At Kai's prodding, I finally gave my blog a real name. I've seen some really clever ones, so please don't judge. I just hope it's at least obvious that I'm referring to one of my favorite childhood series, the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
If you know anything about me, you know that I have a bit of an obsession with pioneers. I'm not talking about space age pioneers, or pioneers of modern medicine - since I was little I wanted to be an American pioneer of the Oregon Trail-traversing order. Mid-nineteenth century, no running water, no electricity, little log cabin, living off the land and carrying out all the hand skills like spinning, sewing, and churning butter that are lost to most modern Americans - that was the dream for a long time. Eventually I acknowledged that, yes, I was glad I hadn't died of pneumonia as a baby, and yes, computers were pretty useful, and yes, in a world of over 6 billion people, it isn't really plausible for everyone to have acreage and cook over a wood fire. But my love of the 'olden days' never really went away (as I'm sure most of you are aware), and suffice it to say that when I was asked at my Peace Corps interview how I would handle the possibility of being placed in a site with no running water or electricity, living in a thatched hut, I essentially told the woman that if I wasn't placed in a site like that, we could forget about the whole thing.
Well, I got my wish, sort of. I've spent a year living in a mud and grass hut, with no running water or electricity, plowing and harvesting by hand, riding on donkey-pulled carts, cooking over an open fire, and washing laundry with a bar of soap and a bucket of water. It has made it difficult, at times, to do my job, that on some level I don't want to change these people's way of life; it's what I always wanted. At other times, it's been frustrating to see how far behind even nineteenth century American farmers they lag - nobody can mend or sew their own clothes, the literacy rate is very low, nobody even has a washboard for the laundry, the tools are of such poor quality, and craftsmanship of any kind is hard to come by... People just seem so much less skilled and driven than I expected.
It's one of the most common complaints among volunteers, that the average Senegalese farmer does not seem to show any initiative in improving his own life. One of the biggest realizations I've come to is just how much a part of our culture the 'American dream' attitude is. Sometimes it seems like, in the way development work is attempted, this attitude is taken for granted - for example, if you hold a free grafting training, you would expect everyone who came to go home and graft trees, or if the villagers get a milling machine from an NGO and it breaks, you would expect them to find a way to fix it, rather than letting the investment go to waste... There are certainly some Senegalese who show initiative and a desire to improve their lives, but many seem to act like the benefits of development work are a given, and refuse to really make any changes in their lives to meet the developers halfway.
Senegalese people will readily acknowledge this to you, too. I can't tell you how many villagers say to me, shaking their heads, 'white people work much harder than black people'. The most common English saying they repeat to me is 'Time is money'. Clearly they are getting the developers' 'hard work = getting ahead' message. But maybe the message is a little anachronistic. They know full well how far they lag behind the developed world and how much they are missing out on - they know they're not pioneers of anything, that no matter how hard they pull up on their bootstraps they'll always be catching up, while they see around them the evidence of the 21st century already in the grasp of Europeans and Americans and their own immigrant relatives.
Well, I'm not trying to be depressing, and I'll keep attempting to make opportunities for individuals to improve their lives in small ways. But on a larger scale, if we are ever going to lessen the divide between rich and poor nations in the interest of global harmony, I don't think relying on the work ethics of those in the most humble circumstances is the way to do it.
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