Free markets are thriving in Freetown and throughout Sierra Leone. You see the competition all around you.
Except the capital is war and poverty. The clients are expats. And the merchants are anyone with a story of suffering and hardship to tell. And the product is horror.
All along the streets and beaches, Sierra Leoneans compete with each other over finding and often contriving the right story to tell of war, poverty, and loss. Sometimes the pitch is simply nudging you with the remaining stumps on their arms (or “residuals” as prosthetic limb designers call them) or asking for money to watch the African cup. Some are prepared with letters and documents of their hardship and needs. Some just follow you for miles on the beaches, requesting aid as your new found Padi (Friend) or Brother. Some tell of their families being killed in the war; some tell of their hungry children at home; some simply tap on the window as your car drives by; some stick their deformed arms in your face or grab your hand pleading for money and food to eat.
It’s a skill, honed by years of sales to expats, discerning what the NGO or UN agency or individual needs to hear to open up the pocketbook and dole out some money. It’s a talent finding the right pitch to reach into the deep pockets of white man, sympathetic and naïve. And so hardships and difficulties are invented, and Sierra Leoneans become fierce advocates for their own impotence so the white man can come and rescue them.
But the pitch becomes so good, comes so often, it becomes harder to discern truth from lie, genuine hardship from contrived. But then, in a country like Sierra Leone, with a life expectancy around 40, with 75% of the population under $2 a day, with over a quarter of the children dying before the age of 5, what hardship isn’t genuine here?
George Packer wrote of war amputees who were brought to Long Island, New York, to be fitted with expensive prosthetic limbs and then returned to their homes in Sierra Leone. He discovered that many of the prosthetic limbs were left gathering dust in some corner of their shack or tin hut. It was so much harder to get sympathy with a nice prosthetic limb on your residual… victimhood was so much easier without a visible sign of the aid you’ve already received.
Maybe this isn’t the capitalism, the free market Adam Smith had in mind. Maybe this is an example where individual self-interest is counter-productive, causing people – like me, with deep pockets and sympathy – to no longer know who to believe and then turn away by default, even from the genuinely needy and genuinely honest. Maybe this is part of the irrationality of man, Kahneman’s psychology of decision-making, injecting itself into the rational calculation of economics. Maybe this is a downside Smith or Milton didn’t consider… Milton, the economist, but I suppose John Milton pertains as well.
For truly, a country sitting on billions in diamonds, with rutile, bauxite, petroleum and now even uranium; a country with arable land and vast fisheries; a country with miles of stretching beaches for the European tourist; a country with all that relying on free market victimhood and horror, isn’t that truly a paradise lost?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
White Man in Africa
Several months ago I was working in my office and one of the local cleaning girls came in. She had been cleaning my office for the last couple days. I like to talk with most of the cleaning and security staff, so I asked what her name was and how she was doing, briefly chatting about a local Sierra Leonean band, Jungle Leaders, and their popular album Pak En Go. Within moments of becoming friendly, the whole dynamic changed and I began to feel uncomfortable, both with her and the other cleaning staff. Like many before me, I had become another rich white man about to rescue some cleaning girl from poverty.
I decided I shouldn’t be as friendly in the future.
Walking to work on a weekend, I stopped and chatted with some kids, saying “hi” or “kushe.” As I was walking away, a couple girls in the group approached and threw their arms around me. I kept walking and shrugged them off as they began offering me prices.
Taking the back road to my apartment, Fatima, a pretty Sierra Leonean girl I met a couple times near my apartment, waved me over to her place, where another girl was doing her hair. Both were probably no more than 14 or 15. She smiled at me and asked how was work, and said she'd see me tomorrow.
In bars and nightclubs in Mali, in restaurants in Senegal and Guinea, on the streets in Sierra Leone, being a white man in Africa… It's almost disturbing to see how easily one could be seduced by the power at your fingertips.
-------
On the way back from work, I took a poda-poda (shared mini-bus) to Congo Cross on the way up to Wilberforce. The poda-poda stopped to drop someone off, and a man standing by the road offered the normal greeting, “Hey White man.” And added, “You come here and fuck our sisters.”
It was rude. It was offensive. And too often, it was right.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note:
After posting On Prostitutes and Whores, the topic emerged in the national news in the US with the Spitzer prostitution ring scandal. This led to several interesting articles on the various approaches regarding various legal approaches to prostitution. Most notably, Sweden has legalized prostitution but, in contrast to Amsterdam for instance, focuses on arresting and prosecuting the clients. Initial evidence suggests that clamping down on the demand and treating prostitutes as victims has been the most effective. The Spitzer scandal is also ironic because Spitzer had taken the lead in reforming New York State law by signing, only last month, a bill strengthening the law against clients (such as himself). New York Times also carried a recent op-ed arguing that the theory women choose prostitution is generally a "myth" propagated by the clients.
I decided I shouldn’t be as friendly in the future.
Walking to work on a weekend, I stopped and chatted with some kids, saying “hi” or “kushe.” As I was walking away, a couple girls in the group approached and threw their arms around me. I kept walking and shrugged them off as they began offering me prices.
Taking the back road to my apartment, Fatima, a pretty Sierra Leonean girl I met a couple times near my apartment, waved me over to her place, where another girl was doing her hair. Both were probably no more than 14 or 15. She smiled at me and asked how was work, and said she'd see me tomorrow.
