Presence
Posted on September 07, 2009 by Barak in Africa | No Comments
It is amazing to consider that over the last 50 years over $2.3 trillion dollars in Aid money has been poured into Africa. Most of us can’t even conceptualize what a trillion looks like. To put it into perspective, a trillion seconds is just over 31,000 years. That’s a lot of money; a lot of activity; and yet progress seems inexplicably slow. We American’s tend to define poverty according to the measure we use to quantify wealth – i.e. the presence of material goods. Therefore poverty must be the absence thereof. Yet poverty is so much more complex, so much deeper than the just the material; even as wealth can be defined by stuff much deeper than money. As my Rwandan friend and director of AEE Rwanda says so pointedly ”We don’t need a ministry of projects. We need a ministry of presence.” ~ Antoine Rutayisire
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