Bring it on Thoreau and Ghandi!
New aventures. New Questions. New processes. New approaches.
In the spirit of living birth through death, the road now leads you, the reader, to new musings:
It has almost been a year since the beginning of this blog and just to think that I was able to share some thoughts with others makes it all worthwhile. In hindsight, laziness got the best of me in many moments where I could have squeezed out some decent insights, especially when overseas.
In order to complete the process of confronting both Mahamadou Diarra and Paul Bunyan, I would like to comment on my experience while going through reverse culture shock.
Initially, I would describe my state as being very fragile and intentional. Part of me feared to step foot in the gigantic Safeway in Smithers. The same thing happened the first few times I spent walking through the Rideau Centre in Ottawa. So much money. So many people with one thing on their mind: what can I buy?
I cannot say that having lived in one of the poorest countries in the world has made me turn to cynicism or become bitter at the "Western" hyper-consumerism. It's not like I didn't see it before, so there's no way I'm going to play the "There's children starving in Africa" card on people in the mall. Guilt may work through other vehicles but I'm not going to drive one of them. There are other ways to invoke change. In fact, this is where I find myself now, in finding ways to make people listen to either what I have to say, or what some of my friends in Mali are trying to communicate.
Having made a handful of presentations to school groups from Grade 3 to Grade 10 (100 on a Monday morning!), it's fairly obvious that stereotypes are alive and omnipresent. That's ok. Would you believe it, some of them are actually true!
Yes there is poverty in Africa.
Yes there are starving children with inflated bellies.
Yes I saw some.
Yes some people live in huts.
Yes there is war.
Yes there are wild animals.
These are some of the stereotypes that often came up when I asked the kids what they thought about when I said the word "Africa".
But do their eyes ever open up when I tell them that I had wireless high speed internet at my office.
Or that I had a TV at my apartment.
Or that an entire village is being powered by a plant the villagers are growing on their marginal lands.
The point is that we can always go beyond and dig deeper. It took me 5 months in West Africa to do it but it doesn't have to. It can be as simple as finding other sources of information on world news. Ok so that link was just a joke, but you get the idea.
I will close with a quote:
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where it should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
