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Reflecting Back

I spent a week in England after South Africa and the very first TV commercial I saw was broadcast by southafrica.net, a tourist website. In the video a National Geographic reporter talked about all the improvements she’s seen in the townships over the last ten years, children going to school, clean drinking water, lots of sports and games. It was a very strange thing to witness since none of the shots included the glass filled ground, the piles of trash on fire, dead sheep heads, or dozens of women huddled around a single water drain. The 30 second spot may as well have had a Disney soundtrack playing in the background it was so one sided.

And while the commercial bothered me because it is not an example of truth telling, I believe it’s a means to an end. The purpose of the commercial is to increase tourist travel to South Africa leading up to the Soccer World Cup. If this campaign is met with success then the economic benefit of having large numbers of international tourists present may trickle down and help the impoverished of the country. This seems like a stretch though. The true attitude of the commercial was less about exciting and more about dispelling fear. Perhaps westerners still perceive Africa as unwelcoming or too underdeveloped to travel to. This commercial then would focus on an image of even the least hospitable locations in Africa having laughing children playing soccer to make people feel comfortable.

This leads into the main discussion that I’ve been having with people as I tell them about my trip. The main thing that changed for me during the trip was my perception of the importance of good governing in development. I volunteer for a political action group that works on poverty legislation. In that, the government of each individual nation is a variable that isn’t very helpful to talk about. Since our work lobbies the national government, not the governments of other states, it’s important to focus development assistance on the areas that we have control over such as NGO’s and on the ground groups. These can be very powerful tools in helping the people in the most desperate areas of the world. In South Africa though I saw how the suppression of a group of people by denying them a good education passes through the generations and translates into a 40% unemployment rate. The effect of one piece of legislation can make any progress by non-government groups disappear. So how do you tackle something so staggering? The answer cannot be just a non-government approach which I had adhered to in the past. The South African government has to be the main driving force behind social improvement. The issues that plague poor South Africa ranges from lack of clean water to a poor health care infrastructure. All of these factors work together to bring down quality of life and in many cases the poverty is so bad that the government, even if it devoted it’s entire budget and personnel to helping just one of these factors, would be unable to fix it.

This leaves me dealing with the same statement that I used when we did the mindfulness exercise. The statement I wrote down was that, “Poverty in unavoidable in the world.” My reactions were identified and a mix of frustration and angst. The reason for that is because I don’t believe that is true. I believe the purpose of human existence is to improve the quality of life for all of its members so that each person is at a minimum, secure in shelter and basic resources with fair access to education and the tools to succeed. That doesn’t mean poverty doesn’t exist. It means there are no societal barriers to getting out of poverty and there is a strong enough social welfare system to provide people a way out of such circumstances. That would be the closest thing to a utopian society I can imagine and I believe human history is the record of our attempt to get closer to such an existence. So this creates an internal struggle where I cannot accept the conditions that I saw in the shantytowns, but I also can’t see anyway for either the government or any NGO to make a significant improvement.

So I go back to my earlier thought from the beginning of the trip. I stated that I thought the only true thing that would cause reconciliation in South Africa was the passage of time and generations of people. Perhaps poverty in these extreme cases is something that cannot be solved overnight, but has to be done gradually. It’s a language tool I use when talking about increasing funding levels for programs but in my heart, if it were up to me these changes would occur overnight. That’s not how humans seem to work though. Hopefully this compromising point will be sufficient for development efforts to succeed. I know the South African government and people are doing the best they can and maybe focusing on the good is what the country needs right now. Hopefully the World Cup shines a bright light on the progress and issues the country faces and the exchange helps the bottom line raise up a little. It’s the best step I can think of.