progress!

maybe a week ago i was asking a group of friends for advice on starting this blog, about how i could write about human rights and development in a way that would impact and fascinate them. sadly (although predictably), they honestly answered that i probably couldn’t do anything that would make them want to visit this page and read about atrocities, seemingly hopeless governments, famine, etc. as i began to passionately take the conversation in the unwanted direction of the history of development, trying to draw emphasis on why it is so important to understand our past mistakes, my co-workers quickly started to look around the room for any

entertainment more fascinating than this. i understand. this isn’t friday evening happy hour conversation.

but then one person asked me “when is it enough?”. dumbfounded, i demanded clarification, “when is what enough?! when do we stop helping people?!?”, and he said, “yes, when do we decide that

we have exhausted everything, when do we accept that development and aid isn’t going to work?”

there are so many ways to respond to that, many of them would have involved a raised voice, incredulity, but a few weeks later, i choose to respond with this: every small victory gets us a little bit closer, and there are so many small victories every day. so often in the media, in articles and books and scholarly conversations, we review and criticize the means that have not worked, pointed at what has gone wrong in the countless attempts to end poverty, disease and warfare. i think that this constant disappointment and guilt exhausts people, and i want to take a moment to appreciate all of the extra pieces of bread that filled a hungry man’s belly if only for a day, the soccer balls that brightened dusty afternoons for four brothers, the anti-retroviral medication that gave an HIV+ woman ten more years of life. these things happen every day. let it make you smile.

prisoners in pink

In the summer of 2007, while living and interning with a small women’s NGO in Kigali, Rwanda, I did my best to avoid memorial sites. I felt that the proof of the genocide was present enough in the eyes of its survivors. However, on a day-trip to Gikongoro, I visited the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre. Murambi was a new technical school still under construction in 1994¹. The guide at the memorial explained how Tutsis had been invited to this site to escape the deadly chaos of the genocide, until local officials called upon the interahamwe², who in turn slaughtered, over the course of 4 days, 60,000 individuals³. To read these words or even to hear them spoken aloud in no way prepares you for the cold and unmoving evidence we saw as we walked through the bungalows and our guide slowly and silently opened the doors to classrooms filled with skeletons. The bones alone held the tension of terror in their positions. Although our guide unlocked ten or more rooms, I only looked in the first. Before I had the sense to look away, I unwillingly memorized one of the tiniest skeletons. The child couldn’t have been more than a year or two old yet 15 years later he was still clinging to his mother.

Leaving the Murambi site, I had to walk a mile up a dirt road back to the bus stop and while taking in the scenery and attempting to shake that last image from my mind, I passed a group of prisoners dressed, as usual in their light pink jumpsuits. These men were on their way to do some kind of manual labor, carrying hoes that, in the right context are reminiscent of machetes. Walking past them, my eye contact with each one grew increasingly uneasy, as I realized the probable connection between these genocidaires, linked and chained, and the skeletons of the Murambi Memorial⁴.

Baby Steps

On the last day of the Berkeley undergrad class “Global Poverty”, Professor Ananya Roy

spoke to some

500 students about the correlation between knowledge and confusion; confusion and inaction. The more that we learned about the history of aid and development, and the more aware we became of the dire need for basic “human rights” such as clean water, food, shelter from the cold and protection from warfare, the more we privileged students became frozen - not knowing what

to do, only that we need to do it. Ananya told us to act through our grayness, to act with as much awareness and wisdom as we could, but to act nonetheless.

Huge, scary, insurmountable questions abound in the field of development and aid. Questions like “is this money going to get past a corrupt and hungry go

vernment to a starving child?” or “will this clinic do any good if the funds run out in a year?”. I have always felt, though, that the only way to approach any big task, is in small pieces and the

first piece, for me, is a woman named Alice. When I was an intern working alongside her in Rwanda, Alice began, bit by bit to unfold her life story over African Tea on

Sunday afternoons. I have been back in the US for two years and it comes as no surprise that things in Kigali have not gotten any easier. School fees have increased and Alice needs help sending her two children to school. I am attempting to raise $500 to pay for Sandra and Ivan’s tuition for one year.