When democracy doesn't photograph well

Mercy Corps field officer Hanife Limani explains a community project to villagers in Millosheve, Kosovo. Photo: Roger Burks/Mercy Corps

Many of the stories sent in from our field offices have to do with meetings. My colleague Dan and I get these pieces, which often read like hastily-transcribed minutes, and honestly don’t know how to turn them into something that anyone but development professionals would want to read.

These stories are usually accompanied by photos that illustrate a meeting in progress: someone speaking at the front of the room, flipcharts stuck to walls or blackboards and a few people sitting in chairs. In other words: nothing nearly as compelling as a camel herder standing in the Gobi Desert or a family returning to their Ugandan village after years of war.

But these meetings, as unglamorous as they might be, are the foundation of the work Mercy Corps does. They’re where communities are created, reconciled and energized. These are the places where citizen engagement and true democracy begin.

I was looking through notes from a trip to Kosovo the other day, trying to find a particular story I’d just remembered. But instead, I came across my own scrawled notes about a meeting — but I read on anyway.

This meeting took place on March 9, 2006 — almost two years before the country declared independence — in a war-scarred schoolroom in the village of Millosheve. There were a couple dozen villagers sitting on small wooden benches and chairs, all business. A young Mercy Corps field officer named Hanife Limani led the proceedings.

The questions they tackled were things most of us have never considered outside a history or civics class:

1. What is a democratic government?
2. What does government transparency mean to you?
3. What are some ways that government communicates with you?
4. Should government have regular meetings with citizens? How often?

These weren’t easy questions for most of the participants, who’d lived most of their lives under Yugoslavia’s total control. But here they were, coming to realizations together, deciding what they wanted from their government — creating a new country one village at a time.

Photos certainly don’t do the proceedings justice — and it’s hard to write a gripping story about three hours of discussion — but this is important work. And it’s happening every day, in classrooms and mud huts and under trees around the world.