Translations

One of the biggest frustrations of living in country and culture so unlike your own is the fact that many things don’t translate (both literally and figuratively). And in reality, that’s exactly what this blog is doing – translating events in Namibia to people in America and vice versa. It often seems impossible to explain situations, both joyful and stressful, because the listener doesn’t understand the context. What might seem like a simple solution is not, and vice versa. To make matters even more complicated, I often feel like an inept translator – both unable to understand something because of its Namibian context and also unable to explain it effectively within the American context. This experience has certainly made me more feel more compassion for the children of immigrants who are constantly straddling two contexts and two cultures and trying to succeed in them both.

I thought I’d purged all my thoughts about adaptation and the human condition in the last post, but it’s still been on my mind a lot lately, so I guess that’s not the case. In particular, the point that I haven’t been able to shake is the image of that destitute African child that you often see on infomercials attempting to play on your sympathies to extract money. I see something similar to this every day, which made the infomercial seem inaccurate. This inconsistency plagued my mind until I recognized that the picture of poverty was incomplete.

It’s probable, I’ve come to realize, that there are two types of poverty, and maybe even more. For the moment, however, it’s been easiest to wrap my head around two – poverty of the tangible and poverty of the intangible.

Poverty of the tangible would include a lack of materials – living in a hut or hovel or shack; fetching your water from a pond several miles away; having only two sets of clothes and no shoes; playing without toys; eating the same bland rice or millet or cassava every day. But if all you’ve known for your whole life is a hut with plain rice and ratty t-shirt, are you any worse off?

The second, and more extreme, kind of poverty is poverty of the intangible – lacking knowledge of the importance of education; lacking the ability to speak your mind or make your own decisions; coping with the mental anguish of losing a parent.

After all, you can give a child a book, but if he doesn’t understand the benefits of reading, it’ll end up as fuel for a cooking fire; you can give a girl a condom, but if gender equality doesn’t exist, she can’t even suggest its use; you can give an orphan a mansion, but if he doesn’t have adults to guide him, he’ll soon end up on the streets and the house in disrepair.

So, then, the logical conclusion seems to be that the seeds to overcome intangible poverty must first be planted before the war against tangible poverty can be waged. But the question remains: Are the right type of seeds being planted? Is the message getting across? After all, what flourishes in India may wither in Canada. At the moment, it seems to me that the only answer is perseverance and luck; that through one of our relationships the right seed might fall on the right type of soil (and avoid the birds – parable of the mustard seed...anyone?).

And now let’s bring this full circle: translation of the message. While I can’t explain to you the details of the poverty I live amongst, I know you understand the message, because intangible poverty exists everywhere – in our country, in our community, in our backyard, in ourselves. So...wherever we are, let’s go ahead, let’s plant those seeds and see if something springs up.