I’m blogging from the basement of the EWB House on Dundas and Claremont in Toronto. For the next 6 days, I will be calling this place home as a transient place towards my final destination: Malawi.
The first day of training brought a lot of joys and struggles. Joys such as realizing some of my strengths and contributions that I can make towards the Malawi Team. Struggles that point out that I have much learning to do and thinking and trying to connect theoretical knowledge with the more practical applications. Our discussion today tried to define “poverty” and “development” I struggled with these terms, because it’s challenging to create a succinct description of these complex terms.
Poverty: what is meant by this? A lack of security, lack of meeting the basic needs? Lack of opportunity to lead a happy life?
Development: Providing opportunity? Alleviating poverty (but what does poverty mean to begin with?)
The Junior Fellows were given a task to interview random people on the streets about their take on poverty. Some people gave it some thought, some people defined poverty in their communities, others defined poverty internationally. However, a lot of people just ignored the term and brushed off the thought like it was…unimportant.
I’m excited to be here and it still feels a little surreal. I think I’m still expecting to go home after the 7 days but my home will be halfway around the world.
The meaning of poverty and even more so the meaning of effective development are questions that I don’t think are ever conclusively answered. The struggle I have is that even if you do great work, it can all be overturned by some new government policy. Or some new policy might do orders of magnitude more good than I could have managed alone. At the same time though, I don’t think people can make the most of a better economic or political environment without having developed their own skills first. I guess my problem is that there is so many different things that need to go right for real development to happen.
What I am thinking about the most these days is how weird it is to live in a boom town when all the indicators I see seem to be pointing to global decline if we can’t learn moderation fast. In Jared Diamonds book “Collapse” he comments how civilizations are usually at their biggest, most vibrate, most powerful very shortly before they collapse to nothing. I mention this because I think that development can’t happen independent of the rest of the world, and I am seriously concerned about what happens in developing countries when even the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nations can’t solve the problems of their own creation. I am worried that if things in the energy and environmental realm go poorly in the next decade, the developing countries will be the ones least able to cope. That inability to cope with the unexpected is the best definition of poverty I know.