Poverty and Me

(sorry for the longer post this time, but I think the topic merited me writing more than usual!)

       On the bus ride home from our excursion to the Volta region, something very ordinary happened that inspired this blog post. As I wrote about in my traffic blog post, whenever cars stop in traffic, all sorts of sellers run up to the windows in an attempt to get you to buy snacks, phone credit, and other random goods (we ran into people selling things as ridiculous as the monopoly board game, electric tummy shavers, and even two little puppies). Today though, there was nothing out of the ordinary, as a man with a little white cart and hand-held horn came up to the window selling fanmilk (kind of like ice cream: there’s chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry yogurt flavors). As a few of my friends next to me bought some fanchoco, I realized that they were being overcharged – typical. Fanmilk everywhere is exactly the same price, it’s usually even shown as a sticker on the front of the seller’s cart (which is also identical everywhere)… it should be 60 pesawas (40 cents) each but he was charging 70! I told him that as I bought my fanyogo (strawberry), and he smiled shyly knowing that he had just been caught, and gave me my fanyogo for the right price. Proud of myself for knowing and demanding the real price given to everyone except for oblivious foreigners, I happily began enjoying my ice cream. This is when the ordinary turned inspirational as those of us on the bus began processing what had just happened.

It was all initiated by Eliya (technically the other author on this blog – hopefully this will motivate her to share some of her journal writings on here), when she turned to me as we drove off and said, “it’s ok to have paid him the 70 pesawas, you know?” Essentially, she was pointing out the fact that we are very fortunate to have a lot of money and power as “rich Americans” – while the man selling the fanmilk had close to nothing and was probably struggling to make a living – why not make his day that much better by letting him have the extra 10 pesawas? Was I so cruel that I had to skimp out on less than a dime (which meant less than nothing to me and probably something to him)? This really bothered me at the time, I didn’t see it her way (as an act of charity) at all, but rather as a sign of disrespect toward me that only reinforced the stereotype of the white foreigner disconnected and alien from the reality on the ground. Before I make my argument, however, let me try to deconstruct Eliya’s into its essential elements so we can all engage with it more aptly (she can feel free and correct me if I misrepresented her in a future blog post :P). Essentially, if we break down Eliya’s argument, it is constructed upon premises that lead to a logical conclusion. The premises are as follows: (1) we are powerful Americans (most blatantly via our economic wealth), (2) the fanmilk man is powerless in relation to us - struggling to make a living, and (3) we care about the plight of the less powerful and seek to alleviate that suffering and inequality. Based on these premises, we can therefore logically deduce that because 10 pesawas is considerably more meaningful to the fanmilk man when compared to those of us on the bus – and since we care about alleviating the suffering and inequality – it would be only logical (and we would probably be happy) to pay 70 pesawas for the fanchoco.

My response to Eliya, and pretty much most of the other people near me on the bus (except Theo who agreed with me, interestingly, somehow there was a gender divide here), was not quite as coherent as I am going to present it here but the main points were pretty much the same. It got a little heated, so I think I owe both Eliya and myself an understandable explanation for the both of us. In the last paragraph, I broke down Eliya’s argument for paying the fanmilk man the extra 10 pesawas into 3 premises and a logical deduction. My response, then, will begin with an argument of my own called the reductio ad absurdum, where I propose that if we follow Eliya’s logic fully we arrive at absurd results. Therefore, the problem might not be with the logic itself, but with the premises. But why would Eliya’s conclusion be absurd? First of all, it is probably obvious (but I will say it anyway) that this situation – that of bargaining and the possibility for charity in negotiation (or lack of it) – is one that everyone enters into here on an hourly basis. Unless you’re buying from a store with a price tag (which is rare), nearly every commercial interaction – whether its buying an egg sandwich for breakfast, a taxi ride to Accra, or buying flip-flops for showering – presents us with this same dilemma. If we were to take Eliya’s conclusion seriously, her premises seem to hold for every one of these cases, and therefore leave us arriving at the same conclusion. This means that we would be dishing out charitable “donations” (even though we know that we are being overcharged) multiple times throughout the day, every day, for the entire semester. The only difference is most of these differences aren’t over 10 pesawas, but reach into the realm of cedis (Ghanaian dollars). I specifically remember Eliya and others, just days before, brashly negotiating with a taxi driver who felt he could raise the price mid-way through the ride because we were foreigners. And when we were offered a taxi for 20 cedis, we rejected it, because we knew the taxi driver would not dare give that price to a local (and his smirk showed he knew it). We waited until we found a taxi for 10 cedis and then proceeded to cram 7 of us into it to maximize value (rather than get 2 taxis). Why not uphold the same principle then? And why not back home when we pass by people that are homeless every day from our homes to the Berkeley campus? Because we know that it is impractical, absurd even, to be charitable at every opportunity because the opportunities are endless – soon we will end up in the same boat they are in.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing against charity. I am arguing for a charity based on judgment, on a widening of perspective, and another (perhaps more critical look) at the premises presented. I no longer give money to people that are homeless on the way to campus, but I do buy them food sometimes because I know the money is being used well. And when I do find myself giving money, it usually has much more to do with how I’m feeling and want to feel (generous, benevolent, moral) than it does with changing the reality of the person in front of me.

