A little help? The way we get by, part 1

I woke up in my village, an unremarkable day just like any other. I walked to the market to buy breakfast and chat with some friends. Sitting next to my friend on this particular morning, I noticed how casually she chatted with a man about the weather and the upcoming market. She gave him some breakfast, free of charge, and then he smiply left, each person giving the other blessings for the day.

Let me explain now why I find this remarkable: my friend chatted with a man with legs so grotesquely bent upon themselves that he could barely even scoot across the ground to ask for food. Routinely, especially on market days, you'll find the sick, the handicapped, and the insane demanding money or food. In a larger city, this is considered normal.

As an American, how would you respond if a crazy person wandered into your house every day and demanded lunch? I remember in my youth a certain mentally unbalanced man who occasionally wandered the supermarket. Never doing anything other than wander the aisles and mutter to himself, he always caused staff and customers much consternation. I think most Americans, when confronted with the unstable would call the police, or as in the supermarket, say 'not it' when deciding which supermarket employee would escort this 'subhuman' away from civilized society.

Yet in my village, two or three such people do wander around the village or into houses most days. And as Malians, these families always provide lunch, a chair or mat if he wants to sit down, and then wish him well as they would any normal person.

For Mali, this behaviour is not remarkable--no government compensation is offered to injured or handicapped people. So if you are classified as such (unfit to produce your own food as Mali's agrarian economy necessitates), your family must support you. Or you must turn to the wider social network...and beg.

But this culture of begging, the processess and attitudes toward asking for help, goes much deeper then simply demanding a handout. Americans in particular have a tough time asking for any sort of help since doing so implies something less than self-sufficiency. There is a great deal of shame with the idea of dependence, shame from admitting we can't carry a heavy bag to admitting we can't pay the rent after driving up our credit card debt.

Further, in America, knowing the recipiant of help triggers another emotional response: there is shame on the recipiant's part, but also pity on the donor's part. I think this is communicated in that feeling we might get when we see someone in a wheelchair or when we speak with the caretaker of an autistic or retarded child--there is something that passes between the two people, something which I cannot adequately explain.  But the two people are never equals; rather, it is as though someone in a wheelchair is fighting a separate struggle: the physically and mentally abled people constantly sanctify the chronically weak or the sick.

So in America, the recipiants of food or monetary aid tend to be anonymous--we have canned food drives during Thanksgiving, or a money collection to help families dealing with Cancer.  The World Food Program sends out bags of porridge powder regionally, but these NGO workers never even meet the doctors or health staff who distribute the food aid. I've yet to meet anyone who admits to benefiting from a food bank or who has received a big check from a charity. As Westerners, we rarely meet recipiants of our help, unless you find yourself on Oprah's holidy season episode.

Yet regarding the crazy and disfigured residents in my village, there is neither shame nor pity. 'Helping people' is just something we do: it's how Malians live, and it's never considered 'special.'  I marvel at how the kids at the elementary school make it an adventure getting the wheelchair-bound boy home every day, or how the one-legged man will shamelessly stagger through the village, yelling at you to move a bit to the left so that he can pass. Or even the farmer who didn't get the timing right during planting season.  He has a bad harvest, and shamelessly asks his neighbor for money so he can buy meat for Tabaski. It's strange for me now to look at magazines like Reader's Digest or Women's Day, which feature stories such as "Neighborhood pulls together, so that recent victims can have a merry Christmas too." Have we really become that alienated from each other? Must we praise and make each other into heros for doing what any person should unquestionably do?

Crazy, disfigured, deaf, and poor, we're all just people trying to get by. So why should someone should be martyred in some personal struggle over another?