I've had better weeks

So, less than two weeks into work and there’s now a lot of talk about pushing the project I’ve been hired to work on back by about a year. I’m not yet sure this will happen or what it would mean for me, but combined with other upended expectations, it’s not made for the most stable week of my life. I hesitate in writing this here in part because I don’t want this to be a detailed personal diary (though I am trying to keep one of those this year), and in part because I don’t want to worry the good folks at home. In striving for a real chronicle of my time here though, I suppose I’m somewhat obliged to not gloss over the harder bits as they come. It does, however, feel surreal and somewhat inappropriate to refer to anything that’s happening to me here as hard.

As have so many development people before me, I’ve been mulling this question (can you really complain about relatively posh conditions in a desperately poor place?) for a while. As I sit in an upscale hotel restaurant listening to Mozart on iTunes and tapping away on my none-too-cheap laptop, I can’t help but feel the urge to censor any form of complaint. Perhaps I’m just lumping too many potential areas of complaint together. It’s reasonable to be frustrated that I may not be able to do the work I came here to do. It’s reasonable to be aggravated by not having the tools I need to get things done. It’s not reasonable to complain about my living conditions, even when they involve pests or a distinct lack of functional plumbing at work. I don’t yet know whether it’s reasonable to be sad about my loneliness and isolation when I brought so much (though not all) of it upon myself. With that I continue to struggle…

This set of questions also invokes a mirror-image set about the appropriateness of taking advantage of luxury in the face of depravation. I know this question isn’t limited to developing country contexts (see, for example, the Hilton in the middle of the Tenderloin in San Francisco), but for obvious reasons, it feels more poignant here. Case in point – I’ve been talking with some friends at work about getting out of the city this weekend and – yes, I fully understand the ridiculousness of this – playing golf at the Firestone Plantation. [I realize now that I may not have actually written about Firestone here before. The short story is that the American tire company runs the world’s largest unbroken rubber plantation here, maybe 90 minutes from Monrovia. The good folks at the United Steelworkers in the US have done a lot of amazing solidarity work to improve conditions for rubber tappers working on the plantation, but as you can imagine, they’re not exactly taking advantage of the on-premises golf course.]

So how wrong is it to go take advantage of this crazy resource? Does the context matter? What if it’s not that expensive, but still kind of frivolous? What if it’s actually good for my mental health? I know this isn’t some new or revelatory set of questions and I’ve wrestled with issues of privilege for a long time, never really coming to reasonable conclusions. In thinking about how to have a sustainable career doing development work though, I feel like I need to reach some more comfortable resolution that allows me to do the work I want, maintain my sanity and not perpetuate the problems I’m trying to solve. All suggestions welcome…

Yeah, I really shouldn't complain: view from my bedroom at sunset