When we find that the implications of a logical argument don’t quite make sense, the next step is to re-evaluate the premises. On the third count, seeking to alleviate the less-privileged’s suffering and inequality, I am with Eliya. Some of you might not be with us here, and that is your prerogative, but that is a disagreement for another blog post to handle. That leaves the first two premises about the rich, powerful American consumer and the poor, powerless fanmilk seller. See, I think the way we are talking about power here is a little bit pedestrian in the sense that sociocultural theorists who discuss power would probably find our use of the term disjointed. Anthropologically speaking, power is generally not theorized as something that people either have or do not have - it is not a substance. Rather, power is a field of social relations in which every social interaction is an encounter in power dynamics. When those in Israel (or in the US or everywhere in the world for that matter) protest against their inability to live sustainable and affordably within the current economic status quo, they might be “less powerful” if we understand power in the way the premises depict it, but the social reality of that protest is that they are suddenly exerting power in reaction to a more consistent form of power that is exerted against them (which they term oppressive, hegemonic, etc.).  We don’t have to get into all of that at all; the point is that power is a social relation and not a social possession. Therefore, I find Eliya’s first two premises - (1) we are powerful Americans and (2) the fanmilk man is powerless in relation to us – false because of what I see as a misunderstanding of power.

So what is actually happening, as I understand it? Well, I see it as a choice between social relations: the first is Eliya’s, the second mine. The first one constructs a power relation where Eliya pays the price the fanmilk man asks for, regardless of the fact that he is raising the price only because we are (mostly) white obrunis. She now has interacted with him in a way that reinforces the current local imagination of white foreigners as alien, disconnected from the social and economic realities on the ground, with full pockets that are loosely ready to give away money. The second social relation, mine, constructs a relation that is – in that moment – as close as it can get to that between two locals. Of course, I can never change my skin color, and of course I have far more avenues available to me than the fanmilk man does and might every have, but I believe it is more important to exert pressure against the depiction of obrunis and reassert my connectedness with the local culture, economy, and lifeways by bargaining and demanding a fair price as every local does rather than give charity as a rich, white man from afar. Mallory and Anneke, two other girls on the program, reminded me that they heard Eliya make a parallel argument that even if I choose not to pay the extra money, I should not be insulted by his attempt at raising the prices because it was the man’s business venture and therefore it was economically logical and viable to ask for a higher price than realistic for his product. But I’m confused - it was obvious to all of us (especially the local Ghanaian students we were with) that the only reason he raised the price on us was in an attempt to take advantage of us as white, rich, oblivious foreigners. I think I have a right to feel insulted, wouldn’t you?

I can already hear the echoes, “but the fanmilk man has such a hard life – how could you?!” Well, my question goes back to how I feel about giving money to people that are homeless: do you want to feel good about yourself or do you want to create more justice – do you want to change their reality? If you want to feel good about yourself, throwing in 10 pesawas (or a few cedis) with every purchase might do the trick. But does it change the system? We have a real opportunity here to make substantial change - we are very privileged. In fact, some international students in the past have worked with government ministers, bureaucrats, think tanks, professors, CEO’s, and others who have the potential to really give a voice to the voiceless. So if you’re so concerned, follow that route, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’ll make change with your few coins (especially considering what it reinforces here). “But even if their system won’t change, don’t you just want to make their day a little brighter once in awhile?” Sure, sometimes I do, but it depends on the circumstances - I give money here and there as long as I don’t feel as if I’m being cheated. Right after the conversation between Eliya and I, I got off the bus to walk off the heat and ran into a lady selling oranges. Most oranges are 20 pesawas on campus, but since this was off the street in the middle of nowhere, she was selling them for 15 pesawas. She couldn’t quite find the last 5 pesawa coin for change, and to be honest I didn’t care if she couldn’t find a little more, she was being fair to me and treating me with respect. And I returned that respect by telling her that it would by accepting her lack of change. We both smiled. The same happened with an extra cedi just the day before when I was buying a piece of woodcraft at the village leading to some waterfalls. At the end of the day though, this is just what I think about every time I encounter poverty here. Everyone has a different way of dealing with it and I totally respect Eliya for doing it her way. I hope she’ll write a blog post soon and challenge much of what I just wrote – I’m kind of excited for it, actually J.

I’m sure this will not be the last blog post about my encounter with poverty here. I feel like I run into it all the time, but I also realize I’m very sheltered at the University of Ghana campus and near Accra (which is where most of international funds for development go). I hear the poverty in the north of Ghana is far more heart-wrenching… I’ll keep you in the loop when that time comes.