{"id":1801,"date":"2011-04-26T08:30:21","date_gmt":"2011-04-26T12:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=1801"},"modified":"2011-04-26T09:53:08","modified_gmt":"2011-04-26T13:53:08","slug":"tales-from-the-hood-on-the-three-cups-of-tea-debacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1801","title":{"rendered":"Tales from the Hood and &#8220;Tea&#8221;-gate (Updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I purposely avoided blogging about Greg Mortenson&#8217;s <em>Three Cups of Tea<\/em> and the Central Asia Institute debacle. I did so because issues with my eyes largely kept me away from my computer last week. More importantly, I did so because as an\u00a0<em>academic<\/em> (and not an aid worker), I am considerably less qualified to discuss Greg Mortenson than my fellow development bloggers whose boots are on the ground.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>A good example of a blogger whose boots are on the ground is J., who blogs anonymously over at Tales from the Hood. I particularly enjoyed his <del>or her<\/del> cynical take on <em>Tea<\/em>-gate titled &#8220;<a title=\"No Sh!t\" href=\"http:\/\/talesfromethehood.com\/2011\/04\/22\/no-sht\/\" target=\"_blank\">No Sh!t<\/a>,&#8221; in which he <del>or she<\/del> addresses how little this adds to our understanding of development practice:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&#8220;Thanks to all those awesomely intuitive peeps in the mass media, what, exactly, are we learning from all of this? Well\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">It turns out that doing long-term programming, and doing it properly is\u00a0<em>hard<\/em>. It takes commitment. It costs a lot of money. Who would have thought?\u00a0No Sh!t.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Going someplace where there are a lot of brown people and having an epiphany about how simple the needs of the poor are is easy. Doing something about it takes a lot of knowledge and skill and experience.\u00a0No Sh!t.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u2026 And even with a lot of knowledge, skill and experience, there are no guarantees of success. Sometimes programs fail. Even ones that are well-planned, resourced and executed. Sometimes they fizzle or deliver marginal results.\u00a0No Sh!t.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Greg Mortenson is a big, lumbering, completely disorganized (according to a &#8216;friend&#8217;) oaf who thought this was all nice and easy, but who \u2013 as it turns out \u2013 was just plain wrong. \u00a0No Sh!t.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">A famous journalist who thought he understood aid better than he does (I know, almost never happens, right?), whose own career has been made by inaccurately portraying the issues (&#8216;it\u2019s simple, really&#8217;) in the name of &#8216;raising awareness&#8217;, and who got all misty over\u00a0<em>Three Cups of Tea<\/em>\u2026 is now heartbroken and covering his own ass.\u00a0No Sh!t.<strong>&#8220;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>(Update: Tom Murphy over at\u00a0<a title=\"A View from the Cave\" href=\"http:\/\/www.aviewfromthecave.com\" target=\"_blank\">A View from the Cave<\/a> informs me that J. is male. Duly noted.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I purposely avoided blogging about Greg Mortenson&#8217;s Three Cups of Tea and the Central Asia Institute debacle. I did so because issues with my eyes<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1801\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tales from the Hood and &#8220;Tea&#8221;-gate (Updated)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-development","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-t3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1801"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1808,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions\/1808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}