Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Closing Remarks.
I suggested that I would take advantage of my time in Naboomspruit to "decompress" because it is customary to use that verb in circumstances like these. Well, I waited to decompress for a foothill of vacant hours and discovered that I must not have reacted to this trip's stresses by pressurizing myself. Now that the familiar set of nuisances and obligations has begun to fade into the year behind me, I am not struck with a need to let my hair down or to take deep breaths.
This forced me to consider what sort of coping mechanism would have helped me through the difficult moments of our campaign only to deposit me, coasting, thoughtless and numb before the paralyzing television set of my friends. I suppose it would be truest to say that I responded to pressure with dissipation and lopsidedly therapeutic outbursts of frustration and rage. That was a strategy bought on credit. Now, instead of enjoying the settling into normalcy of decompression, I will have to labor, tediously and with low volition, to reconstitute my self.
What that means, to a large extent, is that the things I have learned about myself on this trip have yet to be determined. I suspect that they will be born of the choices that I make over the next few months. When I try to follow that thought with specific details or predictions, I end up in the swirling headspace of mediocre options that I have been escaping with sleep and television for the last two weeks.
The knowledge that I have gained during these travels can be a solitary delight when, for instance, I cycle through memories of the exceptional people I've recently met or scenes of Africa's natural beauty; but taken in its entirety, my experience of Africa is a vast, unblinking challenge. That is why I am not currently filled with high-fiving jubilation. It is why I am overwhelmed and a bit more directionless and paralyzed than usual.
One of the purported motivations of my trip was to learn whether or not I could see myself settling into Africa to work for some sort of non-governmental organization. The non-profit sector that I encountered while traveling across this continent is more vibrant, more committed and less venal than I expected. It is also, in many cases, well-staffed and intelligently managed. (Here I am discussing the locally founded organizations to which we gave attention.) The organizations that I respect the most, need funding more than they need the skill-set or experiences of a person like me and I have not taken to fundraising.
The premise of our trip was a good one. I wish that independent observers were regularly tasked with evaluating the relative merit of different humanitarian organizations (instead of, for example, evaluating digital music players and sports cars) and I wish that their assessments had an immediate and significant impact on the funding of all the organizations involved. I would be happy to involve myself in such research in the future; but it needs to be carried out with greater thoroughness and expertise. Unfortunately, there are no jobs of this variety currently on the market; so, the bottom line is: I don't see myself slotting into the existing positions offered within AIDS based African non-profit organizations.
A second motivation for this trip was the hope that I could backdoor the fortress of international journalism and occupy one of its rooms. This hope must've been rather thin however; since my colleagues and I did not devote much of our time or energy to the sort of legwork that might have generated publicity and strengthened our campaign. I am ill suited to networking, self-promotion and tedious requests to be rejected; other team members proved equally uninterested in this sort of drum-beating. Also, when we finally met with someone who took the time to explain how the game works here, we learned that the highest paying news agency on the continent could not support our dinner habit, let alone our fuel costs, accommodation and other overhead. So, it is unlikely that I will be diving into that profession either.
Since a succession of frustrating years at poorly run secondary schools has temporarily hardened my heart against classroom teaching and since I am not committing myself further to the fight against HIV/AIDS or to print journalism, it is not immediately clear what I will be giving back to the continent of Africa, to which I feel both attached and indebted.
Those disinclinations left me in pursuit of other employment for the last couple months and that pursuit has landed me in New York City. I will shortly be joining a non-profit organization that works on mentoring students through the internet; I will work as their Director of Education. In that capacity I will work to develop the curriculums necessary for their online mentorship programs. That might sound a bit dry; but after several years of slogging through badly designed curriculums that I was forced to use, I look forward to bettering them and to creating resources that won't hinder a good educator. Also, after dedicating a substantial amount of time and attention to rather dense and unimportant books, I particularly appreciate the organization's overridingly practical approach to education and goal setting.
The worst thing about this job is that it pulls me away from Africa and the rest of the developing world. I am hoping that the organization's aspiration to expand their operations into East Africa will prove realistic and, failing that, I am hoping that my experience with them will enable me to find more influential employment when I return to the developing world a few years later on.
As a sort of closure, I would like to attempt an explanation of why I feel so powerfully compelled to return to this continent; I would like to devote some time and attention to what I have learned about Africa and to why it has begun to influence me so deeply.
When I first took my appointment in Gambia I did so out of ignorant necessity. I had not been aware of the country's existence or location and I had no special motivation for working there. My first impressions were not favorable and I very nearly left half way through my first year; now, I am addicted to the subcontinent. I do not prefer any of the splendid and benignly famous countries that I visited in my youth to the countries I have just passed through. Two years in Gambia bent me out of shape; but ten months on the western side of Africa showed me dozens of neighborhoods and communities into which I could fit.
