There is this idea that I struggle with. Here in Swaziland it is in my face all the time, but in America it doesn't go away either.
When I was a volunteer, I caught a group of neighborhood kids pawing through my garbage. Rural South Africa does not exactly have scheduled garbage pick-up, so you pile everything up in the yard and then set it on fire. I had taken my trash out earlier in the day and came back from some meeting or event to see a group of kids bent over the pile. One little girl had found some food that I had thrown out. A plastic tube of something akin to instant breakfast that I'd been intrigued by at the grocery store, found really gross, and then delayed throwing out for a few months. She was eating it by the handful, doing her best to assume an air of curiosity and irony rather than intense hunger. Later I found her sitting on the church steps, hunched over and moaning with a stomach ache.
I have never been able to throw food away again. I feel shame when I allow something to go bad, when I don't recycle and repurpose every meal until nothing but peels and rinds are left. Knowing that I am wasting something that my neighbor would have gladly pulled out of the garbage -- I just can't. It would be shameful, cruel, disrespectful. Even if she is 10,000 miles away and will never see that thing of cheese that I didn't get around to eating after it looked so interesting at the farmer's market last week.
And yet.
I hear this line of thinking a lot, from other ex-pats, from folks who have spent 6 weeks, two months, a semester abroad in this part of the world. The disdain for friends at home who buy their children ipads or lots of fancy toys at Christmas. The discomfort we feel going out to a nice meal in a country where fully half (at least) the population is food insecure. My own guilt and unease planning an American wedding while living here, spending more money on a dress than many of the participants I'm talking to will earn in a year.
But I don't know what my discomfort buys them. I don't know what distaste for money spent in America -- for safaris and brunches and nights out at House on Fire here -- does for my neighbor in South Africa. If my parents generously, generously pay what they can afford so that the day when my person and I get married is as fun as we can make it -- is that cruel, is it shameful, does it disrespect the experiences of every couple and their parents who can't do the same?
I hear this line -- the one where you should eat all your peas because of the starving children in Ethiopia, Somalia, Swaziland, and not to mention very likely down your own street anywhere you live in America. And it makes me wary for two reasons:
The first is that children in Somalia, Swaziland, Baltimore, Atlanta, or Oxnard do not exist to be poverty porn. Some of them like peas, some of them do not. People are people, we are complicated, we are multifaceted. We have more than one thing going on at a time. My neighbor does not exist to be the bogeyman who convinces other children to eat their broccoli. She is an autonomous person with other interests than being the sad punchline to somebody else's story. Including mine.
The second reason is that I don't think comfort is inherently immoral. I don't think it is bad to lavish gifts on people you love if you can and if it makes you happy. I don't think it is bad to enjoy an expansive brunch with friends here in Swaziland after working hard and feeling stress. Yes, my stress is not as bad as that of a woman living with HIV and trying to feed her children. I am not an elderly grandmother trying to support three generations of family 10k from the nearest paved road. And I don't pretend to be. But what is the point of suffering olympics? Getting married in a horse hair and lentil dress that I scavenged from behind the Salvation Army is not going change the fact that about 30% of the people I meet on a given day are infected with HIV, and if they are a poor woman they are much, much more likely to be so. I can work very hard to have some impact on that, and also still want to wear a pretty dress.
I think the danger of saying "I can't because they can't" is that it steals the focus from where it should be. When I say that we shouldn't go to brunch because of the township we must pass to get there, where is the focus? Are we talking about the real and devastating structural inequalities that fuel that township? Are we talking about the people who live there, their experiences, their needs, their humanity? Or are we talking about what a lovely and self-sacrificing person I am? This is the other thing I have been learning for the past 8 years, and if I could I would line up every single person who ever even thinks about getting into any sort of social service anything, line them up and shake them one at a time and tell them very clearly:
It is not about you.
I find these comparisons, these wry comments on first-world problems and rants about how much money your cousin's neighbor's friend spends on dog food to be frustrating because they turn the spotlight and the focus onto that rich, likely white, entirely privileged person. It is the idea of 'what can I take from their suffering? How does her poverty impact my life?' It uses other people's lives to highlight your own. Other people who have less voice, less power, who aren't granted the opportunity to be whole and multifaceted and real.
Don't be wasteful because it is bad to be wasteful. Don't be wasteful, because it disrespects and ignores the privileges that you have. Don't trash your dress, don't throw out your food, don't build a superfluous airport -- because those are all a celebration of waste and destruction for the sake of it. But just as bad (maybe) is turning the fact that 650,000 of your neighbors are food insecure into something that is about you and whether or not you should get a massage. That's pretty disrespectful too, as I see it.
I have not sorted this out yet. I don't know that I have the idea just right, but it is something I've been thinking about a lot. I am not perfect. I am trying. I do not throw out food.
