I first started to blog just as an escape to the long lonely evenings I used to spend in my room in Battambang, Cambodia. I wanted to share my feelings, and it soon became an addiction. When you spend your days working and you meet very few people outside your work environment there is this need to share daily things, like: “I felt like punching my boss” or “I feel like leaving immediately and go back to my parent’s house and the comfort I always find there”. I also wanted to share simple ideas about life, relationships, fashion, food, gossips and human beings in general, all we have: good and bad, superficial and deep, beautiful and embarrassing moments. But above all there was something deeper; I wanted to make a statement, to share with people how I see this so called humanitarian world. The travelling, the cultural exchanges, the loneliness, the craziness, the narcissism, the ambiguity and paradoxes we face every day, the friendships we make, the lovers we may find, the lies we tell ourselves, the things we want to believe in and the things we make ourselves believe in.
We spend our days working on highly complex documents, on policy making strategies, on discussions on how to solve this and that problem, on how to respond efficiently and sustainably to the problems faced by the hosting communities. All is in our head, all is about papers, contacts, funds, resources, concepts and frameworks, socio-economic theories, political trends, human rights approaches, etc. We criticize the corruption, the inefficiency, the laziness and we often get desperate because things don’t move as we wished so. You will find plenty of blogs, articles, studies regarding a full set of subjects related to humanitarian aid and development strategies. I won’t say these are not useful references, but there is a human side to all of us and I feel we concentrate too much on theory and little on humanity. How about the communities we work with? Do we understand them? Do we want to understand them? Or prefer to simply prescribe them what we think is more suitable for their well being?
Call me silly, but I think all theories are nothing if not accompanied by a human touch. I have fun, I meet very interesting people, I implement some projects which I honestly think can have a positive effect on communities, my ego gets pretty big when I feel I finally grasped the meaning of this or that theory, that I proved my point of view to that or that UN, World Bank or INGO representative. But at the end of the day we make mistakes, we all make a lot of mistakes. So we have to remind ourselves to be humble. It doesn’t mean we should stop doing our work, but at least be conscientious that even if we understand intellectually all en vogue theories and concepts this does not mean we are doing a good work.
We spend our days working on highly complex documents, on policy making strategies, on discussions on how to solve this and that problem, on how to respond efficiently and sustainably to the problems faced by the hosting communities. All is in our head, all is about papers, contacts, funds, resources, concepts and frameworks, socio-economic theories, political trends, human rights approaches, etc. We criticize the corruption, the inefficiency, the laziness and we often get desperate because things don’t move as we wished so. You will find plenty of blogs, articles, studies regarding a full set of subjects related to humanitarian aid and development strategies. I won’t say these are not useful references, but there is a human side to all of us and I feel we concentrate too much on theory and little on humanity. How about the communities we work with? Do we understand them? Do we want to understand them? Or prefer to simply prescribe them what we think is more suitable for their well being?
Call me silly, but I think all theories are nothing if not accompanied by a human touch. I have fun, I meet very interesting people, I implement some projects which I honestly think can have a positive effect on communities, my ego gets pretty big when I feel I finally grasped the meaning of this or that theory, that I proved my point of view to that or that UN, World Bank or INGO representative. But at the end of the day we make mistakes, we all make a lot of mistakes. So we have to remind ourselves to be humble. It doesn’t mean we should stop doing our work, but at least be conscientious that even if we understand intellectually all en vogue theories and concepts this does not mean we are doing a good work.
1 comment:
At the end of the day you should never forget that the most important thing of all is the carcanhol factor. Helping other people is overrated :P
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