Bye Bye, White Elephants

My last job did it. Pushed me beyond the limit of tolerance and suffering, questioning the reason why I was doing this, making me feel to be wasting my time and that of the involved people.

I don´t say that this project had been particularly bad. Actually I have seen much worse. Like the one where Muslim communities were given piglets for food security… But visiting the farmers two months after end of the project and being received with open hands, like beggars do, demanding money to buy spare parts for irrigation equipment that had been given to them two years ago, calling me a bad mother abandoning her children, this finally lit the fuse.

Years of receiving goods for free, fertilizer, seeds, equipment, money for workshop attention, you name it, the one thing we really managed to develop is a serious dependency syndrome in the participating farmers. Not caring for themselves anymore but expecting strangers to provide for them. Bartered their dignity for gifts from the rich, and we are to blame for that!

Oh, did I mention that none of what the project tried to teach has been adopted? Two months after its end the farmers had already returned to their old practice.

This is the result of foreign saviors coming, telling people what to do, not listening to the farmers and future beneficiaries because there is no time for that, checking indicators (10.000 farmers participated in trainings *check*), and leaving after all indicators are checked (and millions of dollars wasted err spent). Common practice in most international NGOs, competing for dwindling donor resources and trying to impress with ridiculous numbers. White Elephant projects, expensive but useless, and often a curse.

I quit my job, and enrolled in a Permaculture Design Course.