this is a summer well spent.
in around a week from now I will make that dreaded 10 hours flight plus transit over in two airports before getting back into the motion of a student life.
this is my final year as full-time university student. i intend to keep it that way. if I am ever meant to get a PhD that can wait when I have crow’s feet around my eyes.
Thanks to my trip to Colombo, my love of my country has grown by two-fold. despite the bad drivers, and potholes that can kill your rims, I have come to recognized that peace and stability are two things that should not be taken for granted in any country that you are from.
Thanks to the office retreat, I realize office politics are often inescapable. Even if you are in an industry that vows to save the world.
I would love to talk about the upcoming elections, the dissolving of the cabinet, the who’s who in the running elections but the interest hasn’t quite peaked yet.
Maybe I’m just not politically savvy enough to be politically opinionated about something…
Jeffrey Sachs came to Sabah sometime in December last year as part of a roundtable session about poverty in Malaysia – more specifically in the State of Sabah. Initially I was excited on having the chance to participate but at that point of time, sitting in that conference room in Le Meridien, packed with statesmen, famous malaysian bloggers and private sector representatives, all that excitement just evaporated away.
Especially hearing this Caucasian man say “I have barely been here more than 48 hours…” and followed by a half hours worth of speech on how Sabah should be best developed.
OK so first of all, yes I agree with 3/4 of the stuff he had to say (“you must ensure this beautiful place does not turn into a palm oil island”) but his method of deliverance irks all the respect I had previously had for him.
What he has to say is nothing new. I can bet you my bottom dollar that everybody knew what the issue is in Sabah and so what he said was not new, it wasn’t like we just discovered migrants were flooding the borders yesterday.
But it was his method of deliverance that made all the respect for him vanish. Yes he is a smart man and yes he may be doing good and his intentions are nonetheless good. But why do we need a famous figure and Western in origins to tell the locals what the problem is.
If those same words came from a Malaysian, how effective would the message be?
Makes you wonder doesn’t it? It has been over 50 years after we see the last of the British colonials pack up their bags and leave and yet we still salivate at their every single punctuations in their sentences.
Today I stumbled upon a website that assist interested and qualified volunteers from this particular developed nation for placings in international development projects at developing countries. The criteria stated at the application page “Must be [country X] nationals or Permanent Residence”
Perhaps in some sense the whole entire thing was created to focus on giving opportunities to its ‘own people’. Yet it still comes back to the whole idea of ‘we know better than you’ thinking. It’s fair to think in a way that knowledge transfer can only naturally go one way (developed to developing, smart to the less smart) But what about people who fits neither of those criteria? those who come from developing nations themselves and want to learn the ropes so their own countries develop competitively too?
Opportunities are obviously abound elsewhere, but I just hate the fact that often times it goes unrealized that like it or not, the remnants of colonialism still remains especially in the thinking of development
