Read Online Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Don Cheadle, John Prendergast
Ads: Link
then that if the United States would just get involved, we could fix everything.
My education was about to begin.
The only place to which I could get a visa on short notice was Mali, a country well to the west of Ethiopia but suffering a major food crisis as part of the Sahelian drought. I knew no one in Mali, with the exception of Mark Heim, a Peace Corps volunteer with whom I had played soccer during one year of high school (before I dropped out of that school ... starting to see the pattern?). I am not sure what the hell I was thinking I would or could accomplish, or even how I thought I would learn what I would need to do to make a difference.
But fate, or God, intervened. On the plane ride over, a Malian guy appropriately named Mohammed came up to me and told me he remembered me from playing basketball at the Georgetown University gym during my freshman year. I guess since I had long hair then too, and I played very flamboyantly. He understood immediately that I was just a 21-year-old kid who wanted to learn and to help, and he took it upon himself to make sure my introduction to Africa 101 was the right one.
He worked for the Agricultural Department of Mali, so he showed me how Malians themselves were trying to deal with their own problems. Nonetheless, tariffs and subsidies in Europe and the US made it impossible for them to compete as farmers. Right away, I started to see the unfairness of the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. I moved into one of his houses, as he had three little huts in which his three wives lived. He moved one of them into another house, and the chickens and I took over the third hut. Eventually I met an American guy, Jeff Gray, a fellow hoopster who worked for an American organisation called Africare, and he let me accompany him as his assistant as long as I would talk with him about basketball and Philadelphia, and we headed into the Sahara Desert to initiate water projects for the people all the way up toward Timbuktu, a place I thought existed only in fairy tales.
Coming back to the US after that trip was difficult. I couldn’t think about anything else but Africa. I would tell my stories of adventures in Africa to my Little Brothers from the programme and they would tell me their stories of growing up in Philly and DC. The core inequity, discrimination, and maldevelopment were shared, but Africa’s place at the very bottom of the global priority totem pole drove me to want to return, to be somehow part of changing that deadly cocktail of neglect and exploitation.
I went back the next year to Zanzibar to take a volunteer job on a youth employment project. Zanzibar was paradise, but I wanted to go somewhere in which my initial interests in confronting war and famine were at play. So I next went to Somalia, and that is where the worm really turned for me. That is where I saw the Cold War being played out, where the US was cynically using Africa in its geostrategic chessboard, with the Somali people acting as the pawns. My government was pouring money into a military dictator who was brutally repressing and killing his own people. I spent time volunteering in an orphanage and watched babies die needlessly of malnourishment and disease.
My reaction was one of pure anger. Anger at the injustice that was actually killing people. Anger at my own government for not only not intervening to stop it, but instead actually pouring gasoline on the fire by providing arms and money to the perpetrators. I had never seen anything as nakedly unfair as that, and with such devastating consequences. I decided then that I would dedicate the rest of my life to attacking that injustice in whatever way I could. The lightbulb finally went on. I could sit there and try to help save the starving babies, or I could go back to the US and work on policies toward Africa that would ensure that babies didn’t have to starve.
Of course, seeing the pictures in 1983 of millions of starving Ethiopians
My education was about to begin.
The only place to which I could get a visa on short notice was Mali, a country well to the west of Ethiopia but suffering a major food crisis as part of the Sahelian drought. I knew no one in Mali, with the exception of Mark Heim, a Peace Corps volunteer with whom I had played soccer during one year of high school (before I dropped out of that school ... starting to see the pattern?). I am not sure what the hell I was thinking I would or could accomplish, or even how I thought I would learn what I would need to do to make a difference.
But fate, or God, intervened. On the plane ride over, a Malian guy appropriately named Mohammed came up to me and told me he remembered me from playing basketball at the Georgetown University gym during my freshman year. I guess since I had long hair then too, and I played very flamboyantly. He understood immediately that I was just a 21-year-old kid who wanted to learn and to help, and he took it upon himself to make sure my introduction to Africa 101 was the right one.
He worked for the Agricultural Department of Mali, so he showed me how Malians themselves were trying to deal with their own problems. Nonetheless, tariffs and subsidies in Europe and the US made it impossible for them to compete as farmers. Right away, I started to see the unfairness of the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. I moved into one of his houses, as he had three little huts in which his three wives lived. He moved one of them into another house, and the chickens and I took over the third hut. Eventually I met an American guy, Jeff Gray, a fellow hoopster who worked for an American organisation called Africare, and he let me accompany him as his assistant as long as I would talk with him about basketball and Philadelphia, and we headed into the Sahara Desert to initiate water projects for the people all the way up toward Timbuktu, a place I thought existed only in fairy tales.
Coming back to the US after that trip was difficult. I couldn’t think about anything else but Africa. I would tell my stories of adventures in Africa to my Little Brothers from the programme and they would tell me their stories of growing up in Philly and DC. The core inequity, discrimination, and maldevelopment were shared, but Africa’s place at the very bottom of the global priority totem pole drove me to want to return, to be somehow part of changing that deadly cocktail of neglect and exploitation.
I went back the next year to Zanzibar to take a volunteer job on a youth employment project. Zanzibar was paradise, but I wanted to go somewhere in which my initial interests in confronting war and famine were at play. So I next went to Somalia, and that is where the worm really turned for me. That is where I saw the Cold War being played out, where the US was cynically using Africa in its geostrategic chessboard, with the Somali people acting as the pawns. My government was pouring money into a military dictator who was brutally repressing and killing his own people. I spent time volunteering in an orphanage and watched babies die needlessly of malnourishment and disease.
My reaction was one of pure anger. Anger at the injustice that was actually killing people. Anger at my own government for not only not intervening to stop it, but instead actually pouring gasoline on the fire by providing arms and money to the perpetrators. I had never seen anything as nakedly unfair as that, and with such devastating consequences. I decided then that I would dedicate the rest of my life to attacking that injustice in whatever way I could. The lightbulb finally went on. I could sit there and try to help save the starving babies, or I could go back to the US and work on policies toward Africa that would ensure that babies didn’t have to starve.
Of course, seeing the pictures in 1983 of millions of starving Ethiopians
Similar Books
