Ramblings on time, technology and global problems

We have a little less than a week left in Ghana. I am not ready to leave. I even e-mailed the travel agent to see if it would be possible to change my flight. The flights are all full. I do not feel finished at all. I feel like I am getting started. I wonder if Africa can become an addiction. I can’t get enough….

Rob is spending part of this week training people how to build websites. I sat in on the morning session yesterday. I was very proud of my husband! Proud of his patience, his flexibility and his determination to be concretely helpful to these people who are desperately trying to be effective members of the world information community and the international marketplace. To be an African trying to engage the international technology world is to struggle.

I have had a taste of this struggle as I’ve been working on a web-based research project for MMCT. They have broadband internet but it goes down constantly. Other times it is so slow that it takes an hour to send an attachment. Then the mouse breaks. Then the electricity goes out. Then the server is down. Then the program freezes and must be reinstalled. Then an error message about a problem with the hard drive. Try to send things over dial up but the phone service goes out. I have “wasted” countless hours struggling to manage technical problem after technical problem. It has really stretched my frustration tolerance as drastically changed my expectations for what I can feasibly accomplish in a workday.

The “digital divide” is another type of evidence for poverty. Rob and I talk around and around about how technology and the information that technology can provide can be an anti-poverty resource. How is it possible that computers can be a source of incredible sums of money for many people in our country yet virtually worthless to others around the world? It is no surprise that much of Africa has been left out of the technological revolution. Even where there is ingenuity, brilliant business plan, and even investment money to get started - there is simply not enough infrastructure to support e-commerce. I wish I had some brilliant ideas.

The news comes to life when one is away from home. Rob and I have a few days layover in London on the way home. We have been carefully watching the events unfold. Sad. Nervous. We are in the cauldron of international affairs: in the midst of poverty, in the midst of terrorism. I am sure of one thing: terrorism and poverty are related. We, the wealthy of the world (Americans), must begin to take international poverty more seriously if we are serious about ending terrorism. 30,000 children die every day from preventable causes- hunger, unsafe water, etc. Poverty breeds desperation which causes anger which leads to unrest which becomes violence which in its extreme form takes shape as terrorist acts that costs the lives of countless innocents. I am not a political scientist or an expert, but I have spent some time in a few of the world’s most impoverished places and I am convinced that until the world begins to address the drastic inequalities between the two-thirds world and the wealthy industrialized nations, terrorists will have recruiting potential. “There is no security apart from common security… America will never be secure until the injustice and despair that fuel the murderous agendas of terrorists have finally been addressed” (Jim Wallis, God’s Politics, p. 191). My intention is not to make simplistic causational statements between the London bombings and Africa’s poverty. I guess I just want to say that injustice feeds injustice. Fighting one injustice while ignoring another is like picking the leaves off without pulling up the roots.