whose voices?

 Inspired by my colleague Sara Hassan's blog post about the policy of "every voice counting," yesterday at our first workshop I thought about the complexities of power and which voices are heard.  Many development programs want to know what their constituents opinions are in order to be sure their needs and wishes are met.  The complexities of how each voice is heard is so entangled with questions of power that it quickly becomes overwhelming to consider. Some people assume that using numbers and surveys are the best way to get a sense of the Truth, etc, yet obviously those questions and the numbers used are all subjectively chosen by only a few voices. Other methods that are more qualitative tend to believe they might capture better the broad voices, the unique voices, and the marginalized voices (isn't that who we're always looking to hear from?) Yet, even those programs have red flags and flaws---it is still someone else listening to another person's voice, someone else in charge of how that voice gets represented, someone else deciding to even listen to that person's voice on a chosen subject.


Combining what I've learned about empowerment and community and critical practice from my social work training with the research and global context of my public health training, here in Lima I've been grappling with what it really means to capture and present someone else's voice. I'm not done thinking about it yet--these are just some of the thoughts that have been going in my head in thinking about our workshops and global health and "development."


I also thought it was noteworthy that yesterday when I looked in the Lima newspaper, there was article came out about what people in Lima think are the most important problems that politicians need to be working on (a big election is coming up in October).


More on this later...off to the second workshop.