Saturday, visit of an orphanage
February 10th, 2007 by xavier
Last but not least, the weekend! The chance to break the rhythm of the week. So I woke up at 8 (instead of 6 and something!), I launched and went to the university at 10. The thing is that I told my student of my second class that they could come Saturday to practice a bit. So I had to open them the computer room. I left the key to a trusted student and then, I went with Julien, Bénédicte (the two french volunteers) and Elias (the worker of the local Cybercafe) to a small village at 12km from here.
We met there a french couple of volunteers; Sarah and Denis. They are here with the same association than Bénédicte and Julien (DCC). They received us in their big colonial-like house. We ate in their garden. It was very great.
After that, we visited the orphanage where they are working for two years. It is a really big one. They have something like 60 orphans from one week of age till 20.
Denis shared with me a very interesting thought. Since Africa is a matripatriarchal society (which means that families are many levels deep), there were quite no orphans. If your parents die, then you would be in charge of your aunt or whatever.
But since we have implemented orphanages, we have created the need. And now, there are many more orphans than before.
And most of the time, they are not really orphans since they still have their father (usually their mother died while giving birth). But since it’s only the mothers that care the children, the fathers just give the child to the orphanage.
That orphanage was created by an italian couple who lost their two children. They give all their money and all their time one month a year for it. They made an incredible work. Eventually, they achieve to build a well-equiped orphanage. But isn’t it too much? Most of the equipment isn’t used correctly (they have many efficient water heaters but they just don’t use them). On another hand, the people in the village use to say that these orphans have a better life than themselves which created conflicts.
What I wanna show here is that although we can have good intentions, we do cooperation, that we really help to change the situation. Maybe it just helps us to have good consciousness. That’s it.
And we can extend that thought on all the cooperation projects. What they eventually all do is firstly reinforcing the dependence between Africa and Europa.
The entrance of the orphanage and a container used to carry materials for the italian cooperation.
They keep it there since it’s most expensive to bring it back than to buy a new container (!).
The problem is that when we see a poor little child in need of help, we can’t help trying to help him although on the long term, our help will just generate more and more people begging for help. Should this mean that we don’t have to help the people in need? For sure not. When there is urgency, we have to provide all the help we can. But in all others cases, we shouldn’t propose anything that should be normally provided by the local government. And what if their government is corrupted, doesn’t do its job? Then it’s just their problem, not ours. Otherwise they will always be as they are.
It’s a very difficult question though.