Life History Interview: Update

Unfortunately, I learned today that B has left GH and I won’t be able to do a follow-up interview with her. I’m not sure how much GH was her choice or how much it was required treatment, but I do know that she—to her understanding—doesn’t have a family or a home to go back to. So where she has gone and why she chose it is certainly a source of concern for me.

I really felt like the whole experience of working with clients at GH was a failed attempt to develop a mutually beneficial relationship. Instead it felt stronger as a concept than as a real exchange. Part of this, for me, stems from the way the interviews were introduced (or rather, not introduced) to the clients by GH staff. I don’t appreciate how I was tacit in treating these women like children, who were directed minute by minute throughout their day by people in charge. While I understand that structure is important, there is a difference between enforcing a structure for one’s benefit and enforcing a structure because of an underestimation of one’s capabilities.

Also, the experience of trying to get in touch with B through her counselor made me feel like I was bothering GH, rather than communicating my interest in Barbara as a person and her ability to teach me about herself and about my own abilities and shortfalls of oral history interviewing. It began to feel like a battle between institutions—Columbia and GH—and each institution’s agenda and priorities, and I as a student, and B as a client, were really dwarfed by this larger push and pull.

My experiences working at small non-profit organizations has shown me that there’s a huge difference between the stages of Project Design and Project Implementation; what’s added between those stages is audience and actors. Bringing in the people who are supposed to benefit from a project can be the point where a project becomes more of a hollow framework and less of a well-supported concrete strategy for development and change. I say this not so much because my experience working with B and GH failed to teach me anything (it taught me very much), but because it reminded me too much of struggles I have had organizing projects in my own experience. I guess I feel like I’m able to deal with the reality; that’s my job as a human being. As a student, however, I’m in this program to learn ideals and goals within the context of the discipline from my instructors, and to be able to follow those goals and ideals without being overwhelmed by institutional shortcomings. The necessity to engage these ideals with the world (and project partners, et al) is a constant dialectical process that I understand will go on forever, but moreso in the professional field than within the classroom. I would like to avoid feeling burned out as a student of a discipline before ever getting to practice the discipline.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s hard to describe the sense of loss I feel knowing that my contact with B has ended, and that her future is so uncertain. It would have been hard enough for me to complete the interview series and hear about her struggles even within the context of a full interview and follow-up. But the way our interaction ended so suddenly has left me fearing that I tried and failed to help her, and that my responsibility to her is unfulfilled.