Cultural sensitivity is a pivotal aspect of any Peace Corps volunteers’
life. But how relativistic does one need
to be before their own personality and morals diminish? Most cultural practices have arisen due to
economic or geographic constraints, normalizing sometimes arbitrary or harmful
practices, just think of the short story The
Lottery and the message behind it.
Now there are pcvs who are unable or unwilling to access HCN’s behavior
with a nuanced point of view, rather judging harshly and therefore unfairly,
creating stereotypes and unwarranted labels. Understandably this is due to frustrations
with integration. Perhaps they are
projecting their own insecurities and homesickness onto HCNS (host country nationals,
some more PC lingo). I am not saying
that I am not guilty of doing this from time to time too.
This is a story that happened over a year ago in my old
village. I had just moved into my site
around a month and was taking an afternoon stroll around my community. The sun was shining brilliantly. Dust clouds would form wherever I stepped on
the baked earth. Everything seemed in place: women braiding and breastfeeding,
children chasing broken bicycle tires, and people standing in line at the pumps
for water, until all of a sudden I ran into an elderly man prostrated on a heap
of hardened sand. Only the whites of
his eyes were visible as his eyeballs rolled back into his head. He was quenching for thirst as his lips hung
half open parched. His body lay limp,
emaciated and without movement. The only
thing he wore were rags, which exposed his ribs and vacant belly. Shocked I asked the people around me why no
one was helping him, in my then very broken Gasy. The villagers told me that he wasn’t their
responsibility and that his son lived down the road and to ask him about the
old man. I quickly ran to the man’s
family’s hut and called for someone to come out. A young man appeared, and when I described what
I saw I expected him to react differently to his father’s sickness. Rather, he seemed apathetic and tried to feign
interest, but really the answer was found in the expression in his eyes. He went with other family members and
children trailing behind him to pick up his father who lay dying only meters
from his home. I’m unsure of what became
of this story. No matter how much I
inquired afterwards the only response would be that they had brought him to a
doctor and a look to mind my own business. But I knew this wasn’t the
truth. The old man was dead and I couldn’t
do anything about it.
A French researcher told me about a time when he went to
a neighboring village and a young man lay dead with a sweater covered over him
in the middle of the busy market. Someone had dropped him off knowing that his
time on this earth was limited and could not handle the burden and or finance
of moving him to a doctor or respectable place. I was surprised that people in the market
weren’t more aghast at the site of a dead body where they shopped and bartered
for food.
Death is a much more accepted in life here than it is among
Americans. This I presumed is due to
socio-economic limitations. Perhaps this
is why funerals often times lack the same air of dread that they do in the West
or why children are born in the dozen with the expectation that many will not
make it to middle school. Like all
humans we all grieve over loved community and family members. However access to proper medical care is a luxury
not many can afford here. Maybe for this
reason people have become more accepting and complacent of death here. Jaded.
Perhaps this is the crux of a lot of the development issues here. We are jaded as PCVS, NGO’s, the outside
spectator who only hears about hunger in Africa, and even the local
population. We all hope that things can
change, but a part of us feel so limited in what we can do and often fall into
despair or apathy. In what ways does
apathy fuel poverty and in what ways does poverty fuel apathy?
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