Warning: Rant

people call me "Ria" here.. because they have issues with mixing up rs and ls. lol. my favourite gypsy taxi driver (random men who put taxi signs on their cars.. and drive people around, only real form of public transit here.. and DIRT cheap), brotha mike (aka baby) calls me Ria, and I laugh everytime, which makes him laugh, which makes me laugh more because he laughs like a goat!!!!! anyways people here are really amazing,

what have i learned so far? i've learned that Ivan Illich is right. I am selling
a way of life that is impossible to attain here. its making me quite sad in some ways, for example in all the time i've spent in transit with brotha mike, i realize how FUCKED people are sometimes in countries like this, there is no real future for them like we have or that we perceive in our priviledge life as a "good future".

so lets count our lucky stars that we have so many options, because i honestly dont know what mike would do other than drive a taxi, maybe start a small business, but hed never be able to register with the government, and most people are living hand to mouth here. the worst thing is i feel like we are walking representations of the things these people cant attain. most people i meet willnever be able to travel to canada on a whim... now mike wants to immigrate and become a taxi driver there.. its never been his dream before we came... i.. it makes me sad ... its almost like were making people more aware of their own "poverty" when in all likelihood they were pretty satisfied with their life situation until we white people came arounda nd showed them how much "better" it could be.

a lot of people here ask us for stuff, because they assume were rich. this is also very frustrating. i guess relatively speaking i am rich, but i cant afford to buy everyone a beer, or a cd, or give them my tshirt!

i guess this is a rant blog today, because myresearch is FRUSTRATING THE FUCK out of me. first of all, the language barrier is huge, and what should have been a half hour interview was
two and a half hours.. and i still didnt get the answers i wanted... grrr.. and my boss is... well... frustrating. i could rant forever but i wont make you suffer through it.

i'm freaking out a bit because i only have two weeks to finish my research and then a few days to write a report... and what my boss expects at the end is impossible to attain in this short amount of time. it is becoming SO captain obvious that international development research in this kind of time frame is fatally flawed. for me to do proper research on the decentralization process i would have to be here for a year, just to understanda the ins and out of the government.. and even then i probably still wouldnt get the subtleties... and then it would take months to learn the language (something they keep telling me is unecessary... but i cant tell you how frustrating it was to have to ask the same question in 50 different ways... and have them STILL not understand)....

at this point, my impressions of what is happening here are exactly like what i learned in my develoment planning and management class, which is this: national plans that preach decentralization often have no real mechanisms for this decentralization to occur, and the local people who are supposed to implement the plan have no input into the plan.. in fact the people i've been talking with HAVENT EVEN READ THE PLAN. its ridiculous. they are getting NO funding right now from the government. and its uncertain when and if they will.. yet they are supposed to be part of the government structure, and responsibilities have been offloaded onto them in the name of "grassroots" development without the appropriate resources or training necessary to carry these roles out.

its infuriating. government sucks!

Rant over. I'm going to see elephants next weekend!!!!


Ria

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