shouting hallelujah
These people aren’t playing around though. Their effort is a serious critique of misguided development, and of the Western media coverage which often accompanies it. What they want: 1. Fundraising should not be based on exploiting stereotypes. 2. We want better information about what is going on in the world, in schools, in TV and media. 3. Media: Show respect. 4. Aid must be based on real needs, not “good” intentions. (via It’s Africans’ turn to help Norwegians – Africa is a Country)
Pretty accurate. My favorite parts of some set-in-Africa movies are the obviously unscripted bits — for instance, anyone who’s spent time in East Africa would suspect that the children running aside the protagonists and shouting things like “Mzungu! How are you?!” in The Constant Gardener and The Last King of Scotland are one of the most authentic and representative aspects of the films.
(via learnforlife)
Some of this I knew from living on a Ugandan hospital compound for six months and volunteering at a rural orphanage, where the children were mostly orphaned by malaria or abandoned out of extreme poverty. It’s particularly interesting to read this after tackling Tim Butcher’s Blood River last month — a really accessible travel narrative of Butcher’s trip along the Congo River, with plenty of history folded in.
“One takeaway is this: We can feel intoxicatingly good about ourselves when we do things that feel generous or ethical. But if we really want to do good for others, we also have the obligation to think through the ramifications—and the economics—of what we do. We have to make sure what we think is good doesn’t actually do harm.”
Casual Kitchen raises some good points about well-meant, ultimately destructive charity. An example he cites — the destruction of local tailoring in African due to Western clothing donations — is something we experienced first-hand in Uganda, where we bought both hand-tailored dresses and (she sheepishly admits) second-hand Western clothing from the market. The most interesting item I acquired, I think, was a little dress that seems to be a little nylon Western dress from the 1980s altered at the neck and waist to suit Ugandan sensibilities.
We were only in Uganda for six months and there was so much we still didn’t understand, but it’s the reason why most of the charity we don’t give locally goes to Uganda, where we have at least some tenuous grip on the issues.
“Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use.
I find it impossible to bear.
Ripe fruits, acrid sweat, urine flowers, dark spices, and other things I’ve never even seen — I can’t say what goes into the composition, or why it rises up to confront me as I round some corner hastily, unsuspecting. It has found me here on this island, in our little town…”
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
Does this still apply if I lack a sense of smell? I believe it does.
I’m not sure he quite makes the case that Africa desperately needs to grow, but he certainly gives pause to the idea that Africa has dug itself into a hole with rampant population growth — and makes a good case for American complicity in African poverty.
Nicholas Drayson, A Guide to the Birds of East Africa: A Novel
[one of the two books I nabbed with astonishing restraint at the Friends of the Library book sale earlier this month]
Conflicted about this. I mean, I won’t lie, I brought home some sweet market finds from Uganda that no doubt were created in China, originally worn in the US, shipped to Africa, and brought back home by me. And it was easy to see people walking around in unintentionally hilarious shirts — I remember a surly woman in Fort Portal sporting a shirt that proclaimed, “Kiss Me! I’m Canadian!” Also, Smallbean is pretty cool, from what little I know.
(And sorry for being so quiet this week. Moving + starting the new jobz. Crazywonderful. Also, requiring a lot of sleep.)
But I worry about all the unnecessary fuel costs involved in this venture. So we make our clothes in the developing world, import them, wear them, discard them, then buy them back when they can be considered vintage? Something about that strikes me as just a little too profligate to be “for a good cause.”
“THE sun is sinking, the air is cooling and our legs are pumping up and down, powering us toward a horizon unbroken by a cellphone tower, a house or even a fence. I’m looking over the bicycle’s handlebars at the veld unfurling in front of me - the baobab trees in bloom, the hawks circling, a miniskyline of anthills rising in the distance, thinking that 15 miles per hour is about the perfect pace to soak this all up.
“And then along come the flies.”
