This was a very interesting blog piece that I read and responded to a couple weeks ago. I just thought that I would share this with others since it is such an interesting topic. I did minor editing to her piece, minor stuff like capitalizing the beginning of her sentences. Nothing more because it expresses her perfectly.
Feel free to follow up on my friend and her blog if you please, her name is Kate Riley [http://katemriley.wordpress.com/]
What I am actually (officially) doing here
February 26, 2010 at 3:11 PM
So besides picking my nose and making granola, I am acting coordinator of BRA’s USAID Women’s Empowerment Program in the South East Border Regions of Haiti. (there’s a lot of possessives in that sentence, which about sums up how this kind of development work seems to go- everyone wants to be the owner of whatever good comes out of these projects and they do whatever they can to slap their emblem-laden banners all over the place). I have never been a big supporter of development projects that are written up like business reports and throw all kinds of money around. I don’t know anyone who is, probably because I hang out with liberals. I mean, almost everyone passing through the uber-enlightnened CDAE program at UVM has written a paper (or two or three) deriding the failure of one USAID project or another, myself included. Down here, signs for USAID projects are almost as common as billboards for Brugal Rum (the national poison).
