summer lovin

For my birthday, my friend Michelle sent me a copy of Vanity Fair’s Africa issue (thanks Michelle!). One of the things about being in Benin, or Africa, is that you slowly become skeptical of what people back home are saying about this place. First of all, there’s the tendency to talk about “Africa”, as if it were one country. Or an issue, like HIV/AIDs or the illegal arms trade. As in “wow, somebody should really do something about Africa”. Then there’s the tendency to sensationalize, generalize, and simplify. Africa is not a country, it’s a continent, made up of places as disparate as Tunisia and Sierre Leone, Benin and South Africa, Chad and Namibia. It’s impossible to generalize even just Benin, with its 80+ ethnic groups and languages.
So you can understand why I opened the magazine with a bit of distrust. But by the time I’d read the last article, I was surprisingly satisfied. The guest editor, Bono (have you heard of him?), did a good job selecting a variety of articles that touched on the great diversity of this continent: literature, music, economics, and the more usual issues of disease, poverty, and war. Besides a gigantic article on Princess Diana, I was impressed with the justice that was done. I don’t know if the magazine is still on the stands, but I encourage anyone to find a copy.
At the same time, I encourage you to read and listen to news and stories coming out of Africa, or about Africa, with a discerning and judging mind. For example, one of the more shallow articles in the magazine I mentioned was a compilation of paragraph-long statements by U.S. presidential candidates, stating what their foreign policy towards Africa would be like. Would it be fair to ask any candidate what their foreign policy towards Europe, or Asia, would be like? To be blunt, its ridiculous. Some questions I might suggest asking when hearing about “Africa”:
-What country is being talked about?
-What European country colonized this African country? (it does make a
difference whether it was the French, the British, the Belgians, etc)
- When talking about monetary aid, specifically how will the money be
distributed? Who will actually be conducting the programs? The government?
Private organizations? Companies?
- When talking about specific issues, like education, ask yourself what would need to be done to make things better. For instance, one candidate committed themselves to increasing the numbers of children in primary school in Africa. This sounds great, but unless there is also a commitment to train and pay teachers, to expand classrooms, to improve and update curriculum, to provide school lunches, and to make sure that there are more opportunities for people once they ARE educated, the whole idea falls short.

And that’s my rant for the day.

Now for those of you wondering about me, specifically. I’m doing great. After spending two weeks in my village, with no work to do, I’m on my way south for a month. The new crop of Peace Corps trainees has just arrived, so I’ll spend three weeks at their training site. I’m also going to Ghana to take the GRE, and, let’s be honest, take a vacation. This is all exciting stuff, but I’m also excited to go back to Tobre at the end of it all. The last two weeks I spent there were well-spent: studying for the GRE, cracking shea nuts with my neighbors, talking with colleagues, and sitting with friends. One of my friends is a seamstress. She had a baby boy about two and half months ago, and I hadn’t seen her in that amount of time. Last week, she went back to working in her shop, which also serves as a hang out place for women. So I spent hours sitting with her, holding the new baby. Did I mention that she doesn’t speak French? Our only communication is through my scraps of Bariba, her scraps of French, and body language. Beautiful.
Before I left, I was given lists of things to bring back for people. The “bonnes choses” (“good stuff”). Some things specifically asked for were English books from Ghana, a prayer mat, and sea water. I’m still confused about the last one, but at least they’re not asking me to bring back digital cameras and electricity.