When the "Strangers Drowning" Aren't Strangers

A very thoughtful book that came out a few years ago, Strangers Drowning, by Larissa MacFarquhar, seems more and more relevant to our world. The author argues that some of us are so sensitive that when we put a dollar or two in a vending machine, for example, we perceive the starving child that money could have fed standing next to the machine. Or if we hear that a child in our community needs a home, we believe that the child's needs are so compelling that they trump whatever inconvenience might come our way by adopting another child. In other words, pace the book's title, such people take the drowning of people seriously and feel responsible for doing something about it.

In our increasingly interconnected world, it has become more and more difficult to pretend that not just strangers but people we know or should know are drowning. I facilitate letter exchanges between roughly 2,000 students in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest, and some of them are so very sad. Talk to most any school teacher across the globe--certainly in the Portland Metro Area--and you will hear heart-breaking stories. If you start volunteering with vulnerable students, you will start to hear such stories for yourself. People all around us are drowning, if drowning is understood to be struggling with poverty, abuse, fear of deportation, and other tragedies.

Does being human entail knowing these tragedies and comforting those afflicted by them? Does it entail seeking to understand and, if possible, correct the causes of that suffering? What does it mean to live a good life in the midst of so much suffering? What do we owe each other?

Reflections on Writing, Teaching, and Mentoring

A few weeks ago the History Department at PSU kindly hosted a reading at which I shared some thoughts about and from my recently published African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father--Africa in the U.S. Imagination. It was my seventh book and, like all the other readings I have given, it was lightly attended. And all signs point to the conclusion that this book, like the others, will be lightly read. As with my other books, a few people have told me that they have profited from reading it and found it useful. But it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that I have spent a very large fraction of the past thirty years working on books that have had a substantial impact on just a handful of people.

At the reading, however, I also invited immigrants from Africa whom I work with at Portland State or Reynolds High School to talk about their lives. Over the past several years I have found myself spending more and more time with students, from speaking to classes as part of my work with the Yo Ghana! letter exchanges to sitting with particular students in my office or at their schools to encourage them, to assure them that they have powerful stories worth sharing. Watching them share those stories was the best part of the evening.

Academics are trained and socialized to believe that we possess or will possess special insights that will change the world. It would be more accurate to say that we are in a position to nurture and encourage thousands of students who can and might well change the world.