Beyond the Single Story
New Perspectives in Global Development
When I was young, I wanted to live in foreign places, find fantastic adventures, and have an exciting life — the clever hero, besting every villain through mere wit and wile. But when my family moved us back to India from the United States when I was 10, my reaction to the changes was more melodramatic than wily. America was home, and I was in exile.
Being closer to my grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins was wonderful and familiar, but school was a daily gauntlet of isolation. I was an outsider who did not fit in. Back in the U.S., school was bright, warm, and cheery. My kind teachers knew my parents. The future was a faraway place, and worries of the future — of getting into college, getting married, and having babies — were conversations that could wait. But in India, questions of whether I was going to grow up to be a doctor or engineer had been asked long before I arrived. Kids in my 5th grade class weren’t just studying math and science; they were learning algebra, geometry, arithmetic, biology, chemistry, and physics — not from one caring 5th grade teacher, but from a string of faceless instructors who waltzed in and out of the classroom in regular 45-minute intervals. The competition for top grades was real and immediate. I was lost, confused, and unprepared for this learning environment.
The bright spot in my day was my English literature class. Not to be confused with English language class, which consisted of a series of mindless grammar exercises, such as fill in the blank: “________ as a cucumber.” In the States, ‘Story Hour’ and ‘Reading’ were my favorite classes. The trials of Ramona Quimby, mysteries solved by Encylopedia Brown, and all of life’s answers in Judy Blume’s books thrilled and transported me. Their worlds were my worlds. In India, we didn’t read full books in literature class, but we did have readers with excerpts of biographical essays about famous dead people. Three of these stories left a deep impression.
First was George Eliot, a famous and popular writer in “his” time, but who was actually a woman writing as a man. Second was the scientist Alfred Nobel who accidentally created a weapon of mass destruction. He grew to regret it and, as a result, set up a prestigious prize for brilliant and influential people, and everyone forgave him. Finally was Albert Schweitzer, whose story left the strongest impression on me. A foreigner who lived in Africa in a nice house, he saved many villagers’ lives as the only nearby doctor. In his downtime, he indulged in his passion for music. Eliot and Nobel gave me hope that you can bend the rules and make mistakes in even the most rigid structures, but Schweitzer gave me a dream of a life I could see myself living.
Stuffed in the middle of those drafty classrooms, pressed close to the nervous sweat of 70 other girls, I began to imagine a future in Africa. A life of art-filled solitude, making a living by being a hero to entire villages. When I returned to the States for high school a few years later, the dream didn’t disappear. If anything, it was reinforced by returning to English classes with full books and reading The Poisonwood Bible, Heart of Darkness, West with the Night, and Things Fall Apart. In college, my world expanded to include Francophone Caribbean with La Lézarde and Traversée de la Mangrove.
When I signed up for the Peace Corps, my normally supportive family resisted. My dad was especially confused. Being from a low-income family in rural India, he’d grown up watching NGO workers pass through, build a well or a pump, and disappear. To him, development was a Western pastime. These foreign “interventions” did nothing to reduce income disparity or improve quality of life. But my dad is a really smart guy who performed exceptionally well in school. A strong-willed grandmother, an interested uncle, and a fellowship to Stanford University were his tickets out of poverty. To him, my interest in living in a village in Madagascar wasn’t noble; it was crazy and ill-informed. Essentially, by returning to open drainage, non-potable water, and limited access to modern health care, I was doing the opposite of what he had done as a young man. But I knew what was best for my life. I knew I was going to save some lives.
Obviously, as everyone can probably tell, that didn’t happen.
When I arrived in the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, it felt just like Bangalore but on a smaller scale. When I got to my village, it was more “developed” than my grandfather’s farms two hours from Mysore. My Malagasy community was nicer, more open-minded, and often more informed on global issues and events than both of the communities in India and America where I’d grown up. I came to teach and counsel community members about family planning, reproductive health, and maternal and child health, but I learned far more than I taught. My doctor and pharmacist colleagues at the clinic I was assigned to opened my eyes to new realities of providing quality health care in low-resource settings.
I realize now that many of those stories I chose to read growing up that were set in low-income countries only featured a narrow demographic slice of a place: the disenfranchised, the struggling, the poor. In many of the stories, especially those with a white protagonist, the country and the people in it were often invisible, or reduced to simple, one-dimensional stereotypes.
What’s wonderful about story — fiction or non-fiction — is that it answers the complex question, “Who Am I?” in an organized manner. However, when we use stories as means to seek or share knowledge, we need to be conscious of our intent and practice. As human beings, we tend to look for the simplest answer and easiest explanation. We often find comfort in stereotypes and gloss over nuance.
Despite being Indian and having grown up partially in India, I realized too late that my education about the “problems of the world” largely reflected the Western perspective. This is not a unique experience. There are countless warnings against ‘voluntourism.’ There are blogs, reports, and studies by experienced global health and development practitioners calling on the field do more listening and less telling. There are many people doing great development work and following this tenet. But many, I think, would admit to an origin story similar to mine — a bit ignorant of reality, but well-intentioned, and quick to remedy the mistake and shift perspectives.
However, the incomplete Western view of low- and middle-income countries remains. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, in a wonderful TED talk, speaks of the danger of the “single story.” She says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Another insightful TED talk is The Politics of Fiction by Eli Shafak, who discusses how identity politics affects the way we read and consume to reinforce our preconceived notions. Here’s an especially poignant quote from her talk:
The Sufis say, “Knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.” The problem with today’s cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge — we know a lot about each other, or so we think — but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves: it makes us elitist, distant, and disconnected.
These days, when I read and write, especially for work, I constantly remind myself that the “family” in family planning, the “youth” in youth sexual and reproductive health, and the “health worker” aren’t just words on a page. They aren’t a faceless blur or an idea. They’re also not one-dimensional victims, crouched in the mud staring intensely into a camera lens, as well-timed flies settle on their faces. These are people who laugh and love and sometimes struggle, just as I do. Just as everyone does. These are humans with complex stories, just like ours. We are not our problems, and we don’t want our existence defined by them.
Last fall, K4Health, in partnership with FP2020, launched a new storytelling initiative called Family Planning Voices (#FPVoices). FP Voices is our effort to help individuals in the global community share their stories of how family planning has had an impact on their work and their lives.
I love our tagline: “Personal responses to a global responsibility.” Every story we add to this collection is another stitch in a tapestry — a complicated narrative filled with triumphs, sorrows, advice, and inspiration. It reveals the shared effort to ensure that every woman has access to both information and the contraceptive method of her choice. In effect, it is a global movement where every voice is considered and valued.
When we use stories to impart knowledge, the responsibility is shouldered by both the storyteller and the audience. The storyteller must tell stories that do not oversimplify its geography, characters, and topic out of fear that his or her audience will not absorb its message. The audience, in turn, must make an effort to hear or read beyond what they already know — remaining open not just to new information, but to new perspectives.
We need more stories about global health and development work — stories that are unafraid of complexity and nuance. Stories that make sense of data and statistics and explain what these numbers mean for individual human beings. Stories that impart the cultural, social, and political context of the communities we work in, without a Western filter. It’s in these stories that we’ll learn about the work that’s already happening, the challenges people are facing, and context-specific ideas that solve real problems. At the very least, and perhaps most importantly, we’ll connect with each other on a deeper plane of understanding and empathy.
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The Exchange is a K4Health publication. The Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project is supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, under Cooperative Agreement #AID-OAA-A-13–00068 with the Johns Hopkins University.
The contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the U.S. Government.
