Development work can be excruciating. One will traverse leech-infested rivers to reach towns, as well as walk 8 kilometers up a mountain to get to an isolated village. These instances can be depicted. Most defy description.

The mandate of development work is changing the fate of people. No matter how much tome you turn over, that’s the bottom line.

Years of doing this kind of work afford me one conclusion: fate plays a major role in the significance one can have in life. Unoriginal, but true. Fate is the invisible chain that imprisons potential.

I, however, do not refer to fate as that which is written in the stars. If you’ve been to where I’ve been, you’d come to know stars from the vantage point of the gutter.

The people I’ve met are those whose fate has been handed down to them, not from the movements of celestial bodies or the great unknown, but by the machinations of those who are on, yes, equally unreachable heights.

It shapes the lives and continues to dictate the state of this people’s future, as well as of their progeny’s future. Defying it is a concept that is not even known to them. What they know is that one cannot really budge from where one is.

This fate, however, has bound them to a lifetime of insignificance, making them resigned to the dustbin of mediocrity. Their milieu is exactly what Aesop meant when he said “Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety.”

The ignorant mother in a coastal town who doesn’t know what television is because the place she has known all her life has never had electricity is safe from the global fear and paranoia of economic recession. What she knows is contentment because the sea has provided enough thus far. And the sun will rise tomorrow, anyway. And the fruit on the branch will fall, anyway.

If you’re fated to be insignificant, then, by all means, you are.

Potential is a word that comes from the middle class, the affluent, and the civil society.

Maybe, all these efforts in development work to make people realize that they have a potential to achieve might just be disturbing the order of things in their universe. Life in the islands was peaceful and relationships were in better accord when the people were using alibata, an indigenous form of writing. Now, they have to memorize 26 letters in the English alphabet and learn syntax that is not only alien to them, but eventually useless. They are not about to get the chance to leave the island.

Just as Western colonizers were intrusive on our culture, so are we now who are really nothing but puppets of development whose tenets have been formed outside of these islands. We teach people to aspire to ideals that are benchmarked in the West.

We define happiness and contentment for them. We play the spinner of fate and hand them down our definition of potential. We fail to see that, in their ignorance, they are truly happy.

There is stillness in the sea, and it exists precisely for only that. And development workers such as me only disturb this stillness.

There are those who can and will be significant, as well as those who will forever remain inconsequential. And somewhere in between are those, like me, who persist to be a spinner of fate and move the forces of nature so that the lives of the trivial ones escape irrelevance, not knowing that there is a place under the heavens for us all.

Looking at the vastness of the ocean in this coastal fishing village, I conclude that I belong to those who are truly ignorant.