New York Times columnist
Nick Kristoff frequently writes fascinating columns about travels through the developing world. Last spring, he ran an
essay contest for a college student to win a trip to Africa with him and blog about it. I’ve been reading the results of that for the last couple of weeks,
Casey Parks’ blog of her first trip outside of the US, traveling across central Africa. It is fascinating.
Parks writes of her background growing up in poverty in the American South, and contrasts that to what she’s seeing in Africa.
My background isn’t anything like Parks’. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Palo Alto, and Oxford, spending many of my summers in Southern France or elsewhere in Europe. My first experience with American poverty was in my junior year of high school. A girlfriend got me involved with a student organization at the University of Michigan that was teaching classes for middle school students from Detroit. After a summer of letting wide-eyed kids from the projects loose on the campus in Ann Arbor, we switched to running programs at a middle school in Detroit. I remember walking through the dark hallways, black kids lined up against the walls, staring at us and saying “hello, white people,” as we walked past. There were chains on most of the outside doors to keep people from being let in where security couldn’t see them, but which would also have prevented the kids from getting out if there had been a fire. Classes were huge and unruly. There was talk of a recent shooting in front of the school, and while my friends were worrying about getting into college, these kids were worried about surviving the next week. The sixth and seventh graders we were working with insisted they didn’t know how to write sentences.
And yet, there seemed to be hope. Small things really seemed to make a big difference. The kids who said they couldn’t write loved to tell stories. Getting them talking and then stopping them and saying, “write that down, exactly like you just said it,” showed them that they could in fact write. Bringing in a couple of obsolete computers that they could play with as long as they were typing really got their attention.
I don’t know what became of any of those kids, but they opened my eyes to a world I hadn’t known existed, to my power to make a difference, and to the ongoing state of problems I’d been told about in history classes. I still didn’t know poverty, but I thought I’d seen it. Which brings us to Parks’ writings.
Two years ago, having spent lots of time in the moneyed world of the Internet industry, I’d gotten a job at a non-profit working on Internet infrastructure in places I hadn’t heard of. I didn’t really understand what we were working on. I knew important Internet infrastructure. It was big, and expensive, and moved lots of traffic. Why were we sending little Ethernet switches to places that weren’t on my peers’ maps? I wanted to understand, and somewhat impulsively I ended up on a plane to a conference in Kathmandu.
I’d seen movies set in developing countries, and the only thing I could think of bouncing out of the Kathmandu airport in a hotel van was that I was in one of those movies. I wrote at the time:
"The van ride to the hotel was my first real glimpse of Kathmandu, driving very fast on one lane dirt streets, lined with cramped run down houses, the streets a chaotic mix of people, cars, tiny electric busses, rickshaws, dogs, and cows. Rather than having any of the usual rules of right of way, Nepali driving seems to consist of everybody honking a lot, to make sure everybody else knows they’re there, and then dodging each other as they make random traffic moves."
Almost seeming to fit right into the scene were the street kids having a fight. One ran across the street with his face covered in blood, while others chased. Nobody in the crowded street seemed to be paying attention. The van driver drove straight on, right past the police post in the next block.
Over the next two weeks, I had my eyes opened. Importantly for my job, I learned about Internet access in a place where the average person makes $200 per year, and International Internet bandwidth costs $5,000 per month for one megabit per second, or about two thirds the capacity of a typical DSL line. I learned about how differently things are done in an economy where local labor is cheap, but anything imported is really expensive (for instance, if somebody has a car they probably also have a driver, as a driver costs almost nothing compared to the cost of a car).
The group I was with was regarded as visiting experts, and everywhere we went people told us what they needed. We got taken to a college, and shown the difference between American computer books and their Indian copies, printed in black and white on paper barely above newsprint grade. But we also got shown classrooms full of students eagerly learning. Importantly for our work, we got shown the satellite connections at the ISPs, and told of the college’s difficulties getting big learning materials over the expensive satellites, but we also saw the local ISPs working on their own locally priced infrastructure to carry local content.
There were other experiences. There were the incredibly smart street kids, who spoke perfect English and one of whom could even rattle off the capitol of any country in the world. The kids spent their time scamming tourists on behalf of shop owners they were terrified of, but I certainly couldn’t offer them a better alternative. And there were the amazing tourist experiences, including the “mountain flight” past Mount Everest. It didn’t seem to fit in with the situation on the ground at all, but was breathtaking.
Parks, in one of her last blog posts from Africa, writes of wondering what it will be like to be home again, with Western conveniences, but without smiling Africans, African markets, and African huts. I remember having the same thoughts, wishing I could step back and forth between the two worlds, the interesting and the comfortable. What I noticed most about my return from Kathmandu was the silence, but also the orderliness of Berkeley, the calm, the prosperity. Walking down the street and nobody striking up a conversation. The things people wanted seeming absolutely decadent. People driving in silently in straight lines, like zombies. I’ve been to other developing countries since then. They’re still neat to see. But nothing compares to seeing that sort of place for the first time.
