Cuando el pueblo sabe

It has been an odd year. One of great things and not so good ones. I’ve travelled a lot. Cambodia, Thailand, Kenya, Senegal, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, Malaysia. I’ve met incredible people in these places. I’ve talked politics with Kenyans and Cambodians; I’ve followed the Bolivian election and made up my mind about Cuba and why we must be proud of hat it has achieved –and that it shows that we can achieve it too. It has had its down side as well. Jo and I are no longer together, although we have managed to stay close (considering she is in Cambodia). But that is all I’ll say about this.

It has been a mad year for the world too. The boxing day tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan, the collapse of the lies about Iraq, the Africa report, Live8, the London bombs, the MDG summit, the G8 summit, the WTO summit. I’ve moved from Maida Vale to the heart of Brixton and begun to rediscover south London. I’ve learned about networks and how they help researchers influence policy processes in Peru; I’ve developed my training and facilitating skills.

I’ve also worn one of those white bands around my wrist –even after years of saying that I choose not to wear the red ribbon. I changed my mind after overhearing a woman on the bus asked her 6 year old son about the G8 right after Live8; surely had it not been for the campaign, she would have not had that conversation with her son. He and other like him will grow up being more aware, and that is good enough, sometimes.

But only sometimes, because most of the time these are just little changes; too little too late for anything really important and significant to actually take place. In Manchester, this year a conference on CSOs addressed the difference between Development with a big D and development with a little d. One position: that many small ds add to a bid D; the other position: that small ds are palliatives and sedatives and amount to nothing. Big Ds are real changes, real transformations, real shifts in the power structures that govern the world today. A bid D will take away the power from the trans national corporations and give it to the consumers; it will allow local communities to decide what culture they want to be part of and what products they want to consume; it will stop the systematic extraction of natural resources and indigenous capital and knowledge from poor countries to feed the greed of the so called developed countries; it will end this division of north-south, developed-developing, rich poor and recognise that we are simply different; it will bring about changes in the world order; it will force the media to stop misinforming; it will bring about sustainable change.

Small ds play the game. The aid business is, after all, only a continuation of donor’s foreign policies; aligned to their own economic and political interests. The welfare of the poor is secondary to that of their own citizen’s and theirs are only second to the interests of the big corporations and fat cats that keep the rules in power. Only big Ds break the intergenerational transmission of power and poverty; small ds help reinforce the system and extend the process of impoverishment.

At this years Nobel price of literature acceptance lecture, Harold Pinter gave a magnificent speech. The solution, the way out of this cycle of ds and the engine of Ds is education. The casting away of ignorance. Lifting our heads and looking over the shadows; coming out of the matrix to use a more modern metaphor.
“Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” Read the whole speech in: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1661516,00.html

And Piero said it, too “In Para el Pueblo lo que es del Pueblo”:

“Estudiar era un pecado,clandestino era el saber,porque cuando el pueblo sabe,no lo engaña un brigadier”

And I have learned this year. I have had an incredible opportunity to open my eyes in the clear waters of the Thai riffs (literally) and seen the incredible variety of life in and around the coral and the magnificent resilience of men, women and children to the most unexpected and unjust forces that over and over again embargo their potential and humanity.

This is starting to sound to corny so I’ll call it a day. It has been my year of learning, though.