By Jennifer Winstanley The Huffington Post (USA)
I have been writing about the positive experiences that I have had and the personal development that I have enjoyed while working in Southeast Asia over the last year. In order to present a more balanced picture, I wanted to briefly discuss another side of it - the frustrations, the disconnect, and the constant haunting doubt that maybe what you are doing is useless... or worse, maybe it is destructive.
Humanitarian work is controversial - the different organizations, close connection with politics and foreign policy, and questionable motivations that do arise in the field are all things that I had limited awareness of when I arrived in Cambodia. The more insight I gain into this area the more dismayed I am at certain aspects of it. I am by no means an expert on this so I will limit my discussion of it to personal revelation, and in particular a discussion that I had with a moto driver in Phnom Penh early this year.
Driving through the city our casual conversation turned much more serious when I mentioned that I was in Phnom Penh working with an NGO. A polite but passionate monologue ensued, detailing this man's complaints against NGOs and particularly their impact on his life. His opinion of NGOs in Cambodia can be summed up as the following: before the arrival of NGOs, people were poor but there was a sense of community and he was happy; then NGOs arrived, and people started to be competitive with each other, everything became more expensive, and the NGOs had no visible positive effect. He felt resentful of the lifestyle that NGO workers lead and resentful of the change in his life in the decade and a half that NGOs have been prevalent throughout Cambodia and particularly in Phnom Penh.
I didn't have much to say in response to anything he had said, and for the most part I felt that it didn't invite a response. He was sharing his opinion and his experience and I appreciated that he was speaking openly. Listening to him talk did accentuate something that I had already been feeling - some sense of disconnect between the work that I was doing and the community that the work is intended to benefit.
The particular work that I have done with the Community Legal Education (CLE) program was not what I had doubts about. The positive impact of CLE had been demonstrated to me not only through seeing it in action, but also in speaking with co-workers and reading evaluation forms. It is a broader sense of being uncomfortable with the distance between the language and structure of work in the development field and the individuals/communities/countries that the work is aimed at.
The voice of one moto-driver in Phnom Penh is not the source nor the confirmation of this feeling, and I have heard opposing viewpoints from local Cambodians as well - many of whom were grateful for presence of and work done by NGOs. It is something that I think is important to really think about though, as I continue to work in this field - as I hope to do.
Humanitarian work is controversial - the different organizations, close connection with politics and foreign policy, and questionable motivations that do arise in the field are all things that I had limited awareness of when I arrived in Cambodia. The more insight I gain into this area the more dismayed I am at certain aspects of it. I am by no means an expert on this so I will limit my discussion of it to personal revelation, and in particular a discussion that I had with a moto driver in Phnom Penh early this year.
Driving through the city our casual conversation turned much more serious when I mentioned that I was in Phnom Penh working with an NGO. A polite but passionate monologue ensued, detailing this man's complaints against NGOs and particularly their impact on his life. His opinion of NGOs in Cambodia can be summed up as the following: before the arrival of NGOs, people were poor but there was a sense of community and he was happy; then NGOs arrived, and people started to be competitive with each other, everything became more expensive, and the NGOs had no visible positive effect. He felt resentful of the lifestyle that NGO workers lead and resentful of the change in his life in the decade and a half that NGOs have been prevalent throughout Cambodia and particularly in Phnom Penh.
I didn't have much to say in response to anything he had said, and for the most part I felt that it didn't invite a response. He was sharing his opinion and his experience and I appreciated that he was speaking openly. Listening to him talk did accentuate something that I had already been feeling - some sense of disconnect between the work that I was doing and the community that the work is intended to benefit.
The particular work that I have done with the Community Legal Education (CLE) program was not what I had doubts about. The positive impact of CLE had been demonstrated to me not only through seeing it in action, but also in speaking with co-workers and reading evaluation forms. It is a broader sense of being uncomfortable with the distance between the language and structure of work in the development field and the individuals/communities/countries that the work is aimed at.
The voice of one moto-driver in Phnom Penh is not the source nor the confirmation of this feeling, and I have heard opposing viewpoints from local Cambodians as well - many of whom were grateful for presence of and work done by NGOs. It is something that I think is important to really think about though, as I continue to work in this field - as I hope to do.
8 comments:
they fused together, naturally.
NGOs are needed in Cambodia because nobody take care of the poor.
Yes, but not most of them are corrupted.
well, the way i see it: cambodia will need ngo present a little longer until the gov't can solve many social problems such as creating social security, social services and human services to help every individual in cambodia, especially the poors, the low-income family, the disadvantaged, the the youngs and the elderly, etc... these are what cambodia needs to have after education and development of the country or they all can happen simultaneously. until that can happen, cambodia will have the need to have ngo. thank you.
plus having the social security system can help to alleviate rampant corruptions as well like in the USA because social secrity income helps the disabled, the handicapped, the injured, etc to supplement their income, plus it pays toward retirement thus lessen corruption because people in people do think a lot about their future and the future of their children and family, whether one believe it or not; that is the case in cambodia. so, gov't should look into adopt the american social security system or ask american gov't expert to help with create or reintroducing one soon for i think cambodia used to have a good social security system in the '50s and '60s up until the civil war and the stupid, idiot KR regime destroyed it completely. cambodia needs this system badly to help its poors, disadvantaged people to survive so they don't have to beg like some are doing right now. thank you and god bless cambodia.
It's sort of hard to generalize because some NGO's do good work. However, a lot - if not most - have an ulterior motive and that is to impose supposedly superior western values on the people and countries in Southeast Asia. And that is wrong. NGO's should limit their endeavors to alleviating poverty and helping with education, period.
Yes, and if most of them (corrupted NGO) have done their work, we would be a lot better off today.
7:32 how many people in Long Beach are disable and cripple? Try to get your fact strait, will ya?
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