Iron Lion Zion

I am not cynical.

People are generally more bad than good. Most Western aid to Africa doesn’t work and some of it does more harm than good. The human race does not, in general, move forward. We are no less barbaric than we were four thousand years ago. The situation of the poor here in Malawi is not going to get better for a long time.

I am not cynical. I don’t think telling the truth is ever cynical. There are two kinds of dreamers. Those who have a dream (Dreamers) and those who dream as a way of life (Dreamingers). I’m trying to be the former, and I’ll never be the latter. I’m tired of Dreamingers. I’m tired of being called a pessimist by people who’d rather fantasize about tomorrow’s reality than start building the bridge from today’s. I’m sarcastic. I chuckle about gross injustices when there’s nothing I can do about them (which is precisely the reason I usually don’t chuckle about American politics). Not everyone needs to be sarcastic; it’s my way of coping. What makes me mad is that no one seems to see that big brick wall called disillusionment coming. Some people hit it and become truly disillusioned—they sink like Peter trying to walk on water. That’s when you’re cynical. When you’re no longer looking out for the good. Others do what drives me nuts: It’s like disillusionment is an ugly pink eviction notice and they slip it into the bookshelf and hope it blends in with the other printed material. They learn to ignore it. They buy the groceries, read the funny pages, raise the kids. They forget about that awfulness they caught a glimpse of once upon a time. It’s always there, but if you talk about the kind of new blender you want to buy and the rising prices of cable TV for long enough and with enough people who think likewise, it can start to feel like maybe these are really the things that matter. Still others live in a fantasy world, constructed by their egos or religion or just plain naïvette. Dreamingers.

If you come to Africa with both guns blazing, spraying money every which way, starting new projects that aren’t anchored by years of training and/or experience, having seen firsthand the cornucopia of SHIT that comes along with poverty and injustice, AND acknowledged it to be such, you’re a Dreaminger. I could give at least ten pages of examples of such shit without stopping. If you’ve read my blog much over the last year or two, you have a hint of what I mean, and you certainly don’t have to go to Africa to experience it.

I’m not saying I’ve found the perfect way to scale that wall of disillusionment and I’m not saying I’ve got the perfect dream. I’m just saying that any attempt at redemption needs to have a working relationship with the suffering and misery it’s trying to overcome. Don’t get disillusioned, get even. Dig a foundation of determination that runs deeper than the disillusionment—you’ll probably get really dirty and you’ll have to make several trips back to the hole to make it deeper before you can set the forms and pour the cement. But do it anyway.

I am not cynical.

***

Three days ago. Seven new “conversations”, entailing at least twelve new messages, all about the New Jerusalem Food Farm. Gmail doesn’t archive e-mails one-by-one, but sorts everything by conversation. So when I realized that about a dozen people had responded to my seven Zikomo Project requests (spread out over four conversations). It was another very good day. I find that here in Malawi people don’t express joy quite the same as I do—that is to say, like a drunken college student at a football game. So I don’t really do that round here. Hence, instead of letting my jubilation explode like fireworks, I had to settle for setting off a few Ground Bloom Flowers inside my torso. (You know the ones. They’re pink, the shape and size of an AA battery, and they hop and spin like a top when you light them.) I just sort of wriggled and giggled like an autistic schoolgirl. But it was still nice. For some reason people really seem to like the Zikomo Project. It’s been pleasantly surprising, actually.

***

Okay, I promise not to go on long about this. Last polls I had time to read say Hillary’s going to win the Democratic primary. Un-%#!$#*!-believable. We are offered Barack Obama and we prefer Hillary Clinton. What is wrong with us? Are these primary votes being bought like bananas at the supermarket or are we really that blind? Hey, I hear she just voted to identify the Iranian army as a terrorist entity. Nice. Hey America! Let’s replace our awful, nepotistic, warlike, entrenched-politician administration with another nepotistic, warlike, entrenched-politician administration! Just what we need! Please someone tell me that I’m wrong about the polls. I don’t want to have another lesser-of-two-evils choice this election. If she wins (or if anyone else wins, for that matter) and we invade Iran, I’m going to D.C. to join the other protesters.

***

You know my visa problems from the last post? They really brought me down. I felt tense all the time and it wore on me. I felt very sorry for myself.