In bars and nightclubs in Mali, in restaurants in Senegal and Guinea, on the streets in Sierra Leone, being a white man in Africa… It's almost disturbing to see how easily one could be seduced by the power at your fingertips.
-------
On the way back from work, I took a poda-poda (shared mini-bus) to Congo Cross on the way up to Wilberforce. The poda-poda stopped to drop someone off, and a man standing by the road offered the normal greeting, “Hey White man.” And added, “You come here and fuck our sisters.”
It was rude. It was offensive. And too often, it was right.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note:
After posting On Prostitutes and Whores, the topic emerged in the national news in the US with the Spitzer prostitution ring scandal. This led to several interesting articles on the various approaches regarding various legal approaches to prostitution. Most notably, Sweden has legalized prostitution but, in contrast to Amsterdam for instance, focuses on arresting and prosecuting the clients. Initial evidence suggests that clamping down on the demand and treating prostitutes as victims has been the most effective. The Spitzer scandal is also ironic because Spitzer had taken the lead in reforming New York State law by signing, only last month, a bill strengthening the law against clients (such as himself). New York Times also carried a recent op-ed arguing that the theory women choose prostitution is generally a "myth" propagated by the clients.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
On Prostitutes and Whores
Walking back from work at our temporary headquarters in Kimbima Hotel, I spotted a common sight in Sierra Leone and the developing world – a young relatively well-dressed girl escorting an elderly white male around. I ended up sharing a taxi with them part of the way up Lumley beach – the girl informing the clueless gentleman of the taxi-fare (three times the normal going rate) before they headed off to the open embrace of Bunker Beach Bar.
It’s an obvious guess that she was a prostitute. You see them all the time here – whether at Paddy’s – the notorious bar where UN staff such as myself are banned, Atlantic, or in the lobby of almost any hotel frequented by expats. Some are young; some are tall and skinny; some are short; and some are missing both hands.
Sometimes you just meet the pimps, like the teenage boys I met while wandering around the streets of Mopti and Bamako in Mali, eagerly offering up their “sisters” as “babies” where I could get “good sleep, no pay.”
They say wherever an army goes, prostitution follows. Perhaps, more accurately wherever humanity goes, prostitution follows. And in a country as impoverished as Sierra Leone, it’s easy to see why young girls and women capitalize on their comparative advantage in providing cheap sex to a mostly expat clientele… For a girl surviving a war without hands, why shouldn’t she, why wouldn’t she be willing to sell the rest of her body in order to survive?
As the taxi continued its way towards Lumley junction, it occurred to me that maybe the word prostitute or whore doesn’t even fit in many cases, at least not when one considers the origins of the words. The notion of sex for hire is actually not inherent in the etymology of prostitution; rather, “prostitution” has its roots in “sex indiscriminately offered” (fem. of prostitutus, pp. of prostituere, 1530). The dirtier and more offensive of the terms, “whore”, is derived from the Old English word hōra, which in term is from the Indo-European root kā meaning “desire” or “lust”, and the Proto-Germanic word khoraz (fem. khoron-) “one who desires.”
But many ‘prostitutes’ aren’t necessarily indiscriminate or lustful or desiring of sex. After all, they’re selling something – their body or sex – for something else. It’s anything but indiscriminate, and it’s not sex they’re after. Plenty of women and men in the US and worldwide give that away for free. We look down on prostitution because they’re exchanging something we believe shouldn’t be exchanged (sex and by implication self-respect, dignity) for money. Except in places like Sierra Leone, they may be exchanging sex for survival or some chance, no matter how slim, to escape from the grind of every day life, and that is something harder to ask someone to give up. Especially when all we have to offer is some esoteric ideal of human dignity and self-respect – a Kantian Kingdom of Ends far removed from the biting poverty of the here-and-now… And it is far removed from how the “civilized” world has functioned and continues to function. After all the exchange of sex/mating for stability (measured generally in terms of material comforts) has been a central feature of marriage and courtship and dating for time memorial.
But of course all this leaves out half of the picture, namely the elderly chap being led off to Bunker Beach bar – the clients or the “Johns”. The Johns are also exchanging something for sex but not nearly as much stigma is attached to the male clients that feed the industry. Because of the ingrained sexism of our language and culture, the names for Johns are not nearly as varied or colorful or insulting as those for whores, hookers, sluts, and strumpets. After all the clients don’t live in shanty towns and slums or learn to deftly manipulate clothing with the remaining stumps on their arms; instead, they return to their civilized professional careers as UN employees, NGOs workers, businessmen, lawyers, and politicians. But more than any prostitute, these men are exchanging money in order to be able to carry out their lust and fantasies. And they’re the ones continuing to feed a multi-billion dollar industry often based on the rape of children and modern day “comfort women”; a multi-billion dollar industry based on people choosing to turn themselves into an object to be sold on the market.
In the end, I don’t know if she was a prostitute… but I’m fairly certain he was a whore.
It’s an obvious guess that she was a prostitute. You see them all the time here – whether at Paddy’s – the notorious bar where UN staff such as myself are banned, Atlantic, or in the lobby of almost any hotel frequented by expats. Some are young; some are tall and skinny; some are short; and some are missing both hands.
Sometimes you just meet the pimps, like the teenage boys I met while wandering around the streets of Mopti and Bamako in Mali, eagerly offering up their “sisters” as “babies” where I could get “good sleep, no pay.”
