Welcome to JP Melville's review, experience, and statement on foreign aid and the international development industry. A conservative faith in family. A love affair riding the riotous tensions between money, personal freedom, the majestic travesty of our specie's ecological footprint, and economic politics. Selected writing of both prose and poetry, anecdotal travel log to rhetorical essay, dating back from the 1980's to the present. Enjoy!

Monday 30 January 2012

Collected Notes of a Volunteer #1 - Sex



Sex, The Opposite Sex, Race, Class, Disparity
or
All Those Things About Which We Are No Longer Allowed To Laugh[1]

What's the difference between light and hard?
You can sleep with a light on.
*
What do you call a guy driving a Rolls Royce?
Really.  A chauffeur?  A driver?  A cabby who doesn't know when he's got too much of a good thing?  A car thief?
*
For all the agriculturalists who are interested in cultural trivia:
Why does Dolly Parton have such a small waist?
Because things don't grow well in the shade.

No longer able to laugh?  My thought is simple.  While poorer people in poorer countries are invariably experiencing cultural upheaval as they are dragged into the industrial age, affecting even the minutest details of their lives, so too are we.  We do not purchase fuel for our cars, buy cocoa, think of coconut, drink a fair-trade coffee without thought of something… oh but we love our coffee.  Upheaval for a moment.  Sigh.  Political correctness.  Exhaustively self-conscious, we rage against ourselves in the name of utopia.  




[1] A volunteer in international development has been almost invariably someone who chooses to work in a poor country for, say, the financial equivalent of a local salary, sometimes called a stipend.  The dollar amount figure and value of volunteering is (and is not) irrelevant.  There is full health insurance, travel to and from the country, a housing allowance, and various other benefits, depending on the program and organization.  Your local national colleagues have the salary equivalent – minus the benefits + the kickbacks.  Maybe it works out the same.

Friday 27 January 2012

A Research Paper



Northeast (Esan), Thailand

I found myself in the midst of writing a research paper about my international aid work in Northeastern Thailand.  I had called the paper: Multi-disciplinary Evaluation of Large Livestock in Northeastern Thailand.  It was essentially an agronomic conditions and economic analysis aimed at choosing an appropriate research project targeted at small agricultural producers.  The project was to be shared with or implemented in collaboration with peasants.  This collaborative technique derives from a concept referred to in the aid industry as ‘participatory on-farm research and development’.   Participation.  Development.  What were these words?  I stalled.
From a professional point of view, I was not quite prepared to begin writing the paper.  Gaps remained in my technical data.  However, a letter had arrived several days earlier, requesting that I present my work at an annual meeting of the Department of Agriculture.  The meeting would be held in Pattaya, an internationally famous resort just south of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand.
I was uncertain about this offer for several reasons.  Several of them were practical.  For one, all my writing would be in English.  I knew no one nearby who could critique the paper's content before I submitted it.  There were few foreigners in the Northeast and agricultural researchers like myself tended to be working in remote places which were difficult to access.  Another was the time constraint.  I had been asked to present my work in two weeks, a short period of time to prepare a presentation.  Where could I get my slide film developed?
A more important matter was the content of the paper.  I had not seriously begun reviewing my field notes before the invitation arrived.  In fact, I had not told anyone that I intended to write a paper.  So who requested that I attend the annual meeting of the Department of Agriculture?  I was more than a little concerned that I had been asked to present at the meeting merely because I was a foreigner, arbitrarily picked from some list.  Unhappily, the working foreigner in Thailand was, too often, automatically assumed to have expert qualities.  I had hardly been in the country for six months.  Who was I to understand the conditions of small farmers who had lived there generation after generation?  Who was I to make recommendations for change?  I saw very clearly how much the paper would be very much full of MY ideas.  An expert’s ideas.  A white man who had been posted by the Thai government and a collaborating Canadian development agency, CUSO, to Northeastern Thailand, a place officially described as dry, infertile, impoverished, and in desperate need of development assistance, a place which all Thai people referred to with profound sentiment as the Esan.