My decision to stay for a second year in Gambia was as insubstantial as my decision to go there in the first place and my little trips during school holidays were enticing without revealing anything in particular. I took the opportunity to travel with Sean and Tuuli because I suspected that descending through the continent would be a positive experience. When I began to draft the text of our website, I remember discussing our desire to counteract the sort of media coverage that prejudices the west against Africa. I set out to show that Africa is an enjoyable place to travel, full of excellent people and fewer real problems than one would expect. I set out to do that with a great deal of doubt; breaking news about violence surrounding the coup in Togo, about famine in Niger, about widespread, sporadic and severe violence in Nigeria gave me a fair amount of anxiety and that was before I had even begun to consider Central Africa a realistic possibility.
The ten month surprise began almost immediately. In Kayes, Mali, a massive and labyrinthine industrial city, one of the pedestrians who we asked for directions abandoned his plans and accompanied us half way across the city; he then replaced himself with another man who had been in the middle of a meeting, who jumped into our car and guided us far from his office, through dozens of devastated, muddy, unmarked shanty roads until we parked beside a discreetly marked compound that was our destination. He accepted our gratitude, until we tried to solidify it with a gift, and then he set out through the dirt on what must have been a twenty minute walk back to his normal affairs. The tendency of urban Gambians to expect a reward for any rendered service had filled me with cynicism about Africa's poor. But; after a couple of months and several countries, I managed to rid myself of those assumptions that were two years in the making and to realize that they were based, in fact, on exceptions-an exception no doubt created by the enormous imbalance that tourism introduces to that miniscule and poorly governed land.
Our guidebook was essentially useless. We were introduced to Africa by Africans. It wasn't long before all three of us would admit to being entirely dependent upon a temperament and an integrity that we found in every country and in most people. Grasping this temperament and being reassured by its omnipresence gave us a sense of safety that made it possible to enjoy all the other emotions and experiences of life. I am not talking about benefiting from a formulaic respect for visitors, a passing enthusiasm for the distraction that they present or an indifferent, reputation-based protectiveness; those are receptions to which I am accustomed and they may provide a certain level of security; but they don’t fill a traveler with the urge to return or the urge not to leave.
After five countries I had to stop myself from writing "I would be totally happy to live here" in each of my blogs about the large African cities that we visited. That was not a consequence of a sudden lack of such wonderful cities, it was because I didn't think that anyone would believe me and it was because the compliment started sounding thin when I applied it so liberally-though I can confidently say that there are not any cities in Europe, the United States or other wealthy nations that draw similar praise.
So, what was it? What was I getting out of these places that made me want to connect? I was being sustained and enlivened by an openness, a curiosity, a festivity and a decency that I now crave. I loved the conversation; it was never about television, never about fashion, never about celebrity gossip, rarely preachy or confrontational and its silences, when they occurred, were comfortable. Generally, I felt like I was being sounded and situated as a human, not as a member of a sub-culture or someone's network. The talk had very little pretence and the encounters were genuine.
One optimistic theory would be that the mature African people who we encountered saw our own willingness to engage with their culture, on their streets, over their drinks and their meals, as a sufficient overture. People often shared how complimented they felt by nothing other than our attitude and presence, by the fact that we didn't turn up our noses, foreground their difficulties with unnecessary photographs or hurry off. Our leisurely pace and ground level approach to movement paid dividends everywhere.
And the festivity that I mentioned earlier was rarely hard to ignite and never staged. Nothing recharges solitary wandering people like good, heartfelt shared time, whether that involves soft drinks and grilled fish, coffee and eggs or millet beer and chunks of dubious goat. I feel deeply grateful to all of the people who shared their time with me and my colleagues as we made our way south. They made the trip worthwhile and unforgettable. And I remain deeply indebted and similarly grateful to those of you who supported us. You made it possible.
Your Post Script: Keep your eyes open for the book.
I suggested that I would take advantage of my time in Naboomspruit to "decompress" because it is customary to use that verb in circumstances like these. Well, I waited to decompress for a foothill of vacant hours and discovered that I must not have reacted to this trip's stresses by pressurizing myself. Now that the familiar set of nuisances and obligations has begun to fade into the year behind me, I am not struck with a need to let my hair down or to take deep breaths.
