Today is Blog Action Day. Tens of thousands of bloggers are writing posts on the topic of poverty. We’re supposed to write something that means something, that might make you think. But I’m stuck.
I was in Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa, when it was listed as the world’s second poorest country. My monthly living allowance was less than my home phone and cell phone bills, but I think my allowance was still more than what my Malian mother came across in a year.
My Malian mother never asked me for money. She brought me lunch every day — ground millet cooked into a large patty and topped with okra sauce — no meat, no vegetables. Each Saturday was market day, and I bought her a kilo of rice and a kilo of beans, which we would have on Sunday.
One day she came to my house with an empty can of instant coffee. “Kadiatou,” she said, calling me by my Malian name, “Do you have any coffee?” This was the first time she asked me for anything. I had just that very morning run out of my own supply of Nescafé coffee crystals, the only coffee we could really get. So I showed her my empty can — gave it to her, actually, since she and others liked to keep empty tins, old tuna cans, plastic containers.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really just ran out.”
It didn’t occur to me until an hour or two later that I could have given her money to buy coffee, that she probably needed it for a special occasion, that she was asking because she thought I would help. I really didn’t think about it. It didn’t cross my mind that she needed coffee and didn’t have any money to buy it. I had what I considered pocket change in my hut. She had nothing. And I didn’t even think to help.
What do I know of poverty? How can I understand the idea that there absolutely is no money to be had and no way to get it? In Mali, the mortality rate of kids under the age of 4 was 50 percent when I was there. When I arrived, one of my neighbors named their daughter Kadiatou after me. She was my namesake, my togoma, and she was sick all the time. And she had a 50/50 chance of living until the age of 4.
I’m sitting here in a fairly luxurious apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the US. I’ve been whining about not making enough money. Not making enough money for me means I can’t go to the coffee shop for Americanos every day. It means that I’m not going to buy a personalized license plate (I contemplated AVE Z). It doesn’t mean I can’t buy shoes when mine have holes. It doesn’t mean my children may die of malnutrition or illness.
When I was a kid, my parents really watched our money. My dad said he spent those years “investing in groceries.” We got blocks of processed cheese food and jars of peanut butter from the government. But we weren’t destitute. I can’t write about poverty. I can never understand what it means to be impoverished.
Another aspect of poverty that makes it difficult for me to grasp the concept is the enormity of the problem. Can one solve poverty? Can we alleviate that kind of suffering? Can we fix it? I feel overwhelmed into inaction. What could I possibly do to help? Give money to people on the street who say they’re poor? Help out overseas? You’ve heard the saying, “If you want to feed a man for a day, give him a fish. If you want to feed him for a lifetime, teach him how to fish.” But which people do we teach? And how do we teach them?
I’m embarrassed by this post. I’m embarrassed by my ignorance and my lack of initiative. I’m embarrassed by my relative wealth. And I just don’t know where to go from here. Do I rush out and start to help? Or perhaps I tackle another tremendous global disaster, like incurable cancer or the disappearing wetlands or drug addiction or child abuse or female circumcision or….
Or do I just keep writing here in my little apartment with my cat and my recycle bins and hope those real problems never affect me?
Hmm. Not sure they’ll ask me to participate in Blog Action Day 2009.
I may be in love…. A guy named Jack from the UK wrote me this weekend to tell me that I was missing a “full stop,” otherwise known as a period. On my website, Jack thought I should have a period after the word say where it says “Create content for organizations with something to say.”
