Being Inspired and Inspiring Change: Lessons that have shaped me thus far!

I grew up in a joint family – amidst highly educated people, privileged and cocooned. I grew up listening to occasional jibes from these educated people, jibes aimed at Ma, my mother, for giving birth to three girls. Educated folks well aware of the XY chromosomes! I grew up, nurtured by parents telling us to kick ass and kick hard, to not accept without understanding fully, to question, to be. 

So my younger sister and I (my older sister chose not to) grew up riding Baba’s – my Dad’s 350 CC Enfield motorcycle. Even now, in the town we grew up in India, we are known as the “motorcycle girls.”

Two lessons for me, from my childhood:

1.    Formal educationis important but it does not guarantee an evolved thinking. In other words, do not confuse that the more educated a person is, the more they know what is right and what is not. Do not assume the illiterate folks, or those without any formal qualifications do not know what is right and what is not.

2.    Feminist parents, pain in the wrong places they can be, but absolutely vital for shaping the right values. They have shaped me, a person, who can be a pain in the wrong place without feeling any guilt I must say, but someone my daughter aspires to be!

I have worked in many different countries in Asia, Africa and Oceania – lived in them, learnt the cultures and politics and embraced the several discomforts that come with such dynamics. 

Working with communities in the Indo-Nepal borders, communities whose girls and women were regularly trafficked not just by their men but by other men too, I worked in mobilising women into self-help groups, into powerful groups of sisterhoods. Angry men, men whose influence and actions were being questioned by their women, ambushed me one day as I was returning from a village meeting, and almost raped me. I remember the day clearly. It was my quick reflexes and one man amongst those angry men who helped me escape! 

I have worked in war ravaged Liberia and Sierra Leone, with girls as young as 6-7 years old, and women older than 55 years who have experienced unimaginable violence – their minds and bodies so brutally ravaged, that I still get cold recollecting and narrating. In spite of all that gruesome violence they experienced, saw and lived, their spirits remained intact. They went about rebuilding, negotiating, getting their men to turn around. They voted in the Continent’s first elected female head of state when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected Liberia’s President in 2005.

I have worked in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami wreaked havoc in the lives of those who managed to survive it and experienced their grit and their insane resilience. I say insane, because having lost everyone and everything, they straightened their spine, sought help, fought their demons and tried bravely to rebuild their lives. 

In the last 10 odd years of living in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, I have travelled to remote locations, in airplanes smaller than my kitchen, in banana boats, which, though crazily exhilarating, can be dangerous for a person like me who is yet to be skilled in swimming in sedate pools, let alone oceans! Living in the Pacific, I have experienced hospitality of strangers in tiny villages, which does not have the basic services yet the people have hearts bigger than their villages. Living in the Pacific I saw the paradoxes that define human existence – the paradox of people living in poverty amidst abundant resources, the paradox of women still dying of avoidable causes, giving birth, even as 2018 ends in a few months!

Four lessons for me from working with countless people in the last twenty years:

1.     People know. Even the poorest of the poor, the ones without any fancy degrees, they know. They are the experts of their own lives. They have a wealth of knowledge which gets ignored or overlooked in the quest for “changing their attitudes and behaviours.” I have seen awful number of "experts" talking of "them" in patronising, disparaging ways, using their stories and pictures that shows them to be less, to be ones without agency, without dignity, without a being.  Too often, when called out, charities have said "they got consent from the people in the picture!"

2.   Our own attitudes and behaviours, as development practitioners, seldom gets examined by us, seldom gets accounted for. We are not the ones referred to as ‘beneficiaries’, are we! It’s always “them.’ Our biases - conscious and unconscious - are easily excused. Language is the repository of our prejudices, beliefs, assumptions and practices, which we do not examine as often and as honestly as we should. Accountability within our sector remains weak. 

3.   Most problems we are addressing in development and humanitarian work are complex and wicked that needs to be critically understood. Working on complex issues in an integrated way, using multiple strategies, influencing change simultaneously at various levels is essential to sustainable change. What this means is we have to see the human as a whole living within complex systems and relationships, understand those dynamics, understand the specific gender based barriers and bottlenecks, roll up our sleeves, refrain from mindless copy-pasting, truly listen to them, learn from them, refrain from senselessly packaging and repackaging the same old, same old and work with them only if they want and how they want. That is true "localisation" and that is truly "intersectional". Yet how quickly we churn out "human-centric designs" packaged in colourful "theory of change" templates! 

4.   Understanding power dynamics and changing the status-quo needs gumption, patience, smartness and grit. Power lies at the heart of change. Yet too many development agencies do not invest in understanding, analysing and addressing the various hierarchies of power, especially that which is not obvious. Changing the status-quo, more often than not, is fraught with risks and danger. Too many of us are playing it safe. That’s why achieving gender equality will take another couple hundred years more. How bloody unacceptable is that!