They come into a country with a long-term commitment. They don’t just want immediate results; they want souls. Missionaries bring their families and children with them, and those children go to local schools. They live in houses that are nice by local standards, but not in the expat palaces your average foreigner lives in. They bring their stuff with them in suitcases, not container ships.
Missionaries don’t try to do any soul-saving at first, spending a minimum of six months learning local language and culture. Mormons are renowned for their language skills. And once they have learned it, they stick around, spending years or even decades in country. They devote themselves to work in one particular place.
Compare that to your average expatriate working in development, for a donor or implementing a project. The expat lives in a little bubble of fake-home, cushioned by consumable shipments, huge shipping allowances, and hardship pay. With air conditioning and heating to ensure they’re even in a different climate. And they stay in once place for approximately 35 seconds.
Good people don’t have time to get great, and average people don’t even have time to get good. Complicated programs suffer as a result, and funding is biased toward things that are easy to implement and understand. No one has time to learn local context.
Read the full post by Alanna at Blood and Milk. I’m inclined to agree.
It’s worth saying, however, what aid work ought not to share with missionaries: the saving mission. Development ain’t religion, and there are no souls and bodies to be saved. Unfortunately, that actually needs to be said. I think Alanna would agree.
10 Responses
Oh, dear, you got it all messed up now.
There are aid workers and aid workers. There is aid here and aid there, but most aid bring a benefit in the long run, I believe.
Missionaries, on the other hand, bring the worst of the West into any place. They mean trouble in the long run. One thing are church financed ngos' the other are the work of missionaries.
Missionaries meaning only the bad, they divide villages, they break cultures, they ruin societies, they destroy languages, education, knowledge, traditions, they introduce alien moralities, they pretend, and they lie. They only want to make themselves feel good. No respect for the other…
What a bad comparison you made here…
C.
@Michael and @A: You make good points. My take is that there are loads of aid workers who live relatively modestly and are dedicated to a particular place for a long time. They do terrific work. But they are in the minority. Western staff seldom stay more than a year or two, leaving just when they start to get the place. Missionaries are not better across the board, but in my mind they and faith-based development NGOs strike a much better balance on average: less ostentation, more and longer dedication.
And what academics and diplomats could be learning as well.
I confess I don't hang out too much with expatriate development workers. But a long time ago… I had a one year fellowship with PLAN International in Wad Medani Sudan in 1985… the expat Medani regional director lived in a very ordinary Sudanese upper middle class house- no air-conditioning, no imported furniture. Everyone in the neighborhood was Sudanese. Of course, he and his family (yes, he and his wife had two wonderful kids who I remember fondly to this day) had privileges (jam from Poland!).
I've never met anyone living the Peter Singer imperative (well I did meet Jean Dreze once for five minutes…). And PLAN was very effective over the long term in the Medani area (despite the awful letter-writing stuff… I'm talking about the projects).
Michael, I'm with A on that. I don't know a single expat staffer from any nonprofit NGO who lived in what could be termed "modest" housing by Congolese standards. Granted, most weren't paying $10,000 a month for rentals like the UN staff were, but there's a big difference. More importantly, the lack of local language skills and short-term presence of most aid workers made the vast majority of their projects ineffective over the long term.
Michael – While donors are the worst offenders, I have seen lots of NGO staff from the groups you list live in some pretty nice houses.
When I was in Sudan, there was a rumor that a missionary group had flown in toilets … the kind that flush. Probably spread by righteous aid workers.
Perhaps we need more anthropologists-cum-development workers? Just a thought!
I think both of you mischaracterize a lot of development. At Friends of African Village Libraries (www.favl.org) we have very small expatriate presence (volunteers and then volunteer board members and directors, like myself, who basically live in the same housing as missionaries, in both capital city and village), but all of the paid staff is local. The distinction is really between non-profit development orgs. (like Save the Children, CRS, Oxfam) where expatriate staff below the director level generally live pretty moderate lifestyles when in country, and international development agencies (UNDP, WFP) etc.
Actually missionaries ship a lot of containers… We are currently working with Missionary Expediters, a freight-forwarding firm, for our first container shipment, and African Library Project also uses them for shipping books. And when we lived in Ouagadougou we bouth a lot of stuff from the missionaries when they were leaving… lots of Jello, I mean ;-)
Michael
I agree completely that development has nothing to do with salvation. I was very surprised in the comments on my post to discover that hadn't come through!