Oh, my stifled bleeding heart! What a tourniquet development can be.
Passing half-built suburbs; skeletons of mud bricks, it’s hard to tell whether they are being built up or are falling down – the progress of ruin I guess. Reminds me of the crumbled Roman ruins, beautiful but far. Such hollowness there, like humans were never quite involved in it’s building at all, just a cheesy reproduction of Pompeii or Casarea – but no, it’s the slow sad beginning, only the thwarted start of the great crawl towards development.
Came back in January with bounding satisfaction. The solar electricity I had fundraised for had been installed, and I hopped on my transport with anticipation. With grumbling resolve it had been installed without me; I had waited a week for the electrician and the doctors to show up I finally had to leave for my conference in Senegal. The next day my villagers informed me they showed up, and I was happy to give up some control. Because this is, after all, their health center, their village. As a driver of ‘sustainable development’ part of my job is to empower them to do things on their own.
I got off the van and walked in the (intensly orange unforgiving) late afternoon light. There sat the doctor and some of the other members of the health board, those I worked with to raise their 25% of the cost. They jumped up and praised me for the work we did to finance the solar panels, and my ego rose and fell in cruel repetitions as my graze locked in on the wire snaking sickeningly from one of the six panels atop the health center into the doctor’s house. But he already has a solar panel my mind argued, and I smiled as they told me how well the lights all work – ah yes how wonderful! They can work now at night, the midwives can give birth with real light! - but oh man why the hell is it in his house. They took me on a tour and it is really incredible, a light outside when people run here for emergencies and one in each room, the vaccination room, consultation, pharmacy, maternity, the long recovery room…but then the vaccination fridge, one of the main reasons for installing the solar electricity, wasn’t working.
“Why did you take a wire?” I asked the doctor and off spurned a long soliloquy about how it’s helping the community by way of improving his personal space. “Well I would have put it in your house but it was too far.” Totally missed the point. I tried to explain to him that we cannot fund anything that benefits the individual. After meeting with the electrician I finally got the picture of what happened. It seems the electrician had not checked on the power of the fridge, which blew the system the first day it was hooked up to the solar panels. An expert does not necessarily mean expert knowledge. So instead, we still have a fridge which we pour thousands of francs of gas into, and extra electricity to give over to the doctor. We are working with the electrician now to siphon off the energy, so that the lights and the vaccination fridge will work. Maybe it will, or maybe this will just be another development project that only got so far.
The next week I began building the women’s community garden. The women had scraped together the incredible sum of over $200, from women who have to beg their husbands for a few dollars to give birth at the health center. I raised the remaining $2,000, and together we built the 8,000 square meter garden. Success, yes, we’ve built a fence. Now what. We need a well, we need the land cleared, and most of all we need to have faith that we, the village women, will get the use out of the garden that we hope. Will it save the village? No. But it’s a step, right?
So of course these projects are important. Not only for the shallow ego, or the tangible results of an actual structure (I built this, goddamnit), but as a means to help them, well, help themselves. The garden will allow the women to grow their own vegetables to feed their vitamin-deprived children, or even an opportunity for them to sell the vegetables and make extra cash to save for their children’s clothes, school supplies, pre-natal consultations. The electricity will increase the availability of healthcare during the frantic hours of the night, and to provide better quality care in the dark. But in the end, I have mer faith in the sustainability of the impossibly slow process of teaching, sensitization, and promoting behavior change. I can paint the3 whole town full of murals, all yellow and blue and bright, or give sweet talks on hand washing with soap, rubbing hot pepper or honey to drive my point; but it will take generations until these practices are actually done on any measurable scale, a significant sigma statistic somehow erupting out of these impossible constraints. Any my trainings to screen for cervical cancer will always be limited as long as the Malian government doesn’t think it’s a priority. . The more the word gets out, the more healthcare workers are capable and empowered to screen for it, maybe there will be less cases of invasive cancer, a death or two thwarted. Dooni dooni. Small small.
So here’s my grand inconclusion: aid is as devastating if given purely monetarily and even more so if given without a great follow-up system (sorry, because they ‘deserve it’ is not always enough), and as empowering if given from the painfully slow route of teaching and sustainable ‘leg ups.’ But these lines are more then blurry. So just like most volunteers I know, I can channel the frustrations of Ayn Rand as easily as I do the endless humanism of Mother Theresa. So, will Mali, Africa, the developing world ever get there?
Man, I don’t even know where there is.
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