Kiara Soobrayan
Jesuit Refugee Service
Johannesburg, South Africa
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela Day is commemorated through 67 minutes of service, one minute for every year that Mandela dedicated his life to public service. My organization didn’t get to planning for Mandela Day until the week before. So while other organizations had organized school building projects or health awareness fairs, we walked down the street to a cancer hospice that sat in a posh Kensington home.
The hospice was well-maintained, well-funded, completely clean, and not at all in need of our help. In order to find ways to busy the many hands that made the three-and-a-half-minute journey from JRS, a number of staff began pulling weeds that had grown between the bricks in the driveway. Determined to remove as much of the weeds as possible, JRS workers insisted that we lift the bricks.
The concerned hospice workers looked on as JRS staff dismantled the driveway brick by brick, leaving a gaping hole of a mouth in the albeit weed-free entrance. When the call for lunch sounded, JRS workers were quick to lift themselves from the dusty floor and go to lunch, leaving myself and another intern to pick up the literal pieces of what they left behind.
We left the hospice feeling well-fed, congratulating ourselves for the work that we had done, as the hospice workers scrambled to put their driveway back together with no concrete and no map of how the puzzle-piece bricks fit together.
This, in my opinion, is the problem with development work. The development organizations, for all their brains and brawn, tend to push their voices in front of the people they are supposed to be helping. We did not stop to consider that perhaps the driveway was best left as is, weeds and all. We did not falter in our pursuit of the weeds even when the hospice workers tried to deter us because we, the NGO, knew better. In all likelihood, we created an even bigger problem than what existed in the first place.
Without a drastic change to the ways in which we think about and enact development work, we’re going to continue to create holes in driveways across the world.