Challenging the Current Approach to Development

I am 10 days short of a year here in Ocotal, embedded for the first time in the world of "development". And my loosely-defined, altruistic ambitions have been challenged and I am disappointed. I am trying to work out how to make lemonade from the remaining lemons that haven't been spoiled.

I have been debating with myself for days about how to write this blog, balancing a number of concerns:

• how to be honest without being brutal
• how to express my feelings without biting the hand that has fed me for the last 12 months (especially in terms of giving me a first-hand and valuable experience)
  
• how to honor the best intentions that people have while recognizing the reality (and shortcomings) of the outcomes
• how to temper my own glass-half-empty tendency

No more debating! I will dive right in with some random though clearly connected thoughts and feelings, based on my clearly limited experience.

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In Nicaragua, there are bucket loads of trainings, forums, talks, investigations, publications...and what seems like slow and little progress.

Almost every flight I have ever taken to Managua has a religious group with logo´d T-shirts, on its way to an annual "mission" to help or save someone.

The boundary between providing resources for people to help themselves and paternalism is a slippery slope that only gets more slippery with time.

The larger the non-profit, the more it feels like just another corporation, only with a privileged tax status and without the ROI expectations of other for-profits.

Things get done in the non-profit world through sub-contracting that requires endless documentation, oversight and a cost with every contract.

In delivering services, non-profits in the development chain focus on the demands of the organization above and not on the needs of the people below.

As we get more "connected" technologically we become more disconnected from realities, manipulated by images...such as these.

An employee in a non-profit is out to survive just like anyone else in a job and responds to the demands at work placed on him/her by the system in general.

The current system is convenient to those within the system who work in it and those who give to it. Needs are met and consciences are appeased.

The current system clearly responds to needs, but what is less clear is to what extent it meets those needs and whether there is another way to meet them.

It's easy to pick holes, it's much harder to fill them, especially when the holes look so large. Never before did the for-profit world start to look like an attractive option.

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Where do you start when cell phone coverage (provided for profit motives) is wider-spread than drinking water, electricity and health care?

At what point are NGOs part of the problem if the state doesn't do its part and if people don't do for themselves what thay are able to do for themselves.

So I will try to sit with this discomfort and doubt and be present to today's opportunities, trusting that a loving and thoughtful approach will lead to some clarity.

“At the end of the day, the questions we ask of ourselves determine the type of people that we will become.” 
Leo Babauta