Globalisation: Who should be teaching who?

Last week on my way home, I saw a man sitting on the side of the road wearing a Detroit Tigers t-shirt. A few weeks before that, I met a young Sudanese refugee at the Nakivale Refugee Settlement wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. Most people might wonder, “How did they get those?” and while I understand how they got here, it doesn’t make it any less strange.

If you’ve ever seen the documentary, “T-Shirt Travels” (and if you haven’t you should), you’d know about the widespread and potentially destructive effects of certain aspects of globalisation, namely the used clothing trade. My sisters in my homestay are often very open about the used clothing shops around Kampala: “It’s cheaper, and it’s all good clothes from like Europe. The new things they sell here are cheap and from China and everything just falls apart.” Ok, that makes enough sense. But when I turned the conversation to getting clothes made here with some fabric I had purchased, they scoffed- “We don’t get clothes made. It’s cheaper to just buy them.”

And thus ends a textile industry.

When you think of development, too often there’s a focus on westernisation and the bringing much needed technology and resources to impoverished areas of the world. That’s all well and good in some cases. Still, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve got it wrong, that maybe it’s about cooperation and mutual development rather than a one-sided lesson in moderisation. Maybe it’s better to learn for one another’s strengths, rather than assume there’s only one right answer. For example, imagine this setting: a house that stores rain water in giant tanks (and actually conserves its usage), a house where all the power strips and electrical outlets are actually turned off when not in use, a family that owns a car, but 9 times out of every 10, utilizes public transportation (and not just because of the cost of fuel). The funny thing is, this scenario isn’t some modern “green” house found in the US or Europe…

…it’s my house in Kampala.

I’m not saying there aren’t a vast number of technological advances that countries like Uganda could benefit from because I’m sure that there are. What is more important though, is that we (and by “we” I don’t mean the US independently, because that type of solitary blame is undeserved, but the global North more generally) don’t have all the answers, and sometimes our uninformed actions cause more harm than good. It seems like an obvious sentiment, but it still doesn’t seem to have sunk in. I thought that I knew these concepts, but when you see them first hand, your perspective changes immediately. For instance, when you visit an organic pineapple farm and a man turns to you and says, “We don’t need the money they give us, we already have a farm. We need markets,” you think, “Then why isn’t it just that simple?” My first week in Kampala, I was in a taxi off to buy cell phones with a friend of mine, and we talked with the driver for a while as we sat in the jam. Somehow we ended up talking about mangoes and Godfrey just shook his head and sighed. “In mango season, they just lie on the side of the road and rot. If we had markets, we’d be set.”

But it’s not just about pineapples and mangoes and a lack of markets; it’s about mutual understanding and collaboration, an international dialogue rather than a one-sided conversation. I digress and this isn’t so much about globalisation any more as it is about the nature of global cooperation. But maybe they’re one in the same, or rather, they should be. We tend to come in with end-all solutions, ignoring the human side of development almost entirely. I’m not the first to say these plans don’t work, and unfortunately, I won’t be the last. What I can do is speak to what I’ve seen. When you go and observe a group of parents in Busia ecstatic over the vast improvements they’ve seen in the lives of their children since they formed a community group to discuss nutrition and parenting, you can’t help but think, “Yeah, grassroots works.” It might not be the way to solve everything, but it’s sure as hell a start. But then again, maybe everything isn’t a problem to be solved.

(Basically, this incredibly rambling post is quite self-interested in that as I write it, I’m trying to rationalize my belief that there is still hope for change and that this isn’t some greater realization that I’m getting the wrong degree and I should have pursued anthropology rather than the bureaucracy of international affairs. I still hope that’s not the case, but if it turns out it is, well, I know a very nice rural family in Busia that I could go stay with and just work on their farm the rest of my life ☺ )