Changes and Challenges

 International development is a very volatile field. New organizations are constantly being started while others are unable to find the necessary funding to continue running and are closing. Even within an organization, people are always moving in and out, along with funding which can never really be predicted. Communication can be slow and misunderstandings are common. And these are only some of the challenges for people in the international development field. Overall, this is a very uncertain business.

This week Jeannette and I got a bit of a taste of what that is like. Yesterday morning we got our tickets to Ouagadougou. We will be flying out on September 9, having a layover in Paris, and landing in Burkina Faso on September 10 at 16:15 local time. This was pretty exciting news for us, as well as many of the other students in our class who also received their tickets yesterday.

Later in the day, we then received an email about the organization with which we were supposed to be working: AEAD. It turns out that they do not have the funding to get us out to visit the villages where we would be working with the farmers. For this reason, we are going to be working instead with l'Association Solidarite et Entraide Mutuelle au Sahel (SEMUS) which is also where Kevin will be working.

Jeannette and I will now be living in Yako instead of in Gourcy. These two towns are fairly similar in size and only about 30km apart so we will still be in the same region and dealing with similar environmental conditions. We will also have a different mandate. Because this is such a recent change, we are not yet sure what our mandate will be, but hopefully in the next couple of months we will be able to communicate with SEMUS about our work.

When you are getting excited about an opportunity and something changes, it's easy to be disappointed. I think both Jeannette and I are a bit uncertain and maybe a bit disappointed about our new placements. Nevertheless, I believe that any experience is only as good as you make it. Yes, it may take a week or two to become excited about my new placement organization, but I'll get there. Circumstances change and the way to make the best of these changes is to stay positive.

Birdsong

The GYS Chamber Choir

Saturday night I attended a concert for the Guelph Youth Singers. Now, anyone who knew me during grade 6-12 (and probably many of you who met me after I graduated) likely knows that I was a member of Guelph Youth Singers for about 7 years. One of my sisters is also an alumni of GYS, the youngest is still a member, and my mom has also been very involved. I just wanted to share one song that was sung on Saturday that is among my favourites, particularly because of how it was written.

Birdsong uses lyrics written by children living in the Terezin concentration camp. Very few of the children who went to Terezin survived the war, but listening to the lyrics of Birdsong it is hard not to be amazed by these children and how they were able to see such beauty and life in a place filled with death.

Birdsong

He doesn't know the world at all
Who stays in his nest and doesn't go out.
He doesn't know what birds know best
Nor what I want to sing about,
That the world is full of loveliness.

 When dewdrops sparkle in the grass
And earth's aflood with morning light,
A blackbird sings upon a bush
To greet the dawning after night.
Then I know how fine it is to live.

 Hey, try to open up your heart
To beauty; go to the woods someday
And weave a wreath of memory there.
Then if tears obscure your way
You'll know how wonderful it is
To be alive.

Impartiality

Different news agencies have reputations. Newspapers, news websites, and news TV stations are known for their liberal or conservative biases. Trying to write without a bias is one of the biggest challenges of journalism, especially when writing about a subject on which opinions are strong and polarized. Over the winter semester, one of my classes required that I write a paper on an ecological conflict in Canada. We had to write this paper from the perspective of a consultant with a completely neutral tone. While I enjoyed this assignment, I definitely found it a challenge to write neutrally when I generally agreed with the opinions of one party over the other. One thing that I found, however, was that being forced to write with a neutral tone forced me to better understand the opinion of the opposing group.

The reason I decided to write this was because of a fairly recent article in the University of Waterloo's student newspaper "Imprint" regarding the International Development program at the University of Waterloo. This article was titled "The Trials of International Development" and made an effort to highlight the benefits and challenges facing the program after the first graduating class had returned from their placements. Within a couple of days of being published, the article was read by almost all of the current International Development students in my cohort who will be leaving for our placements in September.

In my opinion, the most interesting result of this article was the variety of responses displayed by my fellow students. Some were angry that our program had be portrayed in a very negative way. They felt as though the failures of the program were overly stressed and that the article did not stress enough that this was only the first graduating class and there are challenges with any new program that must be overcome. Other students were excited about the publication of the article and felt that highlighting the problems in a public way would assist in the problems being fixed by the administration.

Personally, I found the article fairly balanced in its content. It mentioned the positive experiences had by many of the graduating students, but also highlighted the challenges faced by one of the students and lack of support that she received from the administration. My concerns with the article regarded the tone with which the author was writing. The personal opinions of the author were evident from the start of the article. Readers were informed of the facts, but this was done in a way that quickly made them critical of the International Development program.

I am perfectly willing to admit that there have been (and still are) challenges with the International Development program, but the responsibility of a newspaper article is to give an unbiased presentation of the essential facts.

Refugees in the Sahel

In January, the Tuareg people in northern Mali started a rebellion against the country's government. In late March, army officers overthrew the government and blamed it for failing to contain the rebellion. During this coup, the Tuareg took advantage of the disarray in the capital to take over a large area of northern Mali. Now the interim leader of the country has threatened to wage a "total war" against the rebels if they do not leave the cities that they now occupy. For the past month, there has been fighting and turmoil throughout the country and tens of thousands of people are fleeing as refugees to neighbouring countries including Burkina Faso and Niger. The UN refugee agency estimates that 130,000 people have been uprooted by this conflict.

