I feel it. To varying degrees we all feel it at some time or another, and in my case, all the time. I call it diasporan guilt. The word “diasporan” will light up on any decent spell-check. Consider it hereby coined. Diasporan Guilt is a feeling of remorse, discomfort or conflict over having left one’s country of birth for greener pastures. In other words, from a developing/poor country to the comforts of Europe or the United States.
I once heard a shopper at a supermarket in L.A. loudly berating the manager over the failure of the store to carry her particular brand of cocoa sugar-frosted loophole bran flakes, or whatever it was. She carried on and on for five minutes to the hearing of practically everyone in the store, and I thought to myself, “She needs 7 days in an African village where she has to walk two miles just to collect some water in a bucket and she will never complain about not finding her cereal again.”
Yes, a stay in an African country like Ghana - and even more so in the many countries poorer than Ghana - can put it all in sharp perspective. In Accra, I was uncomfortably aware of how aghast the driver of my rental car must have been at my ability to withdraw from an ATM in one fell swoop the kind of money he wouldn’t make in three months. Many of the ubiquitous street laborers and traders live on less than a dollar a day and we are talking about walking the equivalent of miles in the hot sun with staggering loads balanced on the head. There are “truck-pushers” who lug cart-like contraptions loaded with scrap metal or other junk across town for four to six hours a day and get precious little for it. Walking one night around the streets of Kaneshie, a district in Accra, I was amazed at the number of people sleeping on the streets. I imagine if you earn 90 cents a day hawking miscellany like DVDs and hairbrushes and you don’t have any charitable friends or relatives in town, the street is where you stay.
But then, Mr. Bleeding Heart Liberal crybaby, you say, if you were living in a country in Ghana, you would probably be among the socio-economic group who’d be riding around in an air-conditioned sedan anyway, so what’s the difference? That may be so, but there is a difference. The effect of an engineer or doctor is monumentally greater pound-for-pound in a developing country. It’s about the relative need and the urgency of response. There are various estimates of population to doctor ratio, but in Ghana and other places in West Africa it’s around 33,000:1 (worse in poorer areas) and in the US it’s about 400:1. The well-known “brain drain” is very distressing, and mine is one of those brains. I have read that within the second year of leaving medical school, 50 percent of every graduating class leave the country in search of greener pastures, while 80 percent leave by the fifth year. Is that really possible?Not only that, the panoply of truly ghastly, deforming and fatal infectious diseases in Africa makes some of the patient visits to my Los Angeles urgent care seem ludicrous in comparison.
I can hear the question in my mind from those of you who’ve been paying attention and haven’t nodded off (yet): “In that case, why don’t you go back to Ghana and treat some worthwhile diseases and stop whining?” It’s not an invalid question, and I never said I wouldn’t consider it.
Meanwhile, there are some ways to assuage my guilt, even if partial. One would be working for a month or two at a time in Ghana in medically underserved areas. I can close my eyes and land my finger on any spot on the map. Sole doctors and doctor groups arrange these trips all the time. Another is to pick a project and support it either singly or through fund-raising efforts, as I intend to do with my alma mater, Accra Academy. This makes me feel better, so does that mean it’s really a little selfish? Maybe so, but it isn’t worth the psychoanalysis.
One thing has to be said: Once you’ve left the country of your birth, gone away and come back, you will always be regarded somewhat as someone who left the country - even if it’s appreciated that you DID come back. In the case of my brothers and me, it’s even a little bit more complicated by our mixed parentage - Ghanaian father, American mother, naturalized American citizens, American passports, childhoods spent in both the US and Ghana. We sit half and half on two chairs at once (one butt-cheek per chair), and it’s not always as comfortable, or simple, as sitting on just one.
ACCRA
FEBRUARY 15, 2008
These are my favorite photos on my Ghana trip
Nana (the younger one) & Victoria - two friends I
made
You sense some of the strain on the face of this street vendor.
Like others of his kind, he walks up and down between
traffic lanes selling anything from pencils to shampoo.
After 12 hours of trading, if he is lucky, he will
make a profit of 90 cents. Many of these traders suffer blinding
headaches by the end of the day, especially those
who carry cold goods on their heads.
The bright face of Sammy, the little boy next door,
atop his uncle’s shoulders.
This schoolboy, Kofi, was on his way to
school one morning and allowed me to
take his photo. His expression captivates me.
He seems very serious, yet tentative, curious
but uncertain. Wonderful portrait, if I do say
so myself.
Energy transfer. That’s Superman on his bike
pushing the truck.
This is a bit of a gross-out for me. The dark objects
hanging in the tree are not some kind of fruit, they
are thousands of bats in scores of trees lining one
of the main boulevards in Accra. I have to confess,
bats give me the creeps.