I am not the first to do international development work, nor will I be the last. In fact, I suspect this is a burgeoning industry, one of relatively wealthy, privileged, well-meaning individuals who venture off to an unknown country with their skills and abilities and education. And while there is nothing new going on about my experience in general, it is, of course, all new and exciting to me. There is so much rich and novel about moving, living and working somewhere, especially to a country that is so different from one’s own. And as a journalist, I naturally want to document it all and relate the experiences of how different things are from back home. Apparently, there is an entire subculture of people like me, blogging away about our time abroad. So where else but from the Internet would emerge a blog satirizing all of our musings about living somewhere different and doing development work?

Today, I will direct you to both this web site and an essay that provide two very different perspectives that help to shed light on what this whole development/aid worker stuff is all about. One is this brilliant (if slightly cranky and devoid of any idealism) blog Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. A whole lot of it rings true for me, in a self-conscious, meta kind of way.

The other is this brilliant essay by someone I have just been made aware of (Thanks @MegFrauts!). It is an essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called “Can the Subaltern Speak?. I have just started it, but apparently it is a very important piece in terms of understanding the implications of post-colonial development. Here is the link.

Enjoy!