Ann Thebau, my Philosophy of Ethics professor once told this story:
“An organization went into a village in Africa and noticed everyday the women would walk a total of eight miles to the nearest river, to retrieve their household water. Thinking this must be such a terrible hardship for these women, foremost by taking so much time out of their day, and adding to it the compounding physical burden of carrying such a heavy load consistently, this group, laden with good-intentions decided to donate and install a well in the center of the village. At first the people were excited, but by the end of the week, the water in the well had been poisoned. Upon investigation, it was discovered the culprits were the women themselves! As it turns out, the walk for water was the women's social time and a temporary reprieve from the demands of their husbands.”
From this story, there is an invaluable lesson, and it is prevalent in every lecture given at SAWC (South African Wildlife College) and every towns-person we met. That lesson is assumptions make action, borne from good-will, irrelevant if there is no investigation into those peoples perceived hierarchy of needs.
As we learned in CBNRM (Community-Based Natural Resource Management), the first step in effectively helping a community is to ask what they need. This may seems like a fore-gone conclusion, a statement of the obvious, but it is the most overlooked of all the steps; from NGO's to government programs.
As Americans, we accept certain things stagnantly, like the definitions of wealth and poverty. The dialogue on this subject in America is repetitious and given as a sermon:
“Of course, those people need access to water in every house. They need electricity too. Their clothing is dirty, they need washing machines, and carpet instead of dirt floors. They still use outhouses, instead of indoor plumbing. Dirt roads need to be paved. Give them cars. They only make a dollar a day, they are clearly impoverished.”
Where as the those very people may be thinking:
“I can get water, but have no firewood. The birds ate most of the greens this morning, what will we eat tomorrow? What if the vendor is out of seeds? A storm is coming, I wish my children had a classroom to sit in. We need to mend the fences so the elephants won't stomp through again. Can I sell this heirloom at market to buy maize?”
Indeed, one classmates reaction after visiting the town of Welverdient, population 17,000, was to exclaim, “I knew they were low, but not that low!” She was, of course, not trying to be insulting and merely remarking about the sense of poverty exhibited against our standards. Half-built, brick houses sprawled across a dry and near barren landscape, with heaps of trash littering the ground along the main roads of loose dirt. Fences, made of wire and metal stakes or branches broken off trees, surrounded every home and were draped with drying laundry.
Even when asking our predominately white lecturers, who worked with these villages, what was considered poverty in the area, they merely restated the U.N. statistic set forth by the MDG(Millennium Development Goals). However, a conversation with Clifford, Principle of the Mtembini Primary School, showed how different the interpretation of these terms could be.
To him, no one was truly impoverished in Welverdient.
They all had homes, even if it was a family of ten sharing a ten-by-ten square-foot room. When there were people who couldn't get grants from the government to buy food, the school, as well as fellow community members would step in to make sure they didn't starve. And although there was a water shortage due to drought, with only two of four boreholes drawing water, most were able to keep a small garden. Every school had their own uniform. Despite running around in the dirt courtyard playing games as children often do, these uniforms looked bright, pressed and unstained with no child left unadorned in bright green and gold.
The community still has many fundamental needs they were waiting to have fulfilled by a teetering government, hoping to ensure their families basic securities and longevity. They still have want of assistance, such as bookshelves and books for their library, computers, tables and chairs for the lab, HIV/AIDS education, opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship, generators for the clinic and wells but, despite all this, calling them poor would, and is, a gross arrogance on our behalf.
I, too, received a lesson in humility, due to my own broad assumptions;
experiencing first hand, my own lack of education on this matter.
A month before embarking on the trip, I thought it would be a nice gesture to bring LifeStraws, a personal-use water filtration device, designed to block 99.999% of microbial and water-born pathogens from any concentration of water. Having read there were places in Africa and certain areas in South Africa where illness due to contaminated water was a serious health issue, I created a fundraiser to buy as many as I could. The response was very positive and in that month, I raised over $700, which bought 37 of these straws.
When we got up to SAWC however, and I asked the administrators which village would get the most use out of the straws, the answer was a resounding 'nowhere near here'. They added, at the moment, the water-table ran so low the biggest problem was the amount of salinization, but otherwise the untreated water they drank/cooked with/washed clothes in/bathed with, created no health issues other then possible hypertension (to which the straws would be mostly useless against). Over the borders of Mozambique, or Zimbabwe, or even in the townships, downstream of Johannesburg, the straws would have been useful. But not where we were at or going to.
This was embarrassing for me, to realize how little homework I'd done on the area I was visiting and the supposition that the villages wouldn't have potable water to begin with.
What was worse, was knowing everything I could have done with that money, if I'd asked the village first. Especially with the exchange rate so weighted in the US's favor- how far I could have spread those donations, for things the villagers actually needed (such as buying those long-awaited shelves, and even stocking the library for the primary school) was the ultimate humbling lesson.
After giving up on my original intent, I donated the straws to SWAC, to be handed to rangers and researchers when they crossed the South African borders on assignment. From their stories, contaminated water was/is a common issue which hinders their work. In this way, the cause was as noble a use for the straws as any, but it was pure luck which made it turn out this way and I consider the gesture a failed one.
But, failure is okay.
From this and my other experiences, conversations and observations, I will know how to go about my good-intentions in an educated manner, so that I may do the greatest amount of good for the community which needs and accepts it, because I will listen to what they have to say.
Essay
South Africa:
A Cultural Perspective on Wealth,
Poverty and Education