They say wherever an army goes, prostitution follows. Perhaps, more accurately wherever humanity goes, prostitution follows. And in a country as impoverished as Sierra Leone, it’s easy to see why young girls and women capitalize on their comparative advantage in providing cheap sex to a mostly expat clientele… For a girl surviving a war without hands, why shouldn’t she, why wouldn’t she be willing to sell the rest of her body in order to survive?
As the taxi continued its way towards Lumley junction, it occurred to me that maybe the word prostitute or whore doesn’t even fit in many cases, at least not when one considers the origins of the words. The notion of sex for hire is actually not inherent in the etymology of prostitution; rather, “prostitution” has its roots in “sex indiscriminately offered” (fem. of prostitutus, pp. of prostituere, 1530). The dirtier and more offensive of the terms, “whore”, is derived from the Old English word hōra, which in term is from the Indo-European root kā meaning “desire” or “lust”, and the Proto-Germanic word khoraz (fem. khoron-) “one who desires.”
But many ‘prostitutes’ aren’t necessarily indiscriminate or lustful or desiring of sex. After all, they’re selling something – their body or sex – for something else. It’s anything but indiscriminate, and it’s not sex they’re after. Plenty of women and men in the US and worldwide give that away for free. We look down on prostitution because they’re exchanging something we believe shouldn’t be exchanged (sex and by implication self-respect, dignity) for money. Except in places like Sierra Leone, they may be exchanging sex for survival or some chance, no matter how slim, to escape from the grind of every day life, and that is something harder to ask someone to give up. Especially when all we have to offer is some esoteric ideal of human dignity and self-respect – a Kantian Kingdom of Ends far removed from the biting poverty of the here-and-now… And it is far removed from how the “civilized” world has functioned and continues to function. After all the exchange of sex/mating for stability (measured generally in terms of material comforts) has been a central feature of marriage and courtship and dating for time memorial.
But of course all this leaves out half of the picture, namely the elderly chap being led off to Bunker Beach bar – the clients or the “Johns”. The Johns are also exchanging something for sex but not nearly as much stigma is attached to the male clients that feed the industry. Because of the ingrained sexism of our language and culture, the names for Johns are not nearly as varied or colorful or insulting as those for whores, hookers, sluts, and strumpets. After all the clients don’t live in shanty towns and slums or learn to deftly manipulate clothing with the remaining stumps on their arms; instead, they return to their civilized professional careers as UN employees, NGOs workers, businessmen, lawyers, and politicians. But more than any prostitute, these men are exchanging money in order to be able to carry out their lust and fantasies. And they’re the ones continuing to feed a multi-billion dollar industry often based on the rape of children and modern day “comfort women”; a multi-billion dollar industry based on people choosing to turn themselves into an object to be sold on the market.
In the end, I don’t know if she was a prostitute… but I’m fairly certain he was a whore.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Random Stories
My office on Jomo Kenyatta road is undergoing renovations so we moved “temporarily” (i.e. 3-4 months) to Kimbima Hotel at Man of War Bay in Aberdeen. My “office” is now a former hotel room with a balcony that overlooks the Atlantic. You can walk out to the balcony and watch dolphins in the Atlantic.
---
On the way back from work, I pass Lumley beach. Some days you can see the amputee soccer game around dusk. The ones who lost a leg play as strikers and defenders, moving around deftly on crutches and carrying out vicious take-downs by using their crutches to rip the other players’ crutches away. The ones who lost hands or arms play as goalkeepers.
---
Sample songs written by children in two villages of Kenema District, Sierra Leone, as part of the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) project.
Mende:
“A’ mu heimie yeh seseh -
Kekeh latrine bur mu weh
Mu gbe a li la dogbui hur
Nao mia wah a hegbei”
English:
“Keep our environment clean
Father dig us some toilet
So we can stop going into
The bush to shit
Because this will cause illness”
Krio:
“A luk titi na wati dan di
Na kaka, kaka di gei gei oh, oh….
Na sei oh, kaka di gei korela, oh…
Na korela, kaka di gei, belerun, oh….
Na belerun”
English:
“I look over there what did
I see is shit, shit can cause
Sickness oh, oh… sickness, shit
Can cause cholera, oh… cholera,
Shit can cause dysentery, oh… dysentery”
Sierra Leone has the highest child and maternal mortality rate in the world.
---
On the way back from work, I pass Lumley beach. Some days you can see the amputee soccer game around dusk. The ones who lost a leg play as strikers and defenders, moving around deftly on crutches and carrying out vicious take-downs by using their crutches to rip the other players’ crutches away. The ones who lost hands or arms play as goalkeepers.
---
Sample songs written by children in two villages of Kenema District, Sierra Leone, as part of the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) project.
Mende:
“A’ mu heimie yeh seseh -
Kekeh latrine bur mu weh
Mu gbe a li la dogbui hur
Nao mia wah a hegbei”
English:
“Keep our environment clean
Father dig us some toilet
So we can stop going into
The bush to shit
Because this will cause illness”
Krio:
“A luk titi na wati dan di
Na kaka, kaka di gei gei oh, oh….
Na sei oh, kaka di gei korela, oh…
Na korela, kaka di gei, belerun, oh….
Na belerun”
English:
“I look over there what did
I see is shit, shit can cause
Sickness oh, oh… sickness, shit
Can cause cholera, oh… cholera,
Shit can cause dysentery, oh… dysentery”
Sierra Leone has the highest child and maternal mortality rate in the world.
