The Handout Syndrome

Over the past year and a half, development and all of its minutiae have become one of the many topics I constantly find myself coming back to. After all, I am working in development; “human capacity building” or some other misnomer that is continually bounced around as my job description. As you may have inferred based on my previous sentence, my opinions regarding development work are plagued with skepticism (although patches of hopefulness are scattered here and there). The more I read on the topic, the more I realize that no one really knows what to do; pump in foreign aid? Turn a blind eye and let crooked governments try to solve their own problems? Conditional cash transfers? Micro lending? Charter cities? I certainly don’t have the answer to this basic development quandary, but I can draw from my experience in Cambodia and conclude that current development practices are creating a dangerous dependency on handouts.

How is development work creating dependency and possibly making things worse? Well, this a complex question that I am not even going to attempt to give a concrete answer to, for I think about it enough in my head and I struggle to eloquently capture my thoughts. But if my school director’s repeated pleas are an adequate microcosm representing Cambodia, then you can figure it out for yourself:

School Director: You know, we will miss you when you go back to America.
Me: Thanks lo cru (teacher). I will miss everyone here as well.
School Director: Yes, we all hope that you will be very rich and successful.
Me: Thanks lo cru! I hope so too.
School Director: Yes, this way you can come back to Cambodia and bring lots of money to this school. You can help us! Don’t forget, when you are rich, you must come back and give lots of money to us.

Unfortunately, it seems many impoverished countries around the world have adopted a similar attitude. “The foreign aid will save us! All we need is more money!” If only it were that easy. Instead of waiting for their knight in shining armor to save them, governments (and citizens) need to understand that many of the problems should be attacked internally. I am not by any means advocating a Darwinian end of all aid money. But there are many factors that need to be in play- a government that isn’t pocketing aid contributions and genuinely seeks to promote the well-being of its people, a citizenry willing to move forward, and a strict standard to hold aid agencies accountable to. Otherwise, you have a big hot mess, precisely what I see here: a government not wanting to improve life for its citizens for fear of losing power and thousands of NGO’s overlapping each other and doing the same work because there is no accountability.

So where does Peace Corps fit into all of this? Well, depending on what day you ask me, I have a different answer. But today, my answer is this: the beauty of Peace Corps lies in the cultural exchange. That is what we’re really here for. Yes, I go to school every day and use a crappy, outdated book to teach kids of whom 90% will become rice farmers. I work with Cambodian co-teachers who don’t really want to change their teaching methodologies because they don’t really want to teach because they get paid 60 dollars a month because money is being siphoned from some mysterious source. So are all the aforementioned strategies causing revolutionary change? No. That’s why we call this ‘grassroots.’ But I can tell you this. The exchange I’ve had with my host family and other Kmai people whom I’ve grown close to is something that will forever change the way I look at things and probably the way they do as well. Each one of us who serves as a Peace Corps volunteer gets an inimitable look into the culture we are dropped into, not something that your average Phnom Penh-dwelling NGO worker gets as they create their foreign bubble, without even an attempt to understand the culture they are trying to “change” for the better. Perhaps a good way to improve development practices of NGO's and its workers would be learning the local language, culture and customs. Strip away the condescending attitudes of those who come to “develop” and what’s left? A good start.