If you want to get to Heaven when you D-I-E
You better put on your collar and your T-I-E
You want to chase a rabbit out-a L-O-G?
You better raise a-commotion, like a D-O-G (Like a D-O-G)
Raise a-commotion like a D-O-G
K.C. Jones (On the Road Again) - North Mississippi All Stars
Hanging in the Peace Corps Training Hub, written in extra bold permanent marker on a large piece of easel paper, there is a definition of “Development” in the international sense of the word. It is a definition written by the self-selected “Professors” of our training group. Most of us had chosen the Professors group not because we considered ourselves to be of a superior caliber of intelligence or because we fancied ourselves particularly apt to teach the nuances of the word, but rather because we knew we couldn’t draw an abstract representation with the “Artists” or produce an poignant Haiku with the “Poets”. I figured I enjoy writing, so I could at least contribute with a 5 cent word or two. I was taking my talents to the Professors.
The exercise was part of a session by the administrators of Peace Corps to teach us about the Peace Corps approach to international development. The Professors were given multiple definitions of Development as they are written by several NGOs and government branches and asked to synthesize their definitions into our own, using the core themes and phrases that we identified within all of them.
We executed the job that was our charge. About eight young, intelligent, and doe eyed Peace Corps Trainees put their heads together, and what we came up with was the single loftiest and most idealistic combination of words and phraseology that I have ever helped to write, and perhaps that history has ever known. It is as follows:
“Based on our common global humanity, Development is a diverse and multidimensional approach to support sustainable environmental, economic, political and social progress. The process is driven by community needs and is inclusive and participatory of both governmental and civil society working towards our shared future.”
Damn, doesn't that all just sound so good?
Now - you may find, after reading our definition, that the IRS is calling you because you’ve jumped up a few tax brackets. There may be a silken scarf draped carelessly yet intentionally around your neck. Soft jazz may have spontaneously begun to play on your speakers, and a soft cheese may have appeared on your table accompanied by a nice Bordeaux from a obscure French vineyard. A good year it was indeed. Yes, quite.
Don’t get me wrong - nothing about that definition is untrue. All the phrases and terms were pulled individually from legitimate definitions of development, which is to say we didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. And additionally, that is the way development should be, and that’s the way it should be done. But as a person who is actually in the developing world, as a Maternal and Child Health Volunteer in the highly esteemed Peace Corps, attempting to carry this definition out in real terms, the question must be asked: Yeah yeah, I know what that means but what does that actually mean?
For weeks I asked this of myself, of my Program Manager, and of current volunteers who assist in our training before I was able to put together any type of comprehensive understanding of it. Should I have fully figured this out before I flew halfway across the world? Shut up.
Over the course of our training, we received the numbers corresponding to stunting numbers in Rwanda. We learned how to create hand washing basins. We learned about good nutrition in the Rwandan context. We walked through Rwanda’s domestic development goals, and discussed development theory.
Yeah yeah, but what does this mean for me?
I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it for several reasons: it can be hard to explain, its hard to understand because the problems we are addressing are so wildly different from American problems and health infrastructure, and every health center that has a volunteer is different, so making generalizations can be misrepresentative at best and unfair at worst. So here I go.
Ndagerageza (I’ll Try)
The Rwandan government brought Peace Corps in to help solve their stubborn nutrition problem. At the risk of crudely generalizing, Rwandans, by any reasonable standard, keep what can safely be called a non-nutritious diet, and what Americans would consider a untenably horrific diet.
As an example: Last week I visited the town I have been assigned to in the Southern Province of the country. I stayed with a guy named Eugene who is one of the laboratory technicians for our health center. Eugene is a wonderful person - he helped me in every aspect of my stay, he is very intelligent with a university education, he has a endearing geekiness that anyone who enjoys “Coming of Age” movies would appreciate, and selfishly for my purposes, he spoke relatively excellent English. Because I was new to the area, staying with Eugene for the week, and there was no McDonalds around the corner, I was entirely at his mercy when it came to our meals.
One night, Eugene went out to buy the supplies we needed for dinner, and came back with a full bag. With his nervous energy and gleaming eyes, he excitedly emptied the bag in front of us, indulging in the big reveal of our illustrious dinner. He asked me, as he usually did with any Rwandan native item, “Alexi! Do you know this one?”. “I know it,” I replied sullenly, realizing what he had done. “Yego…”.