The Esan

I had been in an Esan village for the annual Sonkhran festival.  The main activity during the festival was throwing water on each other, to celebrate the first rains of the monsoon which arrived in April.  I was in the village for several days and nights.
One evening, I was asked to eat in Nai Udom's house.  After the meal, ever the curious researcher, I asked about the state of farmers in the Esan.  Nai Udom said that a lot of farmers in the village were in serious debt.  Each year they sold most of their rice.  Even then they could not pay off principle.  This was because, among other reasons, they had borrowed money for agricultural inputs like pesticides.  The crop failed anyway.  Or they had borrowed to pay for weddings, or sometimes to buy a small motor scooter.  Scooters and weddings do not make rice grow.
Nai Udom said that he was poor, but he had no debt.  He had some cattle and a good chunk of land and a family.  It was all his.  Some years, he bought three or four bags of fertilizer for his rice, though the fertilizer meant fifty dollars out of pocket.  He paid cash and got to keep all his rice.  He would have liked to do more, maybe send his daughters to the secondary schools.  But, things being the way they were, there was not a lot of money to go around.
Nai Udom did spend eight years working in Bangkok, each year hoping to save money. He talked about blue jeans.  How desirable they were.  How expensive they were.  And in Bangkok, he said, you always had to pay for your lunch.  Everyone was in such a hurry, running to make money.  He finally decided to return permanently to his village.  In the village, so long as the harvest was good, you never worried about where you might eat.  If someone was eating they would always invite you to eat with them.  People were eating in each other's houses all the time.
My thoughts tensed when, on his own accord, Nai Udom added that he thought he understood government, the banks, money, and development.  He said there was always some kind of program going on in the village.  Over the years, he could not see that there was much change for the farmers, so he figured somebody else must be benefiting.  Nai Udom was thirty-six and had been home for twelve years.
“I benefit from my hard work,” he said.  “Not from projects.”
Nai Ponsri was another farmer in the village.  He was the village assistant headman, a title for which he received a small annual stipend from the national government.  He had different ideas and different opportunities than Nai Udom.
On the last evening of my stay in the village, after a day of dancing along the paths between houses and tossing water on people and eating and generally doing the Sonkhran thing, Nai Ponsri took me by the hand and led me off to the village headman's house.  There, I was surprised to meet the provincial Member of Parliament. Beside him was an official from the Department of Agriculture.  I did not know they would be in the village.  With them were two secretaries scribbling notes in their notebooks.  A group of farmers sat before them in a small semi-circle.  The discussion focussed around a well drilling project for the farmers.  The project was to be implemented by the government in a minimum of six counties.  It had to do with increasing buffalo strength so that the beasts could pull ploughs faster and thereby increase rice production.  The project required a great deal of organization but everyone would be better off in the end, it was said.  Whisky and salted fish and cigarettes appeared and everyone was having a swell time.
Except Nai Ponsri.  Nai Ponsri became angry.  He shouted.
I had never heard a Thai person shout before.  Shouting was simply not done.  But Nai Ponsri shouted.
"Look!" he yelled.  "It just isn't possible!  The buffalo work as hard as they can already.  Your well is not going to put water in the fields where the buffalo need it to soften the soil.  We have a drilled well in the village already.  If you drill another... don't you know we haven't finished paying for the first one?  You're pushing us too far.  I mean all of us villagers!"
During previous visits to the village, I had heard similar sentiments expressed by some of the other farmers sitting in the group.  I waited for somebody else to speak up.  All of them smiled and murmured that none of them had a problem.
"No, nobody has a problem," they told the Member of Parliament who, too, was smiling.
In Thailand, smiling during difficult social moments was called grenjai.  Grenjai meant avoiding disagreement at all costs with one's superior.  In theory, this was due to respect.  In practice, there were influences, among other things, of karma, patronage, dependence, or even fear.
Nai Ponsri worked damned hard.  He had kept all of his daughters and sons in school as long as possible.  Two had even gone to college.  He tried to use any new technology on his farm.  He collaborated with researchers whenever possible. He was devoted to the village temple.  His household provided food to the monks on a daily basis.  Not to forget, there were his duties as village assistant headman - mainly maintaining whatever government programs they had operating in the village.
Nai Ponsri would know when his people were being pushed too hard.  The responsible ears, however, were not appearing to listen.  The farmers would be pushed just a little bit harder.  And Nai Ponsri would bend with the weight.
Sitting in semi-circle, everyone, including Nai Ponsri, agreed with the Member of Parliament… a new well… more water… the buffalo would thrive.
Sitting in my office, distant from the village, preparing to write a research paper, I wondered who I was, an agricultural researcher, to worry about a process called development?  Making a presentation in Pattaya would be good for my career.  A few photos. An overhead and PowerPoint.  Some text according to the texts.  Bingo.  An offer for a better job.

