By Leila Janah
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to BRIGHT Magazine.
Every time a young white person travels to Africa to be a “do-gooder,” it seems, there is a new flood of snarky tweets about that person’s intentions and how she is playing into the “white savior” narrative. That she’s only there to get Instagram likes and pad her resume with service bonafides. That her time is entirely self-serving.
I’ve been in attack mode myself, and I regret it. Last year, I wrote a piece about the problems with the “One-for-One” purchase-plus-donation model developed by companies like TOMS. And while I still believe that giving work is the ultimate solution to poverty, I think I was wrong to call out TOMS.
Why not instead call out the large apparel brands that do nothing to make the world better, and in fact actively plot against the interest of workers and the environment? Why not spend my time investigating the abusive and atrocious treatment of agricultural workers and farm animals, or destructive mining practices? Why not direct my frustrations at those who sit at home and do nothing, rather than at those who, in their sometimes flawed attempts to do good work, are pushing the world in a more empathetic direction?
I have spent much of the last 17 years living and working between the U.S., sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, first as a volunteer and NGO worker and later as an entrepreneur. And in that time, I’ve met dozens of idealistic young people. By and large, they seem to be looking for meaning, which they may not be finding in the communities in which they were raised. These kids don’t go off to Africa because it seems more glamorous to help “Other People” than the “unexotic underclass” in their own backyards, as Courtney Martin wrote. They go to places where the need seems greatest, and where they might have the ability to help.
There’s a rational basis for this way of thinking. The marginal benefit of a dollar donated to — or an hour spent sterilizing hospital equipment in — a poor clinic in rural Sierra Leone is higher than in most communities in the developed world, even in facilities that serve the poor. Let’s be real. Poverty in Merced, California looks very different from poverty in Mathare, Kenya — I’ve worked in both places with my company Samasource. One can argue that it is easier to make a small, meaningful difference in the life of a slum dweller by, say, giving her a small cash transfer for food or a few books, than to make a difference in the life of a low-income American woman who has a smartphone and more than enough food, but suffers from unemployment, a chronic sense of hopelessness, and addiction to Oxycontin.
This doesn’t mean that the poor American woman is less deserving, or that helping her is less glamorous. It means that helping her may well be much more expensive.
Perhaps the biggest difference between helping a person in the developing world and the industrialized one is in the “good Samaritan payoff” — which is what I call that small dopamine kick you get from knowing that you did something to make someone’s life immediately better. And sometimes, those dopamine kicks can spiral into a lifetime of doing good work that creates real change.
That’s what happened to me and dozens of close friends, who went on to create social enterprises that have helped millions of people lead better lives, both in the U.S. and abroad — organizations like Kiva, Embrace, One Acre Fund, and Rising Tide Capital. Many of us started off by going to Africa or Asia, finding a solution to a local problem there, getting that dopamine kick, and being inspired to bring that model to the United States. Many of us aren’t white, don’t think of ourselves as saviors, and don’t subscribe to the belief that there are any “Other People” who belong outside our circle of empathy.
Ghana at the dawn of the new Millennium was, for me, quite the opposite of a glamorous or luxury experience. When I arrived, I’d just turned 17. My parents were in a decade-long divorce battle and we rarely spoke, leaving me feeling desperately homesick. We’d never had much money, and I had worked a variety of jobs since I was 13 and made it to Africa using a scholarship. I was not a comfortably middle-class “savior” looking for a glamorous aid experience — I was just a kid who wanted to see the world and get the hell out of dodge.
After a month in rural Ghana, I realized the anti-malarial I’d been prescribed was the reason for the terrifying nightmares that scared me to the point where I couldn’t fall asleep. A month after stopping it, I got malaria, after a long bout of intestinal parasites and various other sicknesses that made it difficult for me to walk around and work for more than a few hours a day.
During this time, while I was taking the kinds of cute pictures of me with the kids in my classes that now cue mockery on Instagram, I became tremendously depressed at the needless human suffering I saw all around me — kids dying of malaria because they lacked the $5 Fansidar medication that saved me from the deep bone aches and impossibly high fever. It also dawned on me that because I’d seen what I’d seen, it would be impossible for me to go home and not devote my life to trying to fix this. That was a pretty heavy realization for a 17-year-old.
The following year, after saving money from working as a janitor and winning a tiny scholarship, I went to Senegal for more of the same, interning at a local NGO in Yoff, a small city near Dakar. Upon arrival, I got fast-acting strep throat and 24 hours later, passed out on a concrete floor, cutting the back of my head. Someone heard me yelling in my hostel and got me to a local expat doctor, who stitched me up, fed me painkillers, and told me I couldn’t get my head wet for three weeks, which was torture in the mid-summer head of West Africa.
It sucked. Many of my friends had taken internships at banking and consulting firms in cities like Boston, New York, and London. While they earned money and built their resumes, I sat alone in a stuffy internet cafe while my head healed, trying to get my work done. I was the only brown girl among our group of “white saviors” who’d come from America to work at the NGO on a translation project, and I felt a small sense of victory when, at the end of the trip, someone mistook me for a Dakar native after I’d mastered dancing to the local djembe drums.
These stories of “privileged white kids” from the Western middle class coming to Africa to find themselves didn’t apply to me.
I spent much of my childhood being teased and ridiculed for being too bookish, too weirdly skinny, too Indian, too ashy-legged, too poor to fit in with my classmates. And I believe I found my calling in Africa — not in saving anyone, but in figuring out a novel way to help people access jobs and move themselves out of poverty through Internet-based work, a model that my team and I have now applied here in the U.S.
If you’re troubled by the anti-immigrant, xenophobic, sexist tone of the last U.S. Presidential election; if you’re worried about the impact of what happens in this country on the citizens of a planet we all share; if your faith or your morality bring you back to the knowledge that all human beings have equal worth and dignity, and deserve a shot at living decently, then you have a responsibility to fight for an end, once and for all, to the divisive idea of “Other People.”
We’re in this together.
This article was originally published in BRIGHT Magazine on Feb. 14, 2017.
