Bakora

Yesterday, my school’s absentee security guard showed up plastered on my front porch, begging for food in broken English. He’s a notorious drunk and, last I heard, was coughing up blood and injuring his head in moments of departing consciousness. Instinctively, I said no; he crossed too many lines and I was in a bad mood. Yet moments before, practically the moment I heard him shouting, “KANI,” his interpretation of my name, I realized that I had cooked way too much food. So, what does that say about me? At the moment when helping another person was at its most convenient, I reserved my charity, deciding he was undeserving.
Was he hungry? Most likely; the man can hardly get his life together to show up on payday. Would he take advantage of any charity given to him? Most certainly; if I gave him food, he would come back many times. Were my actions excusable? No, I don’t think so. Here I am volunteering, some would say, precious time, yet I’m too instinctually selfish, too judgmental, to commit the resources to feeding someone, I’d have to guess at most, four or five times before I left the country. It felt shamefully American.
What good is distinguishing between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor?  It matters in a world of limited resources, but why are those resources limited in the first place? Do we distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving” rich? Definitely not in the same way we access people in need.  I’ve been tearfully angry hearing aid organizations describe the ways they prioritize or rescind aid based on dubious need assessments (“The donors want some accountability”), but I have the same response when it comes to giving away what’s mine. Maybe it was my own innate hypocrisy that I found so frustrating.
Of course, it feels good to give and best when it’s to someone we love; that’s human nature. However, we live in a civilization built on the notion that boundless charity and forgiveness are divine. We can’t all be J.C. but how willing are we to forgive our daily trespasses when the sacrifices are minimal and the consequences of our inaction are so dire?
So I ate the food. He had already moved on to my neighbor’s, while I was left to stew in my self-imposed moral damnation. Later that day, my Tanzanian grandparents have me a bag of boiled peanuts just because they care. In any case, life goes on: inequality persists, hypocrisy briskly steps out from behind the curtain, and we’re all left coming to terms with our morality, our actions, and the daily struggle to make peace between the two.
I hope no one takes this too seriously or as any kind of focused analysis. Like most of my blog posts, it’s more rant than essay, more feeling than thought. My real hope is it captures something of my time here in Tanzania. I will be always be thankful of my Peace Corps service for the questions it has made me ask myself and the feeling that, even when I’m unraveling faster than I care to or can keep up with, every challenge is constructive.