Friday, February 29, 2008
A girl from Moyamba
Several months ago a colleague of mine told me about a case he was working on. Four years ago a 14 year old orphan girl in Moyamba district, Sierra Leone, was offered “love” by a young man. She rejected him. Later when she was going to collect palm wine, he ambushed her, attacked her with a cutlass, and raped her. As a result of her injuries, she started bleeding through her nose and nipples during menstruation. She has to be hospitalized every month, and recently has been going into a severe fit every time.
After the initial attack, the man said he’d take medical responsibility for her. No surprise he didn’t. Instead, a year ago he attacked and assaulted her again. She’s now confined to a safehouse and a hospital every month when she menstruates. He’s living in his town, out on bail.
Since I heard about this girl in Moyamba, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about her. It’s with me wherever I go.
As someone focused on human rights issues, it’s not as if I haven’t read or seen my share of horrors. And like many people here, I almost believed, in a twisted way, optimistically and naively that I couldn’t be shocked anymore. But this was new. A way of suffering I never even knew or could have imagined possible.
Dostoyevsky commented, “We talk of bestial cruelty. But that is a cruel insult to the beasts. A beast can never be so artistically cruel as a man.” We can and should admire the amazing artistry of beauty in this world, but the darkness is just as artistic, just as creative, just as inventive.
I thought then, and I think now of Ivan Karamazov querying his brother Alyosha in the smoky tavern. He tells Alyosha about a “poor child of five.”
"(She) was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?"
And he asks Alyosha, if Alyosha could create a world to guarantee man’s future happiness, where he could transform all suffering into joy and comfort, but only on the condition that “it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
When Dostoyevsky left the Siberia prison camp where he was exiled for six years, he commented, “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Like Kierkegaard, the despair of a godless world, where “everything would be permitted,” terrified him too much. So even if it meant rejecting truth, they decided to take the leap of faith, accept Pascal’s wager, and simply embrace god as a divine placebo to the hopelessness they saw facing them otherwise. There would be none of Feuerbach’s ability to find hope in the rejection of god and embrace of “the anthropological essence of religion” - god as merely a projection of man. Nor would they be able to find comfort in the Nietzschean “will to power” after the declaration of the death of god. Rather faith in god grew partially from the fertile soil of fear, fear that if they “gazed into the abyss the abyss would gaze also into them,” fear that a life without god could only be sustained by Schopenhauer’s irrational “will to live,” fear that the world may really be as dark as it often appears, and only some otherworldly power and faith could salvage the wreck.
But I’m not concerned with whether god exists or not. Stuck with my Euclidean mind, it’s an answer beyond my ability to discern. Perhaps I prefer to take the folk singer Iris Dement’s refrain and “let the mystery be,” or bear homage to Kierkegaard’s concession that he is too stupid to understand philosophy, and philosophy is too clever to understand his stupidity. I just can’t help but wonder: Dostoyevsky argued that without god, all things are permitted. But if god does exist, if god can and does act in this world, and if a girl will bleed every month through her nose and nipples, what things aren’t permitted, even with god?
My question is then like Ivan’s. If you could create an architecture guaranteeing man’s future happiness, divine justice, the conversion of all pain to joy, but one girl must be raped and have to bleed every month through her nose and nipples… would you consent? And perhaps more importantly, could you praise such an architect?
After the initial attack, the man said he’d take medical responsibility for her. No surprise he didn’t. Instead, a year ago he attacked and assaulted her again. She’s now confined to a safehouse and a hospital every month when she menstruates. He’s living in his town, out on bail.
Since I heard about this girl in Moyamba, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about her. It’s with me wherever I go.
As someone focused on human rights issues, it’s not as if I haven’t read or seen my share of horrors. And like many people here, I almost believed, in a twisted way, optimistically and naively that I couldn’t be shocked anymore. But this was new. A way of suffering I never even knew or could have imagined possible.
Dostoyevsky commented, “We talk of bestial cruelty. But that is a cruel insult to the beasts. A beast can never be so artistically cruel as a man.” We can and should admire the amazing artistry of beauty in this world, but the darkness is just as artistic, just as creative, just as inventive.
I thought then, and I think now of Ivan Karamazov querying his brother Alyosha in the smoky tavern. He tells Alyosha about a “poor child of five.”
"(She) was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?"
And he asks Alyosha, if Alyosha could create a world to guarantee man’s future happiness, where he could transform all suffering into joy and comfort, but only on the condition that “it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
When Dostoyevsky left the Siberia prison camp where he was exiled for six years, he commented, “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Like Kierkegaard, the despair of a godless world, where “everything would be permitted,” terrified him too much. So even if it meant rejecting truth, they decided to take the leap of faith, accept Pascal’s wager, and simply embrace god as a divine placebo to the hopelessness they saw facing them otherwise. There would be none of Feuerbach’s ability to find hope in the rejection of god and embrace of “the anthropological essence of religion” - god as merely a projection of man. Nor would they be able to find comfort in the Nietzschean “will to power” after the declaration of the death of god. Rather faith in god grew partially from the fertile soil of fear, fear that if they “gazed into the abyss the abyss would gaze also into them,” fear that a life without god could only be sustained by Schopenhauer’s irrational “will to live,” fear that the world may really be as dark as it often appears, and only some otherworldly power and faith could salvage the wreck.
