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| Photo can be found here |
"I may be in Africa right now, but still there is a separation between me and these people, as tangible as the glass pane separating me and these little boys. It’s a weird feeling. I wonder how long it takes in Africa to stop feeling like a philanthropic tourist. I’ve wondered a lot since being here if I love Africa for the right reasons. Or better, do I want to make changes in Africa for the right reasons? There are over 8,000 NGOs registered in Uganda all trying to make a difference, some for the right reasons, some for other reasons. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of development here. It’s different than I thought it would be. It’s messy and disorganized and sometimes (often) ineffective. I believe in it though. And I believe that the sooner we’re on the same side of the glass the better it will be."
I just finished the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide yesterday. (I wrote a little about this before here, before the book came out. The authors had released excerpts as articles in the New York Times.) It's a sobering read, but a very eye-opening one as well. We, as humans, have a tendency to block out the uncomfortable things about life and the human existence. I find this tendency to be much stronger in America; the majority of us tend to turn cringing away from the homeless man on the streets of our own town, let alone from the suffering of millions in other countries. Safe in our little bubble of (tenuous and fragile) prosperity, we don't really want to spend a lot of time contemplating the plight of the uneducated, abused, malnourished, and impoverished "other" people that live all over the world. People that don't even have a real floor or running water, let alone the latest iPod or the newest smartphone.
And then, when we do finally look outside of our carefully constructed bubble world, we go into these people's countries and cultures and try to "solve the problem" with no reference to their situations within that culture. Which doesn't really solve anything and just takes a lot of money to achieve (usually) very minimal results. And so, for the last few days I've been thinking about that, and my friend's post just helped me articulate some of my thoughts. The authors of Half the Sky make the point that the kind of aid that countries like Uganda and Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, etc really need is the grassroots kind - that is, locals helping locals, funded by foreigners when the locals don't have the resources. Reading Half the Sky has really gotten me thinking about how we're supposed to fulfill the commandment the Savior gave us when He said we need to love our neighbors as ourselves. Obviously, we need to spread the gospel, and obviously it's the only thing that's really going to fix the problems in this world; everything else is just some form of a stopgap measure, when you get right down to it, or treating the symptoms instead of the actual disease, if you will. But on the other hand, the Church (or its members) can't just waltz into places and start teaching the people and telling everyone to clean up their act without so much as a by-your-leave, and some kind of action must be taken in the interim. The question is, what is most effective? And how can I be part of the solution instead of part of the problem?
That's what I've been pondering. And no solution has readily presented itself. That's the thing about problems that confront half the population of the world - there are no easy solutions.
