Broken boats and starfish

I argued with Maureen earnestly. I was leaning on the door frame to my room, she was sitting on the floor of Soni’s room and they were both looking at me –quizzically, maybe. I’m not sure what the expression was exactly. But they were not in agreement with what I was saying. They didn't think I should stop the international work.

A few months away from my departure from Uganda, my plan was to leave international development work altogether. 

Conflicted didn’t begin to describe it. Doesn’t describe it now. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my career trajectory in one breath and cultivating joy in another. Sometimes the notion that the two can come careening together in an epic and entangled way makes me smile with enchanted wonder. 

What if someone paid me to travel and eat and write (or any one or combination of those things)? I could pay my bills doing something I do anyway! But as I’ve been unable to cobble together a feasible business plan for that dream I instead focus on other passions. Travel still floats to the top but so does making a difference in the world. 

My brain has been ticking. What does my future look like? What is my next step?

Friends urge me to take stock of my skills and consider their application in a wider arena but ultimately I find myself crafting an imaginary position that is neither imaginary nor new. International public health emerges again and again. And I find myself circling back to that conversation with Maureen and Soni. I left that work for a reason.

I spent an evening talking to a new friend about my disillusionment with development. I talked about the macro: money inspired power dynamics, cultural ignorance, unintended consequences, differential pay scales, Sisyphean feats (because we really aren’t clear on the problems let alone the solutions). The list goes on. I rattle them off periodically when the call of some place far off tickles my feet and makes me wonder if just maybe I could manage it. 

He takes more of a starfish approach. 

“If you could help 100 people in the next 10 years doing this work that you are frustrated is not being done, isn’t that worth it?”

I remember having this conversation with a friend while we working in South Africa. She  was frustrated then. Feeling useless then. Wanting the development system to be as dedicated to meaningful change as the people on the ground – host country nationals and foreigners – who stretch the money, work the programs, celebrate each new well and properly erected mosquito net and grieve each mother and infant that die in childbirth and each outbreak of a preventable disease. And then, I urged her to think about each starfish tossed back into an expansive ocean. “It matters to that one.”

It still matters to that one. To those many that manage to find their way back to the water. 

I can’t measure the worth of a person. Not in the line item of a budget, or the salary of a community worker, or the time in transit to a village. I can’t measure that worth to say interventions shouldn’t continue to happen as they are.

I can’t measure the worth of a person and so I struggle with continuing to throw people back into an ocean one by one when I know that the tide will wash them back on shore once the temporary safeguards (programming without infrastructure or sustainability) are gone.

There is no perfect solution; perfect is the enemy of the good. Waiting for a perfect system would mean countless deaths. Countless more than we see now. 

So what then?

When cholera swept through London in 1854 John Snow figured out that drinking water had something to do with it and then the work of protecting the water source became the priority. Energy is wasted if attention is only paid to the effects of something and not the cause.

My fear, both when I’m working in a country and when I’m sitting comfortably in my bedroom as I am now, is that everyone is so busy bailing water from a damaged boat that no one has time (inclination) to fix the hole in the boat…or even the hole in the bucket (the development system). 

There are a lot of people doing amazing work helping to save lives, partnering with people to improve quality of life…hell, years of life. But Teju Cole wasn’t wrong when he wrote about the White Savior Industrial Complex. The problems of any region, or country, are complex. Piecemeal answers aren’t the only answers, the ways things are currently done aren’t the only ways they could be done, and good works don’t erase the other inextricable issues tied to poverty, illness, and politics.

My new friend is right that sitting here in the US doing other things isn’t helping. But I am still cautious. I still see the danger that doing something can do whether from unanticipated consequences or feeding a system that needs a lot more than tweaking. 

It is easy to sit by the wayside and “tut tut” the work being done, but that isn’t my intent. I want to repair the bucket, patch the boat. Hell, I want a new boat altogether. To my friend’s point, I need to think harder how to make that happen.