“The problem with a rat race is that even if you win you are still a rat.” -Lily Tomlin

I don’t know. A bad stand up comedian returning to his punch line again and again: I don’t know. I don’t. Crickets. Sometimes you are going to bomb, and right now it feels like the bottom’s fallen out. Nothing’s clear, no answers, just uncertainty. Questions that beget questions that lead only to the surrender of shrugged shoulders, dejection, and feelings of total confusion; I don’t know. At the bottom of the year-abroad curve, I look forward often.

My boogers are black. People offer me cigarettes and I tell them: “No thank you, I’ve already been outside today.” Ahmedabad is home to the most polluted air out of all cities in India – illustrious company. Foods are starting to taste the same. Traffic is mad; my fits of bike rage returned. Gujarat is a dry state, doubly dry when you consider the prospects of meeting women, triply dry when you recall the weather. The task of communication is grinding, I still pantomime and over enunciate my way through simple conversations. Cars, bikes, buses, trucks, motorbikes, and rickshaws honk and honk and honk. I wonder why I feel so homesick, why I feel that I’ve been away for so long. This is the only question I can answer for sure: because I have. I left NYC on August 11 and it feels like it.

There is a partner on this seesaw. Bright colors and delicious tea. Wonderful smiles, strong families, gracious hospitality, foods that are delicious and don’t taste the same, yoga, an exhilarating history of legend and lore alive in the streets and buildings, fresh fruit, old men in the park, ice cream, monkeys, week-long weddings, my new room, Bollywood films, a state holiday kite festival, and dozens of other details that sit at the other end of the plank, pushing down to pick me up, and sometimes disappearing in plain sight, Purloined Letters, watching me fall.

But shitty air and beautiful women are symptoms, they are not what really troubles me, telltales that something deeper is awry. Kiwis, working in translation, and papayas reflect a confounded moral compass that is under attack, emaciated by a lack of familiar nourishment, perplexed by questions from a new world, disorienting weaponry that destroys reference points and leaves me in need of recalibration. Small events probe and burrow, adding up to big questions that I do and do not understand, questions that, when explored, leave no sure answer. I stare in the mirror at uncertainty. I don’t know.

My mind is numb, underwhelmed with work, this city, the people, the monotony. This is a massive change, something I hate, and try all the time to remedy but it takes a lot of energy to meet new people, to initiate, be the new guy – especially when you don’t understand anything – that I sometimes concede defeat, sit and read. I do know people, I have friends, there is cool work going on in Ahmedabad, but not in my office. Most of my time is spent in a chair at a desk looking at a computer. There are some projects that I am cooking up, but there is no buzz among the staff, no pep, no scrambling, over-committed excitement, no energetic frenzy that excites, no team that you want to be a part of. Could be that I don’t understand these things when they are expressed, I don’t understand all the time, but it is not a working environment I like, am used to, or allow myself to grow comfortable in.

All the time I feel misunderstood; friends and co workers don’t really understand how to get my mind firing, and when it is firing they offer little oxygen. I am never at full speed, never totally loose, always speak slowly, rarely curse, sedate. Never before have I been in a more different place and never before have I felt so medicated; some sort of charade is constantly maintained. When I do hang out with someone who I think might get me I end up going overboard, overwhelming him/her with what’s been pent up.

I miss friends and family who know me, who are smart in my language, who push back, spar, offer something new and different, tell me to stop being an idiot, tell me that I’ve guessed right, that I can work with, that have something to contribute. I miss my comfort zone, bike rides, salad, NYC, my brother, BC, stupid nights, stupid jokes, flirting, sweaters, dancing, dark beer, the possibility of meeting new, engaging, exciting people, pasta, UNC, not having to work, basketball. I look forward.

To what?

What do I want to do next? What is important to me? Why am I here? How do I want to live my life? What makes me happy? How do I want to be in the world?

Each time I think I have an answer to any of these questions I stop myself before I can finish my thought, interrupted in my mind by the counterpoint that springs up and sounds equally right. Counterpoint after counterpoint, I don’t know.

Supposedly I came to India to work at the grassroots level, at the forefront of human rights advocacy, to partner with an NGO serving as the interface between the most marginalized communities and the services, laws, and rights that they are entitled to. Lila Watson’s quote [“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.”]
tells me that I am not here to help. Somehow, wearing my white skin, a foot taller than everyone and without language skills my presence is to supposed to defy the power dynamics of North/South, Rich/Poor, 3rd/1st and be ‘fair.’ This program hopes that I work and talk with, not at, the flow of information is supposed to go both ways, honest communication, mutual learning, skills transfer, thoughts of sustainability, capacity building. In training we talked about cultural sensitivity, American attitudes, socio political climates, histories that set the tone today, values, morals, sympathy, empathy, body language, norms, conscientious consumerism, the importance of patience, understandings of time, control, ownership, dress, nonverbal messages.

We ran the gamut of development practitioner basics to create young adults with the skills, knowledge, and awareness to operate in this mutually benefiting space that ‘good’ models suggest.

Right now, this all feels like total bullshit. From where I sit, any and all ideas of development are a fantastic fairy tale. Talk of advocacy, organizing, rallying for Dalit rights has been happening in India for over a hundred years. It is India and it isn’t. Substitute any issue – AIDS, poverty, domestic violence, malnutrition, sex trafficking, potable water, aboriginal rights, indigenous rights, ethnic tensions, peace and reconciliation, disaster relief, race relations, displaced persons, genetically modified crops, asthma, obesity, starvation, heart disease, health care, TB, malaria, illiteracy, child slavery, civil war, malnourishment, housing -- at any level – community, city, state, national, international, global - and the same gap between lip service and results exists. Admitted: these issues persist because they are so complex and hard to solve. There are no easy solutions or quick fixes. But, at any level, the impacts pale in comparison to the money, time, attention spent trying to remedy whatever the stated need is. The resultant rat race is a system, a beast, created by best intentions that is as unfair, unresponsive, political, and inefficient as the unfair, bureaucratic, inefficient system it was created to fix.

