If ever there were a safe place to rant about the Development Studies work that we do, this would be it. We aren't in the fields. No one could possibly be reading, or looking or caring. WE are deep in the depths of writing up our findings, creating a thesis, sitting within the walls of the ancient Bodlien, or within the modern steel and glass of the Social Science library. Or maybe we have closed ourselves off within the walls of our comfortable Oxford flats with hot tea and cake.

You know, I live in north Oxford, between Jericho (where the lead singer from Radiohead lives) and Summertown, where there is no discussion of rent. People bought their homes long ago. I count the number of Mercedes benzes I witness parked curbside. Lotuses pass me daily. I witness ferraris and mazeratis (sp?) and lambourginis (sp?) almost daily. People are so rich they don't have to be ostentatious, they are confident enough to be subdued. You think I'm joking, but I have a daily log of how many I see parked vs. driving, and whether they are clean or dirty, that is how wealthy this place, where I study impoverished people, where I write about inequality creating poverty traps, where I discuss ad nauseum the merits of the right theory applied to developing countries, where I try to make sense of this world we live in, where so many have so little and those that have everything complain that they don't have enough.

So what does it matter? Why do we do it? What motivates any of us to do this work? I don't know about any of you, but the God's honest truth, why I do this, why I get up in the morning, the reason I am ok with sitting in the damn ugly library, the reason I am 5000 miles from all the people that love me the most, the reason I am not holding my brother's hand when he is ill, or why I am not with my mother or Grandmother as they traverse difficult new terrain is because I want to make this world a better place. I WANT TO CHANGE THIS WORLD FOR THE BETTER!!!!

It is grand and massive and ridiculous to imagine, but it is the dream that I imagine everyday. I want this world to be better for people when I die than when I arrived. I want the work that I do to actually make a difference, and the best way I can think to do that is to work with poor people to get some autonomy, to determine their destiny, to alter the course of history and to bear witness to shifting paradigms of development. (In normal speak that means I intend to work with people to support them in becoming un-poor) Things are getting in the way of that. And I suppose they are only there to remind us/me that the only things in our lives that come to us that are really really important come through struggle. They come with pain and sadness. They don't arrive easily, if they did, how would we recognize they were truly important to us.

But in this final push to creating our little academic work, complete with theory and methodology and analysis etcetera, remember WHY...remember the why in it all. Remind each other that the reasons we do this are as diverse as each of us, but we all have a reason and mine is to change the world for poor people.