The Esan – Part Two

Development, I imagined, was something which farmers were quite capable of pursuing.  Experts.  They did pursue development; I mean, they did the best for themselves under the circumstances they faced.  To use development words: impact, response, action.
Evolution?  Nai Ponsri in his way.  Nai Udom in his more conservative way.  Is it capitalism?  Is it development?  Is it socialism?  The 21st century?  When have people not  explored and adopted new ideas.  Is not change is intrinsic to all of us, in incremental, self-initiated ways?  I had believed that development was a good thing.  Why, now that I was engaged in agricultural research in Thailand, did development have the appearance of doing more harm than good?  Was this Dunbar’s Number getting in the way?  Perhaps there was another process evolving in farmers' lives.
That process was development.  Thailand, really Bangkok and the surrounding metropolitan area, had become one of Southeast Asia's industrial tigers.  Industrial development.  Annual growth of the gross national product ranged between seven and ten percent.  Initially, industrial development seem peripheral to village life.  It was, in fact, deeply integrated.
The official primary vehicles for industrial penetration into rural areas were cash cropping and technology transfers.  Because nothing from the industrial sector came without a cash cost, farmers who wished to use industrial inputs on their farms had to have cash.  This established economic dependency.  Because the inputs for modern agricultural production depended on industrial production (specifically synthetic fertilizers, synthetic biocides, and the mechanization of farm production), technological dependencies were established.  Somehow or another, the exchange of agricultural commodities for cash and technology never favoured the farmer.  The real economic farmgate price for rice had been diminishing for years.  The real economic and environmental cost of agricultural inputs had been steadily increasing.  Maybe the unofficial vehicle was young girls.
Development, it appeared, was like building your own house, only to find on the day that it was finished that someone else had moved in.  Or, it was like preparing your meals and always having more guests than family, and the guests demanded the best portions, and more portions.  All while the house that you were living in grew older and older.  And the guests came in greater and greater numbers.  So you sent your children into Bangkok, hoping they would send money home, to help put a new roof on your aging home, to buy medicine for the grandparents.  You sent the young children, sixteen maybe eighteen maybe twenty, the naive, the eager, the innocent.

The Esan – Part Three

There were two busloads of young people that came home to the village for Sonkhran festival.  The busses roared into the village temple grounds in a flurry of dust.  The children poured out of the doors in a mass of excited confusion.  I met them in the procession of dancing and water tossing through the streets.  Young men with silver earrings in their ears.  Some with leather gloves on their hands.  Others drunk with white whisky and fatigue.  Whirling they were, twirling, arms about each other. Old friends seen again.  Those who stayed in the village.  Those who left.  Old friends already worlds apart with little to share.  Who understood the young man who was working in Patpong, an alley of sex bars in Bangkok which catered to foreigners?  He told me about the white women that he had known.  He told me what a beautiful face I had.  His words were Bangkok bar words, his soft slur appealing, ingratiating, tempting.  Someone shouted English words, great efforts to speak English.  Tight jeans, hips hugged, on young women, their eyes leering at the white man in their village, luring eyes that had learned to see.  New eyes.  Dark eyes.  These young women were forward, loud, unlike their village peers.  Long hair with permanent curls and coloured nails.
It cost the village one thousand dollars to bring their children home for one night and a day.  Everybody chipped in.  But more than the children came home.  And they have gone already.
What was left behind?
Change.
Who was I amidst all this?
I had tried to learn and I had tried to understand.  Despite the effort, I felt that I had very little to offer to ease people's burden.  I sometimes thought that my presence in the village actually helped make the situation worse.  Because I was the white man and assumed good as a direct result of that?  The assumed expert with answers.  So maybe it followed in people's heads that anything I did was good. Anything I had was good.  Anything I wanted was good.  After all, anybody could see that when I arrived in the village that I had a nice new motorcycle and eyeglasses and a leather bag and good clothes.  They knew that I had flown on an aeroplane.  They knew that I had been through university.  They knew that I knew how to use a computer.  If I wished to come to their village and do a project, well, why not?  I was welcome.
I worked as closely to farmers and listened as openly as a western mind could.  I wrote down and built their ideas into the research project.  I slept in their houses.  I ate their food.  I joined their celebrations.  I, in a word, participated to the depths of participation.  How was I to know if anything which I did was in fact of critical value to the village?  If I asked how things were progressing, the farmers all smiled and said agreeable things.

