Ok, just kidding, this article has nothing to do with municipal police corruption in Kyrgyzstan. This article is about a topic that hits much closer to home for many of us wine-sipping, aspiring intellectuals. At a campus known for its political awareness and worldly outlook, we have all been either participants in or observers of conversations concerning topics like “how corruption in Kyrgyzstan can be solved” or “what can be done about sectarian conflict in Nigeria.”
As intellectually stimulating as these conversations are, whether in a classroom or at a Usdan table, they rarely lead to effective analysis of any issue in faraway countries. You can never accurately comment on the problems of another country without having experienced life there for yourself. Although such subjects are interesting to discuss, as college students we must recognize the extreme difficulty in diagnosing another country’s problems from atop our “Ivory Tower.”
As a freshman last year, I went on a spring break community service trip to Haiti with this know-it-all outlook. I hopped on a plane to Port-au-Prince having read every New York Times article about the Jan. 2010 earthquake and watched CNN’s disaster coverage from a Freeman Athletic Center treadmill. And when I first arrived in Haiti, I thought my presumptions were correct. The poverty looked like it did in the Time magazine pictures. The locals claimed that the government was every bit as corrupt as The New York Times said.
But the longer I stayed in Haiti, the more I realized not only how much I did not know, but how much I could not have known through any of my usual sources of information. I arrived having come to the highly researched conclusion that food and shelter were Haitians’ top concerns, only to find out that the most sought-after commodities were jobs. Though many kids needed shoes, everyone we met seemed to have a cell phone, an e-mail address, or both. The government appeared to not be so much corrupt as completely absent and replaced by local councils.
My ignorance was best highlighted during one of our visits to a post-earthquake refugee camp. I met a group of teenagers who ranged in age from 15 to 17 years old. After spending some time with them, they informed me that one of the teenage girls was pregnant. I acted as if I was surprised to hear this; to be completely honest, however, I was not surprised in the least. Developing countries have a high teenage pregnancy rate, right? Of course a country with as much poverty as Haiti would have its fair share of pregnant 15-year-olds.
As it turns out, they were joking with me. They all laughed at the fact that I believed them. I then learned that most Haitians get married and aim to have kids in their late 20’s or early 30’s.
Despite all of my liberal arts school research and numerous intellectual conversations on the problems in Haiti, I was actually quite ignorant about what life there was like and what the country’s biggest problems were. The same goes for any faraway country. We can read the New York Times international section and gobble up as much CNN as we want, but our research will rarely lead us to draw accurate conclusions about another country’s problems.
So is it always wrong to diagnose the root of municipal police corruption in Kyrgyzstan without having ever lived in the country or even knowing someone from there? Unless you are making real decisions concerning foreign policy, probably not. But a condescending attitude frequently lurks behind these conversations–a belief that we, in our elite universities, can solve a distant nation’s issues better than its own people can. A concrete problem with such conversations is frequently demonstrated in the actions of Western aid organizations and the U.N., which, as we observed in Haiti, often prescribe their own half-baked solutions to problems that they have little experience in dealing with while ignoring real local concerns.
By the way, I actually have written a paper about municipal police corruption in Kyrgyzstan. I can confidently tell you that the conclusions I drew in the paper were most likely inaccurate and are drawn from a grand total of zero experience living in the country. I hope that one day I will be able to make my way there and learn about the country from the people that live there and from my own experiences.
Steves is a member of the class of 2013.
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