After the Batey

The international development field has a martyrs’ mentality. Because the field is dedicated to alleviating poverty and suffering, many development practitioners feel obliged to live in some form of poverty and take on hardships they wouldn’t seek out if in a different field. These hardships take many forms, but range all the way from not eating your favorite name brands to living without running water and electricity.

Having lived the martyrs’ lifestyle for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer – sometimes without water and electricity for weeks at a time – my perspective is that it is, simply put, an invaluable experience. And that doesn’t just hold for those in the development field. The reasons are myriad and each individual will ultimately derive something different from her experiences, but simply in terms of understanding poverty, there is no better teacher. When, for instance, the much renowned saint of global public health, Dr. Paul Farmer, is asked about his greatest teacher, he invariably responds, Haiti - where he first witnessed poverty’s grim face.

But, a friend of mine likes to retort that if, for example, we development workers were in the business of providing shoes, it wouldn’t make any sense for me to take off my shoes just because you don’t have any. My suffering doesn’t help you. What I should focus on is getting more shoes so we can both have a pair. It’s a point well taken.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the martyrs’ doctrine. In fact, I often find myself annoyed by pretentious development workers who carry around a holier-than-thou smugness because they’re spending their summer internship out “in the field” and without electricity. But, that said, I do think we should reach a balance. And in the context of living in poverty, “walking barefoot” is the best way to understand the pains and hopelessness of poverty.

I joined the Peace Corps for a variety of reasons, but one in particular was to develop relationships with the beneficiaries of development projects – the poor. After college, I was concerned that I was headed down a road to “development from above” – meaning large NGOs, the United Nations, and God-forbid, the World Bank. I joined the Peace Corps so I could never forget that I’m not just working with numbers and statistics; I’m working for people like Josepha, a 26 year old friend in the Dominican Republic. She has five kids, no job possibilities, and no means of sending her kids to school. Until recently, she even sent her 11 year old son out into the sugarcane fields to cut cane just to make enough to eat.

It is my shared experiences amongst the poor in the DR and now in Haiti that motivate me each day. It is the relationships I built that remind me why I have chosen the path I’m on. For me, the poor are not a jumble of statistics; they have names, personalities, and voices. If I had decided that walking barefoot was not worth my time, I don’t know where I would have been today, but I doubt it would haven’t been here in Haiti with Fonkoze. And now that I’m here, for the moment, I cannot really image a place I’d rather be.