festival of ideas.
Last night, I was in Ottawa, talking at its author’s festival (review here). I spoke with Peter Pigott, author of the book, Canada in Sudan. I spent my train ride thinking what I was going to as we blurred by early buds on trees and geese in straw strewn fields.
Months ago, I had wondered about how I would avoid being drawn into a political discourse about Sudan. I was already overemployed, and there were few problems with more opaque solutions. And I had one anyway. MSF. Work in places where people suffer, no matter where that is, and avoid politics as much as you can.
I wonder, however, if I have the permission to disengage from solutions in Sudan. I know it better than most people do. I lived there for six months. I wrote a book about that. I follow its story closely, I care about the people, my patients and friends, who I left behind. I think that if one is given the opportunity to focus, he should.
But does it have to be Sudan? It’s on the brink. And tilting.
I spoke about my book, about what I knew about the country. I talked about solutions, about Dambisa Moyo’s recent book, Dead Aid. I spoke about my questions, “why should we care?” and “what is the nature of a human?”, about how Canada could play a role in encouraging peace, that now was a time to engage Khartoum. Mostly I talked about hope, and its infinite amounts.
After I was done, having sent off the Ottawa crowd to bed with leaden dreams, a young man approached me. He was soft spoken, tall, familiar from my patients in Abyei. He was a Dinka, from the South, came to Canada in 2002. We talked.
He thanked me, said he agreed with much of what Peter and I said. He did, however, disagree with a term someone in the audience used to describe Sudan.
“Sudan,” he said, “is not a failed state. Not yet. But it will be if the comprehensive peace agreement is not respected. If that happens, Darfur will not believe in the peace process, and the fighting will continue there. And elsewhere. We will become like Somalia.”
Later, I sat around a table discussing Sudan with someone who was familiar with Canadian policy on the country. He agreed.
“We sent someone to Sudan recently, with an intention to push for peace in Darfur, and he came back with the same conclusion. The CPA.”
Humanitarian needs in Darfur are severe, and need to be addressed with as much urgency as pursuing an end to fighting and banditry in that suffering province. However, those of us engaged (reluctantly or otherwise) in Sudan, interested in a future as free of war and hunger as possible, would do well to remember that the successful implementation of the CPA is one of the linchpins. If any of you are interested in writing a letter to your MP, asking for their attention to the CPA would be a good thing to request.
Ps. John Kerry agrees, read “Diplomacy has a chance in Sudan” in the Boston Herald
What did you say about Dambisa Moyo’s book?
krissy.
just that hers was in important idea, that we should think carefully about how we direct and dedicate our efforts, to ensure their consequences are measurable and trend to the benefit of those who we proclaim to be helping. in my interpretation, moyo’s argument is less with humanitarian relief, and more with the dispersal of large sums through top heavy programs that are distanced from interpreting the effect on the ground. again, the distance thing. and as i tell students who gravitate towards the type of medicine i did in sudan, their job is to work themselves out of one, not perpetuate their own necessity. eventually, if we are careful, and our intentions genuine, south sudan will have enough south sudanese doctors to provide necessary care. in the meantime, while providing relief, we should be also dedicated to the pursuit of our own obsolescence. then, finally, we can all just get a good night’s sleep for once, wake up, and go for a brunch that can last all day. we’ve got some work in the way first, though.
Thanks for your response. I’ve been thinking about this idea of distance a lot as well. I think this distancing you’re talking about is systemic, and if I trace it back I find its roots in an individualistic world view. The same thing that allows people to say “we’re lucky we’re not ____(fill in the blank)” I was recently raising money for a rape relief shelter on the street and I had women coming up to me, putting change in my jar and saying hurriedly “It’s never happened to _me_, but it’s a good cause.” And for people right now to say things like, we’re lucky we live in Canada and not Iran. There’s this amazing thing we manage to do in our minds where we only let ourselves see and identify with certain kinds of oppression, but not see the linkages between all kinds of oppression, the linkages to other ways we are creating distances, so that we can’t see the ways the privileges (including the privilege of othering suffering) we enjoy might come at the price of someone else’s oppression.
I say this because of the unintended line in your bio about being lucky you don’t live in a basement apartment wondering where the last fifteen years of your life went. To me that’s just the same as most Canadians saying we’re lucky we’re not Sudanese, we’re lucky we have healthcare…Let the distance fall away. I say this because I’ve worked in Ghana in education through CIDA, but I also live below the poverty line in Canada, I’m an artist and I live in a basement apartment, and many of my friends live in basement apartments, and haven’t had resources, support or opportunities to be able to go to university. I guess I wonder why it seems romantic to live in a hut in africa, but not to live in a basement apartment back home…
I just say these things because i otherwise agree with what you’re saying- about how we should basically be working ourselves out of development jobs, that the goal should be our own obsolescence- otherwise we’re just reproducing the conditions of our own power and another groups subordination. This is a perspective that seems so obvious after having been “on the ground”…but I think to maintain that perspective I’m thinking a lot about how it applies here as well, where there is also profound suffering. Sex trafficking of women and children into the larger Canadian cities for example. Let the distance fall away.
Can we really ignore politics?
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/292130.html