In my next post, I will get back to my knitting. But I've been waking up at 3 a.m., and this morning, I am thinking about one more aspect of my Africa trip. The animals at Kruger Park have it pretty good. But our encounter with our driver, as well as two books I read while I was there really made me think about how well they are treated in comparison to the people.
Operations Man is a history buff. He brought along a short history of colonial South Africa, and taught me about the years of European exploitation of the people of South Africa. Although apartheid is over,the problems are far from solved, and they are confusing and uncomfortable to bump up against.
We had a driver, J., at the game park. He was a bright young man from a village just outside the park. The village just got electricity three years ago. When J. wants to watch TV, he stands looking in the window of a neighbor's house, and must watch whatever they are watching. To use the internet, he takes a long drive and pays the equivalent of a few dollars for fifteen minutes at an internet cafe.
When he goes to work, J. puts on a spiffy uniform and drives affluent South Africans, Europeans and Americans around, pointing out animals and plants. It can be very intimate, especially if there are few passengers over many rides. We learned that J. makes three thousand dollars a year, and that he has some responsibility to care for his siblings.It's a large family--J.'s father has two wives and nine children. He wants to be an industrial psychologist, but he can't save money to go to school. He lives on a pittance and tips.
By the end of the trip, I wanted to send him to school myself--after all, a year would cost about as much as my four days at the reserve. And we both knew it. If that wasn't uncomfortable enough, when we got home, he actually e-mailed us asking if we could help him out (financially), an action that would of course cost him his job if his employers found out (they won't). Now my charitable giving is exclusively aimed at helping people who don't have basics get them, but somehow it's much more comfortable giving through an institution and trusting them to make good use of the resources, or in a situation where you can gauge whether your attempts to help are working, as when I take on a very low fee patient. Heartbreaking and morally uncomfortable stuff.
The other book I read while I was in Africa, Dave Eggers' "What is the What", helped put my driver's actions into context. You must read it. If you don't believe me, swing over to Amazon.com and be convinced by over one hundred other people who read this book. Eggers became close with a man named Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost boys of Sudan. Valentino was sent from a refuge camp in Ethiopia where he spent most of his childhood to Atlanta, to begin a new life along with many other Sudanese young people. The book tells the story of the destruction of Valentino's village and family life, the effects of the war in Sudan on its people, and the struggles of the Sudanese who tried to make new lives in this country. Eggers' extraordinary gift for prose is grafted onto a remarkable story.
One of the things that Valentino talks about is the confusion about what it is OK to ask for in his situation. To get anywhere, he desperately needs help from more advantaged people. He is a hardworking man (like the driver, who works every day for six weeks, from 4:30 a.m. to 8 at night, then has two weeks off), and he's not looking for a free ride. In fact,he's returned to the Sudan to build a school complex in his home village. (you can get more info about all this by googling him and going to the website--including info on how you can help). Maybe being in such an undeniably horrible situation brought him onto the radar screen of those who can help in a way that will not happen to the underpaid, undersupported inhabitants of more peaceful countries. Valentino's life story has more pain in it than most of us will ever experience, and he's a young man, but he had the great good fortune of meeting a number of people along the way, most notably Eggers, who are helping him achieve his dreams.
Although it can't be me, I hope that J. finds a way too.
