I want to engage more with online and print articles on the subjects that I am interested in (travel, international development, gender issues, etc.) So here is my first article review.
Title: Innocence abroad
Author: Karen Kleiss
Source: Edmonton Journal, May 17th, 2008
To read the full story go here.
But the short version is basically this: A kind, generous and recently widowed Alberta housewife has never traveled past California. She decides to honor her husband’s memory by traveling to Malawi, investing every last bit of her money in a school for orphans. Despite her good intentions, the school flounders in reality of sub-Saharan Africa and basically falls apart, leaving her all but penniless.
Overall, I thought this was a very interesting and well-written article. The story of Charmaine, a Canadian woman with her heart in the right place is touching, sad and poignant. Charmaine’s well-intended but naïve foray into development work that didn’t work out at all is a great metaphor for wider development assistance. (Of course, governments don’t exhaust their funds, since hardly any countries allot more than 0.7 of GDP to development aid.) The author highlights this at the end of the article by including a short section on the drawbacks and failures of foreign aid:
The inability of western aid agencies to alleviate poverty is as old as the notion of aid itself.
I also think that it is great that the author took a fresh spin on a subject that tends to be written about in the same way over and over. (You know, the whole “the cute little boy, covered with flies, frowned because he hadn’t eaten in three days and had worked 13 hours yesterday to feed his 18 younger siblings.”) It is good to add something new and more critical to public discourse on development in Africa, without resorting to clichés.
At the same time, though, I have a beef – with how the author portrays Malawians throughout the article. Generally speaking, the locals seem to have either one of the following roles:
1) Passive recipients of foreign aid – hopelessly poor and without agency:
Charmaine and Tambra gave their hearts to the desperate people of Njewa. Villagers lined up to ask for money to buy maize meal or to taxi the sick to hospital. They bandaged wounds. They helped HIV-positive villagers access health care and paid for shelter. They started an adult literacy group and a youth group and scrounged money to buy food for grandmothers caring for six or eight or 10 orphans… They gave their groceries away.
While certainly what Charmaine and Tambra did was surely appreciated and helpful, this paragraph insinuates that without the foreigners’ help, these Malawians would not be able to cope. What this overlooks is the many strategies that the locals use every day to improve and cope with their own lives.
Or take the following example:
At 12, [Maramiko] he spent most of his time loafing around Njewa, a collection of dusty, fly-blown villages on the outskirts of Malawi’s capital city, Lilongwe…. At night, he and the other children spread themselves on the packed mud floor to sleep, with mats, without pillows. Illiterate and poor, he might have ended up working in another man’s fields, or smuggling diesel along the Mchingi highway to Zambia.
But a little over a year ago, a teacher asked him if he wanted to go to a school for orphans built by a 63-year-old widowed Edmonton housewife… now, at 13, he is at the top of his Grade 3 class.
In other words, Maramiko was “doing nothing” until this foreign-built school came along.
2) Corrupt and crooked Africans who spoil development efforts:
The line grew longer as word spread, and people started arriving from neighbouring villages, asking why they couldn’t have new clothes, too. A loud argument broke out. A man ran up and snatched one of the boxes, and the crowd erupted… [Speaking to the village chief, Charmaine said] “If I can give this dog a cookies from my mouth without trouble, why can’t I give clothing to your people without trouble?
Or, after realizing so much had been stolen from the organization:
The housekeeper, the driver, the school administrator – they were all in on it. They took the blankets and clothes and sold them out of the trunk of the charity’s car at the market in Lilongwe. She suspended them, laid charges, had them jailed. But she blamed herself for putting temptation in their way.
Of course, this isn’t to say that there aren’t corrupt people in Malawi, or that there aren’t people that could use assistance. But it is important not to paint a people in a “saint or sinner” kind of way. There are people who are neither passively needy nor corrupt. And everyone – in every country – has at least some agency and strengths as well or faults. The author, I’m sure, was only highlighting what happened to this organization, but I think it’s possible to pick more balanced representations of a country’s people. With this kind of change, I think the writer can make her fresh approaches better.
*******
Speaking of, um, Africa, check out my friend Chris’ blog entry about Nigerian film. Apparently the Nigerian film industry, or “Nollywood,” has replaced Hollywood as the second-largest producer of films. (The first being Bollywood of course.)
Does this mean that soon us North Americans will be able to see excellent Nollywood movies like “100% Husband”? I sure hope so! (Kinda.)
Post a Comment