I read
my journal entry from one year ago, today. Always a source of entertainment. In
this particular entry, I lay in bed in my house in the US of A, spilling forth
my fears and excitements about Peace Corps and Niger and what challenges I
would face. I bulleted them like this:
- Food
- The heat
- Food
- Culture
- Food
- Clean water
- The heat
- Using a latrine
- Culture
- The heat
- Food
· I also
reminded myself to buy “a billion batteries.”
As I rolled
my eyes at my own stupid exaggerations it dawned on me that the actual battles I’ve fought as a
volunteer, with myself or others, have been entirely different from those I
speculated a year ago. One adapts to food and climate. I adapted. I must say, I
pride myself on being an expert adapter at this point. Throw me into the ocean
and I’ll build a raft from jagged seaweed and jellyfish tentacles and make
friends with the fish. Or something like that. (So glad I retained my ability to exaggerate).
The real
difficulties I’ve faced so far have been the result of cultural walls, or,
surprisingly, of issues with my program itself. Most recently I’ve struggled
with the pressures associated with Peace Corps’ biggest watchword: sustainability.
Peace
Corps, as an organization, prides itself on what it is not. We are not an NGO that throws money at a
community without research or further follow-up. We don’t put our stamp onto
every project we’ve briefly brushed up against (ahem, cough, USAID) and we are
not, most importantly, unsustainable.
One
thing that Peace Corps is is self
selecting. The type of person who joins the organization is full of zeal and
good will; think uneven tan lines, calloused palms and lots of laughter. As a whole we’re
a concerned group. We’re concerned about our commitment, concerned about the
country, concerned about the cultural stressors, and lastly, concerned that our
well meaning sacrifices are worth it. Therein lies the rub. According to Peace
Corps and many development theories, in order to be worth it, our work must be sustainable.
This makes
all the sense in the world. The lifespan of a volunteer is only two years.
Granted, so far it seems like the longest two years in the history of time, but
in the scheme of things it is a blip, a flash, a sprint. In the lives of the
people we want to help, two years is sadly insignificant. It is for this reason
that we strive to find projects that last. This means not only teaching
individuals, but teaching teachers. It means broadening our net of knowledge
and trying to reach as many people as we can in our service. It means trying to
hit all problems at the source and not the end. It means not doing everything yourself, a concept that has fallen hard on
many an earnest volunteer (Mamadiy, I'm talking to you here!) It means,
unfortunately for us, never giving a quick fix but always thinking in the long
term.
I say “unfortunately
for us” because wouldn’t it be so nice to once, just once, give a few extra dollars to help a family get through the week?
Wouldn’t it be so nice to see a grateful smile and know that this baby is going
to live because you paid the hospital bill? Couldn’t I just buy this man lunch
so he doesn’t go hungry today?
But what about tomorrow? What about the day
after tomorrow? What about next week?
Logically,
one can see the large crater I’m so gladly moving towards. I can’t possibly
give money to every sick baby, to every hungry man. I may be a white American
but I’m a Peace Corps volunteer which doesn’t amount to much financially even
in Senegal. Anyways, it’s better to teach a man to fish and all that, right? If I help improve the health care,
if I increase food security, these problems may work themselves out for the
betterment of every citizen, not just two or three. This is the very core
belief of the Peace Corps and sustainability. But this man will die by then,
and that baby will never survive the week without medication. Do I really want
that on my conscience? And so I continue to give small financial aid and
consequently feel like a dirty, corrupt volunteer.
There
are other issues at hand in this scenario. The family system in Senegal, in
much of West Africa to my understanding, is tightly wound and supporting. If
you’re in any need, your family is honor and duty bound to assist you. Some are
not blessed with a particularly loving or capable family, but that’s the
general idea. Let’s consider, however, the viewpoint of such a person in need.
You could save yourself the shame and hassle of petitioning your sister or your
husband by asking this hapless foreigner. You could
find the money in your family, but this poor lad doesn’t know that, right? Also,
he’s more likely to give you ten times the amount you actually need, through
sheer ignorance or that nagging privilege guilt. Sounds like a good deal!
Secondly,
Senegal thrives on the concept of making a quick buck. Any way to fix a piece
of junk for two dollars and resell it for ten is seized upon immediately. The
amount of money scams in this country is astounding. I may have written about
this before, but one that really gets me is coined the ‘prescription scam.’ In
this scene a person will find an old hospital prescription in the trash and
then set about house to house, asking for small donations to cover the cost of
the medicine. “My daughter is so sick, she’s all I have, I need to get her
help, please give me a few hundred CFA”. In reality, no one is sick, this
person probably doesn’t need the
money (at least not desperately) but sees an easy way to fool people into
emptying their wallets. The Senegalese are wise to this scam. Foreigners? Not
so much.
This isn’t
to say we don’t have similar situations in the US of A (or worse, unless I
missed something and Bernie Madoff was Senegalese). The difference is merely the
continent and the continued perception that Westerners have towards the third
world , mainly, Guilt with a capital G. The hand of fate made me a rich American and
so I feel compelled to shell out money for those with fates less fortunate. I
believe this describes, on a small scale, many failed development schemes. Voila – the reason Peace Corps
discourages and frowns upon such handouts, as harmless as they seem.
My personal
problems with sustainability stem from the Master Farmer site. My farmer is
working 24/7 to install this field, a place that is producing nothing as of
yet. Do the math – this man is broke. He can barely afford bread for breakfast.
The Master Farmer program assumes that the farmers have grown children to help
in the field and a family support system to feed them during this installation,
which most of them do. My farmer, however, owns land in Tambacounda, about 40K
from the village where his family lives, and has no grown children. He is
living in a small room in Tamba until he can afford to move his family out
here.
Therefore, rather than watch this rail thin man work himself to the bone
and suffer pangs of hunger and exhaustion, I’ve been giving him money for food.
I also bought him a cell phone to make our work partnership easier – better to just
lay it all on the table.
Flashes
of red warning signs appear in my mind as I write this. I know, I KNOW it’s unsustainable. Other
volunteers would tell me to be wary of setting a precedent that I can’t uphold,
or that the next volunteer will be saddled with. They’d tell me I likely don’t
know the entire situation and it’d be better to keep the boundaries of
volunteer and work partner without travelling into the wastelands of money dependency
from which one can never turn back. After all, Peace Corps is funding his farm - in the larger sense, he's one of the lucky ones. I'd be told to just wait it out and things will get better when we start selling vegetables in a few months. And I’d agree. I’d nod my head, say that I
understood. And I’d continue to feed him, and I defy anyone who reads this to
do differently!
One of
my friends in Tamba put her thoughts about this issue very nicely. She said, “Frankly,
I’d rather be scammed out of a few dollars than deny someone the help they
really need.” My consternation with sustainability rises not from the concept
itself or its obvious merit. But I often feel strangled by the notion
that I’m not ever supposed to give
financial help to those in dire straits, just because I can. I think change agents are forced to sometimes turn a blind eye in the name of the greater good. We can be, if you will...sustaina-blind.
At the end
of the day, I don’t want to set bad precedents or ruin the reputation of my
organization, one that is tenuously built and often undermined by wealthy
French tourists (zut alors!). I don’t
want to leave Senegal having only temporarily helped several people instead of
setting in motion long term shifts that will better the nation forever. I also
don’t want to look into the face of a distressed mother and tell her her baby
will die because it’s not “sustainable” for me to give her two dollars for medicine.
A dilemma, my friends. And one that has been much more than challenging to face than
any third meal of millet porridge or a hot day.
Until
next time,
<3 Phoebe
P.S – It’s
been a year, Africa! Happy Anniversary.