This forced me to consider what sort of coping mechanism would have helped me through the difficult moments of our campaign only to deposit me, coasting, thoughtless and numb before the paralyzing television set of my friends. I suppose it would be truest to say that I responded to pressure with dissipation and lopsidedly therapeutic outbursts of frustration and rage. That was a strategy bought on credit. Now, instead of enjoying the settling into normalcy of decompression, I will have to labor, tediously and with low volition, to reconstitute my self.
What that means, to a large extent, is that the things I have learned about myself on this trip have yet to be determined. I suspect that they will be born of the choices that I make over the next few months. When I try to follow that thought with specific details or predictions, I end up in the swirling headspace of mediocre options that I have been escaping with sleep and television for the last two weeks.
The knowledge that I have gained during these travels can be a solitary delight when, for instance, I cycle through memories of the exceptional people I've recently met or scenes of Africa's natural beauty; but taken in its entirety, my experience of Africa is a vast, unblinking challenge. That is why I am not currently filled with high-fiving jubilation. It is why I am overwhelmed and a bit more directionless and paralyzed than usual.
One of the purported motivations of my trip was to learn whether or not I could see myself settling into Africa to work for some sort of non-governmental organization. The non-profit sector that I encountered while traveling across this continent is more vibrant, more committed and less venal than I expected. It is also, in many cases, well-staffed and intelligently managed. (Here I am discussing the locally founded organizations to which we gave attention.) The organizations that I respect the most, need funding more than they need the skill-set or experiences of a person like me and I have not taken to fundraising.
The premise of our trip was a good one. I wish that independent observers were regularly tasked with evaluating the relative merit of different humanitarian organizations (instead of, for example, evaluating digital music players and sports cars) and I wish that their assessments had an immediate and significant impact on the funding of all the organizations involved. I would be happy to involve myself in such research in the future; but it needs to be carried out with greater thoroughness and expertise. Unfortunately, there are no jobs of this variety currently on the market; so, the bottom line is: I don't see myself slotting into the existing positions offered within AIDS based African non-profit organizations.
A second motivation for this trip was the hope that I could backdoor the fortress of international journalism and occupy one of its rooms. This hope must've been rather thin however; since my colleagues and I did not devote much of our time or energy to the sort of legwork that might have generated publicity and strengthened our campaign. I am ill suited to networking, self-promotion and tedious requests to be rejected; other team members proved equally uninterested in this sort of drum-beating. Also, when we finally met with someone who took the time to explain how the game works here, we learned that the highest paying news agency on the continent could not support our dinner habit, let alone our fuel costs, accommodation and other overhead. So, it is unlikely that I will be diving into that profession either.
Since a succession of frustrating years at poorly run secondary schools has temporarily hardened my heart against classroom teaching and since I am not committing myself further to the fight against HIV/AIDS or to print journalism, it is not immediately clear what I will be giving back to the continent of Africa, to which I feel both attached and indebted.
Those disinclinations left me in pursuit of other employment for the last couple months and that pursuit has landed me in New York City. I will shortly be joining a non-profit organization that works on mentoring students through the internet; I will work as their Director of Education. In that capacity I will work to develop the curriculums necessary for their online mentorship programs. That might sound a bit dry; but after several years of slogging through badly designed curriculums that I was forced to use, I look forward to bettering them and to creating resources that won't hinder a good educator. Also, after dedicating a substantial amount of time and attention to rather dense and unimportant books, I particularly appreciate the organization's overridingly practical approach to education and goal setting.
The worst thing about this job is that it pulls me away from Africa and the rest of the developing world. I am hoping that the organization's aspiration to expand their operations into East Africa will prove realistic and, failing that, I am hoping that my experience with them will enable me to find more influential employment when I return to the developing world a few years later on.
As a sort of closure, I would like to attempt an explanation of why I feel so powerfully compelled to return to this continent; I would like to devote some time and attention to what I have learned about Africa and to why it has begun to influence me so deeply.
When I first took my appointment in Gambia I did so out of ignorant necessity. I had not been aware of the country's existence or location and I had no special motivation for working there. My first impressions were not favorable and I very nearly left half way through my first year; now, I am addicted to the subcontinent. I do not prefer any of the splendid and benignly famous countries that I visited in my youth to the countries I have just passed through. Two years in Gambia bent me out of shape; but ten months on the western side of Africa showed me dozens of neighborhoods and communities into which I could fit.
My decision to stay for a second year in Gambia was as insubstantial as my decision to go there in the first place and my little trips during school holidays were enticing without revealing anything in particular. I took the opportunity to travel with Sean and Tuuli because I suspected that descending through the continent would be a positive experience. When I began to draft the text of our website, I remember discussing our desire to counteract the sort of media coverage that prejudices the west against Africa. I set out to show that Africa is an enjoyable place to travel, full of excellent people and fewer real problems than one would expect. I set out to do that with a great deal of doubt; breaking news about violence surrounding the coup in Togo, about famine in Niger, about widespread, sporadic and severe violence in Nigeria gave me a fair amount of anxiety and that was before I had even begun to consider Central Africa a realistic possibility.
