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"Why the world makes me mad"

Think about where you and your friends would be if you had been born in an average African village. I did this, not with everyone I know but just my close friends:

One of us would be dead.
One of us would be blind.
Most of us would have at least one dead parent.
None of us would have gone to university, and very few of us would even have gone to secondary school.
I wouldn't have glasses or contact lenses, so I would spend all day bumping into stuff.
We wouldn't have had choices. No gap years. No trying out half a dozen different careers. Just farming.
We wouldn't have all the insignificant stuff that makes life fun. No huge record collections. No wardrobes full of clothes. No Half Life 2. No flashing our boobs in Greece.

And then there is the statistical stuff:

We would probably have had unprotected sex because condoms were either unavailable or too expensive, and so a few of us would have AIDS.
Some us would have lost siblings.
We probably wouldn't have a vote.
We might be malnourished.
We might have been hacked to death in a civil war.

My life, if I was lucky enough to still have one, would be utterly unrecognisable and frequently miserable. But little things might make a big difference. A water pump. A clinic. A nurse handing out condoms. A decent price for my crops. And that is why it makes me mad as hell when people say "But it would take billions and billions to solve those problems. You haven't got billions and billions so it's not worth trying."

I have a very, very small personal stake in this too. When I did my degree I spent four months in Ghana researching my dissertation. I loved it there, but I always knew that if something went wrong I could phone my mum and she'd buy me a plane ticket home. Now, if I can sort out the finances, I'd like to go back to university and back to Africa. But I know I'd be in for some nasty surprises. Some of the older people that helped me would probably be dead. Some of the kids that taught me a few words of the language would be gone. Some of the girls I tried to get into bed would be dying of AIDS. And that makes me very, very angry.

Everybody mouths platitudes about how nice it would be if Africa wasn't so poor but nobody, including me, does enough about it. There is something seriously wrong with a world where people still die of dysentery, hunger and the measles. We should be shouting about it from the rooftops and throwing politicians off a cliff for not doing anything about it.

There aren't enough words to describe how mad that all makes me, but that is the best I can come up with.

the communists of course.

Insane Bartender wrote:
> We gave them aid
> and we gave them loans, they hoard the aid and use the loans to buy
> guns.


Who from?

Oh, wait...

Insane Bartender wrote:
> Throw politicians off cliffs for not doing anything about it? But the
> whole civilised world has been pumping money into third world nations
> for decades!

The civilised world gave massive loans to a bunch of corrupt dictatorships, and the people who didn't see a penny of the money have been paying it back ever since. Africa was paying out more in debt repayments than it received in aid so, far from pumping money into the third world, we were pumping sums far in excess of the original loans back out. Debt cancellation is a start but it hasn't gone far enough; and a lot of it is just PR, writing off debts that weren't being serviced anyway but leaving others as they were.


> We gave them aid
> and we gave them loans, they hoard the aid and use the loans to buy
> guns.
>
> It's a lot more complicated than you think trying to help people, and
> if you think people aren't trying then you're a fool.

Yes, a lot of third world governments wasted aid and loans, and used them to buy tanks and private jets. But other governments didn't. And in any case there are other ways of helping countries than simply handing cash to their politicians: use NGOs, fund projects locally. This is going to be difficult and it's going to complicated, but it's far, far too easy and simple to say "those stupid brown people would only waste the money, let's just keep it."

Insane Bartender wrote:
> The problem is, we shouldn't be giving them reams of food, and wads of
> cash. We should be giving them something far more valuable.
> Education.



That, and perhaps if we stop exploiting the whole continent for our own gain, (by 'our' I mean the western world) and actually allowed African Nations to develop.

The problem is, we shouldn't be giving them reams of food, and wads of cash. We should be giving them something far more valuable. Education.

Teach them how to make better use of their land for food. Teach them how to store excess so as not to waste. Teach them what they need to know to avoid future problems. THEN give them aid to help relieve the problems they face now.

The last sentence didn't make too much sense, you can figure it out.

I suppose it's difficult to know where to draw the line. If you give lots of aid, then they can do what they want with the money, which may not be what was intended for it. If you give loans it's at least some sort of protection, but in the end won't do those countries a lot of good. A very difficult issue, and at the end of the day (as much as I hate to use the expression) each country is more or less in it for their own gain, to whatever extent.

SHEEPY wrote:
> Shut up IB

Make me, Scotty.

Blank wrote:
> What I mean is, the whole ethos of giving loans to be repayed rather
> than aid seems somehow wrong.

It was loans in addition to aid, not instead of.


> And would you mind giving examples of loans being used to invade
> neighbours? I'm not accusing you of lying here, I just wouldn't mind
> some examples.

Sure, I'll try and dig something up later.

Shut up IB