It was a single, but very large, sweet potato that encompassed the volume of the whole bag. There was nothing else in it that bag. Dinner contained no vegetables, no protein, no nothing but a chopped sweet potato, fried in oil. It was incomprehensible. Luckily, I had seen this display coming and slipped away from Eugene in the late afternoon to buy a legitimate meal in town that had at least a couple more food groups. Two nights prior to the Sweet Potato Conflagration I had sat in horror as Eugene breathlessly ate no less than 75% of a full pot of mushy white rice, admonishing me for not eating the other quarter, despite the fact that I had lined the entire bottom of my plate with the starchy mess. “It’s so veddy veddy beautiful” he said, heaping serving spoonfuls of it onto his plate with genuine joy in his eyes. Fool me once, shame on Eugene - fool me twice, shame on me.
The Peace Corps Approach to Development
Indeed, one of the biggest points of conflict amongst my Trainee colleagues with their host families revolves around food. Rwandans will eat a single hot dog bun slathered in margarine for breakfast and they won’t eat again until 1:00pm, if they eat lunch at all. They’ll happily eat a pot of tasteless plantains every meal with no representation from a single other food group for days on end. Meat, given the lack of large scale private or state livestock agriculture, is a luxury that many can’t afford - but, while chickens roam freely around many households, Rwandans will attempt to sell off their eggs rather than eat them as a rich source of protein.
As an American, it’s difficult on many levels, lingual, cultural, and ethical, to fight back against this constant assault on the stomach. It makes you appreciate the fact that as Americans we have consistent access to a diverse diet (whether or not we take advantage of it is a different story but at least they are available). But while appreciation may satisfy the spirit, it does not satisfy the stomach; and your spirit won’t help you when your stomach grumbles at night, 30 minutes after eating rice, french fries and plantains. One has to hold their ground against the starch scourge, opting to capitalize on whatever vegetable and proteins are available at the table, and supplement their diet during the day, away from the host family. Rwandan Mamas and Papas and Hosts will hem and haw, they will be horrified and shocked, shocked! But you have to stay strong. You have to just laugh and say Oya, I want to eat this, I have had enough rice, mbabarida (Sorry).
This is all to say that stunting, or slow growth given a certain age, in Rwanda is a stubborn problem, with close to 40% of all children suffering from it, as of a country wide health survey done in 2015. Stunting is primarily a deficiency in growth, given a poor diet, but it can also affect a child’s cognitive functioning and development. And all the damage occurs before the kid is two years old. As a result of stunting, a kid might quite literally have a lower trajectory for cognitive development over the course of his life, not reaching the potential that he could have had he simply been fed a balanced diet before the age he could even produce words.
The data we have seen has clearly shown that babies in Rwanda generally are on a healthy development curve through six months when they are exclusively breastfeeding, then as soon as they begin to eat solid foods in addition to breastfeeding, stunting rates spike up to around 40% where the rates have fallen but not altogether disappeared, as the Rwandan Government would like.
So The Peace Corps, for Rwanda, is a win-win. They have a problem, and they are sent trained, intelligent Americans who want to help them. We are willing to live amongst the people in cheap (-est on earth?) accommodations. It is almost entirely free for the host country, as our salaries, and the salaries of all the support staff come straight from Uncle Sam himself. Through Peace Corps bloggers like myself, Rwanda essentially gets free advertising or, perhaps in a more modest sense, a colorful view into their interesting lifestyle from an international audience. And in many cases volunteers are largely successful in reducing malnutrition in their communities over the course of their service.
So the Rwandan government calls Peace Corps: Peace Corps says “What’s up Rwanda?” Rwanda says “This stunting problem is a real pain, man. We need some of your people to come help us with malnutrition thing”. Peace Corps swiftly replies, “Got you covered buddy. There’s a lanky black guy from Maryland that agreed to be sent anywhere. I know! Yes it’s hilarious. No I don’t get it either, but we don’t ask questions. Yes he wanted to. Anyway, we’re gonna send him over to help you guys out. Yeah put him anywhere in the country, it’s part of the gig. Sorry, I gotta go ,I got a call coming from Vanuatu I think he’s lonely again. Yes, I’m sure. Yes anywhere! Bye.”
