African Reading Challenge: The White Masai

The White Masai
By Corinne Hofmann

Maybe I was biased from the beginning. I told my self I wouldn’t like The White Masai and then I didn’t like it. It wasn’t the story I didn’t like, it was the main character – she was just so stupid.

As a fiction – it wouldn’t have been so bad, cheesy romance where love overcomes all (but not really). But as a “true story” it makes me want to scream with frustration. It took a lot of effort to see it through and I just kept thinking how many millions Corinne Hofmann must have made capitalizing on her “love story.” It’s insane.

To begin Corinne is on vacation in Kenya when she sees a Masai that she falls deeply in love with. So after going home she breaks up with her boyfriend and returns to Kenya to hook-up with said boyfriend. She goes back to his village with him etc.

There are a few trips between Switzerland and Kenya she decides marrying him is a good plan and does so without any understanding of culture, lifestyle, local language or plans for the future.

She is unable to live like locals although she tries – can’t fill her roll in the society and ends up mooching off other people. She opens a store for a while. Then she starts getting really sick because in her attempt to be a “real Masai” she doesn’t take precautions for her decidedly not Masai body. She gets malaria and Hep C among others.

Eventually she has a baby and her husband begins to get insanely jealous and long story short she flies back to Switzerland and sends notes back to Kenya saying sorry, but I couldn’t take it anymore.

The end.

The stupid part is – with some modifications she might have been able to make it work – but she completely ignored the advice of everyone. Also if she was so determined to be the “white Masai” she probably should have acted like a Masai woman and less like a European one – that may have helped her immensely.

Sure she was in love and everything she did was for that love. But, she was so naïve it was insane and then – in the end – she markets the whole thing.

This book – while an “interesting exotic tale of love and adventure” – left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Moving up in the news world

This is a screen grab from a moment of excitement at work when it was realized my article on breast-feeding had launched the Prince Albert Daily Herald to the main Google News Page – my photo and article and everything! Probably the first time the Daily Herald was there – kind of exciting for everyone…


And yesterday my story on the Northern Radio Telephone Service went out on the CP wire – with my name still attached to it. That is kind of a big deal!

Blog Action Day - Local Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day and the theme is poverty, a topic that is often avoided because of the immensity of it.

What comes to mind when someone tells you to think about poverty?

For most people it is the extreme poverty. The one billion people in the world who may not survive the day and every minute of everyday is a constant struggle.

In Southeast Asia I saw that kind of poverty where families lived in tin roofed and cardboard complexes that stretched for miles on undesirable real estate. In small villages, way off the beaten track, in Uganda, I saw some of that – small, dusty children, with big eyes and bigger bellies. Non governmental organizations have done a very good job keeping that kind of poverty on television and on donation request forms. And don’t get me wrong it is something that needs to end.

But, there is a more local poverty, the type most people step over on street corners in North American cities, the type some people yell “get a job” at and it is more prevalent then most people want to know.

Why don’t we want to know? Because we don’t like to think our system has failed someone. We like to think that everyone has the same opportunities and some people have wasted them. To a certain extent I even felt like that – the starving people overseas are MORE in need, and MORE deserving of help.

Then I moved from Uganda to Prince Albert and realized a lot more people overseas have more then we think and lot more people in our cities and towns have a lot less.

In Saskatchewan one in 10 households will have trouble securing enough food. In the Aboriginal community these numbers go up to one in three – if there are children in the homes the numbers go up again to nearly 44 per cent.

Can you imagine? Fourty-four per cent of families in Aboriginal communities in Saskatchewan are not sure where their next meal is coming from? Probably not everyday, but even having to make the decision paying rent or feeding your family once is too often.

It’s almost funny how easy it is for some people to explain why people in our communities don’t need help.

If I say one in three households are food insecure, someone will tell me “well their bands should be caring for them,” or something far more nasty but to that effect.

If I say “what about homeless people on the downtown eastside?” someone will tell me “they are all drug dealers or prostitutes,” like it means they don’t deserve help.

I don’t understand it. If someone needs help, they need help – it doesn’t matter if you are black, white, or Aboriginal.

If we can send money away – why can’t we support some organizations here at home? I’m not saying to stop donating overseas. But, can you imagine how the local food bank or women’s shelter feels when they see the community pull together to send money or items to save starving orphans in Mali when they cannot give a starving child here something to eat.

My solution spread the wealth. If you only have enough money to donate to one organization keep doing it – but drop by the food back with an extra package of spagetti, leave used clothing at the Salvation Army or one of the collection boxes found in most cities.

Don’t have anything to give? Never under estimate the value of volunteering. Many “soup kitchens,” food banks and housing project operate on volunteers.

And while you are serving soup you might meet some of the people you are helping. Suddenly, the person you stepped over isn’t so scary and their look of gratitude might make you stand up and tell someone else to do something.

Because, as clichéd as it sounds, we can only end poverty (at home and abroad) if we work together.

ABC

I would imagine the goal of these poster mail outs was to make people vote conservative. However, after receiving two of them in the mail – paid for by the taxpayer – it just make me think “ABC”

Anybody but Conservative.