The Esan - Grenjai.

In the face of grenjai I was finding myself helpless to act.  I did not know if my ideas pleased the farmers or if the farmers were merely pleasing me.  I did know how the money from a foreign aid agency provided the stimulus for Members of Parliament and government officials to act.  In my own office I had seen my superior promote fish culture research, knowing it would be financed by international sources, and then divert a major portion of that funding to the building of a house for his sister.  I did know that agricultural input suppliers and commodities buyers made a healthy statistical contribution to Thailand’s growing GNP.  Agricultural aid monies, I could see, directly benefited intermediaries.  Only by a twist of my rationalized imagination could I see how those monies benefited farmers.  My imagination painted a beast, the industrial world, from which I came, blatantly devouring the ground on which the farmers stood - materially, traditionally, spiritually.
I had lost my confidence.  I found myself reeling having even thought that it was possible to help the farmers of Esan.  I did not know any longer how to act.
I only knew how much I was a foreigner, a participating development worker.  The smiling face of the industrial machine.  I stimulated and perpetuated mythologies of accessible wealth, progress, and happiness.
In that office, with those papers and books strewn about me, with the fan blowing to cool the monsoon's humidity on my skin, I swirled in a storm of images, feelings, thoughts, circumstance, and change.  I was living with my history and those people's history and both of our tomorrows.  And, in the name of development, I had discovered that I had been taught to justify food riots, to justify drinking water fouled by pollution, begging, forced migration from a new irrigation reservoir, child prostitution... I wanted to be a siren, screaming, "Beware!"
I needed solace, so I took and read again a poem written by Apichart Thongyou, a Thai development worker, written during his work in the Esan:


Daybreak,
another new day.
Arising slowly,
lonely and thinking of someone;
turning and seeing Grandfather
sitting next to the water jar,
using an ax to cut a plow handle,
stroking it delightedly.
Loneliness disappears;
the person who turns the earth is right here.

I clasped my head in my hands, remembering I was trying to write a paper and prepare a presentation to be made in two weeks time to the Department of Agriculture in Pattaya, donning suit and tie.

More Cows



Khong Chiam, Thailand

The ferry crossing.
Today the air is clear and dry.  A very bright, white, half moon hangs in the blue, early morning sky.  A cream coloured cow licks the turn signal on a motorcycle.  Taste test.  Three women squatting on their haunches on the river bank.  Subdued voices.  River level dropped down two and a half metres since the end of the rains.  A tan coloured cow chews on a rusty piece of sheet metal.  A bull saunters down the concrete ramp, stands still, pisses.  A dugout river canoe with a motor putters around the bend and chugs its way upstream.  There are four people in the canoe.
Someone in a red shirt is bailing.

