serendipityoucity

Since my son’s read Shake Hands with the Devil I thought I should also!  Dallaire was my hero before I read the book and saw the films (Shake Hands with the Devil, Hotel Rwanda, Un Dimanche à Kigali) and even more so now.  I cannot imagine the trauma this man went through in Rwanda (map) during the Genocide, then reliving it again by writing the book, in the creation of the films, watching what he suspected would happen after the world did not act in the great lakes regions of Africa as he suggested and if they did not deal with the transboundary issues (re-Congo, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and also Zaire), his ongoing work with child soldiers and the toll on his soul and his family.

I have been arguing for years for access to information and data to inform decisions (health, social, environmental, social justice, human rights, humanitarian, etc.) and then to implement those decisions to create new knowledge eventually, once embedded in social structures leading to wisdom.  What I have missed sorely, is what happens when people ignore the knowledge to serve their personal and institutional instrumentalism? This is what Dallaire made very clear in his book, all the data and information were plainly there & disseminated to the right decision makers, there to save peoples lives and avoid further suffering - yet the apparatus, structures, institutions, rules, laws, egos, tunnel vision & competing interests of stakeholders, will and priorities led decision makers to continually fuck up while the veterans on the ground watched the slaughter.

My observations of East Timor (map) were the same.  We knew the slaughter and destruction were coming before the referendum for independence and we waited until it (referendum, destruction, displacement, rapes, disappearances and slaughter) was over to intervene.  And then we sorta helped.  The same uncoordinated and competing interests of the aid agencies were and are at play just after the referendum.  Dallaire’s descriptions of inaction were the same as what I saw from a distance about East Timor.  In the case of East Timor (ET GDI Paper) I discovered numerous instances where agencies were at odds and impeding each others work.  Further, I also discovered that much of the intel gathered by these organizations left the country on the laptops of the consultants, NGO & UN staff and did not remain in East Timor.  Meaning a knowledge infrastructure was not created to help rebuild the nation in an informed, sustainable (social, economic, environmental) way.

Why is it hard to cooperate, work together, align mandates and coordinate resources? What does it take to absorb that info and embed that into practice? You’d think we could get so much more done by sharing, working together and pooling resources yet we don’t?  What is required to make that happen?