This is my October 2022 ANZEA conference keynote. A story of how I got here, who I am and who I ever was.
“Would you do a keynote for the conference this October?”
“Love to”.
That was June. Distant things seem small. But as months evaporated into weeks and weeks into days ANZEAs October conference and its wero (themes)- decolonisaiton and participation- loomed ever larger. Really what do I have? I asked myself. In answer Bob Marley’s Redemption Song began in my brain’s backwaters “.... these songs of freedom.. cause all I ever had...”.ka jank- ka jank ka jank.. “all I ever had”....Kajank… There it was.! Truth, right there in ragged reggae. All I ever had is me. I’d offer my own song of redemption, how evaluation found and freed me, twisting who I ever was- my history, values, stengths and contradictions -into what I do. I hoped talking about knowing and living my full self, challenging other evaluators to do the same would resonate. It felt risky, I felt vulnerable... it felt right.
This is an invitation to come upstream with me into my distant headwaters, searching out little rivulets feeding into who I ever was. Maybe you’ll want to do the same.
As an Indian I’m colonised to my core- by British, by Portuguese, by Mughals before them and surely others before them. I’m branded by colonialism, my whole community is. My name is Mathias, there are Fernandezes, Desouzas, De Mels. Coloniaism vapourised our Indian identity and left us as English speaking catholics with Portuguese names. Yet we found freedom in the ashes. We sought out education, mined privelige’s mother lode and diasporised ourselves across the planet. That’s all far enough away now for us to reinvent and retell our story to ourselves, as a family narrative.
“We’re South Indian Brahmins who became catholics” I once said, repeating my grandmothers myth to my cousin Ken. While the rest of us chased careers in New Zealand New York, Munich and Melbourne he stayed in India, joined the Naxalites, spent his life in a heroic but ulitmately useless Marxist revolution against India’s ingrained discrimination.
Ken laughed. “Bullshit! We’re low caste. Changed religion and name to escape untouchability”. .
He’s right, Of course. We branded ourselves. Embraced our masters’ religion and names to escape our Indianess and the discrimination wrapped up in that. Thus, colonialism saved me, as well as enslaved me. Hmmm, complicated. (Note to self: If I search my story for truth don’t just accept narratives, self-written stories saying where to look and where not to. Be prepared to unearth contradictions. Embrace them. )
Ken’s dead now. I’m in Aotearoa, evaluating.
Through the Looking Glass. In Cambridge.
We migrated to New Zealand, were warmly welcomed even as a Te Atatu primary school playground took my Tamil, my Konkani, even my Indian accent turned it all into kiwi English. Vaporising me softly. I studied hard (Indian genes?), aced exams through school and a scholarship fell to me from the sky- Untouchable Indian kid goes to Cambridge! Three glorious years of drinking from the cup of privelilge in a world centre of western knowledge eddied out in Pimms on green baize lawns, rowing on the Cam and May balls on breathless summer nights. I’d aced exams again (swotty Indianess - all I ever had?), now golden apples beckoned: PhDs in ivy league universities, the World Bank in Paris, commercial firms in London or the UN in Geneva. One after the other my friends chose and plucked theirs. My proud parents, in Cambridge for my graduation, asked where I was going with my MA.
“South Africa. Volunteering in a multiracial school,” I said.
With hardworking-immigrant dreams going up in flames before his eyes my father shouted “Don’t waste your God-given education!”.
“What about my God-given life?” I shouted back and hitchiked into the heart of apartheid.
Southern Africa exhilerated and terrified me. When the 1981 springboks came to Aotearoa I was a 16 yr old schoolboy, unsure why but certain he had to be protesting in Auckland’s barbed-wired streets. It was the same traversing a war zone in Mozambique in a truck to South Africa. In Auckland’s streets and the truck the same story was repeating itself in different contexts. That trip and the time teaching in South Africa taught me more -about myself- than three years at Cambridge. That was life telling me who I ever was. Happens in evaluation now.
From South Africa to Kolkatta. Kalighat, Mother Teresa’s Home for Dying. Again I didn’t know why and again it felt right. Menial work helping dying destitutes sometimes to recovery, more often to scraps of dignity in death was made more special by morning prayers with nuns and sometimes chai with Mother Teresa afterwards. It was a transformative year, yet indefinably incomplete. I couldn’t articulate but strongly felt there was another calling than tending dying people while looking away from the systemic injustice killing them.
My good catholic mother, proud but wanting me on a more travelled path, dropped a golden Global North apple into my hand in the form of a letter with an Auckland Medical school application. Medicine in Auckland or fulfillment in menial work with poor Indians? Maybe as a doctor I can do more for poverty? Later I’d find rapid sequence intubation in Christchurch ED asks no system and justice questions that holding a dying man’s hand in Kolkatta does not. I could not see that from the streets of Kolkatta. I posted the application.