Thursday 26 January 2012

Theories of Development



Ubolratchathani, Thailand

Theories of development, which I had been taught in academic institutions, have been a far cry from what I have experienced overseas.  From a trained perspective, my role in development would contribute to... well... I could choose a point anywhere along some ivory tower axis, perhaps reconstructive post-modernism, perhaps cumulative modernization.  In all cases, an underlying assumption drove my schooling : that a better world could exist.  Immersed in a world of hope, change, and progress I, along with many others, believed that in the name of development all kinds of great works could be done.  And I still believe that good work done for others and the world around us is as pertinent as it ever has been.  There is always something that one can do for others.  Doing good, however, is distinct from anything linear or progressive.
Why, then, such a special word like development?
On one side, development is simply a new word for a few, very old conditions.  A moral condition: the old testament is riddled with stories of purging people from their evil ways.  An environmental condition: Aeschylus, an old Greek friend of ours (500 BC), suggested that tillage and agriculture could be improved through what we call today, permaculture: "self-sown soils bear food unstinted for men".  A political condition: the great migration to the Americas since the 17th century has been a quest for human freedom and equality.  These are sentiments that any good old development professional would hardly argue against.
On another side, development folks have only claimed an appropriation of the values implicit in these observations.  Development institutions like churches, private charities, governments, and non-government organisations[1], while having presented themselves as being both purveyors and guardians of ideals, are merely pursuing a course suiting their own agendas.  Who decides on democratic form… or even the obligation to have democracy?  Who is the head of a household and who lives or has sex with who or pays for the children’s education – some kind of nuclear family model?  Who wants the pristine natural environment, parkland, and carbon offsets for an environmentally sustainable planet?  Whose god, whose reflection of theology, whose spiritual form governs the morality of any action?
Really, what is wrong with a dictator is that our politics do not govern a country.  What is wrong with extended families and domestic economies is that men and women may not have to work for the international economy… how to export those darn mangoes if there are no workers available for harvest?  What god does not instil the guilt of original sin and a people are not humiliated by their own history, by their presence in the world, nor by some wrongdoing that can never be undone? We are not all like sheep?[2]  We development types overcome our doubt by labelling ourselves as experts.  The other, those people to whom we do our development, necessarily must have a lesser body of knowledge.
Somehow, I got this pedestal concept wrong.  I kept finding myself, in the villages and communities in which I worked, surrounded by people with abilities.  Sure, their abilities did not always correspond to the objectives of any particular development project; they were abilities all the same.  But project objectives are pretty much wholly set by international organizations such as the Canadian International Development Agency or Novib.  Yes, the organizations’ experts consult and hire local people to help set objectives.  But for all the discussion, few will ever look a gift horse in the mouth.  It is simple wisdom to agree with those who are giving you gifts.
Objectives, the concept of objective itself, reflect an image and understanding of the world viewed through the eyes of individuals loaded up with coffee and caffeine.  If the glasses I wear are coloured with double cream, soy latté, and sugar, or are sized small, medium, large, and super-sized, how do I see abilities that are not my expertise?  Really, who are these people always turning up late for work?
On reflection, I am often convinced that the real purpose of having been invited to a foreign place was less to work than to mirror a status symbol.  Not the foreigner with wise ways.  But the foreigner who amply consumes, the ‘have’ with a much better life and all that might imply.  Politics schmolitics.  Just get me the stuff!  From a somewhat more discrete perspective, foreign experts might be a cut-rate deal in accruing benefit to those already established in the given society; why spend public funds on developing your own school curriculum when you can get funded by international institutions?  Foreign experts develop curriculum then applied in schools attended by students whose parents, by virtue of having the ability to send their children to school, already control surplus cash.  Education for enlightenment?  Hardly.  The classroom is a vehicle toward increased conspicuous consumption.
Development workers, we experts, are likewise devices in the machinations of international politics.  What is delivered through the development industry is superficially emblematic of those politics.  What any person or people may actually want is another story.
In this dim light, it is sometimes argued that development workers need not necessarily accomplish much in concrete terms while spending time in a foreign country.   Development, it is said, is ambiguous and projects do not always have to be successful in any obvious way.  The value of this argument depends on at least several assumptions: 1) that cultural exchange alone has intrinsic value, 2) that the development worker will return to their home and undertake activities which help educate the public about global issues, and 3) that the development worker will continue with a professional career and, over a period of time, be able to realize in concrete terms the values implicit in development work.  Well, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.  In the least, the bottom ninety-nine percent of us are increasingly stuck where we are, no?  Whatever the ideal outcomes, development workers  acquire more experience and information than has been disseminated.  The development worker acquires financial and political power.  Hierarchy has been maintained if not strengthened.  Ultimately, the institution of development, not the poor, is the beneficiary of development.
So, we invent some euphemisms.  Grass root development.  Participatory development.  Gender and development.  Integrated development.  Sustainable development.  What do these mean?
I am unsure.  There is a series of relationships to consider - between persons, between circumstances, between histories.  One fallacious response to this uncertainty is to assume that what we do as development workers is inherently right because what others are doing is so obviously wrong: the polluters, the war mongers, the exploiters etc.   But this distinction proves too easily to be artificial.  Development workers are undeniably members of the ‘others’.  We buy imported cheese.  We vote for governments that support the sale of armaments.  We fly on airplanes burning fossil fuels from who-cares-where.  We enjoy our privileges.
I am, however, prepared to offer one certainty.  That is our personal selves: individual feelings, thoughts, actions, imaginations.  I can make decisions.  I can act.  I can react.  I can have new feelings, new thoughts, and I can make new decisions.  In all cases, I can try to be responsible for myself, which, as implied in the old moral, environmental, and political conditions mentioned above, also means that I am responsible to those whom I know and do not know.
This is pedantic, I know.  But it implies an alternative.  One kind of development is that which accrues benefit to certain persons and institutions in terms of salary, prestige, and power.  Certainly, this kind of development also professes its intention to improve the lot of the poor.  It is a progressive, linear development.  The second kind of development emphasizes, not improvement of either myself or others, but my responsibilities to myself and to others.  The responsibilities require relationships of give and take, a process of passing on and receiving from others those things which I and they have come to have.  Reciprocity.  There can be accumulation here, but the intent is responsibility.  An < I am because of you > kind of thinking.
Paradoxically, it appears that those of us who have so many things, so much stuff, are the very ones who need to be developed.  Having what?  Jobs, housing, disposable incomes, balanced budgets, growth, professions, day care, resources, holidays, mortgages, investments, and matching cutlery.
So, perhaps this having is the one key problem in development.  That is, not having is not the problem.  The problem is having and not being able to give away.


