Some Stories and an Angry Rant

Yeah, so orientation for college is this coming Tuesday.  There's absolutely no way to get there through public transportation in time.  My options would be to show up at 1:00 AM and hang around until orientation at 9:00 AM, or to show up at 8:30 and then be late taking a city bus to the campus.  We went to some people who know their way around the system, and they confirmed that it is impossible to make the trip on time.  They offered a source to find an individual who might be willing to make the trip for a price.

Kind of sketchy, but even with this method there was only one person doing Guelph-Kitchener, and they even specified my college's campus.  This woman was offering regular rides for up to three people starting this September.  Sounds like a carpool type deal, probably offered by a student.  Well, she probably doesn't have the same orientation day as me, but might as well try.

Turns out, I know her.  She's related to someone in this house.

Hey, remember that guy who doesn't ever remember me?  Well, I had a big conversation with him about my brother's tree, and he offered to take care of it.  He has been, and when he saw my brother, he brought up the tree conversation with him.  He remembered the conversation, but he thought he'd had it with my brother, not me.  I don't know about this guy.  He remembers everyone else, and he's always friendly with me, but he  just can't remember who I am!  It's so weird!

Do you remember me telling a story about a couple who ran the local convenience store?  One where I tried to buy cigarettes (not for myself! or for anyone underage!), the woman tried to card me, and the husband flipped out on her for disrespecting me by underestimating my age?  Yeah, well, they retired.  The two of them are in their early fifties, but apparently they've amassed quite the sum of money.  He said they worked 16-hour days and basically lived at work.  He spoke of how many years they'd been in the city, and all the common landmarks they'd never seen.  He said he loved the store, but as time passes, it becomes a prison.

So they've passed it on to a pair of younger men.  They also gave me a weird time buying cigarettes.  One of them asked the other one to guess my age (This was the first time I'd met them, but the first guy knew my age).  The other guy guesses that I'm 17-18.  The second guy laughs and says that no, I'm 22, and explains that he knew this from my mom, whom he had thought was my sister until she told him otherwise.  This made me feel a bit better, because it seemed less inexplicable that he would know my age before I had met him.

Then I asked for cigarettes and the first guy asked for ID.  The second guy got all nervous and started putting out excuses for his colleague's behaviour.  It really isn't that big a deal, getting ID'd...  But now I've experienced it from both generations of shop keepers.

Yo, so this guy did an Ask Me Anything with a third world child from Mali.  It garnered an enormous amount of sympathy and attention.  This guy managed  to fundraise a million dollars for the village, plus a doll for the child.  And I hated it.

Don't get me wrong, the money and the doll are just wonderful, but in my opinion, he earned it through lies, disrespect and insincerity.  It was very  obvious to me that the whole thing was fake on the end of the girl.

"What are your living conditions like?"

"We get our water from a well that is very far away.  I have three brothers, three sisters, a mom and dad and two grandparents.  We all live in three rooms."

Okay, go ask a six year old what her living conditions are, and tell me if she says "We get our water from a tap that is in our house.  I live with my mom, my dad and my brother.  We live in a two-story house with three bedrooms."

That Malian girl sure knows all the power-words to tug the heartstrings of first-worlders.

If I'm being charitable, I'll say they at least must have broke it down into smaller questions, like "Where do you get your water from" "How far away is it?" "How many people are in your family?" "How bug is your home?" although it's not proper conduct to reconstruct a question like that without informing us they'd done so.

But let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they really did ask all those questions and faithfully relayed them to us.  You have to consider it was a child who answered them.  When you ask "How far away is the well?", of course a child is going to think it's further away than it is.  When you're young, everything seems bigger, and she's going to speak from the perspective of a child.

And I know what their "Rooms" are like.  They're the size of small houses.  Their living room is outside, and the shower room and toilet room are separate constructs.  My host family lived in three "Rooms" as well, and it wasn't bad at all.  If the translator had translated it as "Three houses" instead of "Three rooms", then I'd like to see how much sympathy it would have gotten.

"What do you do for fun?"

"I don't have time for fun.  I have to help my family do chores.  But every once in a while, I go outside and dance and sing."

HUH?!  "I don't have time for fun"?  I  never met a kid who would say that.  They would play soccer in the day and dance at night.  I guess it's a different village, and there's no saying that Mali is the same everywhere, but he donates a soccer ball to the village because their last one broke.  Not much point in that if they don't have time for fun.  Makes you wonder how they broke their last one, too.  Must've been using it as a hammer or something, since they couldn't have been playing with it.

