1. Jargon is generally accused of being 1) a sign of fuzzy thinking and 2) a tool for oppression and exclusion. Sometimes even by me. It has struck me lately, though, that jargon is also a sign of people who care so much about a particular topic that they want to get their vocabulary exactly and precisely correct. Focusing obsessively about whether people more likely to be infected with HIV are best called most at risk populations, key populations, or risk groups is another form of genuinely caring about accuracy in the work you do. Is it a useful form of caring? Beats me.

2. For reasons that are probably obvious, I’ve been thinking a lot about bureaucracy lately. I continue to believe that structures and process are what differentiate a functioning organization from a cult of personality. That being said, where’s the line between the structures that help and the structures that suffocate? Probably there are papers written about this. I see Google Scholar in my future. (This happens to me approximately a hundred times a day – I have a thought and realize someone else must have thought it better. It’s a miracle I every get anything done with all the web searches I do.)

3. I was at a trilingual meeting the other day that was attempting to interface with an international conference call. The interpreter was somewhat overwhelmed by the challenge. Some problems really can be solved by nifty new tech. On a related note, I used the translate function on chrome to spend quite a while (successfully) tracking down a corruption scandal on a local web forum.

(photo credit: me)

Last week, the Washington Post ran a great article about economic growth in China, and its impact on one young couple who migrated from their rural village. It starts out telling us that:

More than 61 million children — about one-fifth of the kids in China — live in villages without their parents. Most are the offspring of peasants who have flocked to cities in one of the largest migrations in human history. For three decades, the migrants’ cheap labor has fueled China’s rise as an economic juggernaut. But the city workers are so squeezed by high costs and long hours that many send their children to live with elderly relatives in the countryside.

The article goes on to tell the story of one particular couple, Wu Hongwei and Wang Yuan. They take their daughter home to his parents’ house to live, and when she reaches age two they realize they’ve become strangers to her. The article ends with Wang and Wu making a plan to bring the baby back to the city with them. It’s a moving, personal story about the costs and benefits of labor migration.

It’s also a story about people getting wealthy enough to develop new kinds of problems. I have known a lot of very poor people who would sacrifice their relationship with their kids in a heartbeat if it meant making sure their children were safe, healthy, and well-fed. You can always get to know your child later, when she’s a living grownup thanks to her good childhood. They are in real pain, but Wang and Wu have a safe place for their daughter, which is more than many people have. It’s a sign of China’s growing prosperity.

You can see a little bit of that in a quote from Wu’s mother, who is raising the girl. She pretty clearly doesn’t see what everyone is all worked up about: “The countryside has been good for Beibei…The food here is clean. The air is not polluted like in the city.”

It’s a rotten world where your mom has to raise your baby. I totally agree. It’s just not the most rotten world. Honestly, I wish it were.

[health person side note: I also noticed that one reason they cite for taking their baby girl back to the village is the high cost of baby formula, which she started needing at nine months. You can breastfeed a baby past nine months and avoid paying for formula. If she’d just gotten the baby to one year, she could have gone right to table foods and cow’s milk. They’d never have needed the costly formula.]

Sometimes people ask me what they should know about international development. Sometimes they’re new professionals in this field, or people who want to be educated donors. Sometimes they’re health care professionals interested in international work. And sometimes they’re my mom. (Hi Mom!)

It’s a hard question to answer. This work is not easily summed up, and there isn’t a lot of advice that is one-size-fits-all. I usually end up stuttering and mumbling and then saying something trite like “It’s hard but it’s worth it,” or “There’s so much good we can do!” These are true statements, but it’s not exactly useful advice. You’d really think an international development blogger could do better. It’s embarrassing.

It turns out I have exactly one useful thing I can tell everybody: be very suspicious of the easy stories. That’s my very best guide to understanding international development. (Probably understanding everything, for that matter.) People aren’t characters, our problems don’t resolve easily, and it’s hard to understand us. Easy stories aren’t true.

It doesn’t matter if the easy story is about how an outsider can solves problems quickly, new tech immediately fixing things, or how nothing can ever change because we’re all too flawed. It’s not true. The difference between truth and fiction is that in fiction there’s usually a narrator to tell you what’s going on. Outside of fiction, we spend our whole lives in the muddle.

If someone tells you the answer is simple and obvious, they’re deluded or they’re lying. Don’t trust them.

(photo credit mac_filko)