Feb 07, 2008 12:46 AM GMT
I feel very disconnected.
I just returned from Africa. Not the nice places tourists usually go to near Cape town, The Canaries, Morocco, or the beautiful Seychelles.
The places I went to were a tour of several villages, guided by the Gates Foundation, mostly for international businessman and entrepreneurs following on the heels of the Davos conference last month.
As was probably the point, the tour left everyone connected with it a real determination to help those less fortunate help themselves.
I got off the plane here and was met by my driver (the flight cost more than the annual GDP of several of the villages we visited; my driver makes more annually than the combined income of an entire village; the car he met me with costs more than the entire cost of the new village school I am sponsoring ).
We stopped of at a clothing store to pick up a couple new suits I had ordered. While I was there, I picked up half a dozen new shirts, a couple of sweaters, and a small present for Iain. The total was more than the cost of laptops for every child in the school for the next five years.
I went home and changed. The house we bought last year could alternatively have funded more than a dozen schools.
We then went out to dinner and the theatre with some friends. The cost of our dinner would have supplied medicines to a 6 village area for a year. The theatre tickets could have paid for a small herd of milk cows to provide the villagers children with milk.
This has happened to me before, though maybe not to this degree. And I have the luxury of knowing that it won’t last; that soon the more interesting fiction of my daily consumer driven life of excess will again supercede.
For right now though my friends can’t understand why I was so quiet and looked a little ill having dinner at Petrus. I didn’t eat very much. I seem to be seeing through a different lens.
Have you ever experienced a huge sort of disconnect between realities?
(I actually delayed posting this for a few days to see if I still wanted to post it)
I just returned from Africa. Not the nice places tourists usually go to near Cape town, The Canaries, Morocco, or the beautiful Seychelles.
The places I went to were a tour of several villages, guided by the Gates Foundation, mostly for international businessman and entrepreneurs following on the heels of the Davos conference last month.
As was probably the point, the tour left everyone connected with it a real determination to help those less fortunate help themselves.
I got off the plane here and was met by my driver (the flight cost more than the annual GDP of several of the villages we visited; my driver makes more annually than the combined income of an entire village; the car he met me with costs more than the entire cost of the new village school I am sponsoring ).
We stopped of at a clothing store to pick up a couple new suits I had ordered. While I was there, I picked up half a dozen new shirts, a couple of sweaters, and a small present for Iain. The total was more than the cost of laptops for every child in the school for the next five years.
I went home and changed. The house we bought last year could alternatively have funded more than a dozen schools.
We then went out to dinner and the theatre with some friends. The cost of our dinner would have supplied medicines to a 6 village area for a year. The theatre tickets could have paid for a small herd of milk cows to provide the villagers children with milk.
This has happened to me before, though maybe not to this degree. And I have the luxury of knowing that it won’t last; that soon the more interesting fiction of my daily consumer driven life of excess will again supercede.
For right now though my friends can’t understand why I was so quiet and looked a little ill having dinner at Petrus. I didn’t eat very much. I seem to be seeing through a different lens.
Have you ever experienced a huge sort of disconnect between realities?
(I actually delayed posting this for a few days to see if I still wanted to post it)