Prospérité — ProsperityCynthia Harris — Ottawa, ON As with most distributions, at the end of ours, our team shared a meal with the Togolese volunteers to celebrate our joint accomplishment. It was a modest but nice celebration. After dinner our guests sang a few songs and we all danced around the room. With great gusto, they then sang the national anthem of Togo which was written when the country gained independence in 1960. I struggled to make out all the words, but certainly heard the word prospérité several times. I was still reeling from the depth and, more profoundly, from the sheer extent of the poverty that I had just seen everywhere during our trip. Most of the main roads we travelled are lined with rudimentary stalls with people selling just about anything, apparently on a commission basis. Many times we saw someone, usually a woman, sitting on the road selling only a few bananas – already overripe from the heat of the day. Or a few mangoes. Lots of people eat only a maize porridge everyday, perhaps with a spiced tomato sauce. They eat chicken only on special occasions. One of our guides, a twenty-two-year old, suffered a hip fracture last year after a fall doing a high jump. A twenty-two-year old with a full ball joint hip replacement?! No school we distributed at had running water. I can't recall seeing any signs of electricity at them either. The national economy is in rough shape. In 2009, the World Bank cleared $136M in arrears owed by Togo, and they and the IMF do contribute some emergency funding, for among many other things, priority urban infrastructure in the poorest neighbourhoods in Lomé. There were in fact a few newer-looking buildings – two banks, a cell phone company, an insurance carrier and one shipping company. Some people had cars or motorcycles and there were a handful of fairly nice looking restaurants and night spots and two hotels on the main boulevard. But certainly nothing like prosperity. Despite the staggering poverty, the people were genial. They laughed easily. They often smiled. And our hosts sang forcefully and, I think, proudly. From our vantage point, it seemed an odd juxtaposition. And to even begin to tackle solutions for Togo, overwhelms the imagination. Even a very generous thing like 4,000 bedkits seems like a drop of water in an ocean. Perhaps the value is less in the bedkits themselves (although make no mistake, the parents and the children were effusive in their thanks) and more in the psychological effect of the tangible demonstration that someone, somewhere, knows and cares. Antoine de St.-Exupéry said: "As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." |
