Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [87]
For those participating in secular development aid projects, this centrality of control is not so apparent. Our desire to help is not overtly evangelical, but it is there in more subtle ways. We have a concrete idea of what a “good” life for others is and what they need to have this “good” life. So, we force ideas upon them. We have the money and the institutional power to do this. We want to write the curriculum, design the housing project, the water project, the solar project—whatever it is that we think would be best for others.
In the end, however, we keep the control of society in our hands. This is also why most projects help people just enough to give them tools to survive, but not to raise them to a level to make them equal with the ruling class. This would be dangerous because we would no longer have control.
Central to actual change is the real giving away of power and influence. This is very difficult on a personal level because we want to be recognized for our work, for the things we have done that have actually helped, and for the time we have spent on whatever project we feel strongly about. In most cases, this is the reason we participated in the first place.
But, I began to realize, giving away power is a learning experience of the deepest kind. Through giving away outward power, I realized I had begun to gain internal power: of myself, of not needing so much to control others. The insecurities I felt when we began Bahia Street had diminished, even if they had been replaced with a different kind of trepidation. Although I had not yet discussed it with anyone, I saw in the years ahead an encounter with the hardest part, as with a lover I did not want to leave me, the entire model of Bahia Street meant that one day I would have to let go. With love and openness, I must one day let go. I understood, theoretically, that if I knew this from the beginning, Bahia Street would not become a tool to mask my own insecurities and perceived inadequacies. And once I let go, I could begin other projects, take other roads. My life could be full of the many projects I could do.
I say I knew this theoretically, and I knew that the time of my slipping away from Bahia Street, of leaving it all in the hands of Rita and her staff, was in an unspecified future. But, for now, I had not published any research papers for a couple of years, and I had severely compromised my academic career. I understood theoretically the personal compromises I would need to make for a real shift in Bahia Street’s power structure, but I wasn’t so clear on how I personally fit into the plan. I was going to have to make some decisions at some point, and I wasn’t sure at all what they would be.
For starters, I decided to get some furniture. I bought a sofa, bed frame, and a kitchen table at a garage sale. Mike, a white friend in Seattle, had agreed to pick the items up for me and was on his way.
“You think it’ll be OK if I leave my car parked in front of your house?” he asked. He was speaking on his cell phone. He’d never been to the Central District before.
“Is it a BMW?”
“No, a Honda truck.”
“You’ll be fine.”
I was learning how racial social apartheid worked in the United States. Near my house was an independent local grocery store. Everyone in the neighborhood used it, but no one came from outside the Central District to shop at our local store. So the separatism created a community. Each time I went to the store, I met the same people. I was growing to know the checkers. Kids from the local middle school came by in the afternoons to buy potato chips and pop. They hung around the front of the store and showed their school reports to the checkers, many of whom also lived in the neighborhood. The store played excellent music: funk, blues, and jazz.
The leafy neighborhood streets in other parts of Seattle were deserted most of the time. They made me nervous; I kept expecting someone to jump out from behind a bush or something.