Spot'd(evelopment)
because I said so
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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
Mud cookies
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I saw this photo in a national newspaper today after lunchtime. But it didn’t come with a newsfeed, so I jumped onto Google and did a simple search of “mud cookies” because that is what you see in that photo. A woman collecting dried mud cookies to be sold at the nearest market in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Food prices are rising, thanks to the rising oil prices worldwide. That is not a suprise to anyone who has been keeping up with the news in the recent months. So intricate and interconnected are we in this world that for those who may benefit from the hike in oil prices, they are people on the opposite end who has to resort to dirt to stave off their hunger.
What are we doing wrong? Why are there still people mixing dirt, shortening and salt to make a decent meal?
But Jonathan Katz of International Business Times wrote:
“The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.”
Which got me thinking, maybe perhaps in our world eating dirt is something that requires a lot of imagination. Eating dirt is unthinkable.
But maybe for those in Haiti, it’s as normal as Malaysians having nasi lemak for breakfast. No?
There is always that question of what lead the people to choose dirt over other nutritional items like rice, maize and fruits. Perhaps unavailability of such kind of food in the region, which makes you think further, well that can’t be the problem, you can go to Singapore and dine on freshly flown fish from Japan caught on the same day.
And so there could only point to one thing. Purchasing power. Or the lack thereof. It’s not like we are not doing anything about hunger and poverty. There is the “Make Poverty History” campaign and the Global Fund which I was told in November last year had a total of $16b to go around. So then what are we still doing wrong to have people eat dirt, given our belief from their lack of choices, to keep themselves alive?
Howdy, watch-cat
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I have been thinking of doing this for a while now. To set up a blog where I can talk about development, and the issues of development, and my fascination with UN. I wanted it to be thought provoking. I want it to inspire discussions in the comment box. I want to find out what the rest of the world has to say this term of ‘development’ that was once upon a time coined by the League of Nations in the 1940s.
Of course, in an ideal world I would be worldly and capable of talking about global political issues like it lives at the tip of my fingertips. In this world, my posts will probably be confined to South-East Asia, the country from which I am from and the country that I happen to live in at the moment, and perhaps the country that I happen to visit at that time.
For a while now it has intrigued me the amount of influence and discussion some blogs can generate. How does a blog make it big? How does someone like jeff ooi make so many people, even teenagers want to quote him and sound cool? How can some opinions of a person caused him/her to get in trouble with the authorities and perhaps spend a night or two in the lock-up? I don’t know the exact answers to these, but what I do know is that all of them have something important to say and they are saying it.
.. and so here goes, my important 2 cents for the world