[1] The term non-government organization (NGO) often requires explanation.  The NGOs are the OXFAMs CAREs, Médecins Sans Frontiers of the world.  They obtain an incredible amount of funding from government sources, though they have historically behaved somewhat autonomously and without accountability to the general public.
[2] “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6 – Bible.  New International Version.  1984.)

Tuesday 24 January 2012

Cows


Khong Chiam, Thailand

Sitting by the ferry landing, a place called Khong Chiam, the river is flooded, up two metres from last week, maybe three metres, and up at least five metres from the dry season.  Bunches of water hyacinth float by quickly.  The current is fast.  The water is muddy brown.
Early morning, not yet seven o'clock. Last night the rain fell heavily.  It is not raining now.  Cool.  The sky is overcast.  Clouds are low, brushing the mountains in Laos, just there on the other side of the river.  Clouds brushing the earth.  A broad band lies beneath the grey sky above: rich, thick, heavy, green, dense jungle.  Below that, muddy river ribbon.
There is one smell.  It is silty fecundity.  Wet, silty fecundity.
There are cattle at the ferry landing.  Traditional cattle with long ears and easy temperament.  White and tan coloured beasts.  Their shoulders stand only to the height of someone’s chest.  They are skinny.  Some of them are invisible, hidden among the brush and trees, but the crack of branches and swushing leaves can be heard.  The air is gently filled with klonging donging bonging, the wooden, brass, or tin bells tied around their throats.
People begin to accumulate on the bank, waiting for the ferry.  There are women and a cluster of school children.  One bicycle.  Some excitement - the ferry on the far side has started its diesel engine and moves out into the water.  The boat heads upstream, slightly angled to counter the powerful downstream current.  When it arrives this side it simply drives its bow against the river bank which is solid enough for vehicles to drive up and down.  The concrete ramp is submerged in flood water.
Someone in a red shirt, tiny on the surface of the broad river, paddles a dugout.  They pass silently by and disappear behind a bend in the river.

