I had a rather discouraging conversation the other night with a former Peace Corps volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t want to give away too many details, as I’m afraid, given the relatively small number of Peace Corps members recently back from that region, she could be identified. Suffice to say her job was to educate people in rural areas about AIDS/HIV, and to keeps general tabs on various “at risk” individuals, in an attempt to insure they were getting proper health care for themselves and their children.
She said she started out loving the place, developed a love/hate sentiment, and ended up being utterly sapped of hope for the people volunteered to assist. She felt a deep sense of shame about her lost optimism, but could not escape the strong suspicion that most of the folks in her charge were “beyond help”. “Africa nearly destroyed me,” she said, “and I’m just so glad to be back here, and not there anymore.”
She’s a very attractive woman, which got her no end of unwanted attention. That was her first and most personally threatening trouble, and she confessed to never feeling physically safe on her own. She said the level of misogyny she encountered on a regular basis strained belief, and achieved horrifying proportions when juxtoposed with the issue of sexual health. All the terrible things you may have heard, stories of infant rape (a supposed cure for HIV infection), refusal to use condoms, battery and ostracision of female AIDS sufferers (while men continued to infect with impunity), the traffic of child slaves/prostitutes…all are troubles she said she encountered first-hand. She was terribly disappointed also with female complicity in the deadly misogyny; what women there lacked in physical menace, they more than made up in emotional terrorism of those women who were branded promiscuous “AIDS whores” (or something to that effect).
She said medicines for the sick were routinely pilfered by govt. authorities to be sold or given to those with favor. She estimated 10% or less of the money, food, and drugs meant for the masses actually made it to them; the bulk was coopted and sold on the black market, or simply destroyed to settle tribal disputes. She described the behavior of some petty chieftains towards the members of other tribes as nothing short of genocide; instead of Rawandan-style machete maiming and murdering, the “chieftains” in her region used the slower and subtler starvation and disease (most of the time). Guerilla groups would enter from across the border to rape and pilliage, stealing much needed medical supplies and food to give to their soldiers. Occasionally domestic soldiers would do the same.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Her final analysis: She wasn’t sure if sending aid to Africa was a good use of resources. If she had only one bag of grain to send either to Africa or someplace else, she would send it someplace else, for the simple reason that elsewhere it would not be wasted. She described a region on a path towards willful self-destruction, and claimed she could no longer see how the developed world bore further responsibility for sub-Saharan societal pathology. With an air of almost palpalble self-reproach, she admitted she had to wonder of “colonialism didn’t help Africa more than it hurt it.” If you knew her, you would understand what a remarkable thing it was to hear this coming from her mouth.
It made me wonder. It made me wonder a lot. What to do about Africa? Should we do anything any longer?
) Similarly, neither you nor I nor anybody in the World is a Devil impaling a baby on his pitchfork (this is a metaphor, I need to remember to point this out to you, Futile Gesture.) We are Apes. We are, at best, Apes that have learned to wear hats–at worst, apes with blood on our paws. This is out only collective legacy. We will never be the semi-Divine creatures you seem to want us to be. We are only Apes. Europe, Africa, America, Asia. All merely Apes. [/li]