Why am I an evaluator?
Identity in evaluation
Traversing the Mekong 2003. The shape of the land and rainfall in the headwaters way back behind us determine where we’re going way way out ahead. All we control is which stream we’re in, who were with and how we paddle in our Lisse proximate zone
Bearded and in camos, the AK 47 idling on his knees had surely taken many lives.
:¿Por que?” he asked “Why are you a doctor?”
Back then I was a doctor, young and starry eyed, inspired by Schweitzer and Paul Brand, To me delivering medicine to distant and dangerous places was an antidote to inequality and injustice. That took me from a NZ emergency room to apply to MSF, had me sent as a doctor into Colombia’s guerilla war. Now I’d been kidnapped. A kid with a gun abducted me from a medical camp in an indigenous village in the jungle to their guerilla camp where they forced me to repair a child soldier’s hand. Pablo was raping an indigenous woman when a man walked in and swung his machete. Pablo shot him and continuted raping her beside the body, severed tendon and all. It was all kids and guns,
When I’d finished the repair their leader “Che” summoned me. Now on plastic chairs in a jungle clearing with bats slicing silky moonlight into silvery strips around us I readied myself for the terms of my kidnap. Life, in a surreal twist, put cold beers in our hands. Che first confirmed I was a doctor “¿Es medico, verdad?”. In pakeha culture identity may start and finish with “what do you do?” “I’m an emergency doctor” “cool”. Some want more. On discovering you’re a doctor they ask for exciting medical stories, what it’s like in ED or how much you’re paid. Nobody asks why you spent your one precious life to become a doctor. Che did. For him what we do was the third link in a chain: who are you- what do you believe in-what do you do-why?
Its standard, de rigeur almost, today to start any kōrero, particularly at a conference with at least a few words of Te Reo. I love this, acknowledging place and the identity of the people where we stand. It is also so good because Te Ao Māori with Te Reo naturally conects who we are, what we do, where we stand now to where we’ve come from how we got here and with whom. European culture maybe lacks that traditon, English language never devecloped the words. My metaphor for where we come from, which so defines where we are going, is being on a small craft in a huge river. The shape and altitude of a river’s headwater hills drive it onwards to its outpouring so too our lives’ direction is shaped by our place and our past. The country we live in, priveliges we did nothing to earn, history (often unjust), our families and people we’re blessed to be with mostly determine our destiny. Te Reo and Te Ao Māori get that. Western culture focuses onour proximate zone of control, attributes everything to what we do in it. As a paddler swerves around rocks, paddles from this eddy to that flow, or goes hard-out to burst through a hole we are in control of our immediate surroundings. Career choices, investment decisions or moving from Auckland to Wellington don’t define our destiny but do shape our lives. Also in our proximate sphere are our actions, choosing to live in line with values and picking who we share our journeys with. This story is about choices in the proximate zones of our lives which shape our experience, integrity and contribution to this precious planet.
Che didn’t talk terms of kidnap. He talked to me, asked me who I was. He wanted to know everything, not just my life story (Indian kid in New Zealand gets a scholarship to Cambridge, chooses teaching in Apartheid South Africa over job in London, volunteers with Mother Teresa, returns to Auckland medical school) but also who I was and what I believed in. He was interested in me the school boy in Auckland streets protesting against the 1981 Springboks (“why?” he asked) and the the teacher in an illegal multi-racial school in South Africa (“why?” again). He probed what was behind leaving Auckalnd Medical School, insanely walking through the guerilla infested Darien gap, trapping crocodiles in the Amazon and living in a Brazilian favela and asked why I went back to medical school.
Then he told me about himself – village kid gets scholarship to Bogota University, aces an MA in history, is offered a scholarship in USA. His girlfriend Fabi too.
“Esta puta Colombia (this whore of a country” he explained “Beautiful and immoral. Inequality everywhere. How could I leave my village only to become rich in USA?”…pause…
“so I joined la guerilla”…pause… “but Fabi went”… aching pause… “Fabi went”.
