I came into the Peace Corps an already tainted ex-pat. I remember in my first couple months I met up with a recently finished Peace Corps volunteer who had returned to Madagascar. A wonderful woman and certainly someone who had been a tremendous volunteer, I enjoyed a nice lunch with her in my banking town. During this lunch she told me about the many reasons she had returned to Madagascar. One of the main ones was that she was paying for the education and health of a small child whom she even hoped to “adopt” and bring to the states in order to give him the better education (and life) offered there. I remember thinking that this was sweet and awfully nice, but that it was a kind of dependent relationship I would never allow myself in while working overseas. If you help one host country national so much, what are his/her neighbors going to say? I thought back to a critique of the “starfish story” I read in my last year of university (you know: the one about the dude who is caught throwing one starfish after another, out of thousands who have beached themselves, back into the ocean and says something to the effect of “at least I am helping that one”). This critique (a good, quick article if I could only find it) spoke about the success that is better achieved by working towards community progress; not just choosing the one sea-creature and sending it back to its home but trying to figure out how to prevent them from beaching themselves in the first place, or perhaps how to help them to return themselves. (I guess what I’m also talking about reaches into the “dead babies floating down the river” story as well).
Okay so where was I? Right: I was an already-disillusioned, already lived-too-long-in-developing-countries-and-can’t understand-why-someone-would-put-so-much-effort-towards-just-one-person grump. I’d hear these stories of volunteers developing strong relationships with individuals in country and continuing them in a financial way afterwards and I thought “that’s very nice, but I will never cross that line”.
But then a strange thing happened: I fell in love. It was quick, within three months of moving to my new site. I admit it: I am a sucker for a good laugh, a striking set of brown eyes, and a solid afro. Each morning I would get myself out of bed excited to see the apple of my eye with whom I’d spend all my free time. We’d cuddle and teach each other things from each of our cultures and it filled me with lots of joy and after time I found in me this strange desire to protect and take care of….her.
Oh yeah, I suppose it is important to mention that I have not taken a host country “sipa” (boyfriend). The new love of my life is a little girl named Shiela. Here she is
A couple of months after Shiela and I became buddies, her health began to disintegrate. Energy-wise, you wouldn’t notice a thing. She was still the chipper young lass who was so excited to wake up every morning that she’d forget to put on underwear as she ran over to play with her friends. (Often her mom sees me in the morning and throws a pair of knickers at me, telling me to find Shiela and make her put them on). But Sheila’s appetite began to increase absurdly, her stomach bloated up, attached with bad stomach-aches and diarrhea. She developed some sort of infection in her eyes, causing her to loose all her eyelashes. She is sprite as ever, but physically falling apart. Her parents took some methods towards healing her eyelashes, but her stomach issues (which is clearly worms) have not been addressed, and they have no plans of taking her to a clinic about them.
I find myself in this very strange position now. I have always told myself that it was inefficient as a development agent to help out just one person. But now there is this other part of me that feels a kinship to someone and wonderfully, I have it in my ability to help her out. It would take very little out of me to get her back in good health. Perhaps just a deworming pill! But not only is this against my former principals, it is against Peace Corps rules; we as volunteers are not supposed to give out medication. If you give it to one person, then everyone will ask.
But I love her!
Where is the line between being a good, supportive community volunteer and intervening too far? This is just one example out of so many that have come at me in my two years since being here. I believe so much in the Peace Corps experience especially in that it is based around building inter-cultural relationships. But once you have those relationships, how can you watch the people you come to love suffer?
In all my years as teacher, I’ve had this sort of situation many times. It is heartbreaking to see people we love suffer, and that much worse when they are children and we are not their guardians. The best we can do in that situation is to speak with the parents, out of our knowledge, concern, and in deference to their rights. Are there community elders or leaders who would by sympathetic to your concern? If you can bring this as a community problem and provide actionable ideas to them, they may have more sway with the parents. Good luck, and keep heart!
ReplyDeleteLove, Aunt Kate