{"id":34,"date":"2016-09-30T23:36:56","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T23:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/?p=34"},"modified":"2016-09-30T23:36:57","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T23:36:57","slug":"forgetting-everything-i-thought-i-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/2016\/09\/30\/forgetting-everything-i-thought-i-knew\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgetting Everything I Thought I Knew"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I ever thought international development work was a little bit complicated before, I think its unbelievably complex now. When I returned from The Gambia one year ago, I thought I had everything figured out. When I returned from Tanzania one month ago, I thought I had nothing figured out. But sometimes forgetting everything you thought you knew is actually when you learn the most.<\/p>\n

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I believe that each of our life experiences builds upon all of our prior life experiences and are therefore inseparable from oneanother. Thus, in order to understand the significance of my Global Social Benefit Fellows experience in Tanzania, I must first discuss my Global Fellows experience in The Gambia. As I said in my first blog, those 8 weeks I spent in The Gambia were the best in my life. Each day, I felt as though I was making a direct impact in both the life of a Gambian teen girl and my own life, and therefore indirectly the rest of Lamin Village and all of the people I am to serve in the future. Each day, I would see clearly the impacts I had made: the multiplication fact Mariama finally had memorized, the new air of confidence around Fatma as she recited her poem for the class, the deeper awareness of my own privilege I gained from a cross-cultural discussion about poverty and wealth. Each day, I believed I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and at times, went so far as to say that I had found my lifelong calling through teaching at Starfish International. Each day, I spent every waking hour giving and receiving love from the Starfish family, and experiencing the way a true community feels. Even when I contracted Malaria, I was so surrounded by my loving second family that nothing could be wrong. I had expected my first trip to Africa (or anywhere out of the country for that matter) to be difficult, but instead I found it to be blissfully easy.<\/p>\n

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Teaching an enthusiastic group of Gambian youngsters in Lamin Village<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, I\u2019m not going to lie, my experience in Tanzania was difficult. Beyond having to leave my placement 12 days early due to treatment-resistant bacterial dysentery, I struggled with not being able to express my full identity due to traditional Ugandan and Tanzanian cultural values, feeling inefficient\/ineffective in my daily life, and questioning the very core of international development work. Our task was to measure the impact of Solar Sister lanterns on households in rural communities using a 4-page survey, translated into Swahili, and orally administered across a diverse sample of villages throughout five regions in northern Tanzania.<\/p>\n

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Interviewing a young customer with the translation of one of our amazing Tanzanian research assistants<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, I quickly learned that the work we had actually set out to do would be a small portion of our entire experience. I spent far more time just with my research partner in our comfy Arusha apartment watching bad television or at the local restaurant complex eating Indian food than I actually did in villages.<\/p>\n

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Our apartment in Arusha<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As someone who copes by cramming as many things as possible into my schedule, having so much down time was mentally tolling. I constantly felt as though there must be something else I could be doing. If I were living in a community with Tanzanians, I would have spent every waking minute getting to know them, even if it meant just sitting with them silently or constantly relying on my Swahili-English phrasebook. But instead, in touristy Arusha, I felt as though I was in an unpoppable mzungu (white person) bubble. I lived for the hours we spent in the field, but even those left something to be desired. As mentioned in my field blog, I understood that it was necessary for us to constantly travel in order to achieve a sample of adequate size and variety for our project, but I still found it problematic to enter and exit each village within a few hours. Meeting so many incredible people and beautiful children and spending only a few minutes with each of them was heartbreaking for me. I enjoyed the actual work but it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

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Giving the symbolic gift of sugar to a customer after administering our survey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Enjoying a little bit of silly time with some children in the Kilimanjaro region<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But what is enough? When we live in community with individuals in a developing country, we are often making one-by-one personal impacts but not necessarily \u201cdisrupting an unjust equilibrium\u201d in a more sustainable, widespread way. When we travel and do research with individuals in a developing country, we are hopefully making a more long-term systemic change but perhaps reinforcing individual perceptions of white people just coming in and out without any real connection.<\/p>\n

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A brilliant woman I wish I’d had the chance to get to know better<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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A beautiful child I wish I’d been able to spend more time with<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Obviously, this experience has upset my worldview and vision of impact. I am still very early in my contemplation, reflection, and discernment process and am quite unsure where it will take me. On a purely rational level, I do believe that the field of social entrepreneurship and the subfield of impact assessment are the core of creating sustainable change in the developing world. However, on an emotional level, I feel that the most important action one can take to positively impact the world is to live in solidarity and build deep relationships with fellow humans, being with one another through our sufferings. Perhaps this emotionality is selfish\u2014doing direct service makes me feel good<\/strong> but might not actually be achieving the greater goal. Or perhaps this emotionality is a gut feeling telling me what I need to do in a way that cannot be explained by impact measurement statistics.<\/p>\n

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They say that sometimes, you need to lose yourself to find yourself. This experience broke me down and I am ready to build myself back up in a new way.<\/p>\n

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Zebra selfie<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I ever thought international development work was a little bit complicated before, I think its unbelievably complex now. When I returned from The Gambia one year ago, I thought I had everything figured out. When I returned from Tanzania one month ago, I thought I had nothing figured out. But sometimes forgetting everything you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1600,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","no-image","with-title"],"gutentor_comment":1,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"alainaboyle","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/author\/alainaboyle\/"},"qubely_comment":1,"qubely_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"If I ever thought international development work was a little bit complicated before, I think its unbelievably complex now. When I returned from The Gambia one year ago, I thought I had everything figured out. When I returned from Tanzania one month ago, I thought I had nothing figured out. But sometimes forgetting everything you…","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/alainaboyle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}