Poverty Inc. Coming to Portland April 28!

Yo Ghana! is delighted to be collaborating with Ms. Rhiannon Orizaga in bringing the celebrated documentary "Poverty Inc." to Portland.  The film will be presented at the Living Room Theater on April 28, 6:30 p.m., 341 SW 10th in Portland. Reservations are required.  Click here for reservations and to view the trailer.

The film interrogates that warm feeling that most of us with means experience when we view images of African poverty such as the one shown to the right.  We expect Africa and other developing areas to be poor, and upon viewing images of poverty, we start thinking about how we can help.  And that often entails giving things away.

Poverty Inc. urges us to "have a mind for the poor," not just a heart.  Having a mind for the poor means thinking about why people are in poverty in the first place and how the barriers to a better life might be removed.  It also means thinking about the unintended consequences of giving stuff away.  Most importantly, perhaps, it challenges us to think about how and why we would want a group of people to remain perpetually needy.

Poverty, Inc. Documentary

I recently watched a wonderful documentary, Poverty, Inc., which addresses the poverty industry.

The film's thesis is that international aid has become an industry that benefits aid workers, western agriculturalists and manufacturers, and, often, corrupt politicians while often disrupting the economies of places like Ghana and Haiti.  One of the most vivid examples is from Haiti, where the U.S. exported government-subsidized rice that was so cheap that it drove most of Haiti's rice producers out of business and often into poor neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, many on the fault line where the earthquake occurred.  After the earthquake Haiti was flooded with donations of items such as solar cells--which inflicted great hardship on the local manufacturers of solar cells.

The larger problem that the film speaks to is that Americans, especially, think that places like Haiti and Ghana are defined by their need.  We don't realize that such places are full of enterprising entrepreneurs that we should be collaborating with, not trying to drive out of business.

Yo Ghana! tries to be sensitive to these tendencies in three ways.  First, rather than opening schools in Ghana we work with existing ones that are doing outstanding work.  Second, we sponsor letter exchanges that demonstrate to American students that their counterparts in Ghana are resourceful and dedicated not abject.  Third, our grants to Ghana schools build on work they have already started.  The key for well-intentioned Americans wanting to help is collaboration, on working with people already doing amazing things.

We are hoping to bring this film to Portland, so stay tuned.  Here is the trailer.

Thomas Awiapo of Catholic Relief Services

     The other night I had the great pleasure of listening to a speech by Thomas Awiapo of Catholic Relief Services, Ghana.
     Thomas was orphaned at a young age, and he and his three siblings were constantly hungry.  Two died while he was young.  Thomas might have, also, if he hadn't learned that a nearby Catholic school  offered food to children who attended.  Though he wasn't much interested in school, he decided that the food was worth a ten-mile walk each day.  Over time, he got more and more interested in learning and eventually earned a Master's Degree.  Today he works for CRS Ghana in Tamale.   He says he will never forget the sadness and struggle of his childhood, the holes in his life.  But he is full of gratitude.
     Thomas's main message was to say "thank you" to the people who donate to CRS.  A lot of international charity is very abstract.  Being in the presence of this remarkable man, who may well have died of hunger and certainly would have struggled to make a living without the charity of strangers, put flesh and bone on the consequences of our generosity.

Yo Ghana! Letters of the Week

Our Facebook page has for the past few months featured letters of the week.  It is a great place to go to see
what students in the U.S. and Ghana write to each other about.

Yo  Ghana! facilitates the exchange of more than 5,000 letters a year, and it is a lot of work for a lot of people.  We spend thousands of dollars and several weeks a year visiting every school.  The teachers spend a great deal of time coordinating the letters.  Imagine how difficult it is to get, say, each and every one of sixty middle school students to write a clear, thoughtful letter by the end of a week!  The technological challenges are often daunting.  Our Vice President, Dr. Kofi Agorsah, recalls working long Saturdays in a field so that he could have the money to buy a few pages of paper for the following week.  Life in Ghana has improved since then, but our teachers sometimes get up in the middle of the night to send letters when the electricity is on at night but off during the day.  Last week one left the preparations for his father's funeral to carry letters several hours to a school that does not have a printer.

We are now into our fourth year of letter exchanges.  There have been some spectacular failures, and the successes require a great deal of work and attention to detail.  But the letters themselves are revelations. They make all of the work worthwhile. Our students use them to teach each other about their cultures and to care for each other.  They are making, as one of them put it, "the world a smaller place."  Who knows what that will lead to months, years, and decades from now?

