No easy answers...

In development there are no easy answers.

You clear land for a road so people can reach the market but you create flood problems and soil erosion, you build a school but there is no money for teachers, you help one orphan you stigmatize him/her, you build a dam or reservoir for water and some people are helped while others suffer, it goes on and on. And here, in our own little project bubble we have no easy answers either.

We are far enough along now that it is becoming clear which cases can be closed and which need far more attention. And the problem is money. When we thought we had no money we were simply case workers, checking on children, making suggestions to caregivers, sensitizing the community. My team was demoralized because they thought they weren’t helping enough, but I was pretty much relieved. With no money there wasn’t much of a possibility of doing damage.

Now we have an overflow in the budget and a lot of money to spend in a short amount of time. My staff is drawing up glorious proposals for me about how they want to spend money on each case. They are taking a child to the doctor here, buying shoes there, providing books, school clothes, toys and on and on. The smaller things don’t worry me. But, take for example the case of two little boys living with a father who works every weekend. He locks them in their one room shack so they won’t wander the streets. My team wants to pay for childcare for them! And we have been over and over the idea of sustainability-what will happen when our project is gone? What has a family gained from us other than short term dependence? AND STILL, they remain firmly committed to the idea of paying for childcare. I cannot get them to actually meet with the community and come up with “community based” solutions, cannot get them to believe that others may have the same problem and thus the families could join together for a solution. They want the easy way out. And that brings me to…there are no easy answers.

Maybe the ultimate trouble with this project is that no one on the team, other than myself, has any development experience. I have two 22 year old social workers fresh from school and 3 local Burmese liaisons with differing levels of ability and experience in things like education and women’s empowerment. Their answer to everything is throw money at it because that is what they have seen NGOs in Thailand doing for as long as they can remember. This may be an unfair assessment of both my team and of NGOs in Thailand but it is the best I can come up with right now.

What can I do? It is nearly impossible to explain the principles of sustainability and development. You have to experience it-both success and failure. You have to read about it, write about it, let your mind twist and tangle with the options and the consequences before you begin to grasp it. We don’t have time for this. And, sadly to say, I don’t know that my team has either the desire to understand or the mental capacity for it. They have not been in a challenging educational system. Logic and analysis are not well developed at any level of education or in the workplace it seems. Memorizing the answers and looking to superiors-those are their favorite fall backs. I am not at all sure what to do.