Our delicious Nigerian dinner<\/p><\/div>\n

Earlier in the day, I had helped with food distribution. We would bring a certain amount of food to each room, and I learned quickly that some of the refugees weren\u2019t eating all their food. Immediately, I was outraged! I thought we were wasting resources and that there must be a better way to do this. Of course I thought I knew best because I had just written a paper about how to do this \u201cright\u201d and listened to talks at the UN where they told me about how to do it right. I thought why don\u2019t we just have the refugees come pick up their food so we don\u2019t have to see it go to waste?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just a few days later, I came crashing down from my ivory tower. For some of the other areas of camp, this was the method of food distribution. And this method didn’t work perfectly. People would cut the line, fights started, people threw rocks, and chaos descended.<\/p>\n

I learned that life is much more about sitting in the dirt, listening to where another person has been and where they want to go, than thinking up \u201csolutions\u201d and coming up with policy recommendations. I wanted to go out and fix, but instead I learned to sit in the dirt and listen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"