Fun observation. Today when I logged in, this blog had 11111 views. That's a fun number.
Yesterday was Canada Day, which marks my anniversary for when I started CWY, and I guess that means it's been six months since I've come back from Africa. That means I've lived in Canada for twice as I did in Mali, just counting the time since I came back. Doesn't feel like it.
There was a guy who did the program, who came to do an information session before we left for Mali. We saw him again during reintegration camp. It was pretty clear that his experience had not moved far from the forefront of his mind. There was another guy who did the program last year, who actually returned to Mali during the time that we were there. It seems like it's an experience that will take years to work down mentally.
It's too bad, you know? There's a perception in the 1st World that we were born in the best place, and, on the polar opposite, you've got Africa, home of the most 3rd of the 3rd World countries. Because of that, I very rarely tell people the negative aspects of the culture there, because people are so spring-loaded to jump all over them and condemn the nation as vile, and they ignore all the good stuff I'd said, and won't listen to anything positive I say after that. I really have to cram the positivity down their throats. People just want to look down on Africa so badly.
1st World media is very unfair to Africa. I don't know if I got landed in a good place and there are places that are more akin to the 1st World image of Africa, but Mali itself is a fairly bad location even by Africa standards when looked at through 1st World media. It's in the bottom 20 impoverished nations, and bottom 10 for quality of life for women, which I'm going to call bull on.
I've written a lot of my positive stories on here, but I'm going to have to write my negative ones somewhere separate, not for the public. It's kind of funny. Many positive stories I have, I can't put on here, because I can't explain why something was positive without going through a negative experience, whether it's negative because of a Malian or Canadian influence. I also don't write stories where I come out looking too amazing, because I consider it bragging. I've written a number of stories in that vein, just to delete it before posting.
Oh, by the way, elephants do laugh. I thought the Malians may have considered the elephants trumpeting to be a form of laughter, but it turns out elephants do straight-up laugh. There's a number of videos of it that I can't watch on dial-up.
There are blueberries developing on the bushes out here. When I was a kid, I'd spend hours at a time picking blueberries, which Grandma would bake into pies. I've always considered blueberries to be a major aspect of my experience up here, and until this visit, I was ignorant to the fact that blueberry season only lasts a couple weeks per year!
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I think you may have mentioned this before, but one sad thing is that people "here" (I mean the US, but this may be true of Canada as well) tend to think of "Africa" as one giant blob, as if Egypt, Mali, Ethiopia, and South Africa were all the same ... and yet the same people would laugh hysterically at you if you suggested that Canada, the US, and Mexico were all the same.
ReplyDeleteWe do have access to opportunities that people in a lot of African countries don't have. We live under governments that are stable for most people's values of "stable". (They may have various degrees of corruption, but it's been 150 years since there was armed insurrection in the US - I'm not familiar enough with Canadian history to give a similar date.)
But that doesn't mean that Malians all live poor lives, or that North Americans all live good lives. Your life is really only measurable in the context in which you live it: after all, that's the context in which you make your decisions. If my air conditioner breaks down, it doesn't help me to know that Malians deal with significantly hotter temperatures. (Of course it gets much, much colder in Fishers than in Bamako; tolerating summer heat would put me in quite a bind when winter came around.) Malians aren't living lesser lives simply because Xbox Live isn't available there.
We're luckier down here. Blueberry season seems to last much longer, through July and August. (The hotter weather, perhaps? Wonder if that means blueberry season now is even longer.) I wouldn't have known except for my friends who go to farmers' markets and such. It's hard to buy fresh produce for a single person - it's expensive in small quantities and can go bad quickly in larger ones. (One can always freeze, I guess, but I don't have a big freezer - and that is, as they say, #firstworldproblem.)