"Stop Trying to Save the World"

"In 2010, “Frontline” returned to the schools where they had filmed children laughing on the merry-go-rounds, splashing each other with water. They discovered pumps rusting, billboards unsold, women stooping to turn the wheel in pairs. Many of the villages hadn’t even been asked if they wanted a PlayPump, they just got one, sometimes replacing the handpumps they already had. In one community, adults were paying children to operate the pump.

Let’s not pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort of Mad Libs version of a narrative we’re all familiar with by now: Exciting new development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick expansion, failure...

Over the last year, I read every book, essay, and roman à clef about my field I could find. I came out convinced that the problems with international development are real, they are fundamental, and I might, in fact, be one of them. But I also found that it’s too easy to blame the PlayPumps of the world. Donors, governments, the public, the media, aid recipients themselves—they all contribute to the dysfunction. Maybe the problem isn’t that international development doesn’t work. It’s that it can’t...

What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket... The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk."
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it

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There is so much fixing-the-world happening and so little fixed world happening and there are so, so many assumptions baked into the front end. There is so much "I have a hammer, there must be nails somewhere - or at least problems that I can squint at until they become nails".

What does it mean to "do good"? I feel like we've never started with that question, or done the extremely important work of defining it for ourselves instead of being pushed towards preexisting constructs.

I feel like we're all just chasing oversimplified examples of, like, one person. And I feel like it is often phrased in the context of guilt or obligation. That's so sour.

There isn't enough introspection, asking what the "problems" are or where they come from or what our roles are or what it looks like to live in a world without those problems. To ask ourselves: is this our story?

Related: blind side mom essay