But I’m not concerned with whether god exists or not. Stuck with my Euclidean mind, it’s an answer beyond my ability to discern. Perhaps I prefer to take the folk singer Iris Dement’s refrain and “let the mystery be,” or bear homage to Kierkegaard’s concession that he is too stupid to understand philosophy, and philosophy is too clever to understand his stupidity. I just can’t help but wonder: Dostoyevsky argued that without god, all things are permitted. But if god does exist, if god can and does act in this world, and if a girl will bleed every month through her nose and nipples, what things aren’t permitted, even with god?
My question is then like Ivan’s. If you could create an architecture guaranteeing man’s future happiness, divine justice, the conversion of all pain to joy, but one girl must be raped and have to bleed every month through her nose and nipples… would you consent? And perhaps more importantly, could you praise such an architect?
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
On the road to freetown...
On Tuesday, I made my way back from Kabala in the Koinadugu District of Sierra Leone. We rolled down the windows of the 4WD, offering some relief from the heat by letting the dry, dusty, hot air rush into the car. As we pulled into Makeni for a brief stop to buy some vegetables, a woman came over. Her right arm was marred by severe burns from her hand to shoulder. The scars covered her flesh like a thick bacteria slowly crawling its way up and around her body. Her left hand was even worse. A mangled mess, her fingers wrapped around themselves and splayed off in different directions. You could only imagine what caused the injuries. Perhaps in the war she was caught in a Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attack; or perhaps the Civil Defence Force (CDF) or Kamajors suspected her of RUF complicity; or perhaps it was just a cooking or work accident. There are so many potential sources of pain and injury. It need not be as "glamorous" as civil war, genocide, slaughter, or torture. Torture comes in too many forms to narrow it down in such a way...
The woman approached our car, and shoved her disfigured hand in through the window into our faces, asking for money. Like anyone else, we recoiled, said no, and rolled up our windows. We finished our shopping and continued on our way back to Freetown.
I suppose I should try to say something profound now. But these things happen all the time here.
---
For reasons I may explain later, I came back from Kabala with a new sense of purpose in the choices I have made. Or at least I tell myself. I've always been good with words, laying out philosophy and principles with rhetorical and poetic flourish, but words without actions are dead, as James 2:20 reflected about faith. There's no need to write about all the new things I've learned or decided. If I really learned them, the only words that matter will be carried out through my actions, in the kingdom of the here-and-now, and anyone with eyes to see will be able to judge what really lies in my heart and in my head. For now, I depart with just one last reflection.
While climbing one of the many hills in Kabala, I thought about the great commission - the moment in the Christian story when Jesus tells the disciples to go out into the world and spread his word. Jack Miles argued in God: A Biography how, in the Jewish canon, God had been moved to silence after his argument with Job, how God never spoke again but became the silent, reclusive, tired Ancient of Days described in Daniel. What if the central narrative of the Bible is less about how God acts in the world, but how He's decided not to? Maybe the Great Commission is also a hand-off of responsibility to us, to take on the burden of the world and heal it, to become "world saviors," as the Gnostics would put it? Christian or not, maybe there will be great strength and power and compassion and love available to us if we seek it ("seek and you shall find") - whether from man's natural goodness, his ability to reason, or from the "divine spark" in each of our hearts, or whatever term of art we may use - but perhaps, at the end of the day, the only God to help us is the God within us. The responsibility is ours. And it's terrible and terrifying, and liberating...
We need not fly to Sierra Leone to find injustice and suffering. It can be found anywhere - in our cities, in our towns, in our neighborhoods, and in our day-to-day relationships, and it's just as real there as anywhere else. For human rights doesn't begin in some remote corner of the Congo, or some impoverished slum in Freetown. It begins at home - with how we treat everyone we profess to hold dear in our heart. If we can't do even that right... how can we ever talk about human rights and respect for man?
The woman approached our car, and shoved her disfigured hand in through the window into our faces, asking for money. Like anyone else, we recoiled, said no, and rolled up our windows. We finished our shopping and continued on our way back to Freetown.
I suppose I should try to say something profound now. But these things happen all the time here.
---
For reasons I may explain later, I came back from Kabala with a new sense of purpose in the choices I have made. Or at least I tell myself. I've always been good with words, laying out philosophy and principles with rhetorical and poetic flourish, but words without actions are dead, as James 2:20 reflected about faith. There's no need to write about all the new things I've learned or decided. If I really learned them, the only words that matter will be carried out through my actions, in the kingdom of the here-and-now, and anyone with eyes to see will be able to judge what really lies in my heart and in my head. For now, I depart with just one last reflection.
While climbing one of the many hills in Kabala, I thought about the great commission - the moment in the Christian story when Jesus tells the disciples to go out into the world and spread his word. Jack Miles argued in God: A Biography how, in the Jewish canon, God had been moved to silence after his argument with Job, how God never spoke again but became the silent, reclusive, tired Ancient of Days described in Daniel. What if the central narrative of the Bible is less about how God acts in the world, but how He's decided not to? Maybe the Great Commission is also a hand-off of responsibility to us, to take on the burden of the world and heal it, to become "world saviors," as the Gnostics would put it? Christian or not, maybe there will be great strength and power and compassion and love available to us if we seek it ("seek and you shall find") - whether from man's natural goodness, his ability to reason, or from the "divine spark" in each of our hearts, or whatever term of art we may use - but perhaps, at the end of the day, the only God to help us is the God within us. The responsibility is ours. And it's terrible and terrifying, and liberating...
