Far from Utopia

COMMENT

There was a slight element of pilgrimage in the trip we took last weekend. We left the freezing north of Britain and headed south to the renowned Cotswolds region.
I have dreamt of seeing this place for many years, as the house we were staying in was only about seven miles from the valley where the author Laurie Lee grew up and described in his classic memoir Cider With Rosie.
His descriptions of the area have intoxicated me since I first read them many years ago so I had high hopes of a revelatory experience as the train snaked through the spine of Britain carrying us to the fabled place. Arriving late on the Friday night, it was not until Saturday morning that I could at last satisfy myself with the lie of the land.
Despite beautiful views and a crisp, clear morning, far milder than those we have been having in Scotland, I felt a pang of disappointment as I looked over the countryside. For each breathtaking slice of scenery, there was a small conurbation or large stretch of road slicing the green valleys. As I looked out over the scene Laurie Lee’s words sprang to mind. He bemoaned the fact that the landscape of his youth had been “bulldozed for speed”.
Our reason for being in the Cotswolds last weekend was to take part in a reunion of volunteers who had been in The Gambia at the same time as us. Some had been there upon our arrival and others had stayed on after we left but all of us shared a common bond of having lived through that time and place for some shared time.
For this reason, many of us were meeting for the first time in a Western context and the transplant of human to such an alien environment was a strange experience indeed. I say transplant because there was an overwhelming shared sense of all of us having left something behind in that tiny West African nation.
All those in attendance called either Ireland or Britain home and yet, as a group, we seemed to hold in common a feeling of alienation from the lands of our birth.
Certainly, there was a sense that we were not returning to the same countries we had left. The lands we left to travel to Africa were high on the seemingly limitless benefits of the boom years. Now, we returned to doom-laden headlines of repossessions, bust banks and soaring unemployment. Many people had returned to the prospect of servicing mortgages with a slim chance of securing the necessary work to do so.
Something had changed radically during our time abroad but could it be simply put down to the change in the economic and political climate?
In most cases, the answer was a resounding no. Had Gulliver been among us upon his return from Lilliput, I’m sure he would have fitted right in. One colleague likened her return to Britain as re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere having spent a year on the international space station.
On Saturday afternoon, we took a walk through the countryside, ending up back in the small town centre to a familiar sight. So homogenous was the centre of the town that it cold have been anywhere in the country.
Having spent the previous evening reminiscing, although not through rose-tinted spectacles, the sight of this place gave rise to the most extraordinary sense of alienation, a separation from the desires and priorities of the people who rushed, fretted and scrabbled through the hamlet.
In his introduction to The Faber Book of Utopias, the editor John Carey states the following, “Utopia means nowhere or no-place. It has often been taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy. As a result of this mix-up, another word, dystopia, has been invented, to mean bad place. But strictly speaking, imaginary good places and bad places are all utopias, or nowheres.”
Another universal desire in our small group was the desire to leave and work again in some other “nowhere”. Places other than where we now found ourselves were calling us all to their shores. We craved the kinds of work we had been engaged in. Work, as we felt it, with the sole purpose of improving people’s lives.
There are certainly valid arguments against the kinds of work some development agencies engage in and our small group would be the first to admit this but it did little to quench our thirst for meaning in our everyday endeavours.
I am told that the feelings we all experienced last weekend are very common in those returning from engaging in the kind of work we have. I’m sure that many people, if they got the opportunity, would seek a more meaningful working life but the option is simply not open to many. It is so clear when returning to this culture just how trapped people are.
The economic and political systems we have in place in Europe are designed specifically to trap people. By the time you are 25, if you are not saving for a pension you are facing destitution in old age. If you are not taking out a vast 30-year mortgage with an exploitative financial institution, you are facing homelessness or the prospect of paying the mortgage of somebody else to keep a roof over your head.
Perhaps it is in this context that last weekend we, to some extent, idealised the lives we lived in Africa. At the time, there is nothing pleasant about highly erratic electricity supply and no running water but looking back now, it is difficult to say that life in Europe is any more fulfilling.
Maybe it is ridiculous idealism to think that by volunteering one can bring about real and lasting change but every one life changed or person helped feels a lot more worthy than living here under the thumb of a destructive system, such as the one that exists.
The other reality that must be acknowledged is that as long as the global neo-conservative economic policies that now hold sway do so, the world’s poor will be kept poor and their infrastructure underdeveloped.
This ensures that there will be opportunities for volunteers to flee this place and visit the other with the hope of improving people’s lives, at least in some small way.