Theory vs. Practice
Posted By Sika on May 20, 2008
I was reading this book called The Shackled Continent* by Somebody-or-other Whosits-whatsis. In it, he mentions how older male students who are never kicked out of high school prey on younger girls, after which they get pregnant and have to drop out of school. Mr. Whosits-whatsis’ solution is to kick older students out. And I was thinking, yeah! That totally makes sense!
Henry turned 27 a couple of weeks ago. He is currently going through Form 4 (the final year of secondary school) for the third time. He is doing this so he can take his MSCE (leaving exam required to actually have a secondary school degree), for the third time.
Henry is one of the coolest, kindest, most caring people I have ever met. He’s also wicked smart. His mom died a while ago. She had a dream to provide care to the AIDS orphans and other “vulnerables” in her village, and when she died, all of her family loved her so much that they took up her cause as their own. Henry has been vital towards the success of Namikango Orphan Care, spending much of his time researching for Income Generating Activities, taking care of his family, and otherwise keeping his mother’s dream alive at the expense of his own advancement. When a crisis came up at NOC or with his family, Henry had to stop studying and so failed his MSCE (an exam which is capricious, random, and more than a little irrelevant anyway). Derek eventually convinced Henry to try again. That it is better for NOC and Henry’s family that Henry be selfish for a short time and get his MSCE. So Henry is now living for free in Derek’s servants’ quarters (since Dinah and Honester are also living in them while they go to school, we call the servant’s quarters the University hostel now).
But still, Henry does not completely absolve himself of his responsibilities. He’s working as a security guard at Dignitas 3 nights a week, so that he has a little money, but also so his family has a little more money. If I have a meeting at NOC and there’s no one else to bike there with me, he comes. Even if he just got off work. Even though the whole time he reminds me that he is not working for NOC right now. He lays awake at night worrying about how to make his mother proud. His only wish for his birthday was to take some flowers to his mother’s grave, but since he had school that day and work the night before and the night after, he couldn’t make it. (And just so you don’t get the wrong idea of someone heroic and somehow born with a spit-shined halo, he’s also funny and we spend a lot of time devising ridiculous competitions which he always wins—like who can sit on Derek’s balance ball the longest without any part of our bodies touching anything else.) This sacrifice is unthinkable to many of us westerners, but to many Africans it is unthinkable to do otherwise. And so he is 27 and because he is so smart, because he works so hard, because he is so dedicated, he has not completed secondary school
Young men who remain in school because they have nothing better to do and anyway unemployment is horribly high are definitely a problem, especially for girls who already have uncountable odds stacked against them completing secondary school. They don’t need older, seemingly more sophisticated boys who haven’t grown up convincing them that they want to have unprotected sex (because after all, you don’t eat sweets with the wrapper on), so that the girls get pregnant and try to perform their own abortions or have to drop out and get married.** That is something that cannot be ignored.
It is important to protect the vulnerables. But some accounting must also be made for the outliers. Those people who struggle against being shoved through the cracks, though they may fail at times, must also be considered and helped. They are the people who probably have earned the right to help the most and probably ask for it the least. They are the people with the will to change the world. The fate of the nation may rest in their scrabbling hands and on their weary backs.
*Overall, it’s an ok book with some good parts. His arguments view money as the be all and end all of progress more than I am comfortable with, as generally are these types of books about development and how to fix development and why all previous development was obviously and hideously flawed. But it mentions a lot of ideas that I find interesting, some of them in formats that make me reconsider ideas that I have previously rejected. He especially finds an interesting balance between the Jared Diamonds of the world who seem to think that Africa’s current economic position is inevitable, and the guys like this patient I once had who worked for the UN in Africa in the 70s and says that Africa’s troubles are entirely the fault of the Africans and have nothing to do with colonialism, which really just protected the Africans from themselves anyway.
On the other hand, he does have ideas about growing our own food (on a country-by-country basis), as in it not being necessary and farm subsidies keeping Africans down, that seem awfully quaint in light of the food security issues the whole world is having right now. And he mentions the “unnecessary” furor against genetically modified organisms while completely ignoring most of the valid arguments against them, including that Monsanto and its ilk has helped to turn African farming from something self-sufficient to something that requires African farmers to have a flawless season in order to have the wherewithal to purchase their seed for the next year.
I fully admit that the reason African farmers are so susceptible to the wares of the big agribusinesses is that traditional farming left something to be desired in terms of productivity. But the strictly modern methods deplete the soil and require huge yearly inputs of hard to find cash. They don’t work for us either, but we can afford to force the illusion that they do. There are modern improvements that can and should be made to subsistence farming, but these are mostly skills which cannot be resold year in and year out and therefore aren’t terribly useful to great big agribusinesses.
**One of the things mentioned in The Shackled Continent that I find interesting is that the success of a nation is directly related to the success of its women. Girls are not educated for many reasons. It starts with the expectations that girls help with their siblings, delaying their own education, and is complicated by some who believe that secondary school education is unnecessary since she’s just going to be a wife and a mother anyway. Since girls in their mid-20s are “over the hill,” which may be the age she is as she tries to complete secondary school, even dedicated and smart girls may find themselves up against a wall.
But the countries that generally do the best with “success” in the world help their women do the best to succeed in the borders of their own country. Without the brain-, will-, and muscle-power of the women, a country cannot escape their own poverty, and countries that shortchange their women shortchange themselves.
“But the countries that generally do the best with “success” in the world help their women do the best to succeed in the borders of their own country. Without the brain-, will-, and muscle-power of the women, a country cannot escape their own poverty, and countries that shortchange their women shortchange themselves”
I was just reading about Scandinavian women in the 1800-1900s. They had to raise the families because many of the men were at sea most of the year. Somehow they found time to tend to the farms, raise the families, and succeed academically. Literacy is very important to the Scandinavian cultures. And so is hard work.
I haven’t found many, there are some but few, cultures that haven’t had a long history of short-changing their women. Even the most successful cultures in the world still short-change their women in a lot of ways and have only began to seriously change that in very recent history (our life times).
I wonder if poverty is really about sexual politics, how is it that the US, Europe, and China have done so well and they have horrid histories of treatment of women? It seems that it wasn’t until the European based cultures had a few generations of wealth that the women began to have better treatment. From what little I know of the Chinese the women are still fairly held to old traditions despite the growing wealth of the nation, although I do wonder how that will change in the next generation or so.
Sorry it took so long for me to reply. You raise a very good point and it took me a while to figure out what exactly I meant before and if that was negated by your argument.
Not going to argue that western cultures don’t shortchange women, that would be crazy. Although I will clarify to say that I was thinking of modern history. Anyway, what we’re talking about is a matter of degrees: Scandinavian women are encouraged to read; In some cultures women, either specifically or just by the expectation that they will help their mothers raise the children, aren’t permitted to read.
The industrial revolution was in part hastened by the allowance of otherwise marginalized women to step outside of traditional gender roles and work in the factories and such. (Now, you can and would be quite right to argue that a) the workers were treated like crap anyway, and b) women were often treated worse. But they were still allowed out of the house and permitted to have some financial independence–at least in theory. And that changes a lot of things in life.) So yeah, not talking about a dichotomy of well-treated and badly-treated, but some sort of sliding scale where the closer one moves to well-treated, the better off the country is. And I’m not entirely sure about that.