Return from the field

(written in May 2012, but not published until August!)

So I spent a week in Sierra Leone, and it was wholly unremarkable. I did the things I do on field trips: I met people who know things, I facilitated some workshops, I gave my opinions on a range of things that I'm less informed about than I should be. It was as simple and uneventful as you can imagine. I loved it. At first I was preoccupied trying to keep in touch with home - this was pointless as the internet connection was almost non-existent. And it's not that I didn't miss my family. But early parenthood is such a self-obliterating process, and being in Africa made me feel so completely myself again. It was like the experience of going walking in the mountains after months of not leaving the city: that exhalation of delight as you realise that you have been missing a part of you deeply, without even knowing it. By Saturday, wandering the old town with my colleague and her friends, I felt at ease and confident and just completely myself.

 It took a while for me to work out how to feel this way. At the beginning of the week I was antsy. I wanted to be busy, I wanted to meet as many people and see as many things as I physically could. It took me a few days to remember that I had spent a year and a half longing for time to myself to read a book or write an email (does anybody write letters any more?). Slowly I stopped searching for adventure and remembered to spend time with myself. And inevitably, that's when I met people to spend time with. By the time of my departure on Sunday, I felt relaxed.

Being on a field trip for me can be like going on retreat. It involves chunks of unstructured time without the easy distractions I'm used to. No phone, tv or internet in the hotel room. No friends or cafes to spend stretches of time. I'm forced to read and think and write. It's the best therapy imaginable. I don't have specific stories to tell about my week away, but I wanted to note that it was good.

I got home on Monday afternoon, after 18 hours of travel, dirty and wrecked. Worried that the boys would punish me for leaving them. The last time I went away, they were quite sniffy on my return.

This time, Felix and Max were just getting out of their buggy, they made no comment on my surprise reappearance. They climbed up onto my lap, and sat there together, as though I'd just come back from buying milk. Then they cheerfully started blowing kisses at Alice their childminder. "Bye bye now, we don't need you, mummy's home". Alice left, and we played.

Accountability

Professionally, I’m an advisor on governance, participation and accountability. I’ve got the analysis down: some people have money and power, others don’t. Those who don’t have power get ripped off, ignored, never receive basic services. Ultimately, they might resort to violence to resolve the hundreds of intractable problems that thwart their lives. The trick is, the ones with money and power also have obligations to the poor: we are all supposed to be bound together in a web of taxation, election, representation and service. There is supposed to be an accountability network. But it will only deliver rights if everybody uses it, and makes it work.

There’s the analysis, in the most pithy form possible. I have experience too: of local mayors, government working groups, and most of all, local groups of activists trying to make sense of the whole mess to see if “accountability networks” are any better than NGOs or churches at making sure that things get done; that a road gets built, and then serviced regularly.

I know the problems, because I’ve read the research; and because I’ve walked around with those committees and the organisations helping them. Telling people to make demands of their local authorities can be risky. It’s not like Dublin, where you can whine about the government, and they’re obliged at least to acknowledge your letter. In Congo, my colleague Lea told me yesterday, “the government is the biggest problem in my life”. Nobody expects anything of agents of the state apart from extortion. And when you encourage people to withhold their taxes until they can see how they’re being spent – that might endanger them. Those people might end up at the bottom of a river. Why bother? Why risk your life in the interest of saving 10 cents?

Those aren’t the problems I confront every day. My problem is that I don’t know how to relate my supposed area of technical expertise to my own community.

A few weeks ago, a man was stabbed in his house on the street facing mine. Days later, I watched a frenzy develop outside a vacant house, as kids and adults crow-barred the railings off a window and smashed in the front door and window. On Monday morning I left my house to go to work only to find my four tyres slashed, my car in a useless slump. Disaffection and violence has momentarily taken over my community, because of a couple of deeply troubled households. It may move on. Or it may become entrenched.

What do we do? This is not a neighbourhood of apathy and anomie. I know most of my neighbours by name and they know me. We exchange Christmas cards. We don’t socialize much, our neighbours and us; but what we do do is go to meetings. We are all mad for the meetings.

So last week we met with the community garda, and an inspector who is taking a special interest in the mayhem which has taken over our streets lately. We have a close and ongoing relationship with our local councillors. We have the numbers of the landlords responsible for the difficult houses and the difficult people. I fell I’m in a similar situation, now, to the communities I claim to help: feeling powerless and vulnerable; trying my hardest to lobby for change, and wondering if it can make any difference.

I’ve always known that there’s a risk when you organize people that they may not get results. In the field (that term again), we talk about the danger of “creating expectations”, and the importance of “quick wins”. It’s highly instructional now for me to experience this reality in person.

I have a neighbour a few doors down who’s lived here all her life – we’ll call her Shirley. She lived through the hope and semi-vigilantism of Concerned Parents Against Drugs in the 80s, and she knew the streets when this was the hard core inner city and there were no falafel-buying hipsters looking for the flea market. Shirley doesn’t come to meetings. When some of us younger residents first got organized (about the waste on the streets), she was encouraging – although what she’s most likely to say is always “it’s worse it’s getting”. Shirley was mobilized once, against the heroine epidemic, and the whole experience beat her down. She doesn’t believe we can change anything any more.

I believe in citizen activism, I run little tests on myself all the time to check that I am an active, responsible citizen. And when I look at problems around the world, I look at them with a single lens: how can organized citizens resolve this problem themselves, or force governments and institutions to step up and resolve it?

I’m struggling a lot with my current situation, and how to relate it to my frame of reference. There are so many injustices, and I’m not the ultimate victim. The people who are intimidating and threatening me are far more excluded than I am. The government has failed them. But they’re taking that out on me; and the state is doing very little to protect me. I’d get laughed out of the room if I suggested organizing a meeting to do a power analysis and a problem tree… yet if I was in Honduras that’s probably what I’d suggest. That, and stronger bars on people’s windows. (We don’t have bars on our windows).

The advisor on governance sits back and watches me smugly, sees the arc of protest begin to develop: nothing in my story is new, or noteworthy. You know what comes next though: it’s noteworthy because it’s my story. I get it. And I don’t have a clue how or if we’re going to resolve this problem. I hope though that it’s good for me to learn what it is to battle against multiple, opaque forces that are both bigger and smaller than me. I hope at the very least that out of this whole battle I can grow some empathy with the people who have much bigger issues at stake.

(This is a kind of professional post. It doesn’t point out the strain on my relationship, the worry about my boys. It also doesn’t discuss how much I love that flea market, and Dublin 8 generally.  The accountability network is the least of my worries right now. It does give me pause for thought though. It does.)