On October 18th, I gave a presentation on the International Service Learning experience I had during the summer. From May to August, I, with a team of two other students from UBC, stayed at a rural village in Uganda with the goal of promoting literacy and reading culture at a local community library. Now that we had come back, we had to present our work and reflections to the general public. The event was a “symposium” with speakers, workshops, and presentations scheduled throughout the day, and we were encouraged to invite our family and friends so that they could see the fruit of our three months of volunteering abroad. Once the day came, it became obvious that many friends and family of the presenters had indeed come to see our presentations, including those of my team members. This shocked me a little, because I did not consider for a moment inviting my family and friends. I was driven to think about why this was so, and after a short reflection, I came to the conclusion that I was ashamed. I was ashamed because I felt that what we did was a trifle, a colonialist summer jaunt — the very thing we set out to repute.

I am not being entirely fair; I do think that we did some good on our placement. However, first subconsciously then consciously, I realized that I had failed in achieving a personal goal of mine: to be more useful than the cost of my trip. In other words, had I simply sent the money I used to fund the trip to the people I “helped”, would it have been more useful than my actual trip? Although this is a very ambiguous standard of measure, I wanted to be able to answer an unambiguous “yes” by the end of the placement. However, I could not. I could say with certainty that it was a great experience for me; I learned a lot about myself and the world, made great memories, and developed a few useful skills. But I could not say with confidence that I had prevailed over the colonial relations of power, or that I had helped the people that needed it most, or that many people’s lives were improved for my spending three months there. Rather, it seemed to me that simply being there as a privileged, educated, middle-class, white(ish) body perpetuated the colonial trope of the white man’s burden.

I had thought that once people came to know me as a person, my “real identity” would become the primary characteristic over my “western stereotype”. Although I still believe this is possible, I think the short duration of our placement and the lack of “localization” training greatly hindered the process. In retrospect, the fact that we did not know even the basics of Luganda (the lingua franca of Uganda) upon arrival belies our arrogance and naivete. We wanted to decolonize our relationships, yet all we could speak was the tongue of the colonizer. Despite the language barrier, we ended up becoming good friends with a few Ugandans by the end of the placement, in no small part due to our efforts at learning Ugandan Sign Language. However, for the vast majority of people we worked with, we were still rich white western kids. True participatory development cannot take place in such an unequal relationship. I think, cautiously, that we could have diminished the gap significantly if we stayed for a longer period of time such as one year or more. However, in the span of three months, we flew in and flew out — not only much too short of a time to truly get to know people of the community but also a stark reminder to them that we had the freedom and money to zoom around the world, that their lives were something we could dip our feet into and then withdraw at our leisure.

This may sound like so much apologia — doubly so, for my failure to do true participatory development, and for thinking that I could easily divorce myself from embodied colonial histories. Although I’m no white person, I come from an institution and background that is steeped in colonialism. Then let it be an apologia, at least until I come to terms with the uneasiness that has been given a name: the white man’s shame.