Hopes and Dreams

Staying in this line of work and keeping your hopes and dreams is difficult to do. Your sunshine, rainbows and basket of cute puppies assumption about how you will help bring peace and end poverty in this country drains out with every power outage (which I’m enjoying right now) you experience. I don’t know about you, but I can’t bring peace to a country with a head light. End poverty with a horrible internet connection? Heck no. It’ll take me 20 minutes to download the UNDP’s piece on poverty in Liberia, shoot looks like that won’t be solved.


Ok maybe being in this field doesn’t kill your hopes and dreams, it just reshapes them. For example: I hope these ex coms are successfully reintegrated, turns into I hope I find these ex coms in a stationary place. Heck even jail will do (at least I know they’re not going anywhere). I dream about turning this armed robber into an honest carpenter turns into, you’re home now has walls? YES! Party time. Dream fulfilled. A friend of mine recently said that innovation and jaded don’t go hand in hand in international development (http://resistingthecoolaid.blogspot.com/2011/04/sustainability.html). Although there is definite truth to that, sometimes their experience makes them seem jaded. Innovation seems lacking because the original hopes and dreams were repeatedly beat out of them with a reality stick. Or at least that’s how I see it. I’m of course, excluding the UN from this. Their little check list of post conflict success makes it easy to say they’ve done their job well, so they can move on with their fleet of jeeps to a new destination…check list in hand. Bring on the peace.

Sure, sometimes the realistic beat down and donor pressure (they are just as at fault here) leads organizations to re implement programs that hardly meet the definition of success, but that doesn’t mean that innovation has escaped them completely. Innovation, just like their hopes and dreams, simply reshapes into something more obtainable. They know what can and cannot be achieved so innovation comes in baby steps. Like: now I’m writing this with a head lamp and candles. Baby steps. Now would be the time to say “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

For those orgs that re implement mediocre programs, knowing full well that it didn’t work, well they’re not jaded, they’re just looking for a way to spend their excess money.
That must be nice.