During the weeks when this was happening, 3 occasions come to mind: 1) Job, a kid of 21 who wants to be an actor and was “working” (only paid occasionally, when money was available) with the Umodzi Drama Group, a little troupe that tries to scratch out a living in a culture-starved place with little hunger for theatre. He just helped wherever he could, writing, acting, running errands, whatever. Good-looking and America-philic, he was awaiting the outcome of his application to university so he could go on with his education. If he was very, very lucky, he might be able to go to school for acting. If less lucky, he could just get a degree in something else and do theatre on the side. Unfortunately, he turned out to be unlucky, and he was turned down flat. His parents are dead and he lives with his uncle, who won’t suffer his nephew to do theatre, only to work hard for a living. Now Job can hardly even do that. And why was he turned down? Because the year he passed his high-school diploma exams, there was massive cheating and results fraud, and most employers and colleges refuse to recognize any results from that year. Hence, Job had to stop working with the theatre and literally return to high school in order to pass his exams again. Before this happened Job had been a friend and I like him a lot. I haven’t seen Job for almost two months now. 2) I had a long conversation with the teachers at one of the orphanages where I volunteer. They were frustrated with the Board (which is driven along mostly by foreigners), because it was investing all of its time and money into developing a new facility for the orphanage, but paying little attention to the dire needs of the present: Over 300 kids have one dirty outhouse in which to urinate and defecate. There are regular food shortages. And most dire for the teachers, they spend 7-8 hours a day at the orphanage and get paid nothing. Some have families to support and it’s almost impossible to volunteer so much time when you really ought to be out trying to hustle up enough money to buy nsima and maybe some beans for your family to eat. A few have no income and one earns about $2 a week selling eggs. They complain to me and ask why the board won’t help them—after all, most board members drive cars and live in houses with walls, guards, and a gardener. I try to explain but it’s not good enough and I myself don’t agree with the board either. They feel more and more hopeless, after being promised a salary but not receiving it. Meanwhile the Board almost never even visits the orphanage and rarely listens long enough to take in the advice from Steven, the Malawian who tries to hold everything together. I have nothing I can tell them that will help. (Later on through the kindness of a few Missourians, I was able to give the teachers one month of salary as a sort of stopgap, but that money was spent mostly on food and was gone quickly.) 3) “Old man veggie,” a guy who comes to the office of McKallie’s Home of Future and Hope selling vegetables, charges too much. He wants almost double what a person could get at the market for the vegetables, and since I bought from him once, since then he always walks in, stooped and slow, looking at me with those big eyes and expecting me to buy something. He overcharges because for a long time he sold most of his veggies to white people who didn’t know a fair price and were happy to pay the “cute” old man whatever he asked. He got used to it, and sometimes even looks at me like I’m not being fair if I don’t buy from him. His family lives in Zomba and when he has enough money, he goes to visit them. One day when it was raining he came in and told me he couldn’t visit his family that weekend because he’d not sold anything today on account of the rain. I’d once before responded to a similar complaint from him by paying him 500 kwacha for about 120 kwacha’s worth of vegetables and telling him to go and see his family. This time I bought 50 kwacha of broccoli and told him that was all for today. He sort of thanked me and clearly told me through his eyes that I should have bought more.

I think that covers it. Those three things.

It’s the poverty. Not like our world would be perfect if there was no poverty, but I don’t think people who’ve grown up well-fed, clothed, and educated often realize what poverty systematically does. Without poverty, racism would be a largely moot point. Without poverty, we wouldn’t have anything close to the present rates of robbery (armed or otherwise) or even murder. Without poverty who could see any of the wars in recent history even being imagined? And this is just scratching the surface. Poverty touches everything. Massive deforestation in Malawi, for example: People can’t afford to give up the living they earn from the charcoal industry, a terribly wasteful one that indiscriminately burns down forests for the charcoal they can get and then sell in the markets. The people are also not educated about the effects their actions have on the environment, because—surprise surprise—the schools are poorly funded and the level of education is dismal.

Let’s not go too far—We’ll always have poverty because we’ll always have lazy, indolent people. But anyone who names this as the principle reason for widespread, infectious poverty is ignoring, um, HISTORY. If we really decided to get down to it and beat poverty back with a big fat bloody cricket bat, we’d really be getting somewhere.

***

So whatever happened to funny, short posts, huh? Funny . . . let’s see . . .

I dunno. I find that funny. Am I twelve?

As for short . . when was the last time I did anything that could be described as “concise” or “economical?” You should have realized this by now.