Guilt as my garment

But can you at all compare their happiness with your own? If you were used to the village life and T-Z and porridge, to the hard work during the rains, and the idleness of the dry season? If you knew from little girl on that you would marry as the first, second or third wife to a man and have children and work on the land? Well, my ponderings are classical and cliché. But as I have found out before, clichés carry a lot of truth within them. That is, I see much more smiling faces and hear laughter around me than on many a day in the Dutch polder. And if poverty is the absence of opportunities and choice. Richness can lead people to suffer from the uncertainty that comes with having too many… Once you are able to fulfill basic needs, life can become as empty as purchasing the latest fashion.
As always, truth is sure to lie in the middle. There are good things here, there are good things there. We all have our own problems, and the perception of the individual determines the importance or even the reality of the problem. With our rational, Western minds we like to classify our observations to seek for efficiency, effectiveness and economic priorities. Blind to these ghosts of our own, we ignore someone else’s ghosts (the rain god, the ancestors) as back ward. And our preaching and teaching has done its work with the educated Africans leaving their communities and countries to fulfill the new goal of personal achievement. To become more educated and struggle for a place in an office…
And what about me? Where ponderings, feelings, western’ rationalism mingles with African magic, melancholy lies waiting. The feeling of guilt to interfere in other people’s lives without offering them anything in exchange competes with the attraction to a world so different from mine. With the weight of the world on my shoulders converting all my ponderings in moral judgments about my own life’s choices, life is a never ending struggle with depression as a natural reaction. Why is gratefulness so much harder to welcome as my garment than guilt?
Striving to complete integrity, to congruency is only possible in a life without taking risks to make errors. And that is not a life. But then is the good intention or heart enough? Who decides when an error is an error… And am I so infected by Western productivism, that I can only measure my value by the good deeds I am able to realize in the material world as others measure it by money or career achievements..

On lighter days, Africa makes me laugh to a point that it is inappropriate. They laugh at me, for being strange. But customs here are often so strange, that I cannot hold back my laughter either. After greeting yet another chief with some minutes of bowing, clapping and ‘Na, Na, Na’, it start to trickle the laughter muscles as we’d say in Dutch and I have to bite my lip to prevent another outburst…

On others days, in Zinindo, a somewhat bigger town, the plea for assistance of the farmers becomes again unbearable to me. An accusation. Its knifes deadly sharp when in perfectly in tune with my inner critiques…
To the farmers we try to be honest from the start: we come to ‘take’ not to ‘give’, we ask them to be our teachers in telling us about the way they practice agriculture and the constraints that come with it. That by teaching us, we hope that we can send a clearer picture of their situation home: indirectly to donor organizations and us as part of their future work force… in order not to repeat past mistakes. They do understand. They say.