Generosity Across Cultural Boundaries

The theme of this post is complications of generosity, and I will admit from the beginning I don’t have final answers to this one. I'll begin by recounting an incident that I recently heard from a North American neighbor here. This family has a daughter aged 11 who attends an international school over an hour away in Kampala, and has been desperate for playmates nearer to home than her classmates. So, she befriended a couple of girls from the small slum across the road. Her parents, learning a bit about these girls’ backgrounds, felt guilty sending their daughter to an expensive international school while the friends’ families could barely afford to buy school uniforms. They began to pay the girls’ school fees. This went on for maybe a year, I’m not sure, but a few weeks ago it came out that one of the girls had stolen some electronics from the North American family’s daughter. Needless to say, everyone felt betrayed.

Here’s another incident. Back when we lived in Kenya we had a North American friend, we’ll call her Lynn, who while completing her doctoral dissertation hired a woman to help her with word processing, translation, and a variety of other clerical tasks. This woman, Hannah, was so helpful and they had gotten along so well that Lynn had given her rent-free space in her house to start up a business. Lynn had been very free about cost sharing and had also lent Hannah money on one or two occasions.  After some time Lynn realized Hannah had been using the phone and other facilities for personal needs, to the point that Lynn was out hundreds of dollars. Plus Hannah never paid back the loans (we will not get into the wisdom of making this sort of personal loan in any cultural context, suffice it to say that made a bad situation worse.) The biggest issue for Lynn at the time was not the financial aspect, but the fact that she had thought they had a friendship and Hannah had used her.

Here’s a third example. An American couple we are acquainted with allowed a man who ran a street children's ministry to stay in their home for extended periods of time, along with several street boys. They helped set up a school for this man's work, and were shocked when he stole a new car from them.

These are all kind people, trying to be generous, for whom everything went wrong. (Do not ask me for my own confessions along this line, I am even at present trying to determine if I have placed myself in a similar situation, though on a very small scale.) Reflecting on these events, my first intuitive thought was, few Kenyans or Ugandans would find themselves in these circumstances. Something about it is a distinctly "American in Africa" problem. But I was perplexed as to why this is so. Partly, as I have mentioned before in this blog, I think that's because the ingroup/outgroup distinction here is stronger than in the U.S., as is the responsibility (including financial) to support the extended family. Ugandans do things for their families that most Americans would never dream of. (Remember the office assistant in a previous post who is building his mother a house?). That's not to say family members don't let people down, but the web of relationships involved would make it somehow different. 

But then again, could I imagine North Americans doing some of these things in their own cultures? Some of these actions seem naive. Maybe it's not so much an American thing as it is a thing that happens sometimes when North American values interact with the east African environment. Maybe it's a natural but unproductive reaction to two related issues:

1.  Most North Americans have never seen the extremely basic level of poverty like what is present in parts of Africa. For example, we have a Ugandan woman who comes in to cook Ugandan food for us once a week. She tells me she worked full time for the people who lived in this house previously and was paid about $80 a month. (I pay her $5 for a half day once a week, which is more than double her previous hourly pay, though I’m sure she’d rather have the full time work.) Many manual laborers make less than that.  It is hard to know how to deal with the total destitution all around when one comes from a society where the median family income is somewhere in the 40k's. Forget about a minimum wage of $15 an hour. $15 a day is unimaginable for many people here.

2.  A closely related issue. If, like me, you move from a high income nation to the two-thirds world you can hardly escape recognizing what has actually been true all along—on a global scale you are enormously wealthy.  It makes you feel guilty.  I recall vividly when some Kenyan friends of ours had a U.S. exchange student staying with them years ago. One day I asked how the student was doing and the wife responded, "Well, she's now at the stage where she wants to give away all her clothes.  We're trying to talk it through with her."  Apparently from the perspective of her Kenyan hosts, this young lady's reaction was to be expected, though not particularly helpful. It’s possible to assuage guilt by making heartfelt but inappropriate gestures.

Because of these issues we may get confused in our intercultural relationships. It’s not unusual to hear the occasional North American in east Africa talk about how “My house help/driver/cook is one of my closest friends.” It’s wonderful if that individual is the sort of person who makes no distinctions between social classes in his/her friendships, but I think sometimes these folk aren’t being realistic about the power differential that their wealth automatically places between them and these other persons. They may pretend it’s not there, but that won’t make it go away, and the other person--who will be quite aware of the gulf--will respond based on that disparity. 

Probably our best move as outsiders is to seek advice from someone at our same level of power, education, etc. in the host culture about appropriate ways to help. For most of us in an unfamiliar cultural context, the line between radical generosity and stupid generosity is hard to discern.

Photos below:

1, 2.  Roadside kilns for handmade bricks. The office assistant in the mass communication department (mentioned above) has already got the bricks fired for building his mother's house from this sort of place. I know I'm straying off topic, but these kilns are so fascinating to me, and they are all over the place. You first makes the bricks in molds and let them dry (see the unbaked bricks to the side of the kilns), then pile up the bricks in a particular configuration, light a slow fire underneath, and let them bake. Homemade and fired bricks are the way to build affordable housing here that's far more permanent than a hut.