Rest in peace, Teresa Peters

I got an email from an old friend today, the sort of mass email we send our friends and colleagues to update each other on our lives and goings on. I didn’t make it past the first line, because he opened his missive by mourning the death of Teresa Peters.

Teresa was a friend of mine, though we’d lost touch the past couple of years. I knew she had been battling breast cancer, but I didn’t know how gravely ill she was, nor did I know that she passed away on December 16 of last year.

I got to know Teresa a little more than a decade ago through the globally far-flung, but personally close network of people working on technology for international development in sub-Saharan Africa. I was running Geekcorps, an NGO I’d founded to provide technology training to small businesses in the developing world. Teresa was running Bridges.org, an NGO she’d founded to ensure that ICT (information and communication technology) had real and positive impacts in the lives of people in the developing world. We founded our organizations in the same year, 2000, she in South Africa and me in Ghana, and moved in many of the same circles. We were both named “Global Leaders for Tomorrow” and later “Young Global Leaders” by the World Economic Forum, and worked together to try to navigate the surreal experience that is the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos, trying to explain why the work each of us was doing to the rich and powerful people who populate that event. One year, we shared a flight from Accra to Geneva and roomed on the same floor of a respiratory hospital in Davos, the only accommodations either of us could afford given the fragile budgets of our organizations.

While most of us working in technology for development were passionate (and often pathological) optimists, Teresa was an optimistic critic. She asked some of the hardest questions the field needed to address and was relentless in demanding answers. Is information technology a shortcut to improved economic and human development? Who was making choices about technology for developing countries? How could developing nations build the talent they would need to make decisions on their own and stop relying on people like Teresa and me? Bridges.org became the world’s leading think tank for skeptical, thoughtful questions about the field, and I approached her with trepidation for help in evaluating the work we were doing with Geekcorps, knowing full well that if she thought our work was ineffective, she’d pull no punches in assessing our work.

I admired Teresa for her relentless questioning, for her demands that we challenge our assumptions about technology and about development. I was most challenged by her insistence that we move beyond a world where expertise about the developing world comes from experts outside of the developing world. Teresa worked in Cape Town to build a team of African policy analysts who could ask these same sharp questions about technology and development she asked, informed by local understanding. It was a difficult task, and one the international development community continues to wrestle with. I left Geekcorps in 2004 and the organization folded shortly after; Teresa left Bridges for the Gates Foundation in 2006, leaving Bridges locally led, a testament to her commitment to building a strong, skilled team in South Africa.

She and I were in touch sporadically during her time at Gates and reconnected in 2010. Teresa had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had returned to Licking County, Ohio to be closer to family and friends, and to fight her disease on her own terms, in her hometown. Only now am I learning that Teresa chose not to fight her cancer with chemotherapy or radiation, but focused on nutrition, exercise and connection to her community. She survived far longer than doctors had predicted and, from what I can tell, had an awesome, loving and full life in the community she loved.

In 2010, Teresa was starting a new project, a book on evaluating impact, the question she was always most passionate about. I connected her with friends at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC, and we talked about the blessings and challenges of splitting your life between a small, rural community and issues that are global in scale, a challenge I navigate as well from Berkshire County, MA. And then, after a flurry of email, we fell out of touch.

There’s a tendency to assume that, in this digital age, we won’t lose touch with our friends, at least our digitally-enabled ones. (And Teresa was that – this FAQ from 1995 reminds us that she was working on issues of the internet and accessibility years before most people realized the internet was an interesting place to be.) But Teresa focused her attention and her limited time on her community in her last years. She worked on local environmental issues, opening the Going Green Store in Granville, OH with her partner Michael, and on documenting her approach to cancer through a book titled “A New Kind Of Patient”, which urged people battling chronic conditions to be active and activist patients. I am sorry I didn’t get to experience more of this period of Teresa’s life, but I also sense that this part of Teresa’s life was consciously lived with her remarkable friends and family in Ohio, not with the extended tribe of friends she found all over the world in her globally-focused work.

I am of an age when I’m starting to lose peers, friends who’ve left us too soon. For those of us who’ve lived our lives, at least in part, online, it’s a particular form of melancholy to ask Google how we’ve touched and changed the world, because the answers are always unsatisfactory. Some of Teresa’s papers remain online (like this examination of “e-Readiness”, one of the core ideas about ICT4D put forth by the World Bank and others in the last decade), but it’s clear that her importance and legacy to those of us who care about technology and development isn’t well reflected by her digital traces. What is clear is that Teresa was embraced, loved and deeply mourned by those she grew up with and chose to close her life with, that for all her connections around the world, she valued the connections to her family, her friends and her community most of all. I think there’s a lesson in Teresa’s life and her choices for those of us who work to change the world locally and globally, in ways big or small.

I miss you, Teresa, and I am grateful for your example, for your questions, your challenges and your remarkable life. Rest in peace.

Edmond Gaible’s memories of Teresa
Teresa’s obituary in the Newark (OH) Advocate
Teresa’s web site