Welcome to the white, white world

The white savior complex and not wanting to accept that this is just how things are

Have you ever heard someone say about people in developing countries:

"They're so poor but you know, they're so happy!".eah...that's bullshit if you ask me and 99% of the time it comes out of the mouths of those who are about 10000 km away from knowing that there is nothing, nothing at all that's admirable about poverty.

When people are saying this how they do, they're implying the opposite: that the happiness they've been trying to achieve is just as palpable for poor people, and thus completely independent of money.

I think that the people who can say this first phrase are also the first ones to preach "Money can't buy happiness" and all about the Hakuna-Matata good vibes about how happiness comes from the inside. Yeah, that's even more bullshit if you ask me...

I've never been poor, so you might think I'm not better to explain how poverty feels like than any other person, but unlike many, I never say phrases like this, and after three months in Nepal I'm ever more convinced that really no privileged person should.

Yes, I know, they don't mean bad, they never had to experience poverty and why would they do it voluntarily? They just don't know and never cared to find out. Actually, I think they should. They imagine themselves living the life of a person in rural Nepal, as an experiment. If poverty makes you so happy, then there shouldn't be any problem in doing so, or?

Not only the people how said that, but probably the majority of people living in Europa, America or Australia have a very unrealistic and sometimes plain wrong conception about how happiness and money really relate to each other.

In the western countries, many people are greedy for more and more money, they don't care if they're billionaires when compared to Ranjeed, a farmer from the Himalayas, they just know that they're a Ranjeed when compared to Kendall Jenner. Of course, that's not good, and we all ought to be more grateful and not live our lives wanting more. I agree, I'm just pointing out that sometimes, while we are saying that one shouldn't go after money, we take that too far and then we imply that money doesn't matter at all, which I find really disrespectful to those who don't have any.

Really struggling to make ends meet as imagined by privileged people is like a dark cloud that makes your life miserable every second of every day. Guess that's why they were surprised to see poor people even laughing, they imagined them crying while begging for food. Where I live here in Nepal, you don't see beggars in the street, poverty is not that easy to see and as straightforward as a horrible dark cloud, all-consuming of every happy thing in our life. Not at all, from what I've seen these past months, poverty is more like a snake, tricky, always there yes, but under the covers, creeping up anytime you would dare to forget it for a moment.

As for Nepal, most poor people are farmers, so it's not predominantly a question of not having food, but more of not having money to buy your children a new school uniform if they got holes in theirs like kids get them all the time, not being able to buy them biscuits instead of plain rice, not having money for water, electricity, a new blanket or a birthday present.

There are many women who are in abusive relationships but can't leave, there are many children out of school because their fathers have spent their lunch money on alcohol. So if you ever come by to Nepal and see people laughing for a few times a day, or see a picture of children playing just like they play in our countries too, just please don't say that they're happy like you are even though they’ve ten times less money. They have no indepedance, or health insurance or financial stability, how could they ever be happy like you? Just because you saw them smile once?

You can't live your life in fear everyday because there is a snake where you live, but just because you've accepted it and maybe forget about it for a couple seconds every day, doesn't make it less likely for the snake to attack.

As I've started my rant now, I might as well continue.

I will use "us" which is meant for people coming from western countries, mostly with white skin if you haven't noticed haha.

I mention this because there's a very accurate term that describes how we sometimes ( way too often haha) behave when being in developing countries, it's called "the white savior complex". Like the name says it's when we go into completely different countries and kind of act like we're the all-benevolent angels descendant from heaven to instruct the local how to this or that. Essentially it's chauvinism (believing you're superior to others) and it's definitely scratching on racism too.

I'll give you some examples to understand:

Nepal is the country with the most NGOs, many of them are western foreigners wanting to do something good, many believe they know exactly how to do that even in a country on the other side of the world. One of them started a program where Nepali farmers are instructed how to plant rice by Americans, they had been doing this for about a thousand years. But the Americans were fully convinced that they were helping the locals by "empowering and educating" them on something they had been doing well for way longer than Americans.

Many NGO's make the mistake of thinking they can do it better than the locals, they don't ask what their beneficiaries need or want, they built schools in western standard without training anyone how to use them properly, they play samaritan for ego-boost for 2-3 years and then they leave. It's not empowerment, education or cooperation if you believe your partner to be inferior to you.

