White Girl In Africa--Trying Not to "Help"

Before coming to Zambia I was nervous. I wasn’t very nervous about traveling by myself, or being the only American in a community that is in the middle of nowhere, expected to work in a complex and busy NGO with skills that I am not sure I have (okay, I was a bit nervous about that), but I was mainly nervous about being the kind of person that I find aggravating.

The person who goes to a developing country to “help” the poor people with the great wealth of knowledge that they have coming from America, but really ends up taking selfies with orphans, and poorly painting a wall in a school. They go for a week and come back forever changed by the poverty and resilience in the communities that they visited. The term “white savior” accurately describes what I am thinking about.

In a response to the hugely popular and controversial Kony 2012 video, Teju Cole, a US-based Nigerian author described the white savior complex as a belief that “a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior, or at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied.” I do not want to delegitimize people’s experiences, and say that because they were not where they were for long enough, or that because they did not work hard enough their story does not matter. It does matter. But when the intention of a service trip does not equal the impact on the community and the volunteers do not own up to the deficiency, it can create more harm than good at the expense of the very people that the volunteers were trying to help.

This whole “white savior” thing is very sticky and complicated, as are most things that involve colonialism and privilege and good intentions.

There is an undeniable contradiction in what I am writing, as I am literally writing this on a couch in the Chikuni Mission, digesting a lunch that one of the Parish Sisters made for me and for Father Mulobela, the Jesuit that I’m working with. I will, without a doubt, be a voluntourist at times.

I will especially be a picture-taking, souvenir-buying voluntourist as I plan for my trip to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls, and yes, to go on a safari. (Everyone here says that you haven’t truly seen Zambia until you have seen Victoria Falls. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and I am not going to pretend that I am above tourism just because I am here to work. As someone who spent four summers saving up for college working at a souvenir shop in Colorado, I am all for the occasional overpriced hoodie or commemorative trinket. If there is something worth seeing, I am going to try and see it. On road trips to Minnesota, my family would pull over whenever we saw anything interesting on the side of the road. That is how to create lasting stories and experiences.)

So how can I make my time here productive, not only for my personal growth, but for the community that I have been invited into? I will be spending the next ten weeks trying to answer that question.

When one of the Jesuits asked me why I came to Chikuni, I said that I am here to learn about community based NGO’s like Home Based Care, which has a three step approach to serving people affected by HIV/AIDS. I am interested in nonprofit organization and public service, so I wanted to work and learn from an organization that is doing holistic and client based service, to deeper understand my vocational interests (I might not have said that word for word, but the point was the same). We talked for a bit about HBC and the work that I might be doing.

Then I said that I also came to Zambia to learn new perspectives and learn about life outside of the US. “There!” said Father Chilembe, “That’s what you should have said first!” He said that it is so important for humans to connect, build relationships, and understand one another from across the world. That is how we break down stereotypes. He said that is so important to understand the world by seeing it. Articles and pictures in the media do not convey the stories behind the people. (If you haven’t seen Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” I highly recommend it.)

I was talking with a Jesuit in training from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who said that he does not want to visit America because he heard that it has the highest number of deaths per day. It was interesting hearing that from someone from the DRC, which is portrayed as a war-torn, violent country in US media. There is so much in the world that we cannot know from a screen.

Father Greg and I talked about the white savior complex, and I showed him pictures from the Barbie Savior website. We laughed together, me slightly uncomfortable at how non-satirical it was beginning to feel. Father Greg said that he has seen people like this before, but like in the Huffington Post article (linked above as “voluntourist”), as long as people from the West are coming to assist the people who are already serving, it can be productive for everyone. He also said that people from America can be helpful because they bring in new perspectives. They have different ways of solving issues, and can see things from different angles.

It is like when I am editing a paper and I can’t see simple typos anymore. I need someone with fresh eyes to see what I cannot. In the same way that I am here to learn from new perspectives for my own personal benefit, I will be serving HBC by bringing in my perspectives to (ideally) benefit the organization.

There is a lot for me to learn here, and I will no doubt make mistakes (I already have) and fumble through the next 10 weeks. But I am eager to learn from my mistakes while making friendships, laughing and learning new perspectives. The prompt for the reflective essays that I am supposed to be writing weekly is “What? So What? Now What?” What have I been doing, why does it matter, and what am I going to do with what I’ve learned? I realize now that I didn’t quite stick with that prompt for this essay, but the gist is the same. What? I am figuring out what it means for me to be a white person serving others in Africa. So What? I better start untangling my intentions and figuring out what I am really doing here. Now what? I will constantly be analyzing, reflecting and learning from the Chikuni community to figure out how I fit into it.