It's a Happy Happy Happy Happy, Fun Day Day
In my Health Center, outside the city of Huye, in the Southern Province of the country - a woman handed me her baby to be weighed. I found myself with the baby in my outstretched arms, looking helplessly as her little face ran the entire spectrum of emotions from amused befuddlement to horrified tears as she examined my foreign face. I wasn’t fazed, I knew this would happen. It happens every time. As she writhed around someone helped me lace her legs through little holsters as we dangled her from a Unicef Baby Scale. All the components of the scale were made and approved by Unicef, blue and pristine - except for the crude and fraying piece of rope, provided by the health center, that the entire mechanism hung from.
As she dangles in baby agony - which is to say extreme yet transient - I laugh to myself, as I do every time, because this vaunted piece of equipment, the “Official Unicef Baby Scale”, appears to me to just be a repurposed hanging produce scale. Babies or lemons? Doesn’t matter, throw ‘em in the bag and hang em up. 7.4 kilograms, a healthy weight - I write on a torn piece of notebook paper and hand it to the kind mother. Next baby please, I point with the end of my pen to the next woman in line. I take another one, watch it cry - yes I know I’m terrifying I tell him - and hang him up.
Maternal and Child Health Peace Corps volunteers all over Rwanda participate in a number of weekly morning services, provided in their Health Centers, that are aimed to reduce the levels of malnutrition in the country among babies up to the age of two. For me, this means that on Tuesday and Wedneday, I help hand out nutrient-enriched milk to mother’s of malnourished kids. On Thursdays, I help to take the measurements - weight and height as a function of age - and report them back to the Health Center so they can make determinations on if the child is suffering from malnutrition or not. I also help to register newborns for a series of vaccinations against common illnesses.
Outside of these offered services, I’ll go with community health workers into the villages surrounding my health center to interview people and guide them on how to take up simple practices that will help them stay healthier. Practices like what to eat, when to eat it, and washing your hands before you eat food or feed children. Things that, for us Americans, we take so fully for granted that the idea of needing to teach it to others seems vaguely insulting. But the facts are that many people in developing countries don’t know, let alone practice these things. And the results, given the tenuous nature of life in the developing world- like chronic diarrhea and water borne pathogens - can be devastating for entire families.
It is through work like this, community interviews and attempted behavior change, that the Peace Corps best demonstrates its long standing approach to development. Peace Corps has the belief that one of the best ways to help someone to change is through a person that is trusted and integrated into one’s community. It is not a strategy of throwing money at a problem, or proselytizing from On High. It is small change, one bit at a time, from a friend who has taken the time to understand you and your situation.
The approach resonates with me because reminds me of one of my favorite thinkers, Jordan Peterson, who said in a podcast of his that I heard, “Before you change the world, clean your room”. This was, of course, a repackaging of a common sentiment - take care of your own business before you try to take care ofthe business of others. How often, in my work in politics, had I seen well intentioned people emotionally weigh in on topics on which they had zero knowledge? How often had I seen people wholeheartedly empathize with populations of which they only knew as an abstraction at best? How many among us have lamented the ills of The Economy from our armchairs, with no actual understanding of how The Economy actually works? I’ve done all these things.
Peace Corps volunteers as a matter of course have decided to live amongst the people, integrating with them and sharing their struggles wrought by the developing world, and in doing so they earn their trust. And slowly, and on a small scale, they can manage to help a small number of people genuinely adopt healthier lifestyles that may ripple throughout their families over a long period of time. It is development on the smallest possible scale, but in theory it may be development in its most genuine form.
Now, I caution you (and myself) that this is the theoretical approach to development. The actual practice of bringing Americans into the development world and integrating them into a foreign culture is one that is more difficult and painful to execute. I can readily attest to this fact, every night when I eat yet another starchy meal and gaze around, bleary eyed and incredulous, as the house is consumed by perpetual noise and chaos both inside of it and out, and no one but me seems to care. Being a Peace Corps volunteer is an incredible experience, but I stay steadfast in my understanding that it is a singularly life-disrupting, physically difficult, and mentally taxing undertaking.
But damn, doesn't it all just sound so good?