Understanding International Aid - The Psychosis of a Courtier in Development


I am, or have been, what is called an international development professional.  What is a development professional?  In short, we work in or provide services to international institutions.  These purportedly aim at reducing social and economic disparity, minimizing poverty if you wish, between nations and peoples on this planet.  Some of these institutions are government agencies of wealthy nations.  Many are called non-government organizations, popularly known as NGOs, and they are funded at least in part by the private sector.  Other institutions are multi-lateral, funded by more than one government, like the World Bank and the United Nations.  There are hundreds of these institutions.  And certainly thousands of us.  International development is big business.

Here, in these pages, I am attempting to come to terms with what I have experienced on a personal level.  If it were a professional account, the book would be littered with footnotes and references and language that would often be inaccessible to the ordinary reader.  As an example:

Here we refer specifically to the matrix form used in the Logical Framework Approach called the Logical Framework Analysis, logical framework, logframe, or LFA.  (The LFA) is a key building block during project planning helping to focus discussion on the expected results, beneficiaries (target groups), the performance indicators and potential risks.[1]

One wonders just what an LFA is, if it is an approach, an analysis, a framework, or a frame.  But such wondering is not what I am at.  Nor am I fixed on dates or precisely who did what, the journalist’s approach.  Clarification of obtuse language and the provision of facts are not my strong point, which, in part probably make me not a very good professional.  Professionals are full of clarity, facts, and certainty.  That’s what they get paid for.  They get paid for truth.  And I just cannot seem to get my hands gripping so easily onto truth.

However, I once did.  Over ten years ago when parts of this blog began to appear out of nowhere, I had a faith in liberal humanism, as though such philosophical thought was true, in the sense of truth.  Truth, it seemed to me then, was easy to see.  And only short discussion and a few pokes at clearly fatuous thought, would turn anyone into a liberal minded humanist.  Obviously, they would also then dive gloriously into democracy.  Soon enough we would figure out whatever we had to figure out together because we would be clearly on the same enlightened path.  We would be conscious, ethical, pleasantly disturbed with complexity and our resulting uncertainty and doubt.  Mindful of criticism, we would always seek a way to cooperate and to adjust not only our public lives but also our personal lives. 

Well, ten years plus have passed.  I remain a liberal thinking humanist.  But my faith has evaporated and I expect very little from anyone else.

I think the kicker has been this charade in Afghanistan, the Middle East and, of course, in Washington and on Wall Street.  Out here in the wild world of international development professionals, we are only getting more and more jobs and, of course, richer in the process.  In the meantime, while the sales of armaments are escalating, we are aware of an increasing rate and degree of human disparity that is mind boggling all while the planet is diving headlong into a new and unimaginable, systemic alteration of ecology.  In theory, as professionals we consider ourselves responsible for these issues.  What gets me is that my and my professional pals’ feet never quite touch this turf.  I mean, we head into Iraq after the bombs fall and into famine after people starve; but none of us would suggest that our jobs depend on bombs and famine rather than averting them.  It is as though we live in a new strata of the planet’s biosphere: present, but whisking away invisibly when scrutinized under any microscope, curving in time and space such that we are never quite where we thought or think we are, as though our gravitational pull is toward a society with tremendous psychological density, yet no mass.  The geographers and the physicists will have to figure this one out.

So, I have wondered what to call this blog entry.  I mean, what do you call an entry, or an entire blog if at its root it is about something no one knows? 

My father, once upon a long time ago a psychiatrist, would help me with a title.  I can hear him telling me, simply: psychosis.  Delusions of reality. I am adding two key words: courtier and utopia.  An Alice in Wonderland world.  Many thanks to my literary friends, most of whom I have never met, who have given me a sense of the horror that the combination of these terms imply.

JP Melville
An Idea Conceived in Bamako, Mali


[1] Of course, I must footnote this quote.  From : Overview of the Bilateral Project Cycle.  Asia Branch, Americas Branch, Africa & Middle East Branch, Canadian International Development Agency.  February 1999.