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Shaking the Tree

Growing up and losing touch

By Katie Hutchins

Last weekend's International Symposium on Third World Development, at the Law School, welcomed more than 30 speakers from across the globe. It was filled with success stories, regrets and overwhelming optimism. People from all sectors of aid and development spoke, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Chiapas minority to the University community.

What most peo- ple had in common was passion. The majority of panelists spoke of their commitment to developing the Third World for the good of the people. Everyone had their own motives, but the desire to improve people's lives was a basic assumption.

These people are not the norm. Everyone's done their share of community service, but this kind of passion is not prevalent in the average American population.

Take James Grant, whose memory was the focus of the symposium. This guy went to Harvard Law School and had the chance to make big bucks at some law firm, but instead dedicated his life to international development. As executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund, Grant developed a way to reduce infant and child mortality through mass use of immunizations and oral rehydration therapy. His contributions helped increase immunization in the Third World from 20 percent in the 1980s to nearly 80 percent today. And he didn't make much money doing this.

We all know the Third World is in poverty. Maybe we don't know the exact numbers (more than 1 billion in extreme poverty, by the way), but we've seen enough Sally Struthers commercials to know there's a problem. But not that many people care.

One of the panelists, World Bank Vice President Mark Malloch Brown, seems to be one of those people. His arrogant response to protesters handing out anti-World Bank flyers outside Hutchins Hall: "Development's doing very well, thank you."

This statement is particularly heartless in the face of extreme poverty in all the countries subjected to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment programs. When -- many because of American influence -- several countries needed help, they were forced to borrow cash from these agencies to get back on their feet. But the cash brought with it a requirement to adhere to stringent World Bank policies that often cripple developing governments and create a decades-long dependency. Paradoxically, structural adjustment policies that put a squeeze on government expenditure prevent the implementation of the same social programs that might do some good for the economy.

Brown proudly said Korea just graduated from its structural adjustment program -- meaning it no longer has to answer to the World Bank -- as if this was some indication of structural adjustment's success. Many others have no way out.

It seems as though everyone has their own self-interest when it comes to helping the poor. It could be resume-building, it could be a ticket to heaven, it could be glory or guilt. But the bottom line is, pure altruism doesn't seem to exist.

Except when you see bursts of it at events like the symposium. Wayne Meisel, president of the anti-poverty Bonner Foundation and founder of the Campus Opportunity Outreach League, enlisted audience members to write on post-it paper what they planned to do to help. And they actually did it. And they posted their commitments on the board as a confirmation, should they ever forget.

Wayne asked us to do this because he knows that something happens to a lot of us when we grow up. We get practical, we lose our passion, and we focus more and more inward toward developing our own families and futures. You can see it in people like Brown, who used to do development work at the grass roots level. But you can see the passion still alive in people like Wayne and panelist Muhammad Yunus -- founder of the Grameen Bank, which microlends to poor women in Bangladesh.

If we can find some way to hold onto this passion long enough to remember that working at a soup kitchen or going on Project Serve's Alternative Spring Break is just one step in the right direction -- and to develop and hold onto a world-view based on more than our own self-preservation -- maybe we, the future powers-that-be, can create a global consideration that thinks beyond American corporate interests to the suffering beyond and within our borders.

Cheesy? Maybe. Naive and self-destructive? Perhaps. But at least these people can go to sleep at night knowing they're feeding people who never had our opportunities.

-- Katie Hutchins can be reached over e-mail at katieh@umich.edu.