Canada's Global Villagers by Ruth Compton Brouwer, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

In 1961, as the UN launched its Decade of Development and President Kennedy established the Peace Corps, Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO) became the first Canadian NGO to undertake development work from a secular stance and in a context of rapid decolonization. Over the next twenty-five years, nine thousand volunteers, many of them women, travelled to more than forty countries, where they became the face of Canada in the Global South. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, Ruth Compton Brouwer offers a balanced portrait of a group of young Canadians who quickly lost their initial naïveté as they confronted the complexities of “underdevelopment." It was a case, one wrote, of “gnat against elephant." Nevertheless, the volunteers sought to fit into the host communities that had invited them and to provide needed social services, particularly in education. They returned home confirmed transnationalists. As CUSO alumni, they continued to be engaged global citizens, bringing a new level of global consciousness and cultural diversity to Canadian society, whether as activists in their home communities, radicals in development education, or as part of the extensive “CUSO mafia" in the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and other development organizations. At a time when many are concerned about Canada’s waning reputation for global humanitarianism, this book reminds us of an earlier, more hopeful period in our country’s engagement with the Global South. | Canada's Global Villagers by Ruth Compton Brouwer, Paperback | Indigo Chapters