Gimme Five

(note: the internet has been a catastrophe this week. i manage to send one email and the power goes out, or the network goes down. MAJOR UG.)

I've been out "in the field" the last few days and coming home exhausted. The trips are long and bumpy and there's so much to take in. I feel like I'm in a movie most of the time, driving in a convoy with a Toyota truck leading the brigade, with 2 grey SUVs trailing through the African jungle to visit these remote villages where these NGOs do the awesomest work I have ever come across. Them roads are BUMPY.

I'm writing blog entries for the NGO I work for, but they *edit* them (booo!) and it takes a while to get a version we can both agree on. Apparently my writing is too "familiar" for the kind of work I'm doing. IT'S A BLOG! oh well. I smile, nod, and easily accept the editing. You gotta do what you gotta do - I'm easy.

Hopefully there will be a few entries soon so that you can all be up-to-date on the crazy work and things I'm seeing and doing.

I met the most amazing group of kids yesterday. They're part of a counsel of children between the ages of 12-15 who represent all the children in their villages. The things these kids do... I can't wait for them to start working with my NGO, they'll do AMAZING things together. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE YOUTH!!

It reminded me a lot of the work la FESFO does in Ontario. FESFO is the Fédération de la jeunesse franco-ontarienne (formerly la Fédération des élèves du secondaire franco-ontarien) or Franco-Ontarian Youth Federation, if you will. They're young leaders who do different things in their community and in school. FESFO gives them tools to be leaders. How to lead a group, lead meetings, how to organize activities at school, how to rally the troups, as it were. FESFO should consider working with this NGO. Their young leaders would totally get a kick out of it, if it were possible. Not sure. But my brain is working on it.

We visited a site in the backwoods and while we were talking to these kids about their needs as young leaders, there were a few small boys (3-4 yrs?) hanging out, staring at me. I flirted with them and they smiled.

When we were leaving, these little kids were kind of looking at me sideways, curious, so I walked up to them and told them to put their hand out. The little boy thought I wanted to shake his hand (the most common way of saying hello here, other than kissing on the cheek 4 times or touching heads 4 times), but then I held his hand out and gave him five, and got him to do the same for me. Then all the little boys got excited and I gave them all five. teehee!!

We got in the car and I drank from my water bottle. I opened the window to shake another little boy's hand when my colleague Jean handed one of them an empty bottle. The kids went NUTS! We started giving them all the empty plastic bottles in the car and Jean told them not to be greedy about it and to share.

When's the last time you saw a kid go nuts over an empty water bottle? It has many uses, but I'm not sure why they're so valuable. Maybe like in Québec, when you return them at the store you can get money for them.

Jean and I had a huge discussion on the way home about credit cards, mortgages, the credit crisis and Walmart. He said, "if people spent $1 on an NGO everytime they poured out the rest of a bottle of wine, imagine the difference."

Imagine.

The Good in Everyone

Aw ya... listening to some Herbie Hancock, rockin the air conditioning, just got back from my first walk to the beach (the feeling I had this morning that I should buy a plane ticket home vanished when I saw the waves roll in on the sand -- home? what home?) and an uber-filling lunch. Oh my gaaaad I can't wait to be more familiar with the food here so that my friend Jean can stop ordering for me. I accused him of trying to fatten me up. "Just a little," he said.

My colleagues here are all awesome. Such thoughtful and hard-working people. At noon today, I thought, "Holy shit, if I have to wait til 1pm to take a lunch break and go for a walk, I will DIE." They work straight from 8h30 to 1pm!! NO CAN DO! Call me lazy, I call it HUMAN.

I asked Jean - don't you get hungry?? No, apparently not. Then again, at the age of 6 he was getting up at 5am to walk 20km to the fields where he spent all day under the hot African sun cutting down branches, pulling weeds and burning stuff only to walk the 20km home afterwards. There is no lazy work-ethic here.

Anyway, as I made my way to the door at noon -- actually, a funny language barrier here. They didn't understand when I said, "Je m'en vais prendre une marche." Apparently they don't "take" walks. It's kind of a funny expression when you think about it. We could just as easily say, "I'm going walking," or "I'm going to walk," which is way more accurate. Anyway, everyone was working, but I found Jean downstairs reading the paper, so I asked him if he wanted to join me on my walk. Once he figured out what it was I wanted to do, he came with me. "Do you want to go to the beach?" EEEEEK! Yay!

We started to walk and a bunch of kids came out of a school nearby for lunch. The children here are SO CUTE!!!

They have a word for "white person" in Fon, the local language, which sounds like YEY-VO (I'll have to ask how to spell it). The children see you and sing a song that goes something like, "Yévo, yévo, Comment allez-vous, ça va bien merci!"

