C'est La Vie

“C’est la vie,” she said in her beautiful Congolese accent as I attempted to apologize for the gross injustice in broken French. After months of work with no salary and no food, the refugee had just been manipulated out of her wage. Yesterday, I delivered money to the Yambio Diocese in hopes the labor of their clinic volunteers might hold enough importance, to be rewarded. Most of the workers had been denied salaries since April; it was now July. Their toil virtually unnoticed by their superiors and expected by their community, had taken its toll. I searched the face of the Congolese doctor. His resolve like granite, his eyes were somber and deep from 36 years of strong suffering, and his skin an ashy gray from months of malnutrition. As I looked at his face, my attempts to remain emotionally distant from my present dissolved. African bureaucracy was gnashing its teeth at us both and we both seemed to be losing. Africa Wins Again.

With the introduction of money came the fierce vengeance of greed. Siphoning off over 1/3 of the clinic staff’s hard earned money, the diocese devoured my offering and burped with satisfaction. I had been shaking with anger as the spineless leaders, cowered behind attempts to portray me as tyrannical, parsimonious, and indolent before the crowd of workers. Meanwhile, victimizing themselves as helplessly poor, they had manipulated names and numbers so as to reduce the already meager offering, to a fraction of its previous size. One thousand three hundred and fifty pounds was signed for, under what can only presumed as an alias, and placed in the pockets of an unknown member of the church leadership.

Was not the church required to treat all people with dignity and love, especially all aliens and foreigners? For we are all as such. Aliens of the world, beggars of grace, and heirs to the kingdom based purely upon the veracity God’s magnanimity. We are all pilgrims hoping for a better homeland. At least, these were the teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately for my counterparts and me, the theological subscriptions of the church seemed to be pre-reformation in nature.

C’est la vie…In Africa the whites become the problem and the solution all at the same time. You hold the purse strings, and for better or for worse oppress and liberate simultaneously. I would love to tell you my appalled sensibilities and strong words turned the tide of fraudulent dealings within the diocese. But they did not, and I remain unconvinced that I did any good at all to help the people. After my initial assessment of the situation, I unilaterally decided not to provide the next month’s salary for the clinic workers to the church leadership. I decided that if I provided the money, I would further oil the corruption machine. However, at the same time, I withheld any sort of assistance that might have reached the hands of the workers, however small the cut.

I also purchased $400 USD worth of materials for the clinic building itself. Paint, soap, cleaning materials, mosquito nets, etc. Church leadership confronted me after the delivery and asked for a list of the items. They said that if I did not provide them an inventory count, the items might be sold by the staff or misused or stolen. I did not provide them with an inventory list. If the staff sold the items and used the money for themselves, was that actually so wrong at this point? Very rarely is there a true right and wrong. It was Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest. Why should my inventory list give the diocese a leg up when they had already skimmed their portion off the top? How were the Congolese going to survive? On one hand I assisted by providing a bit of money to a few people and standing up to corruption. On the other hand I virtually fostered another form of corruption by dumping a load of “no strings attached” items on the clinic floor.

I am always a problem and a solution. In the harshest terms, intrinsically, my survival rate is high because I am white, American, and a 22 year-old female. My life is valued highly. Theirs are not. Why is that? How can we be more of the solution and less of the problem? In some ways, it saddens me that my life is valued so highly. Not only is my organization caring for me, but my family, my friends, my government, and the expat communities in Sudan all look out for me. I am surrounded by protection.

What is the heart of the matter? Corruption? Social Darwinism? I think to start becoming more of the solution and less of the problem we need to ask ourselves certain questions. We do not need to be the holder of the purse strings or implement more programs. To me, the biggest question is, how do we transmit this value we have as Westerners, to Africa? How can we actually assert, “All men are created equal?” Or do American citizens only subscribe to these principals on their own soil? The media tells us what we value. They report on what we think is important and showcase our own biases by juxtaposing the stories of the Somali famine and the US weather side by side. How is does 90 year-old American woman’s life, who died of heat stroke, hold the same level of importance as the famine that currently exists on the entire Horn of Africa. I don’t know the answers to my own questions, but I know they should be asked…