25 Apr Disruptions and things

I’ve had one question that has been my research question for the entirety of my graduate school experience, whether it was in DR Congo or Haiti (a well-advised location-switch from the chairs): what is it that the people being “helped” really actually truly want or perceive to need in terms of health and health care.

This, of course, was to be tempered and compared to: what is it that people bringing the “help” think the same people want / or need?

In the past two months, several things have come to light that will prohibit me from going into the field for at least 12 months. I have had two weeks to come up with a new dissertation proposal – if only generally. I’ve been stuck.

Working with the diaspora population just won’t get to the questions i most ardently want to ask. In no way could it. I could ask: what does the diaspora community want / perceive the need to be of their families still in Haiti? and how does this differ from UN/USAID/NGO perceptions? But it is just not the research question i want to ask.

This is the thing with life, isn’t it? Facing these moments of disruption and interruption – facing the possibilities of roadblocks and frustrations. But somehow, in this infant stage of my career, i feel paralyzed (no pun intended). To me the important answers are not everybody else’s. Rather, who is asking the people most affected by decisions made everywhere else but there?

I came back to school with the mission to be willing to ask those questions in the places that most needed to be heard – to fight the fight that required power. I came to graduate school explicitly for the letters that would make people listen – not to me, but to the people lifting me up and pushing me forward, for whom i hoped to be a megaphone – to shout over the noise of marginality and into the speaker of power.