Message-ID: <199612301404.JAA18039@jericho.american.edu> Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 09:04:55 -0500 From: Yvonne Sobers <mailto:asante@COLIS.COM> Subject: Re: Escalating philosophising To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
At 01:10 AM 12/30/96 -0500, Dave Johnson wrote:> I didn't find the campesinos I worked with to be the noble types
>that others seem to have run across. In many respects, they were
>ignorant, sexist, cruel people.
> They threw their trash out of every window into the street, they
>routinely killed everything they couldn't use. While they loved their
>children, they failed to take even simple precautions to protect them.
>They were cruel to their animals and completely unfeeling as to their
>suffering.
> The men impregnated young girls without any thought of
>responsibility for the girl or their offspring. Given the choice, they
>consistently blew what little money they had on plastic santas and "flesh
>colored Christs that glow in the dark" { Bob Dylan's words}.
Dave Johnson's post caused me to check my Oxford dictionary for the meaning of prejudge:
"pass judgment on (person) before trial or proper enquiry; form premature judgment on"
Dave follows a trend that is as unhelpful as my labelling American visitors to Jamaica as racist, sexist, cruel, uncaring, ignorant, loudmouthed, insensitive, prejudiced people who are addicted to sex, sun, sand, and marijuana. With trial and proper enquiry, I may find American visitors to be individuals with cultural norms that are different from mine. I may discover, also with trial and proper enquiry, that they have strengths and weaknesses, and also carry cultural baggage, just like other human beings including myself. I may also find that some my labels are projections of my own weaknesses.
>I never really held them to any standards I would
>hold the people on this net to. I didn't expect much from them so I
>wasn't disappointed.
Sometimes, in my country, we also patronize our American visitors by not holding them to the standards to which we would hold those we consider as our equals. We do not expect much from them, and we receive just about what we expect. Generalizing can save us a lot of thinking time. When our relationships with our visitors fail, we can blame them, because we always knew what they were about anyway.
Your experiences and perceptions are only incidental to my comments, Dave. My comments relate to the millions of dollars that have been consumed in developmental projects in my country and across the globe, because persons from well-intentioned agencies prejudged people and situations in developing countries.
i believe that dialog, such as we are able to have on this list, can provide a base for replacing prejudice with mutual understanding.
Peace.
Yvonne
At 01:10 AM 12/30/96 -0500, Dave Johnson wrote: >
>I can't say ,in all honesty, that I am upset with the turn these
>simple stories have taken. Its rather flattering to be the catylist of
>all of this high flown rhetoric. I didn't really plan it that way, at
>most, I hoped that others might relate similiar stories for me to respond
>to.
> It seems that I may be the only person who worked in third world
>countries who came away disappointed in what he was able to accomplish in
>the time he was there and puzzled by what he found. I may also be the
>only volunteer who was not a resounding success.
> Actually, that is a bit ingenuous since most of the volunteers I
>know ended up settling for a lot less than they had hoped for. I suppose
>that can be attributed to unrealistic expectations. In that respect, we
>actually did learn a lot.
> My question is, "Did we learn the right thing?". Could we, if
>things had been better organized and funded accomplished more and thus
>come away with a different lesson?
> I mean, just because you learned something isn't really all that
>big a deal. I learn things every day.
> I didn't find the campesinos I worked with to be the noble types
>that others seem to have run across. In many respects, they were
>ignorant, sexist, cruel people.
> They threw their trash out of every window into the street, they
>routinely killed everything they couldn't use. While they loved their
>children, they failed to take even simple precautions to protect them.
>They were cruel to their animals and completely unfeeling as to their
>suffering.
> The men impregnated young girls without any thought of
>responsibility for the girl or their offspring. Given the choice, they
>consistently blew what little money they had on plastic santas and "flesh
>colored Christs that glow in the dark" { Bob Dylan's words}.
> This is not to say that I didn't like them. I did but, probably
>for the wrong reasons. I never really held them to any standards I would
>hold the people on this net to. I didn't expect much from them so I
>wasn't disappointed.
> You may argue with the prejudices you read into the things I
>write but, you can't argue with my experiences. That was what I did and
>that was what I experienced. I don't argue with your experiences because,
>PC is nothing if it is not individual and personal.
> Actually this whole posting may be a good argument against
>writing anything this time of night after several brandies.
> Dave Johnson
>
============================================================================ ========