It has taken me years to get to where I am today regarding my thinking around aid and development. In this article, I explore the factors that have influenced my perceptions and reflect on my efforts to change them, as well as the sometimes confusing perceptions people have of me.
The narratives we grow up with
Like many young people in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, I was fed a narrative of stereotyped media representations of other countries. Movements like LiveAid and BandAid used music events and sales to raise money. They portrayed aid recipients as people who needed to be rescued from climate crises, poverty, failed political experiments, and, most often, themselves. In reality, the people affected by these crises needed saving from those of us in countries that believed in their own power and maintained colonial processes of power internationally.
As a student, I dreamed of living, working, and travelling overseas. I fell in love with the idea of exploring new (to me) geographies, foods, and cultures. I had easy access to books about people living in poverty, international adoptions, loving children’s homes, and tales of people heading overseas to build organisations that rescue the lost. Much of this we now call volunteerism, development tourism, or white saviourism.
Tales of the deserving orphan, the street child who made good, or the lost-then-found child appear consistently over generations. Western readers see a romanticised idea of rescue, whether they read the Waterbabies and David Copperfield, written in the 1800s, Anne of Green Gables from the early 1900s, or modern books like Harry Potter.
Perhaps not surprisingly, as a teenager I imagined myself as the heroine in my own ‘giving back’ adventure. This became more complicated once I understood the reality of being overseas.
The impact of working in other countries
As an early career teacher from a working-class background, I lacked the funds to travel widely, but the world always needs teachers, so I took up short-term teaching posts in different countries.
At home in the UK, I often struggled to feel like I fit in socially. I was overwhelmed by situations my friends enjoyed and struggled to build relationships. I didn’t feel ‘normal’. (I now know I have a learning disability.) Being in other countries was refreshing because I was already different. I was watched just for being different. I did not necessarily live up to the stereotype of an ‘expat’, but the general expectation that I would be different was liberating. I had to think less about being the me trying to fit in at home, and just be me in a new place.
Working overseas, rather than just travelling, provided opportunities to be part of a community and better understand life in a new country. It showed me the importance of understanding political, cultural, and social determinants of inequality and education sector development. I wanted to understand the inequalities I saw and question the simplified approach to community service undertaken by the students and communities associated with the international schools I worked in. There was little consideration of the structural and social changes required for long-term positive change, and many small projects provided great photo opportunities but little impact.
Is my critical self-reflection enough?
My experiences of working in other countries, and later on non-governmental organisation education projects, shaped and influenced my career and my perceptions. They helped me recognise the opportunities I have enjoyed because of where I was born. I understand the freedoms associated with my passport, and the access it has given me to education and training. I am painfully aware of my privileges as an overseas teacher when I was paid much more for doing the same job as my colleagues from the country where the school was based.
Sometimes, though, I feel confused about how to influence other people’s perceptions of me. For example, in a recent project, colleagues from two African countries were due to work on an assignment in a third African country. When one consultant could not go, I stepped in to replace them. My role was explained as an assistant, dealing with paperwork, resource preparation, and reporting, but I found everyone deferred to me. Project colleagues took scissors out of my hands to stop me doing the ‘menial’ tasks. My African colleague was the lead consultant and much more experienced than me. Yet my nationality or skin colour seemed to prevent others from seeing him as the more senior team member. Why? And what could I have done differently?
Although I am a teacher and researcher with experience in schools and higher education, I recognise that I am not an expert. My position enables me to learn from colleagues from diverse community and international contexts. I get to see connections between contexts, but my colleagues who work in these contexts are more ‘expert’ than I am. I therefore often call myself a facilitator rather than an expert.
While my comparative understanding can help me look at contexts through a different lens, I cannot truly understand, for example, what it means to be homeless, black, male, from a minority language community in a particular part of a country. I can study the policy contexts, bring my experience of trauma-informed approaches to research and practice to a project, and share my understanding of treating teachers as learners and students as teachers. I know what it means to feel like I don’t belong. But these experiences do not equip me to tell people in another country how to develop their resources and programmes. Rather, my role is to give up control and facilitate reflection so I can help colleagues co-design new ways forward.
Frustratingly, there remain too many situations in which ‘being the white person in the room’ is still seen as more important than investing the time and resources that enable us to listen to local voices and act on what they say. Language is a big part of this problem as well as dynamics of power – both colonial legacies that continue to determine the hierarchies in transnational relationships. We need to find ways forward that privilege the voices of colleagues working with and within the communities we support from overseas.
Editor’s note: The author of this piece wishes to remain anonymous. However, their story is not unique.