Like a tickled trout flicked from a stream I landed with a smack in Auckland med-school. On my first day a white girl in a paisley salwaar-kameez drifted into the student cafe. Interesting. She told me she was born in India, lived in Nepal, spoke Nepali, climbed mountains. Fascinating. We missed lectures talking privelige, power and parathas on Lower Circular Road, Kolkatta. As starry eyed and misguided as me she too thought medicine magically unlocks the doors of justice. Irrestible.
“I’ll use my medicine against poverty. I dream of a Global South village clinic, the Himalayas maybe” she said wearing her “why” right there on her sleeve.
I was smitten.
We somehow survived med school- despite (because of?) a wild year off in Latin America. Mountains, crocodiles, hitchiking wiith cocaine-crazed truckies and freedom in the streets of Havana replenished our spirits. I dived back in as soon as I could, doing public health amidst malaria, rubber tappers, gold miners, land grabbers, assassins and indigenous people in Amazonia for my medical elective. Intoxicated by wildness I stayed extra and arrived 3 days late for my final module. A+ grades not-withstanding, my graduation was withheld. I lost my first job, but hell listening to life whispering my own story to me was worth it.
Then a golden junior doctor job in golden Nelson fell to me. White and clean and rich, Nelson is very far from Kolkatta and the Amazon. Kaaren got a job there too. Glorious times ensued, especially paddling and hitchiking to Putaruru for a hippies-on-hay-bales wedding on Kaaren’s family’s gorgeous dairy farm. “We worked hard for this farm” they say. Just like ours, their family narrative says where to look and where not to. Of course they worked hard, but hard working Māori, now landless, are not in the narrative.
After. three halcyon Nelson years was Hamilton. Leaping the flaming hoops of emergency medincine specialization was technically complicated (so much to learn), conceptually simple (follow protocols), and (for me) morally kinda empty- never ask “Why?”.
One day Kaaren came home and said “Time to go now.”
Golden evenings in the python-brown Mekong with slum kids.
Within weeks we were in Cambodia. Up on the banks of the Mekong in a flooded stilt house with poor neighbours we were up to our armpits in bottom-up development. Life in Asian slums is relational and rich. We were intensely alive whether swimming with slum kids in the python brown Mekong on golden evenings or watching one of those kid’s mothers die of AIDS induced TB one black night. Back then our world had anti-retrovirals for Kiwis and Americans but couldn’t spare any for Jxxxxx in Cambodia. As I held her hand, system change was no nearer than from Mother Teresa’s. I saw economic apartheid and saw my feet on both sides of its fence. I’m still like that- outraged and complicit. While living in a Delhi slum in 2010 I got TB- death for my neighbours. I played my privilege, flew to NZ, and was made well by wealth. In Covid’s early days, despite “equality” writ large in our health narrative, New Zealand couldn’t share vaccines with much worse affected Fiji. Everyone looked away.
I wanted to be the doctor, never saw myself in the kid.
After Cambodia we were still trying to use medicine for justice. We visited a Nepali hospital and offered to volunteer. They directed us to their English head office. Without asking why Global South hospitals need Global North directorates we went, were interviewed and were rejected. In London I saw a MSF poster showing a super-hero doctor, radio on hip, leading an emaciated black kid to a makeshift clinic in Africa somewhere. Strong and white and good reaching down to help poor and black and weak exudes colonialism but I wanted to be that doctor. I never saw myself in the kid. We applied, were intervewied in Amsterdam, accepted for Colombia, flew to Bogota, and were sent to Uraba’s heart-of-darkness jungles. In Colombia’s guerrilla war with MSF, a beacon of hope shining from a pillar of colonialism, we started participatory health with indigenous and black people in a ferment of flooding rivers, falciparum malaria, guerrillas, jaguars and bandits. This was my medical elective on steroids, more intoxicating than ever and now with slivers of structural change. Two heady years later, expecting twins, we left. Fist stop was Amsterdam. The head office was jubilant with the news: MSF had just been awarded the Nobel Prize! Eurocentric, idealistic MSF honoured with a eurocentric, idealistic prize. Self-contradictory, idealistic us debriefed and flew back to safe Aotearoa.
In world heritage Carthegena with MSF. Jungles and jaguars, falciparum and Farc lurk just upstream.
I wish our planet didn’t have Pol Pot nor HIV, coca, caste, TB and guerillas. But it does. I’m a self-colonised, educationally priveliged untouchable Indian kid. Kaaren is a multi-lingual white woman, a daughter of missionaries who grew up in the poor world and is a NZ public health physician. We’re made to mess in this messiness.
