Part I - Independence?

This past weekend marked a major holiday here – Jamaica’s Independence Day. The holiday is actually August 6, but the celebrations lasted into this weekend. I’m still not sure if there’s a Jamaican equivalent to fireworks – or any major tradition to mark the holiday, but there is definitely has been a festive atmosphere here, and people are enjoying themselves and the remainder of the summer. (As a side note, how is it already the second week of August? It’s amazing how time flies...)

Jamaica gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962, 47 years ago. It’s interesting living in a country where a good portion of the population can remember such a dramatic event. The transition from colonial rule to self rule here was peaceful, and I’ve actually been surprised at how rarely the subject comes up – I’ve almost never heard a Jamaican talk about that day 47 years ago, and I’m not entirely sure why. The country has gone through a lot of ups and downs since gaining independence, and Jamaica definitely still has a long way to go. But if you think about it, 47 years after we declared our independence, we had already ratified a new constitution, fought a few wars, still had slaves and had yet to fight our own Civil War. So, in comparison, Jamaica’s really not doing too badly.

While I’m writing all of this, I can’t help but think of a conversation I had in a taxi a little over a week ago. (A quick note about Jamaican taxis – they run just like buses do in the states, only with compact cars – there are set routes and prices, and passengers get in or out wherever they want to along the route.) I got into a taxi, and the driver and passenger were having a conversation about the current state of Jamaican politics and what can and should be done about it. At one point, the driver made a comment about how Jamaica has been independent for almost 50 years, and its government officers should know how to behave by now. A valid point, indeed, but I did consider comforting him with the fact that 233 years after our own independence, American officials are still working out a lot of those same kinks. I held my tongue though, and am glad I did, as the other passenger made what I think to be a more interesting point. He said that although Jamaica is independent on paper, he really doesn’t consider it to be an independent nation - it’s not a country that can stand on its own two feet, and really never has. There has been so much aid poured into this country in so many different ways, and I can’t even imagine where the country would be without it. Perhaps if things had been different from the start, this would not be the case. But after almost 5 decades, such a culture of dependency has evolved that even now, there is a deeply held feeling among many Jamaicans that instead of just doing work themselves, they should just wait for someone else to come along and do it for them – politicians, missionaries, aid workers, etc.

It would be unfair to lay the blame for this attitude fully on the shoulders of Jamaicans. Development work is a tricky thing. The whole idea of development is (or should be) that a “development professional” work for a period of time on a specific problem in a specific area, and work towards making themselves obsolete. If a project is successful, it should eventually be run entirely by nationals of the developing country, with no outside help needed to keep it running. But there’s a problem with this for the development professional – true success would mean that she or he would no longer have a job. And yes, they could just move on after the project is successful and sustainable, but that would mean starting a whole new project in a whole new country – a whole lot of work. And a lot of development workers work on a contract – once a project is done, they need to find a new contract. So in a lot of ways, it actually doesn’t pay for development workers to be too efficient. Modern development work started almost 60 years ago, after World War II, and I can’t help but think that if people had really tried to make development sustainable from the start, I wouldn’t need to be here right now, and the world would be a different place. When you think about how far we’ve come in other aspects of life in the past 60 years, it boggles the mind to think that we can’t assist in making a country like Jamaica independent in the truest sense of the word. This cycle of dependency that has been created and is still being encouraged is no accident.

I know this is a somewhat controversial and cynical position to hold, and one that does not shed a very good light on development as a whole. But it’s a side of the truth that’s important to know, and important to see – especially as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It’s so easy to get fed up with the “give-me” attitude that so many Jamaicans have, but when that attitude is put into perspective, it helps. And Jamaica is by no means alone in any of this. Developing counties around the world are remarkably similar in this way. So many countries that started out as colonies have never grown out of the colonial mind-set that their problems are someone else’s responsibility to fix.

Granted, development and its history are a lot more complicated than what I’ve explained here. There’s a lot more to it, and there are an endless amount of books on the subject. And there are a huge number of development projects have been sustainable on a large scale and over a long time, so development can work, and it can be sustainable and successful. But that’s easy to forget sometimes.

So it’s tough to say whether Jamaica is really independent or not. In some terms, there really isn’t any country that’s fully independent, is there? As the recent economic downturn has shown, we are all connected a lot more than we thought. Jamaica is in a lot of financial trouble, and starting next month, will be borrowing from International Monetary Fund (IMF) again to help get itself through the next year. Many Jamaicans don’t think this is the best plan, and I am inclined to agree with them. There’s a lot more to say on this topic, but I’m going to save that for a post a little later in the week – this one is already long enough.

I’m not sure what would make a country fully independent, or if Jamaica is there yet. But it has been an interesting point to think about it this past holiday weekend.