Full Circle Associates

John Abbe points me to Ethan's comment on Live 8 - which is right on the spot from what little I know about Africa.

...My heart's in Accra : Ethan's Weblog - My blog is in Cambridge, but my heart's in Accra: "While it's admirable that thousands of bloggers have added Technorati badges to their pages to promote Live 8, to support African debt relief or to try to revive Bob Geldof's career. But it would be a damn sight more useful and transformative if bloggers would go a step further and start reading some African bloggers... perhaps starting with some of the folks who are justifiably skeptical about the value of yet another rock concert. Allow me to recommend Thinker's Room's 'Live Aid? Please!', Sokari Ekine's 'Live 8419' or Gerald Caplan's brilliant piece in Pambazuka."

While I was in Rome working on a project, I got to spend some time with a man who is a leader in the new government of Southern Sudan. Michael is trying to rebuild agriculture in a land torn and ravaged in every sense by civil war for over 50 years.

As we sat one night on a piazza in Rome, eating an abundance of food, I asked him, how does a country get over the grief and loss of lifetimes of civil war? His first answer was the politically correct one for a person in Rome seeking aid... we get help from blah, blah, and blah. The answer in his eyes, his actions and his optimism however, said to me, "we keep living." In his formal presentation on Friday, he mentioned that those of us around the world should encourage his Sudanese brothers and sisters living in diaspora to come home. Sudan needs them.

So what is aid? It is surely money. It is political leverage. But at the heart it has to affect the lives of people, not just their leaders and the rich of their country. It has to make home safe again for the diaspora to want to come home. For the forests to regrow and the soil to become rich again.

The more I learn, the more I know I don't know. It is time for us to ask Africans what they want, not what we think we should do. That I know.

live8rome, globalvoices, Africa