What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right
The real world�.
What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right
January 17, 2018
In
plain English: s--- is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground,
and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your
food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even
touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.
Never
in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later,
liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better
than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids
that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.
Last
time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou
have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral.
The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to
see.
I have seen. I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.
Senegal
was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives
in their own cultures' terms. But they are not our terms. The
excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right
and wrong, are incompatible.
As a
twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal.
In fact, I was euphoric. I quickly made friends and had an adopted
family. I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man. People were
open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their
innermost thoughts.
The
longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly
obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold
to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they
be? Their reality is totally different. You can't understand anything
in Senegal using American terms.
Take
something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people,
extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one
generation were called "father." Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four
wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed
this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony,
like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include
kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity
was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have
cash for the market.What I did witness every day was that women were
worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children,
did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew
water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held
pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their
husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed
in the shade of the trees.
Yemily was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.
The
Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value
system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything
you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized
Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.
We
hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy
extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated
by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical
workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn't have
money, drop dead. That was normal.
So
here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's
Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't
bathing him, I wasn't surprised. It was familiar.
In
Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom. Go to the post office,
and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying
the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown
out. That was normal.
One of
my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew
hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical
aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of
working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to
see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to
the sick was normal.
Americans
think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would
have them do unto you. It's not. It seems natural to us because we
live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.
We
think the Protestant work ethic is universal. It's not. My town was
full of young men doing nothing. They were waiting for a government
job. There was no private enterprise. Private business was not
illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world
bureaucratic kleptocracy. It is also incompatible with Senegalese
insistence on taking care of relatives.
All
the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a
Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country.
The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for
free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not
allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The
result: Everyone has nothing.
The
more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely
nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a
job means work A job is something given to you by a relative. It
provides the place where you steal everything to give back to your
family.
I
couldn't wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here?
Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our
shores with a visa.
For
the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I
love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my
responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the
American heritage to the next generation.
African problems are
made worse by our aid efforts Senegal is full of smart, capable
people. They will eventually solve their own country's problems. They
will do it on their terms, not ours. The solution is not to bring
Africans here.
We are
lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by
the hundred million with chain migration. They tell us we must end America as a white ,
Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not
racist. I don't need to prove a thing. Leftists want open borders
because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate
America. They want to destroy America as we know it.
As President Trump asked, why would we do that?
We
have the right to choose what kind of country to live in. I was happy
to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor
Senegalese I am not willing to donate my country.
No comments:
Post a Comment