Us and them
Maybe Oxfam’s work isn’t about givers and receivers, wealthy and poor, but something more collaborative–just people, trying to come up with solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
February 19th, 2009 | by Anna Kramer
Community radio operators in the studio in Mangalamapatti, India. Photo: Atul Loke / Panos for Oxfam America
Few verbal chasms loom as large as the one between “us” and “them.” Between these words stretches a negative space, full of unspoken meanings. As long as there is an “us” and “them,” there will always be an “other.”
So how do we close the distance?
As a writer here at Oxfam, I’m sort of stuck between two worlds. My job is to get people in the US to care about–to fight for–people they may never have met, with whom they may have little in common on the surface. I don’t know what it’s like to be an alpaca herder living at 16,000 feet up in Peru, or a struggling rice farmer in Senegal. But by meeting these people and documenting their stories, we writers try to cross the chasm between the people on the ground and our audience. Our goal is to turn the “us” and “them” into a shared story of human experience.
But sometimes words fall short: they’re ambiguous, after all, and weighted with readers’ own perceptions.
A commenter on our blog, for example, saw a line from the post Poverty Porn? (”poor people are just like us in many ways; they’re just trying their best to make a go of it”) as a reflection of Oxfam’s “patronizing, elitist” attitude. Whether or not you agree, it’s interesting to see what words sparked that response: yep, “us” and “them” again.
Maybe we need to come up with a whole new vocabulary. Kate Tighe, a former Oxfam colleague, is trying to do so in her blog Development Grammar: “When as aid workers we say the simple sentence ‘We help people’ we make ourselves the subject, the doers. And people the objects, those acted upon,” she writes. “But that’s not the best way to help people, and that’s not really what we mean.”
Kate believes “a more accurate language of aid” can be found in projects like a community radio station in rural India. Without the support of Oxfam and local partners, she says:
There would be no village information center. There would be no radio production studio. But the community members are the key ingredient: to develop the content, to be the producers, and to be the listeners. If they thought that this project were lame, or that the people offering it were obtuse, or that the content was not useful, it would go nowhere … When we think about the statement “We help people,” maybe this is a good example of an inclusive “we.”
Reading about these efforts, I wonder if we sometimes make the “us” and “them” more separate than they need to be. Maybe Oxfam’s work isn’t about givers and receivers, wealthy and poor, but something more collaborative–just people, trying to come up with solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
But what do we call it then? A human effort? A shared struggle? A movement?
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Anna Kramer
Writer Anna Kramer joined Oxfam America in 2005. Based in Boston, she covers a broad range of issues for Oxfam, with a focus on our campaigns and organizing work.
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Navel-gazing is all too common among NGOs, but it’s usually mock-humble assessments of their achievements, often explaining away the many other things that didn’t work out. You seem to be gazing at something much more essential. If an organization seeks to improve the circumstance of a previously marginalized community still thinks of its purpose as helping “them,” then it hasn’t really addressed the marginalization at all. An obvious but apt analogy is dropping a few coins in a pan handler’s cup and feeling good about it but never considering why the cup entered your field of view or what happens after you’ve walked away.
The other thing we’re missing, is how when everyone is involved/invested in the helping, everyone benefits. Even “us.” By helping, we’re also being helped, at least on a personal level.
It’s just a theory, only true if we act as though it’s true: but by recognizing the benefits to us, we start to recognize all that the knowledge, insight and experience that people we work with have to offer, and how much we have to learn – despite formal training.
Then the aid relationship becomes a mutual exchange. Then the measure of success becomes “Are we giving as much as we’re getting?”
Also, I’m quoted as writing: “When as aid workers we say the simple sentence ‘We help people’ we make ourselves the subject, the doers. And people the objects, those acted upon, But that’s not the best way to help people, and that’s not really what we mean.”
But I was really paraphrasing Dr. Hugo Slim, who was telling a story about being the first person to a refugee camp early in his career, and he rushed to a tent, and said to the man there, “What do you need? How can I help you?” And to his surprise, the man slowed him down, invited him inside the tent, and offered him tea.
Slim’s point, I think, was that sometimes when we focus only on being helpful, we can overlook the humanity of the people we’re trying to help.
One way to stay humble.
Thanks, Kate, for the response and clarification (and for inspiring this post). It’s good to hear that aid workers out there are thinking deeply about these issues.