Question - What brings over 2000 people to Westminster Central
hall on a cold Thursday night in December, to hear about yet
another African famine?
Answer - When 'the worlds favourite and funniest travel writer'
is in town.
Thus I joined the throng to hear Bill Bryson read in person
from his latest publication - Bill Bryson's, African Diary.
The evening was hosted by Stanfords (the travel bookshop),
with the generated profits, royalties and plaudits going to
the coffers of Care International, who nursemaided Bill and
his American naivety around Kenya for ten days in October.
As I sat and waited with anticipation and
amazement of the growing crowd, I thought of the genius mind
that had linked travel writing with disaster relief. He had
the boldness to approach Bill Bryson in a London Park and
introduced the idea of helping the developing world in a different
genre.
British society today has had it's heart hardened by progressively
hard hitting relief appeal after relief appeal, steaming all
the way back to the 1980's when Live Aid brought the shocking
truth of the first global African famine to our television
screens. Ever since then we as a community have 'done what
we could' but 'it is so difficult to get involved' and 'doesn't
it all end up being stolen or diluted through corruption anyway'.
Here we had a really new thing, a tangible
thing, something to help British society help itself, something
for the coffee table or for the Christmas stocking. We now
had a book that was written by Bill Bryson, well that must
be funny - it is in parts - about Africa in general, Kenya
in detail - which is interesting - written and produced in
under ten weeks - a near miracle.
In fact Bill's 'African Diary' will be a Christmas best seller,
with all the right constituent parts, size, cost, subject
matter, author, placement next to the counter till. But does
it deliver the real Bryson experience, the suffering observational
humour that he is renowned for. In short - no - as the author
himself said on the night, he finds it much easier and more
comfortable to be observational about developed societies,
that are in fact too developed and thus has fat for some cutting
observations, aiding us to laugh at ourselves. What Bill finds
in Kenya is a society with little fat to be chewed.
In short Bill found Kenya distressing. Shanty
towns that exist on no maps, but that have spread to the end
of government official's gardens. World Bank funded highways
that had never seen that tarmac that it paid for. Refugee
camps that have 28,000 school pupils but only 807 desks to
sit them at, when Bill personally offered to fund more desks,
he was told that you can not make a refugee camp better than
conditions in its host country.
In such an environment, one might think that Care International
can have a massive impact, but as Bill discovers, Care dose
very little and why, because it can't. Local Kenyan governments
chose to ignore the problems, where sudden improvements would
just cause others to migrate to a better place.
So how does Care work, how does it make
a difference? By working at the truly micro level. A water
pump here, a trained farmer to train other farmers there.
Micro aid lending schemes to help people make $6 a day. It
seems that in 2002 only direct action at the real grass roots
level is tangible enough to make the difference on the African
sub-continent.
As the evening drew to a close I was struck
by the difference in timelines between Europe and Africa.
The short-termism of our western lives, compared to the long
term investment of African generations, where a father's goal
is to leave his children $30 better off than he was. We all
want to make a difference, but what size of difference are
we happy with? I left wondering has Bill Bryson shown us and
helped understand a way to do that?
Bill Bryson describes himself as -
'A man who suffers so that his readers can laugh' - how much
are we prepared to suffer along with Bryson for the sake of
humanity in Africa today? To start with a stocking filler
for £7.99 isn't too great.
Bill Bryson's African Diary
Hardcover - 64 pages (2 December, 2002)
Doubleday; ISBN: 0385605145
|
