How do we save our children from bastards?
Dec 20, 2006
ONE of the more interesting things about living as a so-called “Muzungu†in Africa, especially during Christmas, is living so close with global disparities.
By Thomas Froese
ONE of the more interesting things about living as a so-called “Muzungu†in Africa, especially during Christmas, is living so close with global disparities.
I come from Canada, a fortunate corner of the world where there are only small differences among classes. Unlike its neighbouring United States, Canada has been forged with enough socialism to blunt the sharp divides that capitalism tends to accentuate.
But I have caught something since coming to live in Africa: a certain disturbing feeling that has grown in my stomach, feeding on the various foreign sights and sounds, especially those of the children, especially now at Christmas. I know there’s more to African life than western stereotypes. More than “Do They Know It’s Christmas?†that moving, if not unnerving international hit by Band Aid, recorded two decades ago to bring attention to the then Ethiopian famine, and still played on radio across North America every Christmas season.
Africa has much more. Still, unlike in Canada, this holiday season, at least some African children will starve. Many others will experience childhood as it is never meant to be. And having my own young children here does not help my stomach much. Not when my three-year-old, Elizabeth, asks, as she did recently, “Daddy, what is a Muzungu?†How is one to respond? Or, when visiting a Ugandan orphanage, how can her mother and I explain why some children have no mummies or daddies? There is so much that many of the world’s little ones don’t understand. So many of them here in Uganda, Elizabeth and her brother Jon included, sing innocently and honestly about how “red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves all the children of the world.†So then why does the UN’s 2006 State of the World’s Children report that 11 million children under five are now dying yearly from malnutrition or disease? Why do 600 million live in abject poverty? Why can’t at least 100 million access even primary schooling? Why do 2.5 million have AIDS, a killer that has orphaned another 15 million, with plenty more coming?
Why during this, what should be the Mother of all Childhood Seasons worldwide, when gifts spill over in so many living rooms, do so many children live in this sad and sorry and terribly-true state? Why are truckloads of innocents becoming nothing but cold, dead statistics? A cynic might ask, can’t Jesus do better? Despite some gains, disparities stretch across the globe like some hideous alien’s tentacles. Simon Fraser Public Research Group, a Canadian think-tank, reports that if today’s world had 100 people, 50 would be malnourished, 70 wouldn’t be able to read, and 80 would have rotten housing. Six would have half the wealth. One would have a degree. Of course, there is a complex web of reasons for all this, and none have much to do with Jesus: poor personal choices, destructive cultural mores, wars, government corruption, unfair global trade, and the list goes on. It seems that, metaphorically, the lunatics are taking the asylum. And children are suffering the most.
Now consider some recent science from Paul Zak, of Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in California. Zak suggests human nature is basically good, that our brains are even hard-wired to cooperate. People find it natural to, for one thing, share.
But some two per cent of us, at least in Zak’s lab studies, are “pure non-cooperators,†always hoarding, always into themselves at all costs.
The rather crude technical term used in Zak’s lab for these people is “moral bastardsâ€. Their brains apparently work differently, like those of sociopaths who don’t, or can’t, care about anyone, maybe due to dysfunction of the chemical oxytocin.
So it can be argued that there really are so-called bastards out there. The question is, how do we save our children from them? And how do we avoid becoming such bastards ourselves? It may seem strange, but when one is a Muzungu in Africa, these are the things that can fester in one’s stomach, especially at Christmas.
Then again, as it is put in Philip Yancey’s book What’s So Amazing About Grace? maybe we are all bastards. And maybe God loves us anyway.
Maybe that is why the story of the first Christmas has been left for all of us to ponder. It is all something to think about the next time you hear a song for the world’s children.
And it is something to give thanks for when you see that Christmas wonder in a child’s eyes. No matter where you are from.
140765@sympatico.ca
The writer is an award-winning journalist from Canada who has written from five continents, particularly from the Middle East and East Africa
ONE of the more interesting things about living as a so-called “Muzungu†in Africa, especially during Christmas, is living so close with global disparities.
I come from Canada, a fortunate corner of the world where there are only small differences among classes. Unlike its neighbouring United States, Canada has been forged with enough socialism to blunt the sharp divides that capitalism tends to accentuate.
But I have caught something since coming to live in Africa: a certain disturbing feeling that has grown in my stomach, feeding on the various foreign sights and sounds, especially those of the children, especially now at Christmas. I know there’s more to African life than western stereotypes. More than “Do They Know It’s Christmas?†that moving, if not unnerving international hit by Band Aid, recorded two decades ago to bring attention to the then Ethiopian famine, and still played on radio across North America every Christmas season.
Africa has much more. Still, unlike in Canada, this holiday season, at least some African children will starve. Many others will experience childhood as it is never meant to be. And having my own young children here does not help my stomach much. Not when my three-year-old, Elizabeth, asks, as she did recently, “Daddy, what is a Muzungu?†How is one to respond? Or, when visiting a Ugandan orphanage, how can her mother and I explain why some children have no mummies or daddies? There is so much that many of the world’s little ones don’t understand. So many of them here in Uganda, Elizabeth and her brother Jon included, sing innocently and honestly about how “red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves all the children of the world.†So then why does the UN’s 2006 State of the World’s Children report that 11 million children under five are now dying yearly from malnutrition or disease? Why do 600 million live in abject poverty? Why can’t at least 100 million access even primary schooling? Why do 2.5 million have AIDS, a killer that has orphaned another 15 million, with plenty more coming?
Why during this, what should be the Mother of all Childhood Seasons worldwide, when gifts spill over in so many living rooms, do so many children live in this sad and sorry and terribly-true state? Why are truckloads of innocents becoming nothing but cold, dead statistics? A cynic might ask, can’t Jesus do better? Despite some gains, disparities stretch across the globe like some hideous alien’s tentacles. Simon Fraser Public Research Group, a Canadian think-tank, reports that if today’s world had 100 people, 50 would be malnourished, 70 wouldn’t be able to read, and 80 would have rotten housing. Six would have half the wealth. One would have a degree. Of course, there is a complex web of reasons for all this, and none have much to do with Jesus: poor personal choices, destructive cultural mores, wars, government corruption, unfair global trade, and the list goes on. It seems that, metaphorically, the lunatics are taking the asylum. And children are suffering the most.
Now consider some recent science from Paul Zak, of Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in California. Zak suggests human nature is basically good, that our brains are even hard-wired to cooperate. People find it natural to, for one thing, share.
But some two per cent of us, at least in Zak’s lab studies, are “pure non-cooperators,†always hoarding, always into themselves at all costs.
The rather crude technical term used in Zak’s lab for these people is “moral bastardsâ€. Their brains apparently work differently, like those of sociopaths who don’t, or can’t, care about anyone, maybe due to dysfunction of the chemical oxytocin.
So it can be argued that there really are so-called bastards out there. The question is, how do we save our children from them? And how do we avoid becoming such bastards ourselves? It may seem strange, but when one is a Muzungu in Africa, these are the things that can fester in one’s stomach, especially at Christmas.
Then again, as it is put in Philip Yancey’s book What’s So Amazing About Grace? maybe we are all bastards. And maybe God loves us anyway.
Maybe that is why the story of the first Christmas has been left for all of us to ponder. It is all something to think about the next time you hear a song for the world’s children.
And it is something to give thanks for when you see that Christmas wonder in a child’s eyes. No matter where you are from.
140765@sympatico.ca
The writer is an award-winning journalist from Canada who has written from five continents, particularly from the Middle East and East Africa