I'm living and working in culture very, very different from the one that I grew up in. I'm a child of white middle-class America, and I'm working in a village in the malaria belt of Africa. The nearest paved road is a 2-hour drive by 4x4 land cruiser to the north. Running water is created by pouring out a plastic teapot for your neighbor. A kitchen is three bricks on a ground that can balance a pot above a fire constructed from sticks. Children spend hours finding ways to harvest mangos off the huge trees all around us, then eat them and throw the pit on the ground. Cows amble down the street on their free time, when they're not hitched to oxcarts to haul bricks.
Everyday activity for everyone around me is so far from my ordinary, so far from the normal that I grew up with, that I constantly go with the flow. Everything around me is the new normal. Nothing really surprises me any more, because every situation that presents itself is immediately normal for me. It's a bizarre state of flux that I find myself in.
Children play in the dirt. Trash is thrown on the ground. People have between one and three sets of clothes. There is no standard practice of hand washing. Latrines are not available for everyone. Women die in childbirth. People die from malaria.
When everything that goes on here is normal, where is the line of what's acceptable and what's not? We're here to fight against the high mortality rate of malaria. Malaria isn't a death sentence; we, in the world, have the drugs and means to fight it. We even have the technology and resources to prevent it. We, as a world, just haven't implemented it yet. We're in the process, I suppose you could argue. We're changing it. In decades, there will be a new normal. People won't die as easily as they do now.
But where's the line of what's acceptable, and what needs to change? What's the line between cultural difference and unacceptable lack of development? Children shouldn't die of malaria, but they can poop in their neighbor's field. A woman will survive childbirth, but that child will only have one item of clothing at a time until she's 10.
Two older girls get in a fist fight over a mango when they can't decide who procured it from the tree. A crowd of boys and girls gather to watch. The girls break apart, arguing, then resume fighting 30 meters down the street. A man wades into the crowd with a switch he pinched off a nearby tree. He slashes at everyone around him to disperse the crowd, and whips at the two fighting girls. They spring apart and run off, the mango forgotten. Another child darts in and snatches it while the man is facing the other way. In seconds, the street is deserted.
I don't move or say anything from the doorway of our compound. I'm shocked by the violence I just saw.
This is the new normal.
What do we change? What is culture, that accounts for our diversity as human beings, and what is unacceptable? Who's judging?