So, please, go to our Facebook page, read the letters, "like" us and "share" us.  Let's multiply the impact of these dedicated writers.

Brando's Idea of a Dinner: May 14, 3:00 to 5:00

One of the most enjoyable parts of last year's inaugural Yo Ghana! gathering was seeing some 230 people from such diverse backgrounds come together to learn about Ghana and each other.

That was what Brando Akoto, the man whom the May 14 2016 dinner will be in honor of, had in mind.

When I think of nonprofit dinners I have been to, three things stand out: 1) High ticket prices: 2) Lots of flashy auction items; 3) Plenty of alcohol to jack up the bidding on said auction items.

Brando had a different set of essentials: 1) Low ticket prices so everyone who wants to come is able to; 2) Honor teachers and other people who make Yo Ghana! go; 3) Provide great Ghanaian food and music and an experience that encourages friendship among people of all ages, income levels, and cultures.

So that's the sort of experience that we'll be striving to again provide from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 14, in the big hall of the Immigration and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), 10301 NE Glisan, Portland.

We also hope to make some money for Yo Ghana!  But we also remember Brando's counsel whenever the question of fund raising came up: "If we take care of relationships, everything else will take care of itself."

More details to follow, but please plan on being part of the party and a chance to pay our respects to Brando, our guiding light and best friend to everyone who knew him.

The Secret History of Missionaries to Africa

Few topics are apt to generate such a negative response among academics and intellectuals in the U.S. as the subject of missionaries.  One of the interesting parts of traveling to Ghana has been discovering that most people there--and history textbooks--are generally enthusiastic about missionaries.  Of course the major reason for this is that most academics in the U.S. are hostile to Christianity--particularly the variety that entails conversion--and most Ghanaians at least give the appearance of being enthusiastic Christians.  It's often a subject of great puzzlement to both sides of the cultural divide.

So it has been with a certain amount of trepidation that I have begun studying accounts by missionaries from the U.S. in Africa in the early twentieth century.

There is plenty of material to offend modern sensibilities in the accounts of missionaries such as Jean Kenyon Mackenzie, pictured here.  These missionaries were far from being cultural relativists.  They frankly regarded many if not most cultural practices other than their own as savage if not demonic, usually conflated Christianity and modern Western norms.  They also seemed very comfortable being toted around Africa in litters or on carts and other privileges of whiteness that they enjoyed.

But the missionary women, especially, often showed a deep respect for African Christians.  Missionary periodicals in the U.S. featured articles by black Africans long before mainstream secular magazines did.  Truth be told, missionaries were about the only Americans in Africa who were more interested in African people than in African animals.  Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and the great white hunters were there to prove their masculinity through hunting, though they occasionally wrote about the "boys" who made the safaris run.  Naturalists such as Carl Akeley or the Johnsons were there to collect animal specimens or film.  The best friend that Akeley's first wife, Delia, made in Africa was a monkey that she took back home with her.  She hired an African to take care of him while in East Africa and wrote an entire book about the animal, whose death left her shattered.

Mackenzie wrote many lyrical letters and observations about the remarkable people she met and worked with in Cameroon.  Here is a sampling from 1913, as she recounts talking about God with a group of villagers who are working at various tasks: "The hands of the women bruising green leaves in wooden troughs and the grinders at the stones were idle.  Men laughed with a kind of wonder.  One woman flashed with interest behind her mask of purple tattoo and bright beads. . . . I see this thing in my heart like a thing shut in from time and change, and I wish I may never forget it."

Brando's Abundant Love

Brando Akoto, who passed away in late October was the most generous person I've ever met--and his generosity continues to resonate.

Before I knew Brando well, I made the mistake of answering honestly a couple of questions he posed before we traveled to Ghana together: how did my laptop function in Ghana, and what did I eat while in Ghana?  I told him that my laptop was getting up there in years but worked fine and that I was pretty flexible about eating in Ghana but liked to take along a couple of packages of granola bars for emergencies.

A few weeks later he gave me not one but two laptops he had reconditioned, and while we were in Ghana about a hundred pounds of granola bars magically appeared.

When it came to giving, Brando was anything but temperate.  If he cooked for you, there was enough to feed ten, not one.  If you asked for five minutes of his time, he would give you an hour.  He made me realize that people were capable of much more love and generosity than I had thought possible.

So I should not have been surprised a couple of weeks ago when Lilly, his wife, dropped off a check for Yo Ghana! for a very large amount, by far the biggest donation we have ever received.  It was, she explained, a love give from Brando.

We miss you so very, very much, dear friend.  But you shape and enrich our lives every day.