“Don’t you know there are children starving over in Africa?” Many of us have been asked this rhetorical question at one point in our lives, most likely by someone who is intent on trying to guilt us into feeling bad for being selfish directly after we’ve made a trivial complaint of sorts. The question is, does being told about the existence of issues such as; starvation and poverty halfway around the world actually impact us in any way? Personally, I don’t think so. Watching commercials of families suffering in Africa, or hearing celebrities discuss their opinions on these world issues may motivate some people to make donations or to feel bad for a millisecond, but there is always a certain degree of detachment that remains whereby we, as individuals, can’t implicate ourselves in these situations.
When I was younger, I was gravely concerned that I was lacking some of the compassion and empathy that most people feel for others. Sure, I loved taking care of abandoned animals at the shelter and volunteering with less-fortunate kids at after-school programs, but for some reason I could never shed a tear for the atrocities and injustices certain people around the world are constantly experiencing. Yes, on the surface I was deeply saddened by extreme poverty, but returning to my comfortable home in downtown Montreal every night made it very easy for me to forget about those things and focus on other aspects of life, trivial things, such as what I wanted to do on the weekend, or what I wanted to eat for dinner.
All this changed over the summer of 2014. I pushed myself to sign up for a month-long teen community service trip to South Africa in the name of stepping outside of my comfort zone and doing things I could never expect to be doing here in Montreal. I must admit it, my first few days doing manual labor at an elementary school was nothing short of exhausting and discouraging. I had acquired a bad cold, couldn’t carry a cement-filled barrel for the life of me and was sick and tired of living in a hut, to be perfectly blunt. Then, a few days later, everything was put into perspective. We were volunteering at a pre-school, playing with the kids and teaching them words in English. Every few seconds little kids were running up to me, exclaiming words in an unfamiliar language, trying to show me they were excited and wanted to be interacted with. I immediately picked up this little girl and put her on my lap. Now, people have told me numerous times how lucky I am to have been born in a country as magnificent as Canada, and I would never doubt them. Yet, I never completely understood the implications of “luck” in the past. It was only after holding this shoe-less three year-old orphan in my arms and communicating with her through smiles and gestures that the tears started to roll down my face and I finally realized that shortly, I’d be going home and she’d be staying there to battle the obstacles imposed on her at such a young age.
The teen tour group, myself included, playing circle games with the kids in St-Lucia, South Africa!
The message here is that shaming the people in your life about their lifestyle as a means of persuading them to think of others isn’t effective. The point is not to condemn them for having been born into a good living situation, it’s to get them out of their own headspace and push them to make the realization on their own that the outside world is chaotic, and sometimes unfair, and that all we can do on our end is create a future for everyone whereby equality and justice prevail. You don’t need to travel all the way to South Africa like I did to have an epiphany on the matter at hand, you just need to force yourself out of the bubble you’ve been confined to your whole life and learn how to empathize with those who are suffering right now.
-Arielle Supino
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