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Blog action day: the road to academia

Today is blog action day, and this year’s theme is poverty.

As for La Marguerite, one of my favourite personal/public blogs on climate and human responsibility, I was thinking of blogging something close to home, maybe climate related. But much of the thought process at the moment is around writing a critical incident diary for my programme of study, a certificate in teaching and learning development, and poverty played quite a role in me entering into teaching.

I did grow up in a single-parent family, in a council flat, on an estate in London. We were relatively poor, and my mother worked two jobs. Similar to the new Minister for Higher Education, David Lammy, I was the first person in my family to come to university.

But only relatively poor. The moment of poverty I remember on the road to academia was in Zambia, one morning in April 2003. I was in Zambia to work with our office there, supporting them in the delivery of a number of DFID-funded projects to use media in development, e.g. a community radio audio-sharing facility.

On the way to work one morning, in my taxi, we ran out of petrol, and I sat in the taxi while the driver took his jerry can to go and find fuel. We’d broken down next to a pile of rocks at the side of the street, being picked up every now and then by a truck taking the rocks off to some building site. Breaking the rocks into smaller pieces were two four, five year old boys. This was 7am. This was their childhood.

Zambia is one of the poorest countries in the world. 78% work in the informal economy, and 70% live on less than two-dollars a day. It is ranked 166th in the list of 177 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index. It has had a resugence due to the price of copper, its main export, but Zambia still wallows in poverty.

We think 5% inflation is bad. On one morning, the whole country woke up to find that income tax had increased from 30% to 40%. Overnight. This was a condition imposed by the IMF to ensure their debt relief plans could continue with their implementation. Headline story in the newspaper that day: the government had bought and flown in 22 new Mercedes for its ministers. But I doubt the IMF were around to see where that extra 10% was going.

I sat in the taxi, watching the children break rocks. They were smiling, happy enough. But I’m assuming this was the only life they knew, and that earning someting, anything, was a privilege for them.

I had an awful time in Zambia. Guilt-ridden, panicked, selfish. I did not handle the poverty at all. Orignally, I was staying in the hostel of Finnish charity organisation Kepa, where volunteers were housed. I asked to move, because it was too young, too noisy, and I was face to face with people who were handling the situation, working with the street children to try and improve their lives. I moved to an altogether more comfortable guest house, with satellite TV and two housekeepers.

It was on the road to academia, because two months earlier I had turned down a job as Communications Director at the Alternative Information Centre, in Palestine. Life would have taken a very different road if I had accepted that job. Considering the hard life it would have entailed (crossing the border every three months to renew a visa, with no guarantee of return; oh yes, and the poverty, the violence, the occupation) and the difficulty I had in Zambia only a few months later, I guess I made the right decision.

At the root of that decision, however, was not only fear. At its root was that I knew that I was competent at the job I was doing at the time, but not excellent. Committed, but not passionate. It was work. Work is not a word I have ever used when talking of writing or teaching.

To make a committment to somewhere like the AIC would have been a full life commitment: to do justice to the people and the programme, I would need to be passionate about the work. It would have meant a 3-5 year commitment–you can’t go somewhere as a Director for 18 months and bail out. So it just felt wrong. Because what I was passionate about was theory, research, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, teaching. So I turned down the AIC, and began plotting a way towards academic life.

The poverty I faced in Zambia, and turned away from as I couldn’t deal with it, was at least, for me, and still selfishly, justification that I had made the right decision.

However, I’ve dealt with that guilt and response, at least in some degree. Many people never even make it that far: to witness the poverty first hand, and to give at least some life time (I have four years) to charity work, helping individuals and communities help themselves. And I am now working with students from similar backgrounds to mine: underprivileged, working-class, single parents many of them.

Most importantly, finding your place in the world, when contributing to the benefit side of the equation, is critical for adding to the overall quantity of human happiness. And I feel that I am progressing as a person who would be able to return and do good this time, rather than turning away in panic from what many see as a poverty caused by London and Washington. Amid this great banking crisis of the Western World, I think about those two boys breaking rocks, just like I think about my taxi driver, who used to play for Zambia’s national football team but had seen too many friends killed as footballers (riots are common). I wonder how much of this ‘bail out’ will trickle down to them. And what my work can do to help them, as well as the students I teach.

A couple of other bloggers on poverty today: