[URBANTH-L]ANN: In the River They Swim Essay Competition

[Angela Jancius]

In The River They Swim Essay Competition Prize
Deadline: September 1, 2009


Where Sentimentality and Top-Down Solutions Give Way to Business Strategy, 
Culture, and Local Wisdom

The SEVEN Fund is sponsoring a global competition seeking the best essays 
written in the spirit of "In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the 
World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty". The competition will run from 
April 1st to September 1st, 2009. The top essay will be awarded a $10,000 
prize; the best submissions will be published on www.intherivertheyswim.com 
to be read by a global audience, and, perhaps, in a future book.

What are we looking for?

We give you the same instructions that we gave our authors. From your 
experience living or working in the world's poorest countries (or poor 
regions of developed nations), tell about a personal journey you have had 
doing enterprise solutions to poverty. Teach us something about your work, a 
useful experience, a person you met, or a framework you have developed or 
used. Tell us about something you contributed, or more interestingly, some 
action or assumption that turned out to be wrong and what you learned from 
it. Give us your beliefs, goals, attitudes, and assumptions. Do not settle 
just for self- expression, though; give us high-level craft and try for art. 
Your writing can be loose, exploratory, and digressive; it can be about 
failure with or without redemption. But locate yourself in the solitary 
endeavor of writing, at the crossing of the self and others, process and 
outcome, experience and meaning. Recognize that what you write is important. 
It shows what you do, and who you want to be.

Submissions should be 2000 words or less; should be well written and a 
pleasure to read; deeply introspective and probe the author's emotions and 
journey within development, globalization, and enterprise solutions to 
poverty. Take a theme from the book, or from life, and make it your own by 
infusing it with your insights and your story. We believe that the short 
essay format is a powerful and underutilized mechanism in development 
thinking. It is a versatile medium that requires succinct, insightful 
writing that can be published in multiple venues.
We look forward to your submissions.

The following excerpt from the Introduction to "In the River They Swim" 
further examines the essay form, and what we hope competition authors will 
aspire to.

Why the Essay?

The essay represents a long proud tradition of a humble form, that of 
Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, Woolf, and Orwell, to cite a few of its masters. 
And though we cannot pretend to reach the height of their eloquence, we do 
attempt to take the rules of their form and to apply it to the domain of 
economic and human development - specifically to enterprise solutions to 
poverty.

We asked ourselves several questions: What if we changed everything about 
how we work? What if we used a "second - class genre", the essay, that 
reached the height of its popularity a century and a half ago and that some 
have called the "formless form"? What if we adapted the premise that we can 
hardly advocate the merits of change without changing ourselves first? What 
if we stopped preaching and eschewed the epic pretension of advisors to 
nations, and revealed our greater discontentment with our ability to change 
the world than with the world itself? What if we displayed all our warts: 
our vanity, exaggerations, misplaced hopes, rage, and ignominious failures? 
If failure speeds up learning, would it help to show others what worked and 
did not work for us? Could it help others who want to try to help the world 
to feel grounded and less lonesome and freakish? If success comes after 
learning to fail fast, frequently, and most importantly, originally, would 
writing essays be a start?

Essays allow us to become the crucible in which our own experience is 
tested. There is a personal nature to our work that rigorous analysis alone 
cannot explain. We have the freedom to explore, in these pieces, a learning 
process that is iterative, messy, and sometimes deeply introspective. The 
essay is supposed to be digressive, reflecting the sloppy process of how one 
learns; more than any other genre, it shows the learning taking place, 
almost in real time. We want to show life itself as it is forming on the 
pages. Though some of the authors achieve it better than others, there is 
merit in the struggle that each has faced.

These contributors come from and know every part of the world; they speak 
over twenty languages including Swahili, Wolof, Pushtu, and Kinyarwanda, but 
that is not what was important to us. What was important was whether they 
could turn an eye inward to find and know better places in the mind; to know 
that, while education exists outside of oneself in the mundane world, each 
person is an education unto herself, interminably engaged in the 
apprenticeship of knowing himself better, through his or her relationship 
with others and, in some instances, with God.

We, the editors of this book, gave the contributors the following 
instructions: from your experience working in the world's poorest countries, 
tell about a personal journey you have had doing enterprise solutions to 
poverty. Teach us something about the work, a useful experience, or a 
framework you have developed or used. Tell us about something you 
contributed that turned out to be wrong. Give us your beliefs, goals, 
attitudes, and assumptions. Do not settle just for self- expression, though; 
give us a high level of craft and try for art. Your writing can be loose, 
exploratory, and digressive; it can be about failure with or without 
redemption. But locate yourself in the solitary endeavor of writing, at the 
crossing of the self and others, process and outcome, experience and 
meaning. Recognize that it is important what you write. It shows what you 
do, who you want to be. You can be confident that some development experts 
will read our essay book, but will some lovers of the essay read our 
development book?

We assured our authors that these pages would be a safe place for their 
idiosyncratic voices, the margins of their drafts, a happy hunting ground 
for their best ideas. In an era of total global competition for resources, 
of hollow advice, of poverty that degrades and destroys progressive human 
values like trust, civic- mindedness, and tolerance for others, we asked 
them to write as if these essays may be our last resort. We also told them 
to reconcile with the fact that they may never rise above the nameless 
unproductive babble of practitioners and celebrities in development. Above 
all, they should bear in mind what the Marxist theorist and literary critic 
György Lukács referred to as the "wonderfully apt" label of essays, which 
means simply to try.
info at sevenfund.org

Visit the website at http://www.intherivertheyswim.com/competition.html