Margaret Helen Mclennon, Masters in International Development and Globalization, 1st year
Internship country: Rwanda
Canadian NGO: CECI
Local NGO: SaferRwanda
I’ve spent around five years sitting in classrooms talking about international development. Throughout my undergrad, and now a master’s I’m still chipping away at, we talk about what’s working, what isn’t, what counts as best practice this year versus five years ago. And crucially, whether the whole field carries a neo-colonial logic baked into its foundations, no matter how good anyone's intentions are. Some weeks it feels like we’re not studying a field so much as studying an argument that never actually ends.
I sat with that argument for years before I ever did the work it’s arguing about. Now here I am in Rwanda, a developing country, for a three month long internship doing exactly the work criticized in the literature. What I wasn't prepared for was how different it would feel to actually do the work the theory keeps circling.
Here is something I have been ruminating about for awhile. It’s not imposter syndrome, or at least not just that. Imposter syndrome begs the question “can I do this.” But what I’ve actually struggled with, through basically my entire education, is “should I be doing this at all.” As a white person studying international development, I've spent years unable to fully shake the possibility that the field itself is part of the problem it claims to solve and that I might just be part of the problem— that showing up in a country like Rwanda to "help" is just a newer, better-mannered version of an old pattern. The literature doesn't let you look away from that critique, and I don't think it should. That’s not a fringe idea in this field and I don’t think I get to just wave it away because I have good intentions.
But then I actually got here.
The work itself has been genuinely inspiring and not in a vague, brochure, picturesque sense, but in the specific, unglamorous way that comes from watching a plan turn into something real. Seeing a part of my work actually reach the people it was built for, and seeing it help, has made me sure for maybe the first time in my education, that I picked the right field. And it is not because the critique disappeared. It definitely didn’t, I am still being reflexive every day I have been here. It just finally had something real to sit next to instead of just floating around in my head.
And something else happened that I didn't expect. I came in braced for suspicion, or at least a kind of polite wariness — the thing the literature had trained me to anticipate. Instead, people have been warm, curious about me, wanting me involved. Maybe it is because of how I've shown up as curious, willing to be corrected, not prescribing, and genuinely there to contribute rather than to perform contribution. I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back. I’m saying it because it genuinely surprised me, and because it taught me something no seminar could. It taught me that whether this work is ethical isn’t only decided by the history of the field. It’s also decided one relationship at a time, by how you actually treat the people next to you.
That hasn't erased the bigger question. I still think it's a question worth asking, maybe permanently, rather than one you answer once and set down. But it's stopped being a question that makes me doubt whether I belong here, and started being one that keeps me paying attention.
If you asked me to name the single thing I believe most, underneath all the theory, it's that human connection is the point. I think that’s what we’re here for, as people, in the broadest sense — to connect with each other and to make each other’s lives a little better wherever we can. Nothing in my five years of coursework has moved me the way it moves me to see someone smile, or see someone’s circumstances shift a little, because of something I did or said.
The theory gave me the vocabulary to critique this field honestly, and I still think that vocabulary matters. But it was the practice that gave me the reason to stay in it.