I'll have to learn way more Fon while I'm here. I wonder if I can find a textbook of some sort. SPEAK WHITE, DAMMIT! (kidding, kidding...)

This little boy was hiding in the shade under a bench, playing in the sand while we were walking along the beach. Jean wanted me to try some local fruit... and we bought it from his mother. She had this little bundle of baby blubber straped to her back, sleeping soundly... I wanted to eat the baby!!!! It's hair was all natted with different coloured elastics... holy cuteness! While Jean was negotiating the price, this little boy started to sing to me.

I'm sorry Maria, WHAT?! Yes, I've been eating the fruit here.

Those who know me, know I don't eat fruit... but I promised my friend Dair that although I wouldn't go out of my way to eat any, if any fruit was offered I wouldn't decline. I think my body will go into shock, but we'll see. Speaking of which, I think he left the bag of fruit we bought from the lady at the restaurant we stopped in after -- I should go ask him. In any event, he made me eat some local fried bananas at lunch, so I think my fruit quota has been met for the day. HAPPY DAIR?!

Anyway, during lunch we got on the topic of fear... oh right, because we were talking about how people here talk to each other and aren't really afraid of one another, and how when he went to Toronto, a girl was afraid of him when he went to help her take her bags off the subway, or the time he was walking down Gerard and a girl started to run in the other direction (he's not shady or anything, quite good looking, he's just black). Or how our first instinct is fear (or annoyance) when we go to a bank machine and someone is waiting behind us. It's a crazy world we live in. It's just not like that here. Everyone talks to each other, or doesn't. Whatevs.

We started to talk about how important it is for the good in the world to stand up. The bad in the world speaks very loudly. The good whispers. The news we watch is all bad, all the time. Violence, war, disease, corruption... why? Is it not the minority of events? Isn't there far more good going on in the world?

I wish people would talk more about organizations like UNICEF or Right to Play rather than Al Quaeda. Why not promote these messages of hope rather than the messages of violence? It's important to know about the bad, but far more important to know that there is good. Why not mention that a black man saved a white couple from drowning rather than splatter the headline, Black Man kills White Couple?? Why doesn't the first make the news?

This is why I watch The Hour and not The National. It has an effect on us -- don't think it doesn't.

When was the last time you smiled at someone on the subway? Or said, "Hi, good morning" to the people who work in your building, in the elevator? What happened to our humanity?

Of course our conversation ended with Obama. He is the quiet good majority turned into a roaring lion of hope. SPEAK UP DAMMIT. Make the kind of world you wished you lived in. What's the worst that could happen? Someone will look at you funny for saying hello? For helping them with their bags?

The risk of violence and accidents exists no matter what we do.
So forget the bad for a moment and do more good. Ignoring each other is not good.

Oh my god - 2 of the 4 croissants they brought me for breakfast are staring at me... "we are chocolate and we are delicious!!" oooh my belly is so full from rice and cheese and plantains... Africa's gonna make me fat.

God sometimes you just don't come through...

I believe that every society is exactly the same. There are lazy people, extraordinary people, gossipy people, mean people, nice people, smart people, stupid people, violent people, passive people, proactive people, etc. in every society.

But there's something about tribal people, be it African, Aboriginal (Australian or Canadian), or South American that gives the impression that they just don't care to better themselves. They live, they die. They don't explore, they survive. They don't really evolve, they just improve, again, for survival's sake. I'm not saying this is actually how it is, just that that's the impression I have.

I had an interesting discussion with my brother over Christmas about the African "blahs". I won't go into how my brother feels about the situation, since I can't remember his point of view, only that I didn't agree. Are they really indifferent? Or is it just that the indifferent people have been in power, using the money they make through warfare to keep up with the Joneses in bling and not in societal structures...? I'm ill-equipped to theorize.

I read this great article on my friend Andrew's blog. Andrew's in Liberia, a few countries over (west) from Benin, working in orphanages. The article talks about how Christian organizations are bringing a sense of hope and self-respect and self-awareness to these people... for better? or for worse?

Oh big-G. Where would we be without you baby?

I thought this article was à propos... so many people, when I told them I was going to volunteer abroad, said, "You're not working with a Christian organization, are you?"

I'm not, but for the record, I'm totally bringing Jesus with me. He's got my back.


As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset
by Matthew Parris

Read the whole article on The Times Online

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

<...>

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete. END

While I agree that "a whole belief system must be supplanted," I'm not sure I agree it has to be supplanted by Christianity or religiosity as we know it. I know we are all connected as a human race and as a planetary organism... we call the energy within us and around us "God"... but what if we gave it a different name? What if this energy wasn't there to riddle us with guilt or pity towards those who haven't yet "found God" and instead worked to make us realize that we are all the same?

Bah - what do I know. If Africa enlightens, I'll report back.


Blog title is from Tori Amos' God: crazy video... oh Tori.