For my sins, I have to read, or at least scan, a lot of stuff written by caring, sharing people who work in international development. Like many of them, I fully subscribe to the notion that we don't have all (or any?) of the answers and that we need to help people to help themselves. But why is it necessary to bludgeon those ideas upside the head with prose like this:

Dr redacted also interacted with redacted farmers in redacted district and the redacted farmers. The farmers shared their experiences on growing redacted, marketing and utilization as a food and nutritional security crop. The most successful women farmers in redacted village of redacted, Ms redacted, and in redacted village of redacted, Ms redacted, shared their stories with Dr redacted.

Couldn't Dr redacted have visited, or talked to those farmers? Could they have told her about growing redacted? Maybe they sell and use redacted, but do they really think of it as a food and nutritional security crop?

No need to reply; I'm just getting this off my chest.

Thank you for the opportunity to share my experiences of this pandering to donors and people who know squat about storytelling.

Two ways to respond: webmentions and comments

Webmentions

Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.

“Ordinary” comments

These are not webmentions, but ordinary old-fashioned comments left by using the form below.

Reactions from around the web