Sometimes my heart sinks.
Like when my laptop computer refuses to keep up with my
typing or freezes in the middle of a large upload (like it is now!); or when I
get followed by a group of secondary school kids on the road who start annoying
my boys; or, let me be honest, when I see our gate open and a stranger comes in
and you know it is going to involve a withdrawal from the Shrubsole ATM!
But sometimes my heart doesn’t
sink, and that is what concerns me.
Like when I was with my dad and mum in the government
integrated school where I work and dad saw about 5,000 books sitting on shelves
not being used, with another four huge boxes of books in Spanish waiting to be bunged on the shelf with them. My response was to shrug and say “that’s how
it is and has been for the 18 months that I’ve worked here.” Then dad became outraged at the waste and how
much these books could actually be used rather than gathering dust and my heart
began to sink twice: once for the fact that yes, it is a waste and these books
should be used, and twice because perhaps I no longer cared whether the books
were used or not!
Let me explain. Last
week Save the Children sent a delivery of hundreds of large boxes of books for
the school to use. “Great!” you say.
But alas, the books are in Spanish and there is nowhere in the whole of
Africa (except Equatorial Guinea, I am informed by my husband!) that uses
Spanish and I have never personally met an African Spanish speaker. “Teacher, are you using these books?” asked
my dad, innocently. “Yes, the children
take them home each week to read” he said.
“Is that why they are so dusty?
They look as though they are not used.”
I could feel dad’s blood pressure rising! I intervened: “How will you use these books,
sir?” I asked one of the teachers. “I will just translate them” he replied,
matter of factly. “Oh, so you speak
Spanish?” I enquired. “No.”
Ah.
Then this week I was in the dusty resource room and there
was another table being piled with
books from America. They looked like
pretty good English text books but I looked at one of the chapters entitled
“What does it mean to you to be an American?”
Very culturally appropriate.
Speaking of appropriateness, my dad’s favourite book that he found as he
nosed around the dust was entitled (and I kid you not) “Pub Walks in
Yorkshire”. So, let me ask you this: if
you live in Kasese, don’t read English, don’t drink and have never travelled
outside of the district of Kasese, let alone out of Uganda, is it likely that “Pub
Walks in Yorkshire” is going to be of interest or use to you?
Why have these Spanish story books, tourist books of
Yorkshire and the like ended up in Kasese?
Only ‘we’ Westerners can answer that, and I invite you to do so, because
we are the ones sending these books to Africa and we have as much to answer for
as the recipients who don’t really know what to do with the things we
send! So next time we want space in our
attics and we want to rid ourselves of a few dozen kilograms of things we have
not used for twenty years, we should take time to think about where they will
end up. Which organisation are we
sending them through? Will the
organisation teach the recipients how to use them and make sure that they are
used regularly so that they don’t sit in dusty rooms getting filled with
insects? Are they culturally as well as linguistically
appropriate? Are they of a correct
reading/developmental age? Most of us
have never knowingly sent inappropriate stuff to Africa but have you ever found
out what happens to the things in charity shops that don’t get sold in the
UK? Chances are they are offloaded to
Africa along with out-of-date electronics that are dumped in huge piles for
street children to dangerously pick through; along with factory manufactured
clothes that are sold too cheaply and put local tailors out of business; along
with children’s story books about things and experiences that children here can
only ever dream about.
It is very difficult, as a ‘consumer’ (and when did we
become consumers instead of thinking, loving human beings?!) to know where the
things we have finished consuming go but I reckon it is not impossible. I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone
else here that can we become more aware of where our rubbish ends up? … Because
more than likely I’ll be rummaging through it at school next week!
Thoughts about sending things overseas:
Before packing something off think to yourself “is this the
best use of space in a shipping container, considering the cost of shipping to
a landlocked country?” Think of the
journey it has to make. Some poor soul
in a dreary office in the West is ticking these objects off on his list before
loading it onto a ship where sailors brave Somali pirates bringing them to the
East African coast. They are then hauled
in the hot sun onto dilapidated trucks which will drive for four or five days and
probably break down a few times on dangerous and bumpy roads, being stopped
every hundred miles by a underpaid policeman who wants to know why this African
truck driver is carrying “A Guide to Pub Walks in Yorkshire” or a pink bikini
or some other random item to a school in Uganda! We could really save them all the trouble!
But how? We could
read the small print for the charities that we send money or items to, finding
out if they are paying huge shipping costs for inappropriate objects. Let’s ask our local charity shop what it does
with things that don’t sell in the UK.
We can ask our local council what happens to the fridges and freezers
that are left at the special electronics dump site. And finally – support the local economy that
does, indeed, sell pens, pencils and pads of paper instead of sending
stationary miles and miles around the world!
There are many things that can usefully be used here, with a
little thought, and the charities that we know to be competent and experienced
at bringing useful items are Tools With A Mission (TWAM) and READ International. I speak to myself as much as to anyone else
when I end with this: Let’s make do and mend; walk short distances; don’t
upgrade every season, and show the world that Westerners are MORE THAN
CONSUMERS! (And let’s not dump our old,
used rubbish in the developing world.)
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