There is being poor and being poor. A friend who gave out food in Haiti years ago said that a lot of the people coming to get a meal were stark naked and couldn't even come up with a can to receive their food in. They held out their hands for the soup.
On a medical project in the mountains of Guatemala, we were leaving some medicine for a Mayan woman. She was to take a teaspoon full each morning. No one could find a spoon in the little village. We had discovered that a cap from a coke bottle was 1/2 teaspoon. We gave her that coke top and they thanked us profusely. All over the world we can see examples like this.
I will use the example from Guatemala to get to my point. Wherever there has been a colonial power (everywhere?) you can follow the same pattern, with different players.
So, the Spanish conquest. We know about that. Bad for the Mayans, but they survived and rebounded over 400 years and remained the second or third largest indigenous population on the planet. Then came the friendly neighbor from the north. As with the First People in the continental US, they did not own property. Land was for everyone. That made our take over mostly, at first, by United Fruit Company, relatively simple.
The Mayans were driven to worse and worse land, higher and higher on the volcanoes. They quickly adapted and grew their food and made their villages. The Company (which was connected by blood to our 'The Company' via the Dulles brothers) used most of the land to grow food which was shipped out of the country along with all profits. They used pesticides, did no crop rotation, built huge fences, had their own police force .
When the situation became untenable for the Mayans because they were starving to death at an awful rate, they voted in a reform president. The US CIA overthrew him and supported a military regime which was hell bent on a genocide. They carried this out with a lot of resistance from the locals. According to the UN over 250,000 Mayans were killed. But we didn't stop there, we used the divinely conceived Tierra Raza policy that was perfected in Vietnam.
You kill all the people, you burn all the land, you kill all the animals, you poison the wells. So, many Mayans fled to surrounding countries, mainly Mexico to survive, barely.
Then, they returned to new villages where they were mixed up with other Mayan languages and cultures and made to have tin roofs, so they could be targeted by planes if the need should arise, and then good, kind, well-meaning people come to teach them better farming techniques, not to cut the trees, sanitation ideas, recycling, pollution control, forms of governance, women's rights and all the things we have perfected in the USA.
And that if they love Jesus, they will be saved. Now, at some point don't we think that the Mayans might be muttering a kind of prayer, in complete befuddlement, hoping that the neighbors from the north are actually teaching them to save themselves from the neighbors to the north. It must be confusing for several reasons. First the Mayans don't forget. Given enough time, they can tell you their whole history. Perfectly memorized, word by word. The other thing is - they know that things aren't so very perfect up north.
They do know that we have a lot of cancer from the chemicals on our food, our industry, our life-style. They know that we do extrajudicial acts of violence with impunity (killing 'terrorists' without trial). They know about our dangerous agricultural techniques, our murder rate, our rates of imprisonment, our aggressive foreign policy, our hate crimes, our deforestation, our mining and how fat we are. They aren't stupid.
So, my idea is that it might be better if our aid was actually reversed. If we asked the poor how to survive on a dollar a day, if we learned to do everything for ourselves, if we came to learn how to share, how to take care of the old folks, to spend time together as families.
And maybe give them a fair shake at starting over.
How, in God's name, can we tell someone else how to handle garbage? We are drowning in it, much of it nuclear. How can we ask that someone in another country, find alternative ways to make fuel and keep lights on when we don't? I think we should preach and practice only the things that work exquisitely in our country first. And then, when we have heated our houses for years on cow dung, and used plastic bottles with chlorine to light our rooms, and can manufacture iphones without killing people in China, and have found everlasting joy from our religions, should we go and 'help' those whom we have put in 'untenable' situations. After all, we know our life style is 'untenable'.
I have no judgement on the kind intentions of people trying to help others. I can't see a better road to wellness. But, I would hope it would be a visible two way street. Respect, Rasta
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