People still carry shit on their head. Pick an issue, fill in the blank, the need is there and the system sucks.

Human history has never known more material wealth. Billions of people live on less than $2 a day. Each day tens of thousands of people die of preventable diseases. Disparity, by any indicator, between rich and poor has never been as great. How do we know this? Some NGO did years of research, paying exorbitant bribes and salaries, to find out the problems. Using their figures another NGO did research on how best to reduce these problems. Then another NGO wrote a proposal, vetted by an NGO consulting NGO, for funding for community work to reduce said problem. Another NGO attacked them for a wrong model. A different NGO did work on the harm caused by the original intervention. Another NGO was hired to conduct an assessment of their work. More research on the changed, emerging new face of the same problem. People still carry shit on their head.

Looking out from the eye of the storm, this development beast looks like a downright stupid proliferation of NGOs, NGOs that help NGOs, NGO’s that really are governmental bodies (organizations that have become exactly what they hope to reverse), consultants, models, papers, academics, competition for funding, conferences, workshops, trainings, meetings, summits, World Days, awards, honors, fellowships, grants, support, photo essays, empowering projects, films, documentaries, photographs.

The big houses drive around in Land Rovers, A/C blasting. Small NGOs sprout up like flowers in the April, each organization is staffed by people who care, will be that much closer to the frontline, better, more local, more fair, more participatory in its development model, more focused on involving women, locally staffed and better able to address the needs of the people by the people. Everyone you meet is working with an NGO on these same, vague issues of community development with the most marginalized, the most downtrodden, the lowest. It doesn’t count unless they are really marginalized.

Awards scramble to keep up with these social entrepreneurs, global citizens, people of the year, leaders of the future. First the Nobel Prize to award outstanding accomplishment. Now, the X Prize, Rolex, Ashoka, Macarthur, Echoing Green… universities and corporations affiliate their names.

Let’s be honest for a second: my liberation is not bound up in yours. I don’t carry shit on my head. The thought of a common humanity that unites the world, stops our destruction of the Earth, feeds, clothes, shelters, provides medical treatment and safety to each and every person in the world is a powerful, right idea. NGOs don’t work with me. I am not the member of a marginalized community. I am liberated. My life is far more impacting on the Earth than it should be, but according to most of the key socio-economic indicators, I am where billions of people want to be. Equitable change will take sacrifice from my global bracket and we are connected, but that is a tangential connection. If my liberation is bound up in yours we are talking about a very different kind of liberation. Do we quote Lila Watson because we agree with her or because it makes us feel good? How do our actions answer this question?

Most people do as much as they need to feel good and as little as they can to be helpful. Paul Farmer calls these people White Liberals. Photos holding starving children. International volunteer trips. Volunteer cores. Me. Mission trips. Sighs of sympathy. They mean well. But, good-intentionsare not enough. Watson’s words are all over dorm rooms and profiles, t shirts and posters. Millions of people have read Mountains Beyond Mountains. These are the same people who work at NGOs. They are good people, they mean well, they have good intentions. But, so what? What does that poster on the wall mean to the person who’s liberation hangs in the balance.

I don’t know. Yet, I am here. I am not taking pot shots from afar, for reasons that are stronger that my disdain for the nonsense of the NGO world I am here, trying to answer these questions. Looking around makes me wonder if this was a good decision. Thinking of the world and just how fucked things sometimes seem, the wholly inadequate responses we well-intentioned actors muster, the stupidity of non governmental posturing, I am skeptical. So too is there so much beauty, love, support, hope, and success. Still I wonder: is the urge to help helpful? Is the desire to ‘help’ entirely self indulgent and disconnected from the sacrifice required to maybe make a difference. A coached impulse that quells some inner discomfort, some perceived injustice, a wrong. Where does this come from? How does one make a difference, how do you know? Can you change the world or can you change the people you meet, control what you can control, be in the world how you want to be.

Next year I am going to move to New York City, be near my family, interesting people I can speak with, bike rides and adventures, friends, comfort. I want to do what makes me happy. The world is fucked, let’s admit it. The problems are not going anywhere. I know I need a job but I don’t need a career. Each morning I want to wake up excited for the day, my work, my play, them being the same thing, my partner, my location. My liberation is bound up in my liberation. You are only young once and now is the time to do what you love. Maybe.

Do I have the courage to take my own advice? I give it quite often, to friends deliberating between grad school and something cooler and less orthodox. Do what you love, now is your time I tell them. What will I do?

That stupid impulse to help, work with – whatever we are going to call it.

Do I want to sit in an office and write grants, review proposals, assess things that I am far far away from and don’t understand, quote Lila Watson on my facebook profile and work for an NGO? If I learned anything from Kenya it is that smell is the only sense that allows you to understand the absence of proper sewer systems – not a movie, a report, not a photo. They help, but you don’t get it. To understand you’ve got the be there, not in an office in NYC with really bright white lights.

That sounds boring, but it might be the best way for me to ‘help’ If helping is a good idea, something I want to do, what can I contribute and from where. Why am I in India? A blonde hair, blue eyed American who can’t speak Hindi or Gujarati, I stand out, I am a foot taller than most people - I am not doing grassroots development, I am writing documents that non-english speakers can’t write. Good thing I flew all this way. Let’s talk about carbon footprints. I ride my bike here but took a jet around the world first. How do I want to be in the world?

These are the questions that trouble me right now. People still carry shit on their heads. I don’t know.