The White Elephant in the Room
My only genuine concern before going to Nicaragua to volunteer on a development project in september is doing it right. I don’t mean taking the right clothes or the right anti-malarials, but the job. The task of arriving in another country to a place where other people live in a community, with their own culture and then being of use to them.
Before I have even left the country these concerns have raised their head in the form of comments, criticisms, the odd jest from lighterhearted friends and my own study of aid, development and intervention. It is, I hope, common knowledge that it is often poorly executed work which seems more concerned with soothing white guilt rather than enabling sustainable development.
The elephant in the room, the white elephant if you will, is us. British people going abroad yet again to intervene in the lives of others. Regardless of how this power is exerted, hard power or soft, it is essential to recognise it as intervention. Arguing for or against is a conversation for another day. The importance for me at this point is not succumbing to the pitfalls of the ‘saviour’ - mainly depriving the people in the community we are working with of agency, imposing a program of improvements upon them and generally behaving like a Kony 2012 campaigner.
I went to a training weekend with Raleigh International as part of my preparation and after discussing these concerns at length it seems that they have already considered these factors and put systems in place to avoid them. We spent a long time reflecting on our own culture and thinking about how we might go about interacting with another which is not familiar. I am pleased to be going with an organisation which is self-aware and which has sought permission from communities to work with them. It may seem like a statement of the obvious many other organisations have failed to achieve even this.
I am aware that this is the tip of the iceberg, that some argue against any kind of intervention from western countries and that the process of people volunteering like this is essentially self serving. As one friend put it “these things only impress other white people” which has some truth in it. It is an activity of privilege to go and work abroad for free and a direct result of imperialism. Many of the situations that western nations now seek to alleviate have their root in the imperial past.
