Aid Worker Voices

This project, according to “J.”

I’ve spent the better part of the past twenty years believing that something was wrong with me.  I knew the cause, of course: I am a professional aid worker, and I have been for some time. And that fact alone seemed, for a while, to explain it all. Aid-work-induced weirdness was for many years something easy to hold up as a pseudo-explanation for why I couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to try to fit in or get along.

But you get to a point—or at least I did—where the simple acknowledgement that “aid work affects you” is no longer sufficient. It’s not sufficient because we want to understand ourselves, and others like us. I am now in a space where I need to understand, supervise, lead, and in a few cases even mentor actual, young, newly-minted aid workers. The ability to analyze and make some sense of my own experience, including those moments of jarring disconnect, is a critical attribute.

But there’s also more to it than enhancing one’s own level of self-awareness. There are real world—real aid world—consequences to not understanding ourselves, as aid workers, too. In her paper entitled ‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’? (Missing) debates on altruism and professionalism in aid work, Dr. Anne-Meike Fechter argues that:

“A persistent and exclusive focus on the ‘other’ obstructs more open and necessary debates on the role of aid workers. Such academic invisibility allows popular and misleading stereotypes of aid workers to flourish; more pertinently, it hinders honest appraisals of the experiences of aid work and its challenges.”

In other words, it is important to understand us, too. Aid workers. We are part of the aid equation, too, and if we’re not understood, neither can our roles and contributions be understood. And if our roles and contributions cannot be understood, then we cannot make improvements to it all.  Good aid requires good aid workers, and good aid workers require and understanding about what an aid worker is in the first place.

All that having been said, we’re an understudied and largely misunderstood group.

Which is why, I’m particularly proud and pleased to be part of a new project meant to address exactly this. It’s my privilege to be able to collaborate in my personal time with Dr. Tom Arcaro of Elon University on a project to study us! The first step, as any real aid worker will appreciate, is to do a survey, and that is what brought you to this blog.

This project, according to Tom:

As founding Director of the Periclean Scholars program and Mentor of the inaugural Class of 2006, I have mucked around on the edges of aid work for the last 12 plus years.  Guiding my Class through their experience partnering with HIV/AIDS related NGO’s on the ground in Namibia  gave me a deep appreciate for the complexity of aid work and thus began my long and serious emersion into the world of humanitarian outreach and development work.  In the last several years I have been teaching a course on ‘global citizenship’ in general and more specifically about the issues related to humanitarian aid.  The work that I am doing now in studying the aid world is important to be on many levels but most critically because (1) I believe that a robust conversation about the realities of how we are responding to our global issues is vitally important and that (2) knowing more about the views of those most directly involved in this response is a positive step toward a more just world for all.

So, thanks for being part of the conversation.  Stay tuned to this blog for frequent ‘mini’ polls which will appear on the right side up this page (see above now for the first one), ongoing presentation and analysis of the emerging data from the survey and, we hope, both heat and light.