Sunday, November 2, 2014

Because another ebola post felt necessary... for SOME reason.

Let me tell you something about living in a concrete house with no electricity: you do a lot of thinking. You think about what makes you mad. (A lot of things.) You think about what makes you sad. (A lot of things.) You go over conversations you had that day and correct your french grammar. You think about what movie or tv show you would watch if you could. (Mindy Project Mindy Project!!) You think about your work, you ponder the past, you dread the future. You think about how outrageously hot you are, and what you would do for a cold fizzy water. 

Also, you think about all the blog posts you would write if you had a computer. (I suppose I could write it the old fashioned way, with a pen and paper, and Lord knows I have the time, but not the patience.) I have a very long list of funny stories about my cat, what it feels like when the rainy season starts, what I’m actually doing here, how I spend my days, the cast of characters I spend my days with. And now here I am, only five minutes spent on facebook, and I am MAD. Everything that I intended to write just flew out the window, because I have something even more important to say.

CAN WE PLEASE CHANGE HOW WE TALK ABOUT AFRICA PLEASE??? Like seriously. I just flipped through my newsfeed and it was such a bipolar mixture of my American friends being so maddeningly flippant and my Peace Corps friends sharing the most interesting, well-rounded, uplifting (mostly) news about Africa. Make whatever assumptions about what you think I’m trying to say here, but there is more to Africa than ebola. 

Let me repeat that, there is more to Africa than ebola.

And you know what, even if there weren’t (shudder) can we please just remember that this is a crippling disease that hurts people, kills people, devastates families and economies and childhoods, in a place where families and economies and childhoods are already incredibly fragile. But fragile like the kind of glass you expect will break when you touch it, but survives fall after fall and proves itself to be incredibly resilient and strong. And beautiful. I don’t know why I have to say this, but this is not about you. It’s not about me because honestly, I LIVE on this continent and the idea of being scared hasn’t even occurred to me. It worries me how my generation has reacted to this devastating epidemic. It is not something to joke about, and it is not something to panic about. Can we please find a middle ground that actually lives in the neighborhood of accurate and truthful? 

Like about how there is more to this continent than this disease? Like there are projects that are really inspiring? Like there are people, Africans and otherwise, who are doing really good things here? Like how I personally have had a meeting or worked on a project every single day for the past two weeks with a handful of EXTREMELY motivated Beninese people, of varying levels of education, doing work in three different villages? I know, dear reader, that it is not your fault, that you are reacting to the reactions of the media. 

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