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While we potentially still have a readership (although probably far reduced from our high of 197 unique viewers last week) and I have this soapbox, I wanted to share this blog post by NYTimes columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Nick Kristof is an award-winning journalist known for his op-eds covering humanitarian crises around the globe. He’s one of my heroes, for his ability to bring some of the most pressing and under-reported human rights issues to the attention of the American public, and I “blame” him in large part for my humanitarian wanderlust. If not for a high school history class assignment to read the New York Times every day, I don’t know when I would have learned about the crisis in Darfur or sex trafficking in Cambodia or just the average life of the typical citizen of the globe who lives on less than $2 a day. Anyway, back to my main point…
Kristof published this blog post right before we left, in which he discusses some criticisms of his writings as portraying Westerners in a sort of “knights on white horses” role to Africans who are helpless in their dire needs. Check it out here:
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/westerners-on-white-horses/
In the short post, he explores a few issues that I think are very relevant to our project. One is the extraordinary work being done by Sierra Leoneans – like Dr. Barrie and everyone who works at NOW. Or the rising stars of EFO, like Jalloh, Suma, and Idrissa, students who have the technical expertise to bring electricity to all parts of Sierra Leone. Or even entrepreneurial Uncle Ben and his guest house, which is undergoing construction for expansion and providing pretty much the only secure, clean, and safe lodging for visitors to Kono. Another issue is the portrayal of Africa – I think sometimes we were frustrated with the pace of progress, or the corruption that was accepted as the norm, or the vast number of needs we witnessed. Yet I hope that we also portrayed a picture of Sierra Leone that highlighted the rich culture and incredible people and signs of hope for the future. A third issue is the Westerners – we did show up with solar panels and funding, and although I would have been sad to not have been able to visit Sierra Leone again, the project could have happened without our physical presence in the country. However, sending the four of us was not only a great learning experience for ourselves, but we were in a sense the “bridge characters” that Kristof talks about. Would we have reached as many people as we did with the story of GAF/NOW’s great healthcare work and EFO’s steps to light the country if the Beacon Solar Energy Project for Sierra Leone (that’s us) didn’t keep a blog?
Hopefully the benefits of this project extend far beyond the community of Koidu. Maybe someone out there was looking for a worthy cause and has since contacted or become involved with GAF/NOW or EFO. Or maybe everyone is just a little more knowledgeable about Sierra Leone or solar panels or international development (a topic that I sometimes think is harder than thermodynamics). I hope through our blogging, we joined people like Nick Kristof in raising awareness of both the needs and the success stories in places like Sierra Leone.
-Meghan
