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It was a familiar scene today at a village market: an old woman, hunched over, leaning towards me to ask for money. She looks right into my eyes, shamelessly, as she asks, and puts her free hand up to her mouth as if to suggest she's hungry. Two village women stand behind me watching my reaction to the old lady. What do I do?
I bet among you, or any other random sample of U.S. citizens, your answers would vary. Do you reach into your pockets? Do you pretend not to hear her until she finally leaves? Do you respond but say you have no money?
I never really had a consistent response in the states. Sometimes I reached into my pockets. Sometimes I didn't. The only really consistent reaction I ever had was to try to forget seconds later that I just passed someone who begged me for money. Why think about it for too long? You'll go mad overanalyzing a problem that's not going to be solved, and the person on the street corner will be back the next day...and the next day...offering you the opportunity to ponder his situation then if you want.
Right or wrong, I tried to avoid thinking about the subject of poverty. But its a little bit harder to now that I'm in Burkina Faso. Burkina is one of the poorest countries in the world. I get asked for money all the time, directly in the market, or indirectly with those I work with who are interested in starting "projects", a term used to imply a proposed activity that needs to be "financed-by-someone-other-than-us". Sooner or later, I've got to come out of the fuzzy, inconsistent grey matter of avoiding un-fun subjects and tackle the question - which goes beyond beggars on the street - "to give money to the poor or not to give money to the poor?"
The unofficial sentiment among Peace Corps Burkina Faso workers is: fight the urge to instantly gratify and don't give money unless the project is sustainable (ie: don't spend your two years coordinating clothing drives or writing grants to U.S. companies trying to get money). Inevitably, the argument goes, you'll leave after two years and the Burkinabe will be no better off - the clothes will soon be worn out, the people won't have the capacity to write grants without you. What's worse, you'll feed into the notion that Africa will always be the recipient of charity, unable to stand on its own two feet.
So, in my first year here, I've kind of adopted that approach, not able to counter it with any better argument. Sustainability has been my motto. I've started microcredit clubs with illiterate women - where they buy their own piggy bank and they save their own money and I'm just there to teach them about how to give loans to each other. I've talked to vulnerable populations about AIDS and taught grown men and women how to put condoms on (which may have been against the preference of the current U.S. administration...shhh). I've spent this past month going from village to village in my region, teaching my friends about native-grown trees and how nutritious their leaves are for malnourished children. I think that all activities have successfully met the requirements for "sustainablility" - they've cost nothing, and maybe they've taught a few poor men and women how to better their lives in some small way. They were incredibly rewarding projects for me.
But as I'm rounding the one year mark, I'm starting to change tunes. The change impulse was reading the book "Mountains Beyond Mountains". (For any of you wanting to add a book to your summer reading list, I can't think of a better one). I was completely and utterly inspired by Dr. Farmer's story to rethink the notion that "gift-giving to the poor is unsustainable and therefore not recommended". In the book, Farmer questions the value of constraints placed on international health projects to be 100% sustainable (ie: Don't give away expensive TB medicine for free! Don't give your patients small gifts! It's not sustainable!) when to treat a TB patient in New York city costs something like $60,000 per patient. He makes the case that if we're going to talk about cost efficiency, lets start with the massive spending problems in our own country, and not bicker over the peanuts we might be giving for free to some of the world's poorest people.
Over the past few months in my village, I've been questioning whether or not to try and help the community to find the money to build a bridge over a river that cuts off one village from the rest of the community. I've had to wade through this river with waist-high water and strong currents. And for a while, I thought, "Resist the urge to find them money for a bridge. Teach them to save up for it. Teach them to take control of their own community and stop looking for handouts". But the truth of the matter is, these villagers, my friends, can't take full control over their own community because their government is not supporting them enough. Corruption breeds in waters of Ouagadougou, we'd all be naive to think that international money given to the governments of many African nations ends up in the hands of its most deserving citizens.
It's a tough call to make - whether or not to give money to the poor, and if so, how. If I found the money for that bridge, it would be like a gift. It would be like giving the beggar fifty cents. But I'm going to spend a bit of my next year here trying the slightly un-kosher approach, not yet convinced that sustainability is such a golden word. I might try to build that bridge, I might try to find some fancy extras for their schools. I don't care anymore if this feeds into the idea that "whites" are just walking around with pockets full of money, and that we'll just continue to give charitable gifts so no need for the Burkinabe to work problems through themselves. The fact of the matter is, relatively, we ARE all walking around with pockets full of money. And for Burkinabe to take control of their own nation, some sort of corruption-reform has got to take place, which no Peace Corps volunteer can solve. So I'm going to try some different approaches, and see what works and what doesn't in my village. We'll see.
When I've said to many of you in letters that Peace Corps is challenging, I think this kind of gets to the heart of it. It isn't the heat. It isn't biking in the mud. Any of my frustrations that arise as a result of this being a poor country - the lack of food, the lack of good transport, a mentality you often can not identify with - have, at their root, a connection to this dilemna. The food could be better - the money exists for it in this world. The transport could be better - the money is out there to make it better. But how to make it better? That, is the question, for anyone trying to develop anything I guess.
Thoughts welcome. :) A bientot.
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