Modern Development
My second Saturday at the Finca, I spent most of the morning reading my ISSLP course packet in the missionary house’s dining room. Granted, it probably wasn’t the best place to read with its heavy foot traffic, but the reading was painful. I’m pretty sure that over the span of two hours I read maybe one of the reports. I think that it was on malnutrition. Page after page was filled with statistics and research on how to combat malnutrition in the developing world. The article was well reasoned, well supported, and well written. It made sense. But, while I was reading the article, I got lost in the numbers, maps, bar graphs, line graphs, and pie graphs. I got lost and could not find the people I was trying to serve. This situation is emblematic of my experience with development while I was at the Finca and because of this, much of my time was spent trying to reconcile my service experience with the development I was learning about in books.