I once met a philanthropist, an eloquent woman, who was considering donating money to university volunteer projects in developing countries. A group of seven students including myself had just completed a water purification project, powered by solar panels, in Sri Lanka. It was a year after the Boxing Day Tsunami and one of the villages that was demolished was called Seenigama. The people there were fully aware of how much aid money had been poured into the government and how little had been rebuilt. They were angry at the government and welcomed volunteers. There has been a lot of justified criticism that volunteers from developed countries don’t add much value or only add the same value a local would while taking away local employment opportunities. I agree, and it was the Australian students who benefitted from the project the most – but that’s not always a bad thing.
The villagers were more than capable of installing the system on their own yet we did it side by side and were invited into people’s homes and their lives. It was an exchange of goodwill and of something else entirely. Perhaps it was simply an understanding that essentially we are all the same and equally vulnerable.
The philanthropist decided not to give our university any money. She gave it to us, the students. For each student she gave us a cheque to reimburse our airfares to Sri Lanka. Just to say that there are other people in the universe who appreciate goodwill. It blew our minds.
This happened a long time ago but it’s been on my mind recently. The reason is not obvious; it’s related to laundry. The said philanthropist told us in our brief conversation that she wasn’t wealthy, she just didn’t need much money. Her favourite thing in the world was to go to her cabin away from civilisation and do her washing by the river with nothing but birds for company. It took me all the years that have lapsed since that encounter to understand what she meant. Which is how we are where we are and why we are doing what we are doing. Our laundry, by Lake Tanganika*.
I am less noble than the lady philanthropist and laundry is not my favourite activity. I daresay it is the key luxury that I miss from my sedentary life. But I still enjoy it as a part of living simply. It took me a couple of years after starting work to stop living like a student and to spend money on myself. When Andrew and I became ex-pats we went into consumerist overdrive. It was a lot of fun. I cannot overstate how much fun it was. But it didn’t take long for it to peak and leave me wondering, is this it?
I have two bucket-lists; one is a travel list and the other is a list of things I want to do, that happen to be more substantial than travel. One thing on the latter list is to live with less. It just sits better with me.
Another thing is to write. A blog wasn’t specifically on the list but it’s gotten me writing more and I feel that it’s a good thing. Sometimes people ask me what the blog is about and I struggle to explain. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a plunge.
The last thing I’ll mention from the list comes back to the philanthropist: goodwill. We’ve had short bursts of it so far but the memories have been the place marks of this trip. The sightseeing we do is an agreeable way to pass time in-between. In South Africa we encountered it through a company who donated two systems to single mothers. One of the mothers cried the first time she used her electric lights. In Malawi we volunteered at a hospital which needed a new solar system to save money spent on fuel used to pump water. We also met a young Malawian man in Livingstonia who was delighted to find out we were Australian. Why? He once took an Australian on a guided walk and explained that he could not go to university to study engineering as he wished because he did not get the marks. So said Australian offered to pay for extra schooling so he could sit his exams again and try to achieve his goal. There are many things said about donations or volunteering and its effectiveness but there are also many ways of making the impact real and long-term. Personally I think money spent on humanitarian relief and education, including skills training, are effective areas for altruism while in other areas I support ‘Trade not Aid.’
I’m not saying what we are doing is in any way significant, we're just trying to head in the right direction. If I had to tell the harpies that guard the gateway to non-existence** my lifestory I would like it to be peppered with goodwill.
*Please don’t be outraged our fellow environmentalist friends. We are doing our laundry without the suds contaminating any watercourses.
**His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
