One Week Later

             I have been home now for a little over one week. As I tell more and more people about my experience in Haiti I notice each time I put a more positive spin on it. Each passing day I idealize it more and more. I almost forgot about our rodent roommates and the lizards that splattered on the floor. Clearly I need to write this post before I romanticize my recollections.

            This summer was 100% a worthwhile experience. I learned A LOT about development, public health, NGOs and myself.

           

For most of the summer I felt like I was swimming upstream against a tidal wave. While I hope I helped a fish or two along the way, what I really want to be do is change the direction of the current. That is frustrating! Changing the direction of neoliberal economics is not an easy feat. We are living the results of colonization, debt, “free” trade and reaganomics.

            Swimming upstream doesn’t begin to cover it. The insignificance of 1 person, 1 internship, 1 organization and even 1 country makes you feel like you are caught in a whirlpool. Hopefully people smarter than me can think of a way to stop it. Honestly I’m not that optimistic. What can anyone do to reverse centuries of oppressive poverty? It’s not just Haiti and it’s not just the developing world; people in every country are caught in the current.

            Maybe everything we do to make the slightest upstream headway is just delaying the inevitable rock bottom. Marxist ideology would say that rock bottom is the precursor to the revolution. Its easy for me to toot that horn; I have little faith that an economic revolution will happen in my lifetime so in the meantime I get to live my life in a system that works for me because I’m at the top of the political food chain.

            The umbrella lesson of this summer that I don’t know shit, and I want to do the right thing but I have no idea how and that paralyzing, because I saw the results of good intentions gone wrong and its devastating.

            At the same time my summer was wonderful. It was rewarding to collect data and see the numbers that validate my beliefs about poverty and development. I met interns who excite me with their dreams and views of the world. I got a taste of what it means to live in a country like Haiti. I understand political economics in a way I never grasped in the classroom. I appreciate that public health indicators depict vivid pictures about people and their place in the global hierarchy. In that way my experience this summer was invaluable. I had to stop thinking about it as something I was doing to help others and see it as a crucial point in my personal development. I have had to accept that over and over again; every time I try to help others I end up helping myself. All I know is that after this summer I need to think long and hard about what I want to do with my life, what I want to invest my time in and how I want to spend my money.