Day 2, and I’m slipping already! Meant to post this before I fell asleep last night… Not exactly what i’d call well-written, but here ya go.. will post Day 3 a little later on in the day.
I’m not sure what direction I want to go with this post… since it’s so general. I feel strongly about several things, to different degrees. How do I pick just one?
I’ve struggled with coming to terms with the fact that Africa, the richest continent in terms of mineral wealth and natural resources, and arguably strength and endurance and cultural diversity, is the poorest financially. If there’s any justice in the world, Africa should be stuntin’ on you hoes. But it’s not. We’re not. In fact, we beg for money. We make budgets that account for income from external aid, budgets that won’t work if that extra cash isn’t flowing in. We’re doomed if we take aid, damned if we don’t. Locked in with high interest rates, trade agreements which involve by-passing cheaper alternatives and buying instead from the countries that we are indebted to. Crippled by the fact that our hardworking farmers produce raw cocoa and have only a few fair-trade opportunities. We send the cocoa that our land bears to the world market and we are told what we can get for it. The world decides, and Africa must accept, palms cupped open, ready to receive the meager amounts; crumbs from the king’s table. We lack the industries that will help develop our raw materials- turn our coffee into gourmet breakfast beverages, transform our diamonds and gold into engagement rings and bracelets…
I spent a lot of last month travelling around Ghana. I saw a lot of the country; places I’d never been. Chilled with an elephant on a Safari, had baboons steal my food and share it amongst their children, played with the most flexible, and fastest swimming children I’d ever seen at a village on stilts, pet a croc, crawled through the door of no return, spent three hours 2 miles underground struggling to breathe in a gold mine, and bumped along on the worst road I’d ever been on in my life in the North. There’s so much to love about Ghana, my little corner of Africa. And if in 22 years of my life I hadn’t seen so much of what was out there in my own country, I am humbled by what the rest of Africa has to offer. For a continent full of such rich experiences and moments to be reduced to fly covered children and Tarzan-like natives who swing from trees (don’t let me get started on the universal ‘African’ accent that we all have, according to Western television) is sad, narrow-minded and robs the world of the far more enlightened perception that they could have.
The most promising solution I can see is the one that involves myself and people like me. It’s up to us to come home, whatever the case may be. Get your education, nothing wrong with that, Western education can be very helpful… but come home. I know the system has loopholes and things don’t work the way they should a lot of the time. I know the man is tempting you with the $65k salaries straight out of undergrad… but put it in your plans to return home. Africa needs you… it’s alarming just how much.