The ten month surprise began almost immediately. In Kayes, Mali, a massive and labyrinthine industrial city, one of the pedestrians who we asked for directions abandoned his plans and accompanied us half way across the city; he then replaced himself with another man who had been in the middle of a meeting, who jumped into our car and guided us far from his office, through dozens of devastated, muddy, unmarked shanty roads until we parked beside a discreetly marked compound that was our destination. He accepted our gratitude, until we tried to solidify it with a gift, and then he set out through the dirt on what must have been a twenty minute walk back to his normal affairs. The tendency of urban Gambians to expect a reward for any rendered service had filled me with cynicism about Africa's poor. But; after a couple of months and several countries, I managed to rid myself of those assumptions that were two years in the making and to realize that they were based, in fact, on exceptions-an exception no doubt created by the enormous imbalance that tourism introduces to that miniscule and poorly governed land.
Our guidebook was essentially useless. We were introduced to Africa by Africans. It wasn't long before all three of us would admit to being entirely dependent upon a temperament and an integrity that we found in every country and in most people. Grasping this temperament and being reassured by its omnipresence gave us a sense of safety that made it possible to enjoy all the other emotions and experiences of life. I am not talking about benefiting from a formulaic respect for visitors, a passing enthusiasm for the distraction that they present or an indifferent, reputation-based protectiveness; those are receptions to which I am accustomed and they may provide a certain level of security; but they don’t fill a traveler with the urge to return or the urge not to leave.
After five countries I had to stop myself from writing "I would be totally happy to live here" in each of my blogs about the large African cities that we visited. That was not a consequence of a sudden lack of such wonderful cities, it was because I didn't think that anyone would believe me and it was because the compliment started sounding thin when I applied it so liberally-though I can confidently say that there are not any cities in Europe, the United States or other wealthy nations that draw similar praise.
So, what was it? What was I getting out of these places that made me want to connect? I was being sustained and enlivened by an openness, a curiosity, a festivity and a decency that I now crave. I loved the conversation; it was never about television, never about fashion, never about celebrity gossip, rarely preachy or confrontational and its silences, when they occurred, were comfortable. Generally, I felt like I was being sounded and situated as a human, not as a member of a sub-culture or someone's network. The talk had very little pretence and the encounters were genuine.
One optimistic theory would be that the mature African people who we encountered saw our own willingness to engage with their culture, on their streets, over their drinks and their meals, as a sufficient overture. People often shared how complimented they felt by nothing other than our attitude and presence, by the fact that we didn't turn up our noses, foreground their difficulties with unnecessary photographs or hurry off. Our leisurely pace and ground level approach to movement paid dividends everywhere.
And the festivity that I mentioned earlier was rarely hard to ignite and never staged. Nothing recharges solitary wandering people like good, heartfelt shared time, whether that involves soft drinks and grilled fish, coffee and eggs or millet beer and chunks of dubious goat. I feel deeply grateful to all of the people who shared their time with me and my colleagues as we made our way south. They made the trip worthwhile and unforgettable. And I remain deeply indebted and similarly grateful to those of you who supported us. You made it possible.
Your Post Script: Keep your eyes open for the book.
3 Comments:
Pleasant morning read on the bus. I wonder if also some of the differences you note between gambia and the rest have to do with transience vs rootedness. And further, how much the solicitous world you noticed would have remained intact had you had to settle in any of those places and let the real differnces in worlds show themselves the first time you got on an airplane oe got an I pod or were invited to a members only swimming pool... And then suddenly to cease being the friendly travellers and start being other again... What you think?
C ... Out
C ... Out
Yes, some of those difference had to do with my transigence and if I had stayed around and tried to pretend that I did not have more resources at my disposal their would have been some awkward moments. But everything would hinge on how I decided to act if I chose to stay. I am confident in my ability to craft a place for myself in a community where I am "other" and I am confident that many of the communities through which I traveled would, in fact, have proven more welcoming and open if I had chosen to stay.
Further, I object to your phrase "real differences" if you intend it to describe some vast chasm that I failed to observe, which would ultimately divide me so irresolvably from African people that I would recognize my true place in a member's club with an ipod.
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Further, I object to your phrase "real differences" if you intend it to describe some vast chasm that I failed to observe, which would ultimately divide me so irresolvably from African people that I would recognize my true place in a member's club with an ipod.
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