Africa

Africa. What an interestingly complex continent. After spending a few weeks in sub-Saharan Africa in July and the last few months in Egypt I don't understand any part of the continent any better than I had before. Living amongst the problems of poverty, of Aids, of radical religiosity (both Christian and Muslim), and vast economic, educational, and social disparities has added a completely new layer of complexity in attempting to understand this place. The limited news we receive from about the African Continent in US media is usually a 100 word article about Somali pirates on the bottom left hand corner of the 8th page of Tuesday's New York Times. When Americans (myself included) think of Africa we think of a barbarous place where everyone's dieing of AIDS, a place where children go hungry, where democracy can't function, and where countless ethnic and religious conflicts have displaced and killed tens of thousands. Maybe you don't think any of those things of Africa. Maybe like most people you don't think about Africa at all or any of the world for that matter. The fact of the matter is that roughly 8,000 people die of Aids everyday on the African continent. Everyday over 20,000 children are orphaned and everyday more and more people are killed or displaced by unnecessary violence. The majority of this happens in sub-Saharan Africa. Where politics, religion, and the Sahara desert divide, poverty unites. 


Whether in Cairo or Nairobi it's apparent that you're in the developing world. Trash lines the streets, buildings show a more than appropriate level of dilapidation, and idle potential workers sit outside of run down store fronts or try their hand at hawking goods on the street. This is a continent in need of financial repair. Their farming practices, their industries, their governments, and their education systems are all in need of repair. Thus far our means of resolving these problems have been to, to put it truly, "throw money at them," or food or whatever it may be. We, especially the US have decided against truly investing ourselves within a continent that has been nothing but exploited by foreigners for hundreds of years. We have decided that our interests as a nation lie elsewhere. We have decided that the genocide in Southern Sudan, the ethnic crisis in Rwanda, and the collapse of the Zimbabwean government are not of direct importance to our government. Our aid in these instances either never came (in the case of Zimbabwe) or came once things got so bad, once so many people died we could ignore them no longer. Even then our aid came through money given to the United Nations. Money, that's all we'll give. 


I recently finished reading a book titled When a Crocodile Eats the Sun , a memoir about a white Zimbabwean's life during the collapse of Zimbabwe. I highly recommend the book. It intersperses the unencumbered rise of Mugabe's regime with the story of the author's dieing father. The book talks about the state of things in present Zimbabwe, a country suffering from over a million percent inflation, a country that drove out all its able bodied white land owners and divided their large farms up amongst undeserving government pawns, a country who 30 years ago was more economically, socially, and educationally advanced than most of the continent. Now a nominal democracy exists run by an 86 year old man named Robert Mugabe who enjoys a nice life while his people suffer jobless, homeless, and hungry. This isn't a unique situation in Africa. Somalia barely has a government and Liberia has had two civil wars since 1989 killing 250,000 people. But we in America shield ourselves from these things. Ignorance is bliss but we can't remain that way forever. 


In Cairo I've found myself in poverty stricken areas. Places where you keep a hand on your back pocket as a group of children approach you to make sure nobody grabs for your wallet, places that smell of trash and urine, places where the people look at you and try to figure out why you came to their part of town. I walk through these places as I have in Nairobi, in Waco, Tx, and in Mexico City and feel utterly powerless. I can do nothing for these people. Nothing. In all of these places I get invited into people's homes, excited that I'm there, and they talk and do everything they can to make me feel welcome. But I can't do anything for them. I can only see them. I can only tell their stories and tell people about their plight. I can't do anything but maybe you can. Maybe you can adopt a child or sponsor one; maybe you can join the peace corp or even help out someone who is; even if you all you do is read a book about something that's going on and educate yourself, any of this is better then living in ignorance. Poverty is an international disease that  requires our collective knowledge to be cured.