We need not fly to Sierra Leone to find injustice and suffering. It can be found anywhere - in our cities, in our towns, in our neighborhoods, and in our day-to-day relationships, and it's just as real there as anywhere else. For human rights doesn't begin in some remote corner of the Congo, or some impoverished slum in Freetown. It begins at home - with how we treat everyone we profess to hold dear in our heart. If we can't do even that right... how can we ever talk about human rights and respect for man?
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Saving the world
The last village we visited today was Serabu in Kenema District of Sierra Leone. Our CLTS team, Kamboi, was already there implementing the strategy. While walking towards the meeting area, Kamal Kar - the pioneer of CLTS - noticed a young boy lying on the steps of a building. He asked the surrounding members of the community about the kid. The kid was clearly severely dehydrated in the dry, dusty 40 degree heat; his frail arms seeming as if they would break when we touched them. We got a water bottle from our vehicle, and gave him some salt and sugar water to rehydrate him. Our Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) escort took him to the local health center. As the kid began to vomit, the nurse reported that the village had a very high rate of diarrhea and dehydration but most didn’t come to the health center because of a local witch doctor.
While all this happened, our team worked diligently to carry out our strategy to get the community to clean up the village, unaware of the tragedy slowly unfolding steps away. How easy it is to become so focused on saving the world that you lose sight of saving one person.
(Children in the village of Serabu after they wrote and sang a song telling their community to clean up the village so they don't get sick and die)
(Children continuing through the village singing)
While all this happened, our team worked diligently to carry out our strategy to get the community to clean up the village, unaware of the tragedy slowly unfolding steps away. How easy it is to become so focused on saving the world that you lose sight of saving one person.
(Children in the village of Serabu after they wrote and sang a song telling their community to clean up the village so they don't get sick and die)
(Children continuing through the village singing)
Saturday, February 2, 2008
The many faces of Sierra Leone
I just spent a week working on a Community Led Total Sanitation project. I head up to Kenema for a week tomorrow to continue the project. During this week, I caught a glimpse of the many faces of Sierra Leone.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
A kid and an orange
A kid offered to buy me an orange today. I met him at Lumley beach as I was juggling with some other kids. He was with a group of friends of his, who were pushing him around in a wheelchair. When he came over to watch me, he crawled out of the wheelchair and slowly pulled himself across the sand - his right arm and leg inverted, twisting around themselves like a poorly formed vine. We tossed the ball back and forth, with him throwing the ball into various juggling patterns. He explained how he was living on the street around the bus station along Wallace Johnson street; he no longer had any family because most had been killed in the war or died of diseases. Beyond his fellow street kids, wheeling him around in his chair, he had no one. And then he offered to buy me an orange because he had some money.
When I was in Mali, as a UN employee, I “earned” DSA (Daily Subsistence Allowance) for resting. I earned more money by taking a vacation than these children may make in a lifetime; I earned more money for one day of “rest and recuperation” than families here make in a year. I came here to fight against injustice; sometimes I wonder if I’m part of the source of it. We talk of income inequality back in America, but we have no idea of what it looks like. The UN perpetuates one of the most glaring systems of income inequalities in the world, and I am the beneficiary. And while we maintain our positions of wealth, a poor street kid offered to buy me an orange.
In Mali, I thought a lot about one of Thomas Aquinas’s arguments, and as the children stripped off their old and ragged clothes and headed to play in the ocean, I thought of it again. Aquinas, in contrast to Nozick or Rand, argued that right to property or ownership was based less on possession than need. That a rich person may possess great wealth but that person had less right to that wealth, that food, that life-saving bread than a poor person, a poor and hungry child. He argued that in a sense, it was the wealthy that were stealing from the poor simply by not sharing the possessions they had. I have no interest now in parsing the philosophical merit of this argument, or dissecting the practical policy or economic implications of following the logical conclusion of this argument through to the end. Only sitting in the hot sun on Lumley beach, the sky filled with the harmattan haze, the children frolicking naked in the waves, a poor street child pulling his inverted and twisted body over the sand, I couldn’t help but feel there was at least a seed of truth to Aquinas’s claim.
After spending a few hours with them, I ended up doing what everyone else does, and what you‘re forced to do a hundred times in a country like Sierra Leone. I walked away, heading out into the long stretching beach before me - this slice of paradise, and turned my back to the least of these.
When I was in Mali, as a UN employee, I “earned” DSA (Daily Subsistence Allowance) for resting. I earned more money by taking a vacation than these children may make in a lifetime; I earned more money for one day of “rest and recuperation” than families here make in a year. I came here to fight against injustice; sometimes I wonder if I’m part of the source of it. We talk of income inequality back in America, but we have no idea of what it looks like. The UN perpetuates one of the most glaring systems of income inequalities in the world, and I am the beneficiary. And while we maintain our positions of wealth, a poor street kid offered to buy me an orange.
In Mali, I thought a lot about one of Thomas Aquinas’s arguments, and as the children stripped off their old and ragged clothes and headed to play in the ocean, I thought of it again. Aquinas, in contrast to Nozick or Rand, argued that right to property or ownership was based less on possession than need. That a rich person may possess great wealth but that person had less right to that wealth, that food, that life-saving bread than a poor person, a poor and hungry child. He argued that in a sense, it was the wealthy that were stealing from the poor simply by not sharing the possessions they had. I have no interest now in parsing the philosophical merit of this argument, or dissecting the practical policy or economic implications of following the logical conclusion of this argument through to the end. Only sitting in the hot sun on Lumley beach, the sky filled with the harmattan haze, the children frolicking naked in the waves, a poor street child pulling his inverted and twisted body over the sand, I couldn’t help but feel there was at least a seed of truth to Aquinas’s claim.
