Making One World - Solidarity not Charity

Making One World - Solidarity not Charity
December 11, 2007
A trip to Africa these days has changed a great deal. Rather the journey has changed but the destination remains very much the same. I am sitting in Schiphol airport with internet facilities that allow me to communicate directly with friends and family everywhere. In the village I am aiming to visit, there is still no electricity and no telephone communication.
It is tempting to treat these as different worlds: rich / poor; developed / underdeveloped; modern / traditional. It is part of one and the same world and therein lies the theme of my trip. Making it one world. Bringing home to people in Canada, the reality of life at the end of the development spectrum that has been deprived of its share of the world’s wealth.
In my view, a blog, like any piece of writing, requires a theme to hold it together. Where can I find a theme?
It has been many years since I was involved in the development industry, the aid business. I was a fresh faced Canadian who had applied to CUSO to see the countries where my African friends Ulli and Weidi come from. My evolution from that point has taken me from naïve and pristine to a serious expert in the NGO solidarity business. The eleven years I spent from 1968 to 1979 were exciting formative years. For the last 27 years I have been dedicated to the field of education in the college system and again acquired a deep knowledge and pedagogical expertise of dealing with the multicultural mosaic that is young Canada. That has been a slower, less exciting, but nonetheless dynamic and rewarding path with patience one of the virtues acquired by dint of persistent hard work.
It will be very exciting to bring together young people from Makupo and Montreal to share and learn from each other, but more importantly to plan for the world of the future where their differences will be insignificant and not based on money / no money. Their joint plans are what I hope will guide my activities over the next decade – Doug’s development decade. This will be a time when I try to bring together the apparently disparate realities of my different lives.
Bringing resources to bear from people who want to short circuit the trickle down of the aid industry and contribute directly to the building of community self sufficiency.
In August 2007, the people to people support of friends in Canada led to the sinking of a well and the burden of village labour has shifted dramatically. Now Makupo can host a visit from 9 Canadians representing all the glorious mix that makes up Canada.
The Malawians in the village share a long history with a common place, while the Canadians have histories that involve new homes and building new links. It is an interesting stew and I am looking forward to seeing how it cooks into a tasty dish.
The result should be solidarity not charity. The hand that provides charity is always higher than the hand that receives it. The people of the two sides of this trip will not have a higher or lower status, but a shared human equality.
Yours in solidarity
Doug