A Rant about fish.

I’m only speaking generally of course, but I don’t understand why people get so worked up about how life is here. I’m referring here to People, and by people I mean CENSORED. We spent a good hour in class yesterday debating the fact that here, the needs of the community always come before the needs of the individual. Waly was explaining that the community is always right- if you act against society you’re wrong. The elders always know what’s right, they decide things to protect the individual. CENSORED was arguing that isn’t there some time when the social norms are unfair, can’t they change? Waly says that those things change naturally. She asks but waht if someone gets cast out of a village because they believe something different? Waly says that serves them right for not following social rules. She gets mad and he gets excited and he starts spitting blood because he just came from having his tooth pulled and it hasn’t healed yet. She’s getting so angry and I feel so fed up with being American and she doesn’t realize that we’re coming from a country that has had more than a few civil rights movements, but that is not this country’s history! This country has not had a giant overturn of social norms, not really. If anything they’re about to go through it with women but so far they’re still blaming women’s lib for the rising divorce rate as if it were a bad thing.

And SOMEONE ELSE’s sitting next to me eating a sandwich, he came to class late because he was going out to get lunch and he comes back with a baguette wrapped in newspaper and it smells delicious. There’s no food allowed in the classroom, by the way, I think we all knew that, and it smells amazing and we’re all so hungry looking at the clock when is this class going to be over, maybe Waly and CENSORED can just start arguing by themselves none of us are really involved anymore so we should just go out and get lunch and they can resolve their cultural differences. SOMEONE ELSE isn’t sharing. This community of students needs to finish class and go eat lunch. The needs of SOMEONE ELSE who is personally hungry and is seeming very selfish right now, and the needs of CENSORED to be right and force our teacher and host to believe in her way of life is just ridiculous. I start laughing. We’re in Africa to study, not to start a revolution. I’ve got enough to worry about just trying to buy a bottle of water, how can she spend so much energy resisting the culture that’s hosting her?

This is a woman who starts her blog post with “how did everything from plastic bottles to dead animals end up in the road”. She is constantly asking us how many pages our papers were, when exactly on Friday is the assignment due, what should our class presentation cover and how thoroughly, and you can tell she’s the person who agonizes over how to format a table of contents according to which addition of the MLA handbook. She’s writing a paper on how the system of talibés is child abuse or at least child abandonment. Because in the U.S. sending children/students out to beg for money for you, sending them without supervision into the dangerous dirty streets and then taking the money they worked so hard to collect. It violates workers’ rights and endangers poor helpless children. This is all true, of course, of course it’s true. I wouldn’t deny that. But it is also very narrowsighted to see children everywhere and jump immediately to “how could they, this is child abuse”. I mean, it is. But it is also the result of an evolved system of mentorship that, although it has changed, remains a strong part of traditional Koranic education. To these students, and probably their parents too, this isn’t robbing them of education, it’s just a different schooling system. This is their education.

In her internship, Kaela’s going to work at a center for street children. She’s going to be teaching or playing games with all these children who before only would beg on the streets. She’s going to help the children, but not by arguing the system. Because here, you don’t help out by imposing our own Western way of life as “better”, even if scientifically speaking it is. You help out people, on their terms.

You don’t give a man a fish, and you don’t teach a man to fish. You ask a man how to fish, and you have him teach you how. And then, if he uses nets you give him a net. And if he doesn’t use nets, you ask him what he does use instead. Because if you give him a net that he doesn’t want to use, even if it would help him catch more fish, if he doesn’t want to use a net, then he won’t use it, and he won’t catch any fish. And he’s a fisherman. He knows how to catch a fish.