After spending a few hours with them, I ended up doing what everyone else does, and what you‘re forced to do a hundred times in a country like Sierra Leone. I walked away, heading out into the long stretching beach before me - this slice of paradise, and turned my back to the least of these.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Reflections from the past
I was just reading some entries from a brief blog I kept in Princeton. I put them up now because the sentiment still resonates with me, and I wrote it better then than I could do now.
(journal)
5/9/04
at the end of the day, i want justice; i want be the voice of the voiceless; i want to do what's right
at the end of the day, i want to be happy
i wonder sometimes if those things are incompatible....
1/20/04, 10:01
sometimes i think that the hardest thing about believing in humanity's potential is being constantly reminded how far short we fall of it.... perhaps, an idealist isn't someone who believes in an ideal world, but someone who refuses to lower his values, refuses to abandon the ideal even when it's betrayed by those around him...
there are 70,000 child soldiers in burma
last year, 10,000 children were abducted and forced to become soldiers in the Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army
in 1994, we watched genocide unfold in rwanda, and witnessed the fall of Srebrenica
11/30/03, 4:27 pm
my dad brought me "the watchmen" on friday, and i reread most of it again last night. there's something about that story that always gets to me. i have often wanted to walk from this path that i have chosen, longing for some easier road, to be able to close my eyes to the world's dark underbelly. but i can't. and even if i could, i would never choose to do it. once a man has faced the truth in all its forms, he can never turn back.... sometimes i ask myself why i fight for the rights of strangers. watching mehdi zana speak about his eleven years in torture, knowing that his wife was probably going through something similar; i was able to formulate what i had been feeling and thinking for so long.
if someone i loved was suffering or being tortured, i would want some random stranger to do something, anything to try to make a difference. how can i ask anything less of myself? i am that random stranger to so many people.
11/29/03
1:27pm
i suppose i feel talkative today. sitting alone in the basement of a deserted robertson hall. i just reflected on jacob landau's eerie pictures about man's inhumanity to man. maybe i shall go looking for beauty later today...
11:25 am
beauty is present in the simplest of things
"in the depth of winter, i finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - albert camus
11/12/03, 3:29 am
it's another all-nighter in Friend. the issue of human rights in liberia lies before me. i wonder sometimes why i pour over these human rights document, learning the stories of unnamed women being gang-raped, left in some abandoned village, bleeding from their vaginas. or of child soldiers pumped with "bubbles" to make them brave and strong as they can engage in some horrible, random atrocity. or of soldiers dressed in wedding dresses and flowing colorful wigs, amputating and collecting limbs to acquire some reward from their commanders. what is it that makes us stare into the heart of darkness? what is it that allows us to still survive despite the horror? is it simply schopenhauer's irrational, all-pervasive, irresistable "will to live," a wild dionysian ethic pulsing through our veins, a Karamazov thirst for life? how can we stare at beauty after seeing such horrors? doesn't the contrast with the beauty make the horror too terrible to bear? but how can we help but stare at beauty after living in such darkness? needing something to cleanse our souls of the terrible filth of reality? how can we maintain faith in humanity seeing it so degraded? how can we lose hope when we see the good that people can do? "Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained."
it's so late that's early.... i've been staring in the shadows for so long, sometimes i wonder how my eyes will adjust when they see light again. but i want to face these demons, i want to believe the world is beautiful despite everything; i want to be able to proclaim the beauty of world, not out of ignorance or fear of facing reality, but because i have seen it in all its heart-rending horror and all its breath-taking wonder.
it's late. and i need to focus my mind on negotiating some path through problems of terror in some far off land..... i've been thinking of this quote from The Thin Red Line recently: "what difference do you think one man can make in all this madness?" i don't know. but i want to find out.
About me:
In High school and at Princeton, one could easily chalk my career as a success with a solid academic record and impressive extracurricular resume. Like most students, I could list my accomplishments as I have done and fool myself into thinking that they really mean something important, but I don't think that they do. My success is not defined by those things. My focus throughout high school and Princeton has not been acquiring awards or recognition. Despite the due care that I put in all my works, laboring over every word in a paper, obsessing over each nuance of the guitar string, or learning the precise angle for a drop shot, it is life that I have tried to invest the most care into. My final work, my final project is simply the life I live.
When Buddha was asked who he was, they said: "Are you a God?" He said, "No." "Are you an angel?" "No," he replied again. "But then what are you?" He said simply, "I am awake." I have often longed to wake up, to see the world with an un-obscured vision, to slice through all the distractions of existence and to begin to truly see the form and logic pervading all things. I do not believe that humans are destined for intellectual or moral slumber. I do not believe that we are unable to move the world and move ourselves. We are so busy making excuses for our failures; we are so willing to abnegate our responsibility, to relinquish our ability to change ourselves. We often forget that life is an art; we must take due care to live properly and study the precepts for living a good life.
For the past several years, I have studied human rights violations, pouring over heart-rending accounts of slaughter and destruction.
Why? Because if any of my friends were being beaten or raped or tortured, I would have a problem with someone standing by and doing nothing about it. If this is true, then seeing the immensity of evil in this world; I cannot with clear conscience stand by with utter indifference in the face of such abject suffering.
