A Ride through Britt's Random Ramblings...

Hello again, dear friends, family and assorted others. It’s been a while. Since writing last I have celebrated a one year anniversary as a Zambian resident, spent three days tranversing the continent on a train, read 10 books, cemented and painted the walls of my little hut, now affectionately known as Kamizhi’s Cottage, and spent countless rainy afternoons and candlelit evenings sewing and my newest craft-based obsession, collage-ing. (side note: the current trend is anything that cannot feasibly be modified with a chitenge scrap – i.e. tabletops, door, magazine files) should be covered with photo clippings and leftover wrappers. So far my cat has escaped the chitengifization of 2010 but he did earn himself a bowtie.) Confession: while much of my craft-happy binge can be blamed on the rains, another major factor was my decision to smarten up my reading lists. While I love reading the classics and policy books that fill out Solwezi library’s shelves, a few weeks of straight James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are enough to drive even this most bookish of girls to the needle and glue stick as it were.

There is no real unifying theme to this entry besides its randomness. So I’ll skip the strained transitions and label each new thought line as it appears. Enjoy the glimpse into the disjointed musings that have been bouncing around my head these days.

School and Such.

Work goes well. January started a new school year in Zambia – a much more logical system. At seven years, two of my favorites children on the family compound are now old enough to walk the two kilometers to school and back. Twin brothers, they love to show me their workbooks on the days they actually go. They point out their clumsily drawn alphabets with pride-filled gap-toothed grins. Workbook gained and teeth lost – concrete evidence of the passing months.

At my zonal school, we’re trying to start a small library out of our resource centre. If anyone has any free(ish) ideas for encouraging literacy in kids, please pass them on! On another kinda note, I’m spending this week training the incoming volunteers at my old training stomping grounds of Chongwe. Don’t really feel like I know enough about anything Zambian to be an effective trainer but perhaps I’ll fool them (and myself).

Stuff

Peace Corps Zambia’s population operates the way the world’s population should. In order for new volunteers to come in, the old ones have to go out. Meaning that in about a month, a good quantity of my friends here will be returning to America-land. While I get this on principle, in practice it is much harder to accept. Besides causing emotional strain, this upcoming departure also has me thinking a lot about stuff, literally.

Packing has never been a pleasant experience for me. I hate deciding what to leave and what to take. I like my things. I want them with me. I believe it hurts their feelings to be left behind, a theory I trace back to early childhood movies where toys came to life behind their owners’ backs and lamented their slow fading into disuse. But maybe that’s just me trying to put a veneer of psychological romance to my materialism.

Already I am dreading the task that my friends are now confronting – packing up their Peace Corps life into as small a space as possible, jettisoning most of it as giveaways to other volunteers or the village, and strapping the remainder on their backs as they set off for final vacations before the real world begins. Seeing this process made me realize two things: I have a lot of stuff; I am very attached to it.
Who would have thought that this experience would make me embrace my materialism? Perhaps it is just that this little cottage is the first place that is truly all my own. And the longest I lived anywhere for one stretch since leaving for college. Ideally I would like to just pick this whole little hut up and plop it down somewhere in America, preferably a rather incongruous urban setting. With maybe the addition of electricity and plumbing.

The upshot of my stuff dilemma is that I still have a year to cultivate a Buddha-like non-attachment. But I’m not holding my breath.

My ramblings on how to save the world/Stop reading if you are not a development major with some time to kill
Two of the more intellectual reading materials that have passed over my desk these days are Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” and New York Times’ special women’s rights issue (timed to complement columnists Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book “Half of the Sky”) Klein’s book links a suspension of democracy, neoliberal market changes and torture, starting in Pinochet’s Chile and continuing throughout transitional countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. This trifecta is responsible for the explosion of inequality and dearth of social safety nets in the developing world and for the “shocked” populations’ refusal to demand their basic economic rights. The Times focused more on the traditional outrage-inducing rights violations – Indian women whose husbands drank away their microloan earnings, Afghan girls attacked by acid throwers on their way to school, African mothers with botched or fatal childbirths and no access to contraceptives, American wage earners with bank accounts three-fourths as full as their male counterparts. Reading the stories of these anecdotal women, there is a clear connection between the hit-you-over-the-head blatant abuse and my rising sense of injustice.

For Klein’s book, the lines of repression are murky, no drunken spouses or rapist soldier to villain-ize but a complex web of global corporations, think tanks, international organizations and suited speculators. A fog of evil or just plain selfishness that has none of the solid edges of a traditional enemy. It’s hard to get riled up about private banks and export treaties. Together the book and the magazine revived the dichotomy of my AU life – “The Shock Doctrine” mirroring the dry economic readings and second generation rights lectures; The Times that of noisy student meetings and impassioned coffeehouse debates. (side note: I have been missing my days as a linked-in member of activist circles for a while now. A small sacrifice to make for my Peace Corps experience, which requires a hiatus of activism while a government employee. Still, a part of me aches for the communities of loving fighters. We who built up imaginary utopias, who dirtied our hands with policies and actions, who knew that when the world’s hurt pushes you to your edge the only solution is to scream into the void and pray that your echo brings you back some hope.)

It is cliché to say that the modern bleeding heart will care a lot more about the easy, personalize, gross individual rights violations highlighted in The Times than the vague, systematic violations perpetuated against entire populations by the market. For one thing, the neoliberal rights violation is less an abuse of a person than a restriction of the realm of the possible. If throwing dissidents in prison or mutilating genitalias could be compared to beating a dog, then imposing neoliberal markets sans social safety nets could be putting that dog on a very short leash. Who’s to say it would leave if it got the chance anyway. And if the leash leaves the dog defenseless against the elements and would-be attackers, well is that really the leasher’s fault?

Most people recognize a good economy that provides jobs and opportunities and a state that provides healthcare, education and security as prerequisites to any good quality of life. Still, most people who care about other people in this world are by nature fixers. It’s a lot easier to “fix” hunger by donating a cow than it is to throw off a global yoke of an economic system. One solution can be finished with the click of the mouse in between email checking and dinner plans. The other takes a little longer.

Call it the “drive-thru” mentality. We like issues that can be easily packaged, ones we can throw our money at and move on, full on cheap empty calories and conveniently ignoring the lack of nutritional sustainability.

Being here has made me painfully aware of this drive-thru ethos of helping. Zambians are conditioned to see Westerns as donors – of school rooms, of medical supplies, of water wells. These money-based quick fixes may satisfy a village’s immediate hunger, but they do absolutely nothing to permanently nourish a country that is starving for better systems of education, healthcare and sanitation. Worse, they perpetuate a dependency on aid, make skills transfer work like the Peace Corps’, unspeakably difficult, and allow for a governmental sloth on basic rights issues. It’s the equivalent of a Big Mac’s artery clogging, spare-tire inducing effect and it is only getting super-sized.

It seems that countries like Zambia need more than aid to develop. They need the changes hinted at in Klein’s book. They need a rollback of the neoliberal revolution of the 90s. They need a greater state hand in the market. They need the Third Way that was briefly thought possible after the fall of communism but eclipsed by dominance of unfettered capitalism.

Sadly, these changes will not be as easy coming as the aid dollars. And perhaps my conclusions are too short-sighted. I’m too near the problem to see the solution. Perhaps the next book I read will send me another pseudo-intellectual diatribe. Maybe I just miss college term papers more than I’d like to admit. Regardless thanks for putting up me. As always.