The Orthodoxy of Survival
Poverty is not simply an issue of material wealth. Nor is it dealt with through opportunities provided, access to resources. I hesitate to say poverty is a mentality; I think that’s a dangerous place to go. But self-determination is powerful tool when it comes to battling poverty. Empowering people makes the difference between effective advocacy and paternalistic development. The mind matters.
I have become, I think, caught in a comfortable cycle of work, food, friends and home. I go to work, I hang out with friends who are more often Canadian than Ghanaian (though I do have Ghanaian friends), eat at places I feel comfortable and hang out at home. This bothers me. I may be comfortable, but there is something missing. I am making inroads into myself, I am doing the work laid out for me, but still. I’m not making the inroads into Bolga’s culture that I want to. Yes, I have some people that are showing me around, and I don’t feel totally outside things. But I have found a comfortable way of doing things, and this is now limiting my ability to stray from pattern, routine. I mean, I haven’t even explored the side roads around my house! I know the way from town to my home, and in my mind it’s one road. Maybe there are a thousand, but I have yet to venture down them. I am lacking initiative.
And I don’t think that it’s really been a big deal until now. I’ve been trying to find a comfortable existence here; now I have it. But that means it’s time to keep pushing. Keep looking for new frontiers. They don’t have to be big ones; something as small as finding a new place to eat, meeting a new friend, going out alone. These are the small challenges that face me, but ones that will probably help me better understand where I am. But it’s an easy thing to want to stay in routine. I have found a certain kind of comfort. It’s a level of living where I know I can survive. And now that I have some of level of comfort it seems easy to slip into a pattern, and repeat it. But this is not really what I want for myself here. I want safe places, certainly, but I also want to be challenged. I want to pushed outside my realm of normal existence, to taste something different, hear a new voice. Ride down one new dirt road every day.
And in my comfort I wonder, what makes poverty such a slippery subject? We have the wealth and resources to deal with, and fifty years of trying to “develop” countries (amidst coups, exploitation, and an incredibly unfair economic format). Is it a culture of wealth and privilege in the global North? A history of exploitation that continues today? Colonized cultures struggling to understand themselves in an internet world that still doesn’t really leave a whole lot of room for them to actually be wealthy? So many things come together create the levels of wealth and poverty we see today I couldn’t explain them in a PhD thesis. And being at the top of metaphorical privilege pile, I feel kind of uncomfortable speculating about what makes poverty, because obviously it’s so different from place to place. But I have some ideas to explore and this is one of my forums for that.
And I think I may have a kind of . . . metaphor . . . to understand what has stopped previous delopment initiatives from dealing effectively with poverty. One of the ideas I keep running up against in my research and writing is the idea of welfare-level development (that is providing pure welfare-level resources to women or underprivileged communities or people with disabilties or whatever). And it just doesn’t work. Providing resources to people, the model of paternalistic “development” that has been in place since this whole crazy post-WWII idea of development replaced colonialism is empty without allowing them to make decisions. Only by making people a part of the process do they have any stake in “development” (such a problematic term, I know, but I use it, for lack of another word, to encompass poverty-reduction, advocacy work, environmental work, etc. and I think it has as much a place at home, in developing better ways of organizing ourselves to deal with problems, as it does anywhere). Otherwise they are stuck in a kind of subsistence living that, if not comfortable, is at least manageable and familiar.
Its an orthodoxy of survival. Obviously my experiences in Bolga are the experiences of a privileged outsider trying to make sense of an experience. But in the culture shock that comes with a new place comes a kind of struggle to survive, mostly in an emotional, but also in a physical-comfort sense. Food, water, company. These are, actually, the things that occupy my mind most of the day. I have the wealth to procure them, but considering how to do it always remains an issue. And so I think I can, from a very outside perspective, try to understand a little bit why poverty is a problem that can’t be dealt with by throwing money at it. Because it’s about having control of your own destiny as much as it is having enough to eat, shelter and water. These are the prerequisites to control, certainly. But poverty does not end there. It ends somewhere else, and I wish I knew where.