At the best of times, caring for thousands of refugees is a challenge for towns in Niger and Burkina Faso where people look only to the present and lack the resources to worry about future needs. Now, after a year of drought there is an impending food crisis in the Sahel region which is being intensified by the refugee crisis and may threaten 10 million people this year. There are already food shortages in the Sahal and the refugees are concentrated in the areas which are already the hardest hit by the food crisis.

So far, people living in border towns have shown significant generosity towards the incoming refugees despite their own challenges, but what happens next? What will happen if this coming year brings another drought? Will the refugees ever be able to return to their homes? What responsibilities do we have in responding to this crisis?

Living in Canada we are lucky to not be faced with a decision between feeding our own family and preventing our neighbours from starving. But even though refugees from Mali do not live across the street, we still have a responsibility to treat them as our fellow human beings. It's easy to ignore the problem halfway across the world especially when there is very little media covering West African crises, but ignoring the problem will never solve it.

If you want to read more about the challenges in Mali and its neighbouring countries, you can check it out here:
Conflict in Mali Aggravates Sahel Food Crisis

School again...

As I mentioned from the start, I am not very good at keeping up with my goals. I'm going to try and post at least one or twice a week, but sometimes even the best intentions fail. Now that I'm back in school for the summer I'm hoping it will be easier to write more often. It's also easier to write once you have something interesting to mention.

Anyways, this past week I moved back into residence along with most of the other 30 people in my class who are going overseas in September. During the week, we had many chances to meet and talk with the class who had just returned from their placements. There were three students who had been in Burkina Faso for the past eight months so Jeannette, Kevin, and I spent a fair amount of time talking with them about their experiences. There was also a day where each of the returning students did a short presentation on their placement and experiences which gave our class an interesting glimpse of what our lives will be like in the coming year. It was really neat to hear about the different lessons people learned about the NGO world and the ways in which people work around the world. A common theme I noticed among the students was that almost every one wanted to return to their host country as soon as they could.

The week concluded on Thursday night with a gala to celebrate the graduation of the first International Development class of the University of Waterloo. It's pretty strange to think that one year from now I will be among the students presenting. Right now I'm looking forward with excitement to September when I leave for Burkina Faso, but in only 12 months I will be back in Canada and wishing I was going back.

International Conservation

As part of my Conservation Biology class, we were required to read a book by Robert Nash on Wilderness and the American Mind. The final chapter in this book focuses on wilderness in an international context. Historically, the United States has worked with a philosophy that wilderness is an evil that needed to be conquered by the pioneers. Throughout the development of the US, this perspective has shifted to recognize the importance of wilderness. Unfortunately, conservation efforts were mostly too late- there was nothing left to conserve. Now people in the developed world are looking at developing countries and seeing them do the same to their wilderness. Tropical rainforests are being cut down for agricultural land, lions and and tigers are being killed by trophy hunters, and elephants and rhinos are being poached for their tusks and horns.

The international community has been looking at ways to prevent the loss of wilderness throughout the world. One idea that has been proposed is the creation of International Parks where land is reserved for people around the world to enjoy the wildlife within. Other ideas include the creation of natural parks where only certified scientists are allowed to enter or the implementation of a quota system on indigenous hunters. Some people in the developed world have decided to act individually and will buy portions of tropical rainforest or other land in developing countries where they forbid human activities like logging. The challenge is that it is impossible to go to a sovereign state and say that they have to change what they are doing. It's also unfair to say to a country- we have destroyed all of our wilderness, but we won't let you do the same.

It's easy for conservationalists to say that poaching of animals like lions should be stopped, but they do not see the impact of these actions. In Tanzania there are an estimated 100 people killed by lions each year. Human survival depends on keeping a low lion population. Trophy hunters visiting this area view their actions as some of the most effective forms of lion conservation. The $30-40 thousand that they contribute to the local community for the right to kill a lion goes to indigenous people who put part of it towards efforts of conserving the remaining lions.

Regardless of what efforts the international community makes towards conservation of nature around the world, they require the support of indigenous people or their work will be futile. The local people depend on their natural resources to survive and preserving wilderness needs to be economically viable to be a possible alternative.

The same thing is true for development initiatives. You need buy-in from local people to have any tangible, positive impact.

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

Many of my fellow International Development students know Jared Diamond as the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel or other popular science books I would guess that fewer people know about some of the work that he did before getting into this field. In my conservation biology class on Thursday, my professor told us about one of his studies from 1975 regarding bird species in New Guinea and its nearby islands.

Diamond looked at 141 species of birds found in the area. He then looked at which species of birds were present on each island. Comparing the makeup of species on each island he tried to determine if the subsets were always predictable with the more competitive species persisting on each island.

He found that competitive ability was important and there were "forbidden combinations" of bird species that were never able to exist together. The makeup of species also depended on abiotic factors like the size of the island. On the larger islands, the species that were less competitive were able to escape from the dominant species and there were fewer species on small islands.

It's interesting to look at the life of someone like Jared Diamond and see how many different things in which he's been involved. I would guess that there are more people who have read his recent work compared to his older studies, but I think that these older studies are also quite interesting and worth a look.