A Gringo’s Perspective on the Developing World
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- Published on Monday, 08 February 2010 20:46
- Written by Todd Schweitzer
For the last 2 years, I have lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. A central tenet of the organization is community immersion: the volunteers are successful not because of any extraordinary knowledge or project budget, but because they live as a member of the community in which they work. I have had to adapt to a different lifestyle, bizarre foods, weird illnesses, and the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen in my life.
But my blog will not be about my Peace Corps service. I want to use my experience in a developing country to talk about the perceptions that we (citizens of the industrialized countries) have towards the developing world, and the realities of life in those countries.
I arrived in the Dominican Republic in September 2007 thinking I had a pretty good grasp of the social, political, and economic issues regarding the developing world. Yet I have come to realize that my understanding of most issues was either wrong or incomplete.
A disclaimer: the Dominican Republic is not wholly representative of the 90-odd countries of the developing world. It is a middle-income country, it has a relatively stable government, and its economy is healthy and growing. In fact, the DR could be considered within a different category from the poorest 30 or so countries stuck in the vicious cycles of negligible or negative economic growth, awful governments, and violence. Although my entries will look at issues that should apply to most of the developing world, I acknowledge that I may be overlooking some important circumstances in the most impoverished countries.
I think we (in the rich nations) recognize more than ever our role in helping the poorer nations of the world. Our response to the earthquake in Haiti, just a few hundred miles from Santo Domingo, has illustrated our willingness to make life better in the developing world. But it is essential that we understand the realities of life there, in order to more effectively influence positive change. By discussing the realities I have come across in the DR, I hope to expand your understanding just a little bit.