A senior job in Roto Vegas ED dropped into my lap. I was asking questions now: why, in a hospital on iwi-gifted land, are so many of my māori patients disconnected from land and health?; How were they vaporised into tangata non-whenua?; in New Zealand which our national narrative says doesn’t have discrimination? Such questions had taken me to South Africa long before medicine. Now while doing chest drains and femoral lines in Rotorua ED by day I started studying development extramurally through Massey by night.
Next was the world capital of clean and white and good, Christchurch. Christchurch ED is its epicentre. After two well-paid years of complicated, uncomplex medicine, I was getting used to the sweet side of the tracks.
Then my moral compass came home and said “its time to go now”
We chucked everything into a container, put it in a Canterbury paddock and hitch-hiked into the Himalayas (“Flew” doesn’t aliterate). Twenty years after our med-school cafe conversation we arrived to a clinic in a forgotten HImalayan valley. There was heroic surgery, spinal anaesthetics and other such schweitzeresque stuff but forr us clinical medicine segued into supporting village women health workers, a network young mothers as nutrition workers and a programme with kids of Nepali migrant road wokers. Though essential for India’s burgeoning infrastructure Nepali migrants suffer brutal exploitaton and discrimination. This in India,inspirationally liberated from colonial discrimination by Gandhi, salt marches, ahimsa* against artillery and all. My India.
We took a cliff-bottom hospital to questions like “Who has TB? Why?; Whose knowledge does government education exclude?; Do migrant road workers have rights?; Will you look away when we say “caste”?. Leading a community-based adaptation to climate change project (aka helping Indian villagers whose planet I polluted change their behaviour) pushed me into systems and how they change. Now I was circling in on evaluation, asking questions, looking for answers and thinking systemically. In the journey I found Outcome Mapping and Outcome Harvesting. I joined online- talked actor centredness, complexity, partners not beneficiaries, system change by system members, undermining power… In listening to and learning from others with similar questions (and some answers) I found my tribe, people for whom Indonesians with HIV, Afghan health ministers, Kenyan street kids, police chiefs, schoolgirls- all count. Finally! The confluence of my professional and personal journeys.
Last year I evaluated a prisoner reintegration programme in Ōtautahi. “We don’t have apartheid” says our national narrative (narratives, eh?) yet somehow 60% of NZ high security prisoners are Pasifika or Māori- (are my in-law’s farming their ancestral land?). Actually I wasn’t evaluating, only facilitating. Long term prisoners, corrections staff , men in the community, volunteers defined their questions, what data answers them, how to get it, Interviewed, analysed on software and we sense-made together. This was my privileged self reaching across the fence inside, shaking hands with my excluded self and saying “let’s do this”. There I was, all of me, integrated in what I was doing. So of course I was evaluating. Evaluating myself, decolonizing myself.
In my river’s headwaters is an Indian kid telling and retelling himself the same story since forever. I’m brown, enslaved and emancipated by colonialism. I married a gorgeous white woman on the gorgeous Waikato dairy farm her colonial English ancestors hewed out of Tane’s trees. We’ve oscillated between power and poverty, complicated and complex, in and out ever since. We chose hard options sometimes, let golden apples land in our laps other times. Trying to contribute to justice via system change originates up there. Evaluation has me confronting my contradicitons, able to ask complex questions of the world and myself. I’m doing what is important to me, truly living not just leading my default swotty-indian-kid-becomes-a-doctor life. I can now look my (now dead) father in the eye and explain why his twenty year old son hitchiked into apartheid.
I’m still trying to align myself with my values- we all are- but I’m getting there now. I write this from Afghanistan where I am working with government, community, NGO, men and women together as a participatory evaluation team in a country where women are not allowed to work. Out in that wild world beyond protocols that always intoxicated me evaluation shows me sketchy trails winding towards system change by stealth. I can look that world in the eye. I’m glad I said “yes” to the keynote. It made me define where I am, where I’m going, what I’m doing, ask myself if my why aligns with my who.
That’s me. Looking back to where I came from shows me the way to coherence in what I do now. Is like that for you? Are there questions you always asked without knowing why? Do some stories surface again and again from hidden depths in your life? Why? Do you see yourself oscillating around something huge and hidden in your centre, a “Leviathan stirring to ocean birth your inland waters”? [ Baxter, Matukituki valley]. Risk a deep dive in there, amidst all those unravelled ends and tangled threads, tease out your own story’s connectiong strands. Colours that run through the whole fabric. Your evaluation practice will be much better for asking why you evalaute and knowing who it is doing the mahi. Mine is.