's high time to admit that although the West claims to develop economies, it also seeks to develop societies in its own image across the world. When we ask citizens of other nation-states to let girls attend school rather than get married, when we send in doctors and nurses to vaccinate against polio, and when we give loans through the IMF and WB, we also come into contact with - and often, up against - social norms that directly contradict ours. Or worse, the people we meet are unlikely to cooperate to meet our service-based goals because our economic or political foreign policies (surprise, surprise) really don't benefit them at all.
(Letter of the Day, The Daily Monitor, 09 January 2017)
It's also time to admit that those in the West tend to view their own way as the only right way to do things, and that other countries view theirs in the same way. For example, does it really matter whether we keep time? In terms of a certain understanding of efficiency that is determined by productivity divided by how much time it takes to make [this much] money, then yes. But what if output isn't the only thing that matters in life? What if time is a man-made concept? To a certain extent, and at a certain social level, time matters (think: the importance of reliable infrastructure). But it carries no moral value other than that which we attach to it, and it is certainly idolized in Western nations, almost to a fault.
Time is only one example. There are millions more. As I am, I will never understand certain subsets of Ugandan culture, and even though there is merit in the human-to-human interaction, I have to ask myself: at what point do I become an ambassador for a way of life that I forsook even as I grew up in it, am part of it, and still benefit from it? When I show pictures of my childhood home in NY to my friends and acquaintances who are Ugandan, they always comment on how nice it is and how much they would like to go to the U.S. And then they ask, "Why are you here?" and my heart breaks. If all I am doing is to promote a standard of living that the people I meet and make friends with have no hope of meeting (and which, in that sense, indirectly promotes U.S. global policy and hegemony), should I even be here?
I don't know. I really don't know. In half an hour, I am going to go back to my host family's house and tell riddles with my host siblings, who already feel closer than friends. Maybe there is enough grace left by God in the human experience to redeem even what I cannot control and only partially understand.