1. Rubbish. Why do so many people living in poverty not seem to care about it? What is it about having nothing that means people accept life in a rubbish dump, festering trash under their feet? I’m talking about the villages I’ve passed through in India, in Morocco, in Yemen, in China, in Jordan… all these small poor, poor villages where people do the best they can. Except that they could gather the rubbish together, dump it in one place away from their homes, their families. Why don’t they?
2. If I should feel guilty about speaking English. When English was the only valuable skill I had to share I didn’t want to go teach it, despite how much I wanted the lifestyle it would bring, because I didn’t feel qualified (I hadn’t learned it the hard way) and because I was uncomfortable with the connotations, the linguistic imperialism, the fact that I don’t speak another language. But now English has been claimed by much of the world. Over the last decade countries have embraced it for their own benefit rather than seeing it imposed on them through a colonial yoke. At least, this is how it feels to me. I still feel the same shame based on my own lack of skills, but not the same shame because of my English, English, English. And I notice how important my English is to me; how much more easily and meaningfully I can engage in some remote areas of Africa than I can in tourist-heaving Nepal, how important this language can be. Has the world changed, or have I, and does it matter anyway?
3. Why some good people can be so wrong. I’d better be specific here. I believe that some international NGOs operating in developing countries take advantage of local staff or, more specifically, allowing some of their international staff to do so. Good people treating employees, subordinates, cleaners, drivers in ways that I don’t think are acceptable. Why does this happen? Because they think it’s ok, right? Or because they think they can get away with it? Do they get sucked into the ‘white man is king’ lie that’s so easy to buy into when you live like one and rules don’t apply to you? Does this make some people lose perspective on what is right and wrong? Or am I actually the one that’s wrong? Overly sensitive to power imbalances perhaps; does this skew my interpretation of what I see?
4. What the answer should be to child labour. An eleven year old boy who made my breakfasts, boiled my tea and cleaned my room at a local guesthouse in Pushkar, Rajasthan. He wasn’t the son of the owner, no, ‘a friend’. He slept on a rug by the kitchen door. A two or three year old girl dressed up in bright silks waiting on the stone steps to a temple in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Her father, dressed in rags, pushed her out into the path when he saw me coming and she danced, swayed, tottered, eyes wide and hands reaching for a coin from me while he squeezed out a traditional tune to accompany her performance. The siblings who sit in the scorching sun on the Liberian roadside, wielding rocks to crack, crack, break other rocks into smaller, usable pieces. Rock chips flying, cutting, youngsters performing the work of years, millennium, just breaking down rocks. What would stop this? What should stop this? I’d really like a real answer here.