I’ve shared this sentiment over the last few months as well. If you have worked in a so-called “developing country” for more than six months, you snap out of the “reductive seduction of other people’s problems”. You come to terms with your own cultural arrogance, your own technical ineptitude, your own tacit participation in systems of economic oppression. Some people get stuck in a cynicism loop, but many others come out with a wizened pragmatism, an understanding that positive social change is slow and frustrating and complex. So I can appreciate the argument that working abroad changes YOU, the “Western aid worker”, far more so than your day-to-day labor impacts your environment. Even if your beloved project is forgotten in two years, you’ll retain that internal growth, which will transform the next fifty years of your life.
And yet… this mindset also seems to center the Western do-gooder’s growth as a primary benefit of development. We come to think of the developing world as a training institute for America’s privileged youth. You experience real scarcity for the first time and matriculate a more resilient character than your peers. This narrative is how we cope with our ambiguous results. We hold on to this idea of developing countries as source material for personal enrichment so tightly, and it becomes an Othering trap: most do-gooder stories, even those about failure, are gratingly ethnocentric. For example, we don’t make similar arguments about personal growth when referring to recent immigrants in the US (Americanah excepted). We assume their benefits are chiefly economic.
When you think about it, global migration’s expat/immigrant swap is a bit absurd. Why should Ethiopia settle for America’s 23-year-old poli sci grads, when America gets Ethiopia’s brightest 40-year-old doctors? From this bargain, Ethiopia loses about half its best doctors, but gains remittances and cheap Western-educated labor; America loses a potential intern, but gains good health care in its poorest states, and the credibility to shape a narrative about global poverty. Both individuals get CV-worthy “experience” and social prestige (with diminishing returns). But is that swap a fair shake for developing countries? Isn’t it better for Ethiopia if a young Ethiopian does the young American’s job?
On the other hand, part of me thinks it’s just harder for an American to make a large scale impact in the US. Sure there may be less blatant corruption than where I live in Zambia, but there’s more bureaucracy, more competition, no excuses for failure, and now, more political uncertainty. If it’s true that the real benefits to working abroad are internal growth rather than external impact, a year or two away may be enough. I can’t be sure.
By no means am I advocating for a kind of volunteering isolationism to complement our new nationalistic solipsism (“why give aid when we have enough problems here” etc etc). The year I spent in Zambia with Global Health Corps created some of the most profound professional and social memories of my life, partly because the co-fellow model forced me out of so many false dichotomies. What I do wish, however, is that after a year in Zambia, the program took both me and my Zambian co-fellow back to the US for Year 2, with that same work-hard-for-cheap ethic. Maybe then each of us would better understand if it was really possible to “make a bigger impact at home.”