Nepal is a work in progress, yes, but they're not pitiful like we imagine them. Nepal's illiterate grandma’s debate as good as anyone about local politics and the coronavirus, Nepal has got promising businesses and qualified diplomats, and there is road construction in the Himalayas that I'm sure less than 1% of our engineers and construction workers could do. THEY ARE NOT STUPID!

In my village I'm one of very very few foreigners, I have only met a few but passed some others, but it didn't really feel right to talk to them just because they were white haha (to be fair, as I'm looking for people who speak English, they're just the easiest to recognize, but still, I just passed).

Plus I am not here as a tourist, I work for community empowerment and at this point have my own ideas of who I imagine achieving that. Buttttt, most of my projects are kind of a one-girl show as nobody except me really gets why I'm doing what I'm doing.

For example, trash is everywhere. The children play with it, the goats eat it, it stinks when it is burned and also when it isn't and it's in the water that runs on the field, where the plastic bags are also left just like that. Of course, I'd like to get a microphone and tell everybody that the should demand bins everywhere and the prohibition of wrapping everything in plastic 3 times and that they should demand waste management and some recycling so they don't have to burn their trash it in the street. I'd really love for them to demand all of that, but even if I had the guts to tell them I couldn't because it's not my country and not my language and not my way of living. The bottom line, it is not my place to preach, I'm so foreign, so young, so white, and that's why I can't start a drama by becoming the foreigner that is picking up trash after the locals. Same with the air pollution, the dust of Kathmandu valley is known for being a "silent killer", but there is so much I can say without giving in to my own "white savior complex".

I have to be especially careful about this when I'm at the school, foreigners have been judging the quality of Nepali education by the amount of English people can speak, as if the only thing they ought to learn is how to be more like us. NGO's love to put their logos very big on the schools they built and they are very proud of the schools students when they read and praise the name of the "good souls that helped them" out loud in awe. The School uniform seems like from an English private school, all they learn about the west is how to look up to it, no wonder that Nepali students apply "whitening" skin creams every day. They are moments when they are proud of where their from, but whenever they step into an English class, they get the feeling that they're less...

When we teach the same way in Nepal than we do in England, we'll have the same robots on both sides of the world, knowing only what to think and not how to think.

People often tell me I have to accept that I can't change everything and help everyone. This makes me INCREDIBLY mad, though most often I don't show that.

It happened once that we were talking about how invisible the children of lower-caste, marginalized and poor people are here. There are thousands of children like this and one of them I know from seeing. I was suggesting we could talk to the school to check if she could get some further support, I was only talking about one little thing for one child. People started telling me I can maybe try this thing but I won't be able to do another, and if there are so many why even start, and blablabla this is a big problem, and nobody knows or cares, and its tradition and it's society and blablabla it's too big and there's nothing I can do basically because it's just how it is. How is it our responsibility if this illiterate poor mother is too stupid to make sure her child goes to school?

Sometimes, I drift off and see too big of a picture of a problem, I talk and talk and by the end I realize the problem is so big that I forget where I could start and then I do nothing. But this time it wasn't like that, I was focussing on what was in my ability, what I could do without drawing too much attention to just do a little bit more than pretending I didn't see this girl that was out when she ought to be in school. People were telling me I was taking on too much weight when I really wasn't for once I was focussed on helping not everyone but just one single person. Most of the time I try my best not to listen to people when they tell me to accept things, because if I do listen it means I'll come to a point where I am frustrated because change is so hard and then not do anything. These people have numbed down their indignation of the system and are now supporting it, they're accepting too much and as long as they do so. They will never bring upon change.

The thing is, not accepting something about an Inequality that is everywhere and so powerful, is exhausting. I really can't be outraged about the big problems every day, sometimes I have to ignore them so I can focus and do my little part. I have to accept because it's too much and I would spend too much time being outraged and not enough time being active. Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. I feel like a grain of dust on the road when I'm thinking about inequality, but at least I am moving. I am accepting this, but not out of the same reasons as the people who told me that's just Nepal. They accept to ignore and stand still , and I will accept so I can focus and move something, somewhere. It's painful to accept because it feels like giving up, it will take years for my village to get bins, but I think that the two people I talked two will throw a little less trash on the street than they did before, and that's what I content myself with.

Rant over,

in friendship,

A Teddy Smile that is trying to get rid of her White Savior complex