The Bang-Bang Club: Book Review

The Bang-Bang Club
Snapshots from a Hidden War
By Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva

“Let’s go find some bang-bang”

The Bang-Bang club is a group of photographers that banded together to lessen some of the dangers of working in the townships around Johannesburg in the early 90s. The book tells the story of the four (and some of their friends on the periphery) Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter, and Ken Oosterbroek and their images. Two of those four are now dead – one shot during the last days of violent uprising in 1994, the other by his own hand after a battle with drugs, the loss of his friend, and criticism over his Pulitzer prize winning photograph caught up with him.

The Bang-Bang club talks about the biggest fear I have as a journalist and photographer. How do you rationalize what you see through the lens, when do you help, why do you do what you do?

I know this isn’t one from my originally African Reading Challenge list – but I had to recommend it! As a photographer, I liked it. As someone interested in South Africa, I liked it. It’s violent, it’s sad, but somewhere in-between is a group of adrenalin-junkie photographers who make their impact on the world. You respect them for what they do – because most of us can’t and we need to see.

US government cuts funding to condoms

The lead that arrived in my inbox two days ago -

The US government is cutting its funding for the supply of contraceptives to family planning clinics run by Marie Stopes International in Africa, alleging that it condones forced abortions in China.

MSI does some amazing work in Uganda and other countries. They play a huge role in HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and counselling in Owino Market ensuring people get access to medicines and CONDOMS.

MSI has categorically denied that it supports forced abortions or coercive sterilisation in China or anywhere else in the world, and says that the actions of the Bush government will result in more abortions in Africa, as women will be unable to get contraceptives and will end up with unwanted pregnancies.

As it turns out - at least if you listen to the group Catholics for Choice, Condoms for Life Campaign – the religious right plays a large role in influencing how USAID (and other American organizations) spends their money. On more than one occasion condoms have been pulled out of Aid packages in favour of the ABC approach to controlling HIV. I'm not saying anything about the accusations, just saying that USAID has looked for excuses for not sending condoms before this time. Funny they cut funding to condoms over abortion - that seems counter-intuitive.

If someone doesn’t believe in something that’s fine – but does that person have the right to make a life-or-death choice for someone else?

Article courtesy of Mail and Guardian (they are a great news source) and the rest can be found here.

Election Suggestion

Not that I believe in swaying the vote – I support all of you going out and making informed choices in our upcoming election – but if I was living in Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar I would choose Nettie Wiebe.

I first heard her speak at the annual Stapleford lecture at the University of Regina – where she spoke about food security to a packed auditorium. Here are some of the things she said back in 2005 in a lecture entitled “Who’s cooking the food system?”

• She says she believes the right to food is a basic right, putting her on one side of the International debate and she says the food system is about values, nutrition, culture, and increasingly about power.
• According to Weibe, a large part of the food system is knowing where the food is from and how far it has traveled.
• “If you are what you eat, you should know what you are eating, no?”
  
• She explained to a stunned audience that most of the food has traveled at least 2,000 – 3,000 km and that it has been packed, repacked, moved, and packed again. The human justice aspect plays a large role here.
• “You know less and less about your food the further it travels,” she said. “The less you know the less democratically involved you can be in it.”
• She says that in North America we are like those cheap toys found in dollar stores – made of 100 per cent unknown fibre. She said she thinks this is because “we have enough to eat.” Whereas 850 millions people in the world are food insecure, the politically correct term for starving.
• “We need to regain control of food at the local levels,” she said. “We need to know who we are and what we are eating.”

She knows her stuff when it comes to big phrama getting rich, ecosystem destruction, brutal human processes and money making empires. And can tell you story after story on them.
So all you in the Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar riding - get involved and you might have someone stand up for you.

Food Aid Changes

So according to an article in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian the United Nations is going to start buying surplus crops from low-income farmers in 21 developing countries for the World Food Programme.

Apparently 80 per cent comes from developing countries but all from traders (aka middle men) and large scale farmers (possible bad labour practices?).

The article says

"The world's poor are reeling under the impact of high food and fuel prices and buying food assistance from developing-world farmers is the right solution at the right time," said Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, who said the Purchase for Progress scheme was a "win-win".

Win-win indeed – wonder why it took them so long to come up with this?

Charitable foundations established by Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, are funding the project, which targets some of the world's poorest countries, including Sierra Leone, Malawi, Ethiopia and El Salvador. It is expected that 40 000 tons of food - enough to feed to 250 000 people for a year -- will be purchased in the first year.

Right it took Bill Gates and Howard Buffett to come up with this…

The farmers will be required to form collectives and the usual UN requirements for growers to provide surety bonds, transport and packaging materials will be relaxed or waived. By selling directly to the WFP rather than to middlemen, it is expected that the farmers will receive higher-than-normal prices.

That’s great – I have nothing bad to say about it!

Although it’s entertaining because as we grow closer to the deadline for the millennium development goals it seems that us developed countries are realizing we are going to have to work at achieving them

Apparently we just can’t make goals and then sit back – we have to work for them.