Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 August 2005 18:25:04
After I qualified as a nurse, in 1999, I had a impulsive and very cheeky moment where I wrote to the charity's Director and invited myself on the next trip that he was making to Moldova. Which turned out to be a joint trip with a consultant from a large UK Christian development agency who was doing a mid-term evaluation of the projects being funded by them. So, at the beginning of 2000, 4 years after my last trip to Moldova, I found myself in Chisinau (the capital) again.
I couldn't believe the difference. Don't get me wrong, the place was the same. Same poverty, same misery, same all-round crapness. But the difference was the people they were working with. Unlike the last, depressing time, I had such a sense of hope. Here were people who were hungry to learn new ways of working with the poor, of serving them, of developing their own capacity so that they could achieve more, of trying to envision the wider church to serve the poor in their community (despite being so poor themselves) that the hope that was totally lacking before hit me between the eyes. I came back knowing that this was another "beginning" for me and that I had more to do there, but just like before I knew that I didn't have the skills, or the knowledge, to be much use. Yes I was a qualified nurse. Yes I could speak the language a bit. But, realistically, although I would have happily gone back the next day I knew that if I did I would be more of a burden than a help - I could do stuff myself but was limited in how much of that I would be able to pass on to increase local capacity, and to me that is one of the major limitations of aid. Yes it's great to help, but when you're gone, if the people left behind don't have the capacity to carry on then you've not done the best job. I also found the consultant's talent, energy, knowledge, enthusiasm and ability to draw out the best in the local team absolutely inspiring, and deep-down I started to think "that's what I want to do".
I started to look into increasing my qualifications, as it was obvious to me that to work credibly in development you need more than just good ideas. I discovered a number of Masters degrees in Development, and ended up enrolling for the Open University one (the end of which you shared with me last year :D ). That was always such hard work, as I was combining distance learning with full-time work, but the development modules in particular (4 out of the 6) I mostly found quite inspirational (apart from log frames, which to this day remain my nemesis!). Although distance learning was difficult, 3 of the OU development modules had some day schools where you would spend a few Saturdays (usually just prior to an essay submission or the exam) discussing the themes and topics of the module. These were always great, and I met some fabulous and really interesting people. Some worked for NGOs, some wanted to, but all had amazing tales to tell and big dreams of working in the developing world in some way or another. I miss that a lot - we all found it really inspiring. We even for one module had a long weekend away at a study school; at the time we all really moaned as the weekend clashed with the first anti-Iraq War march in London (February 2003) which we all had wanted to go to, but we made up for it with an extended 3 day role play where we were various parties in East Timor negotiating the return of some East Timorese refugees to their land (I was in the maverick group, the delegation from Portugal (the previous colonial rulers), nobody took us seriously so we were able to do some really outrageous things like getting the Indonesian Army representatives and some East Timorese NGO to hold hands and recite poetry - hilarious, and the one and only time I can honestly say that group work/role-play wasn't of the devil!). What I learnt through the whole experience was that development is so much wider, and messier, and complex than I'd ever ever imagined before, and even with the MSc which as you know I finally gained at the end of last year I've come out of it feeling like it's only the beginning - there's still so much more to understand, to figure out, to negotiate. That's why it's so fascinating (and, I think, why throughout the course I could see so many parallels with Christianity - the longer I'm a Christian, the more I realise I don't know or understand but the deeper I want to go).