Subject: What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right By Karin McQuillan Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment." In plain English: s--- is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism. Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral. The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see. I have seen. I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true. Senegal was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms. But they are not our terms. The excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible. As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal. In fact, I was euphoric. I quickly made friends and had an adopted family. I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man. People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts. The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they be? Their reality is totally different. You can't understand anything in Senegal using American terms. Take something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called "father." Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market. What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees. Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend. The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail. We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead. That was normal. So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised. It was familiar. In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom. Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out. That was normal. One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal. Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture. We think the Protestant work ethic is universal. It's not. My town was full of young men doing nothing. They were waiting for a government job. There was no private enterprise. Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy. It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives. All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing. The more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a job means work. A job is something given to you by a relative. It provides the place where you steal everything to give back to your family. I couldn't wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here? Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa. For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation. African problems are made worse by our aid efforts. Senegal is full of smart, capable people. They will eventually solve their own country's problems. They will do it on their terms, not ours. The solution is not to bring Africans here. We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration. They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist. I don't need to prove a thing. Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America. They want to destroy America as we know it. As President Trump asked, why would we do that? We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in. I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese. I am not willing to donate my country.
Was at a local craft store and saw a mother of similar ancestry direct her 4 year old son to dispose of a"used" diaper in the parking lot. Kid flipped me off, and mother got mad when I told store security. Then had the termerity (sic) to say she couldn't see the rubbish bin in front of the store.
Parts of this country are every bit as bad, but it's in the urban areas and not just confined to LA and San Francisco: Barstool Sports Interesting how the ideals of kleptocracy meld with socialism. I'd never seen the connection before.
I have been all over the field thanks to Uncle Sam and my favorite Uber, the US Navy. Ashore in every armpit nation on earth, I have seen people living in squalor and filth, children covered in flies, malnourished, some mutilated by " freedom fighters" of whatever stripe was there. Coming back to the States, I saw the look in the eyes of my fellow Marines to be back home, to see healthy kids and civilians. Even the crappy looks some gave us in Jville, it was still better than "over there". The problem we, as Americans, do to others is try to apply our ways and morals to others. We try to shape their cultures to fit our standards. It reminds me of the ways the British would try to civilize a new colonial annexation. The "wogs" were treated as inferiors and second class citizens as they weren't white or as educated. This would eventually cause the populace to rebel and eventually the British Empire shrank to its current size. Unfortunately, our powers that be never seem to read history or learn from it. So we continue the cycle.
Every one of us on earth is a cultural elitist who believe that our beliefs and traditions are superior to those of others. Our culture is the basis of who we are as an individual and as part of a society. We can enjoy learning about other cultures, appreciate them, even visit them and accept the differences but can we ever actually become one of them? I think there is probably an underlying feeling that our own way of life is inherently better than others. I think of it as getting married and joining the family of one's new spouse. Even if we are ethnically the same, share a common Judeo-Christian belief system and are within shouting distance with their economic circumstances, their traditions are different from our. Neither one better nor worse than the other, just different. How do we fit into that new family without losing our own identity? How does an immigrant sit into our culture without loosing their own? Is it possible? All four of my grandparents were immigrant and raised their families with the traditions they brought with them. Until the day they died, they yearned for their homeland and clung to the memory of a life much different from the one they had here even though they prospered in American, as they probably would not have in their birth country. I remember being a 20-year-old new bride trying to find my way in my husband's family of Italian immigrants. I can remember sitting at their dining room table and watching my mother-in-law get up and go to her husbands place and cutting his meat and loading food onto his plate. When I failed to follow suit, she took me aside and told me that it was now my responsibility to do that for her son. LOL I heard the words but I lived on with the tradition of my birth family where the women were strong and independent and their men appreciated it. Based on my own experience, I don't expect all immigrants to adopt our culture or beliefs but since they have chosen to be here, I expect they will adhere to our societal expectations and abide by the norms of our culture, the same as we must do if we emigrated to their country
Very good article and well written and entirely true. I spent close to 40 years overseas, loved it - well - most the time. And, in some places, some things, actually, a lot of things, was better than the good ole US of A. And, some places and things were worse, some a lot worse...different country, different culture, different people. That's what made it interesting. It would always bother me that Americans would go to a foreign country and expect things to be like back stateside - I mean - why travel if that is what they want, right? And, this article talks about the corruption in an African country and from my experience she is correct; however, there is corruption in EVERY country, in EVERY culture but I freely admit it is different in each. For example, my wife is Russian, born and raised in Central Asia when it was part of the Soviet Union while I was born in America but I'm more of a multi-culture mutt due mostly from my years abroad and rubbing against different cultures. We constantly laugh at the level of corruption here stateside compared to the level of corruption in Central Asia countries, both are very, very corrupt but different in their corruption. In Central Asia, even the little man on the street can benefit from that corruption, bribe a police officer to get out of a ticket, bribe a state administrator for a late payment, or a license or to change a document but here in America - well - only the rich elite can do such a thing, not only do it but do it at an extreme high level and get away with it. LOL! Look at our own former Vice President Biden and the crap coming out now about him and his son or Hillary Clinton's server with classified documents or the so called suicide of Epstein... Will anything happen to these people, are they above the law? YES! YES THEY ARE ABOVE THE LAW! LOL! Welcome to America and America's culture of corruption! LOL! And, of course, here the USA says it is so clean, innocent and pure and they stamp out corruption while in Central Asia everyone knows it is a tradition, part of the culture - hell - that why they call it 'government' because in those countries if you want to get rich you go into government...wait...isn't it the same here!!! LOL!
"The Ugly American" comes to mind. Been a long time since reading, but -- Novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer 1958. Alleged to be fiction ---
That's right Miss Dee-licious,The lucky SOB should have fixed you a plate after the cooking and served it up,Along those lines a foot massage while your eating is always an added plus !!!
Our country is at war with our government. Our fight is a civil war that was started by people who do not live here. They control the government like puppet masters and we only see the puppet. In the middle of THE biggest fight in our country's history they have convinced us to look to other shores. Political correctness, helping everyone but ourselves, racism, guilt, saving the children, corrupt education, these are the weapons they use against us. We need to wake up and remember what it means to be American. Fight back. It doesn't matter if we can win or not. That is not the point. The point is to live free.
Gator, it was only my youth and inexperience that made me chose a Northerner, Italian no less, rather than a Southern man like you.
It never ceases to amaze me, after talking. with ex-Peace Corp Folks how much they admire the people they worked with, even in third world countries... We had one in the Commune I lived in, who did his time in the mountain villages of Nepal.... I got my Kukuri from him, when he came home with a few others.. His job was to reach them how grow better crops, and he lived above the village Storehouse, where the crops were stored, after the harvest... He did his job very well, and increased production by 35% in two years... Of course their cash crop was Hasheesh......
Governments have been using free hand outs to crash economies for a very long time. They get free money from taxes, call the program Farm Aid or something attractive to all the arm chair activists, and then drive whole economies down the drain. This has been going on for a very long time. The way to stop it is by the people waking up. Uneducated people who allow themselves to be tied up with rules, or those who ask for more and more rules, and those who do not fight against those rules cause this. If your number one priority is not freedom then you will lose it. Any rule or statute you add is a freedom you lose. It is simple math.