Night swallowed our evening as we argued over Pele (Che) or Maradonna (me) as greater footballers, he talked longingly of beaches with Fabi, I told him about mountains with Kaaren. In another surreal twist we recited a Neruda love poem,Then, with warm dregs in our cans and night creatures shreiking weirdly from the blackness, Che abruptly broke into this soliloquy: “So here’s, Che. A man who dreams of peace yet leads kids to kill and rape. Yearning of integrity he’s ebedded with fucken FARC, souless and evil. Lives violence and hate while tenderly loving his university flame Fabi. Surfing in California, she’s forgotten him. Oh, I’m so far into this river of blood I can’t turn back. If I leave they will capture me, torture me, kill me. So I fight this bloody war, forgotten and hopeless. On and on and on until jungle mud swallows me. All for nada (nothing)”.
That “nada” is as bleak and black as the “nothing” in Macbeth’s haunting soliiquy.
Two almost parallel lives intersected that night in Colombia. We were there for the same reason-- we dreamt of a world different to what we saw, were doing what we could, using what we had. To Che the Fates offered only an AK-47. His brief candle is surely out now- a gun a knife, maybe capture and torture in government hands, maybe untreated leaismaniasis. He’d dead. His question though has eddied on and on inside me, asking and reasking itself for 30 years. The Fates offered me more. Here, in this rambling story, is one of life’s great injustices. Those whose rivers flow out from privilige laden headwaters, find ourselves sauntering lazily through sunlit lowlands and seldom ask “why?”. “How and where is justice found?”, “Who’s “in”, who’s excluded?”, “Are our planet’s resources shared or corraled by the wealthy?” are not urgent questions for us. Those born where those questions bite are born without options to answer them. Che, Colombian village boy who magically became an MA in history, saw only an AK 47. Bravely he took it. Inevitably he failed.
Suddenly Che said “Its late. Come, I’ll walk you back”. So we walked together in silvery light, the AK 47 on his shoulder bobbing along as our third companion. We stopped metres from our camp. Alexandra our nurse was singing softly, face glowing in the firelight.
“Our ways part now” Che whispered.
“May your dawn be bright and clear” I offered
“Shelling at midnight more likely”
“Ah but one day your dreams will come to pass”
“My dreams drowned long ago in mud and blood”
My every upbeat subjunctive countered with a black riposte left me only “Adios”.
“Adios” he replied “amigo (friend)” then modified that to “hermano (brother)”.
We embraced. I walked into the light without turning back. From that pointt our two almost parallel lives divergibng forever.
Che’s “Hermano” meant “We were born to the same path, you and I. I failed, me and my gun, but you go, take your stethoscope, bring justice to the world. For us both”. Twisted into that parting exhortation was his “why?:” “Does doctoring align with who you are, what you believe, what you want to contribute to this planet?”
I can’t honestly remember what I said to Che’s “Why?” that night long ago but carrying on down the river of my life, action filled emergency doctoring increasingly felt frothy, an eddy disconencted from my main flow. Brand and Schweitzer then, Mathias with MSF in 1996 were only treating disease not inequality. I' redefined myself.. Next month I’ll evaluate a mental health project in Afghanistan. Sticking to principles I insisted on the impossible- women, Taliban, mullahs, NGO and community all together as a participatory evaluation team. Unbelievably we got a dispensation for this to happen! The world changed! Including women in shaping a project in Afghanistan is who I am and what I believe in more than helicipter rescues in my (well paid) New Zealand emergency medical career, more even than spinal anaesthetics and heroic surgery as a (voluntary) doctor in Himalayan villages. These days evaluation aligns who I am, what I believe and what I do. Afghanistan is for you, Che.
I invite you to shine Che’s question onto yourself, your life, your identity. As evaluator, as Māori, Tau iwi, parent, partner... human being - Why evaluate? “Why do you choose to spend your life like this? Are you asking and answering questions for those who can’t? In ways that honor them? Why? Does who you are, what you do and what you believe align?