07/30/08

After half a year in one of the wettest cities on the West Coast, then coming here to four months of incessant heat and dryness, I am rejoicing in the fact that the rainy season is now in full force. Just this past week it rained for the first time during the day, and my younger sister and I took advantage of our newly cemented drainage spout to shower under the gutter in front of the house. The day-time rains have become more frequent, which unfortunately means that the accompanying flooding in the lowest lying, poorly drained areas of town has also become obvious, and not everyone is as delighted to see the rain as I am. Many of the newer parts of the city are hard to get around in, and with the standing water, mosquitoes are rampant.

Just the other day (well, about a month ago now really) I went to a part of the city I hadn’t seen before, but had heard much about - the area of town where women smoke and dry thousands of fish every day to later sell them to be trucked east further into country, or exported to Mali, Guinea, and Burkino Faso.

The area of town is called “Xelkom,” (pronounced ‘Helcom’), and in fact the adjective ‘hellish’ would not be far wrong. My counterpart walked me around, and with my little notebook and pen in hand, I felt like a scientist making observations, seeing from the outside, looking but not touching, thinking and not knowing what to feel. It’s the equivalent of a factory, only outdoors and totally unregulated. No health sanctions, no supervisors, no cleanup at the end of the day, no coffee breaks. All the detritus from the smoking fish falling to the ground, caked into the earth, rotting and mixing with horse manure from the constant tread of charettes hauling fish from the port.
And now that it’s the rainy season…imagine what happens to that wretched mixture of decaying fish guts and fecal matter.
Take a minute...
That’s right.

It’s interesting to me, introspectively, how terrible this situation seems to me, and yet how it is still possible that I continue on with my own life, wanting to stay as oblivious as possible. Those women are out there every day, dawn to dusk probably, some with babies on their backs, in the smoking inferno, breaking their backs to scrape by a living in near squalor. And yet I can sit on my mostly comfortable and relatively very clean bed, under a mosquito net, in a room all to myself that would likely sleep as many as five children over by Xelkom. How can my conscience rest easy knowing that so close by there are people who have it much worse off than I do? I don’t know. Somehow it does.

I guess if I had to be upset about everyone in the world who has it much worse than I do, I’d never get any sleep at all. My stomach would always be uneasy, and I think I’d always feel off-balance. Somehow now I’m reminded of Ralph Nader and the speech he gave during my college graduation. He urged us to find one thing to be passionate about, and to pursue that cause to the best of our ability. I think he’s onto something there. You can’t be passionate about every cause - at least I know I’d wear out that way. You can be compassionate about many, true. But I think the way you can live with yourself is to commit yourself to something you believe in, that you love doing, do that thing to the best of your ability, and know that in doing that thing, you’re doing your part to help the world in the best way you can. I think that’s what “saving the world” comes down to, in a nutshell. Each person does what he can, where he can, all the while trying to keep in mind that he is a member of this 'global humanity'.