Why? Because when I say that the world is beautiful, I do not wish to say it because I am ignorant and unable to face the darkest corners of reality.
Why? Because if we wish to know truth, then we cannot pick which truth we wish to see, for there is only one truth, one reality, one world, and it is simply up to us whether we wish to face it or run away to cower in fear of a reality we are unable to face.
(journal)
5/9/04
at the end of the day, i want justice; i want be the voice of the voiceless; i want to do what's right
at the end of the day, i want to be happy
i wonder sometimes if those things are incompatible....
1/20/04, 10:01
sometimes i think that the hardest thing about believing in humanity's potential is being constantly reminded how far short we fall of it.... perhaps, an idealist isn't someone who believes in an ideal world, but someone who refuses to lower his values, refuses to abandon the ideal even when it's betrayed by those around him...
there are 70,000 child soldiers in burma
last year, 10,000 children were abducted and forced to become soldiers in the Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army
in 1994, we watched genocide unfold in rwanda, and witnessed the fall of Srebrenica
11/30/03, 4:27 pm
my dad brought me "the watchmen" on friday, and i reread most of it again last night. there's something about that story that always gets to me. i have often wanted to walk from this path that i have chosen, longing for some easier road, to be able to close my eyes to the world's dark underbelly. but i can't. and even if i could, i would never choose to do it. once a man has faced the truth in all its forms, he can never turn back.... sometimes i ask myself why i fight for the rights of strangers. watching mehdi zana speak about his eleven years in torture, knowing that his wife was probably going through something similar; i was able to formulate what i had been feeling and thinking for so long.
if someone i loved was suffering or being tortured, i would want some random stranger to do something, anything to try to make a difference. how can i ask anything less of myself? i am that random stranger to so many people.
11/29/03
1:27pm
i suppose i feel talkative today. sitting alone in the basement of a deserted robertson hall. i just reflected on jacob landau's eerie pictures about man's inhumanity to man. maybe i shall go looking for beauty later today...
11:25 am
beauty is present in the simplest of things
"in the depth of winter, i finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - albert camus
11/12/03, 3:29 am
it's another all-nighter in Friend. the issue of human rights in liberia lies before me. i wonder sometimes why i pour over these human rights document, learning the stories of unnamed women being gang-raped, left in some abandoned village, bleeding from their vaginas. or of child soldiers pumped with "bubbles" to make them brave and strong as they can engage in some horrible, random atrocity. or of soldiers dressed in wedding dresses and flowing colorful wigs, amputating and collecting limbs to acquire some reward from their commanders. what is it that makes us stare into the heart of darkness? what is it that allows us to still survive despite the horror? is it simply schopenhauer's irrational, all-pervasive, irresistable "will to live," a wild dionysian ethic pulsing through our veins, a Karamazov thirst for life? how can we stare at beauty after seeing such horrors? doesn't the contrast with the beauty make the horror too terrible to bear? but how can we help but stare at beauty after living in such darkness? needing something to cleanse our souls of the terrible filth of reality? how can we maintain faith in humanity seeing it so degraded? how can we lose hope when we see the good that people can do? "Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained."
it's so late that's early.... i've been staring in the shadows for so long, sometimes i wonder how my eyes will adjust when they see light again. but i want to face these demons, i want to believe the world is beautiful despite everything; i want to be able to proclaim the beauty of world, not out of ignorance or fear of facing reality, but because i have seen it in all its heart-rending horror and all its breath-taking wonder.
it's late. and i need to focus my mind on negotiating some path through problems of terror in some far off land..... i've been thinking of this quote from The Thin Red Line recently: "what difference do you think one man can make in all this madness?" i don't know. but i want to find out.
About me:
In High school and at Princeton, one could easily chalk my career as a success with a solid academic record and impressive extracurricular resume. Like most students, I could list my accomplishments as I have done and fool myself into thinking that they really mean something important, but I don't think that they do. My success is not defined by those things. My focus throughout high school and Princeton has not been acquiring awards or recognition. Despite the due care that I put in all my works, laboring over every word in a paper, obsessing over each nuance of the guitar string, or learning the precise angle for a drop shot, it is life that I have tried to invest the most care into. My final work, my final project is simply the life I live.
When Buddha was asked who he was, they said: "Are you a God?" He said, "No." "Are you an angel?" "No," he replied again. "But then what are you?" He said simply, "I am awake." I have often longed to wake up, to see the world with an un-obscured vision, to slice through all the distractions of existence and to begin to truly see the form and logic pervading all things. I do not believe that humans are destined for intellectual or moral slumber. I do not believe that we are unable to move the world and move ourselves. We are so busy making excuses for our failures; we are so willing to abnegate our responsibility, to relinquish our ability to change ourselves. We often forget that life is an art; we must take due care to live properly and study the precepts for living a good life.
For the past several years, I have studied human rights violations, pouring over heart-rending accounts of slaughter and destruction.
Why? Because if any of my friends were being beaten or raped or tortured, I would have a problem with someone standing by and doing nothing about it. If this is true, then seeing the immensity of evil in this world; I cannot with clear conscience stand by with utter indifference in the face of such abject suffering.
Why? Because when I say that the world is beautiful, I do not wish to say it because I am ignorant and unable to face the darkest corners of reality.
Why? Because if we wish to know truth, then we cannot pick which truth we wish to see, for there is only one truth, one reality, one world, and it is simply up to us whether we wish to face it or run away to cower in fear of a reality we are unable to face.
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