Rethinking Development
…with a beach view
After a few minutes watching the moonlit waves rush from dark islands of silhouetted palms to throw themselves at my feet, I fled into my hotel room to watch TV. There’s only so much beauty one can take.
Instead of gazing at the mystic sea, I gaped at some local Madang television.
There were a few grating music videos, men singing love songs against cheaply-filmed island backdrops, and then a news report with such low-quality audio that it was pretty much incomprehensible. A pity, because the topic of the report, so far as I could make it out, was development — something about how development can actually lead to an increase crime.
I’m not surprised. Development is complex and the closer you look, the more confusing it gets. The past few days have definitely made that clear. The reason I’m at this insanely gorgeous resort is I’m tagging along on a five-day retreat with the German NGO that Daniel’s working for. I agreed to take minutes and in exchange, I get to learn more about the work they do with local NGOs in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and West Papua.
Between dips in the sea and sips of coconut water, one topic that comes up a lot is “rethinking development.” Economic development in the Pacific, as in many poor countries, often means pumping up GDP by letting foreign companies exploit natural resources and unprotected labor. Coming from that angle, rethinking development means changing the focus to the distribution of wealth throughout the population. You can even push that a bit farther and look not just at money but at well-being, or rather, gutpela sindaun, a Tok Pisin phrase that stems from the English words ‘good sit down’ and evokes abundance and joy, the good life.
But the point can also be a bit more sophisticated — not just about helping people, but refining how to help them. Old-fashioned development aid means charity. Hand-outs. Development 2.0 is supposed to be more sustainable and empowering, teaching a man to fish and all that. Except it’s not so much about teaching people how to fish (fishing’s not actually that complicated) as, say, teaching people how to organize against mines that pollute the rivers they’re trying to fish in.
That line of rethinking sounds exactly right. When development works as a home delivery service, the hero-role and the victim-role stiffen into masks that neither can remove. Yep, I am a total cheerleader for this, 100%, gimme an S gimme a U gimme a STAINABILITY!
And yet…
This resort is nice. Really nice. It’s not just the bungalows with private terraces that look out on the annoyingly beautiful Pacific. It’s the lavish meals that are served three times a day. It’s the exotic birds that wait around in a cage to be admired: crown pigeons, cassowaries, and two parrots who say “Hello cookie!”
So no, this resort does not even come close to approximating typical PNG conditions. For which I am super grateful for because wow
But luxury has a price and that price is part of Development 2.0. This NGO funds a lot of local organizations that reflect and strategize and network, all of which is good, so good, so necessary — and so many steps removed from their ostensible, ultimate impact.
I get it. Sustainable development takes time. But it is a little awkward how much of that time (and money) has to be spent on experts hobnobbing, bandying earnest words between bites of double-cooked pork belly and pineapple lime cheesecake.
The other mosquito of a thought that’s been nipping at me throughout the retreat is how any of this progress can be measured. Like most big non-profits nowadays, this NGO lays a lot of stock in accountability; every step of their work is monitored, reported, and evaluated. But exactly how do they go about measuring things like whether communities are “empowered”?
How can anyone measure gutpela sindaun? It’s a big question, massive. It’s that hungry kind of question that could eat up my whole life if I wanted it to.
For now, I’ll just stick to writing down a dream I had here at the resort. I was inside the ocean, swimming through schools of fish and bulbous, twisted reefs, though it was hard to see them. It was hard to see anything through the blurring, surging water. My day-time thoughts seeped into the dream and I wondered, “How can you measure an ocean?”
Then, in that discontinuous lurch of dreams, I had suddenly surfaced and was floating on my back. Above me stretched a twinkling black sky. As the water gently rocked me up and down, I thought to myself, “Sailors measure the stars.” It had a eureka feel to it. “Sailors measure the stars.” The thought stuck in my mind as I slowly woke up.
I know, that isn’t exactly the most thrilling dream ever recorded. Still, in a lot of traditional Papua New Guinean cultures, dreams were (are?) understood as messages from gods or ancestors. So in the interest of promoting traditional values, another big topic of this retreat, let’s assume there’s a kernel of truth here too.
If I want to develop and help others develop, to push forward like a sailor through the sea, I have to turn away from the watery world of endless flux. The shining points that can guide me are fixed and more or less eternal. Instead of being knocked about by restless waves, I need to patiently learn the position of these points, calculate their interrelations, draw them out on maps.
Well, that interpretation is just about as vague and helpful as the dream itself, or the original phrase “gutpela sindaun” for that matter. What are these fixed, eternal points??? Values? Basic material needs? They’re in the sky, so maybe they’re religious truths? Or stories, like the myths of the constellations? Some combination of all of these? I have no idea. But that’s all the dream gave me to work with, so I guess that’s all the gods or ancestors saw fit for me to have.
One thing I’m sure of, though, is while a dream may be a fruitful beginning, it is very far from the end. To understand gutpela sindaun, we can’t lie in hotel rooms, dreaming. Nor can we sit in conference rooms, debating. We have to get out and talk to people affected by all these well-meaning pursuits. We have to listen to their stories, their dreams.
That’s the next step for me. Bit by bit, I hope to learn more about the people around me. And at the same time, I will keep on reflecting on my own values, since you can’t fully appreciate another person’s point of view if your own is invisible to you.
So, back to Madang, to rubbish and robbers and bumpy rides crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a sweaty PMV. To real life, to beauty that is deeper because it has to be sought out. That’s where I want and need to be.
In the meantime, though, it’s hard to deny that I am sitting down pretty freakin well.