"Sometimes I go outside"?  They are only ever inside when they're sleeping!

"Are you happy?"

"I don't know.  I think a doll would make me happy."

That's it.  Let's raise a million dollars for this kid.

So they get her a doll.  You know where they get it from?  The village  market!  There was a doll for sale in the market, priced and marketed for village girls in the area.  I guess it's nice that they sprung for the doll, but it wasn't nearly as far out of their reach as what this fool is implying.

The guy was kind of tactless in his delivery, too.  He didn't bother saying the girl's age, gender or name in the description, and nobody asks her what her name is.  We only see that she's a girl in a follow-up video where they give her the doll

Also, in his video, he describes himself as being "In the middle of nowhere".  If he had a proper empathy for the people there, it would feel like a place to him.

And then in his follow-up video, he drives through the village and plays sad music to  scenes of the villagers acting normally and going about their daily business.  It looks pretty much exactly like Karadie.  It is so disrespectful to make their way of life synonymous with tragedies.

Lots of people called this whole thing out as being fishy, myself included, and basically everyone who did call him out was someone who had been to Africa, but it wasn't enough.  The masses ate it up.

Whenever you have something like this, there's always a select few people who go "How can they have so many children?  It's fucking irresponsible!"

And yeah, when they portray the problems of Africa as centering around food shortages (which they did in this interview, speaking on that non-existant Sahel crisis I've mentioned previously) it does look "Fucking irresponsible" and stupid of them to have so many children.

But it's NOT food shortages!  My counterpart said that "Mali is a land where nobody starves" and I never saw a contradiction to this.  I can't speak for all of Africa, but right now my neighbourhood is being used as the archetypical place for African starvation sympathy, and it isn't true.  The problem is quality, not quantity.  It takes ten years to develop a resistance to the water and you're not born with it, so the first ten years of a kid's life is a test to see if he can develop a resistance before the water kills him.  I've already described how I was capable of eating less and less of the food by the day, to  the point where I could only eat a few spoonfuls before I started vomiting,  and I completely lost my appetite to the point that I thought I would starve myself to death if left to my own devices.

We were also plugged full of vaccinations and took Malaria medication, which the locals don't get.  We were also covered by CWY in case of a medical emergency, which the locals don't have.  Ask any Malian my age, and he will tell you that he's had Malaria like, six times.  The girl I was dating almost died of Malaria early on in the program, but she received no medical help because she was a Malian and she couldn't afford treatment for herself.

Now, when the problem is food shortages, then more people means lower quality of life for each individual, and may lead to unnecessary deaths.  However, when the problem is the quality of the water and food, then everyone can eat and drink to their hearts content no matter how many children there are.

In fact, it makes sense to have lots of children.  Want to  know why?  Because I  lived in a village of 800 adults and 2000 people.  The sinister implication is that not very many of those 1200 children become adults.  Take into account what I said about each child having an equal shot at growing up regardless of the population, and we come to a place where it's required for them to have that high a number of children in order to maintain their adult population.  If they didn't, they would dwindle and die out.

Saying the locals suffer from food shortages and then emphasizing the immensity of their child population makes Africans look like irresponsible dumbasses, and it's not true.  I would go so far as to say that they do the best they can given the resources they have.

In fact, they understand the importance of controlling the population and try to discourage sex as a recreational activity.  One such method of discouraging this is the ever-unpopular practice of female genital mutilation.  I in no way condone this practice (and it isn't nearly as common as Western media makes it out to be), but First Worlders look kind of hypocritical when they say things like "A woman should enjoy sex.  But she shouldn't have sex."

It's like how some people put up these big signs in Sirakorola, saying "WEAR A CONDOM".  Two problems with that.  First is, the sign is written in French, which only a select few in  the community will be able to read despite their insistence that Mali is a French-speaking nation, and the second problem is that there are no condoms in Sirakorola!  Fucking pointless-ass sign.  Malians actually have comparatively little sex, when contrasted with North Americans.

And I really hope that Mr. Interviewer didn't just hand the million dollars over to the villagers in cold, hard cash (and if they did, please, please let it have been in West African Francs and not American dollar bills), because having lots of money doesn't do much when there is nothing to buy!  I guess it'd be good for them to be able to send people to the hospital in Bamako when they got sick...