Descriptions of our country

...from other people writing of other places:

Yes, I wear my slip and skirt, but I can’t seem to ever keep them in good repair or to get them as clean as my colleagues do. These other women also tend to wear secondhand American prom dresses… my sallow complexion can’t really carry it off, and I usually feel frumpy in my cotton tee shirts and long skirts.
--Dear Exile, Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery (in Africa)

I noticed, as I had around Cange, that many people we passed wore clothes from America, brand-name running shoes that had seen much better days and baseball caps and T-shirts bearing the logos of professional sports teams and country clubs.
--Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder (in Haiti)

Many bring him presents. Milk in a green bottle with a corncob stopper. “Thank you, thank you!” Farmer says. He smiles and, staring at the bottle on his desk, says in English, “Unpasteurized cow’s milk in a dirty bottle… It’s so awful you might as well be cheerful.”
--Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

Only then could you really understand an event like the mango lady’s death… Accidents happen. Sure. But not every bad thing that happens is an accident. There was nothing accidental about the wretchedness of the road down Morne Kabrit or the overloaded truck, or the desperation of a peasant woman who had to get to market and make a sale because otherwise her family would go hungry. These circumstances all had causes, and the nearest ones were the continuing misrule…[of those] who used the money to keep himself and the elite in luxury and power and spent almost nothing on things like roads and transportation.
--Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

Up ahead we could see the check-in point for the charter flight to Havana. You could tell from the piles of luggage, the boxes containing radios and kitchen appliances, the sacks full of things like disposable diapers… One can guess a lot about the economic condition of a country by inspecting the baggage people carry there from the United States, the shopping mall for the poor countries of the world. This sort of scene, I think, was so commonplace… For eighteen years he’d been performing for Haitians what are called commission, Creole for “I got some stuff for you to carry on the plane.”
--Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

I noticed that most of the class, rather than respond to the questions, had simply repeated my classroom lectures… I thought they had cheated; it was inconceivable to me that they could have re-created my lectures so precisely without notes. My colleagues, however, informed me that this was regular practice… At the next class after that exam, I was furious… they did not know any better, this was what most professors expected… From the first day they had set foot in elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing.
--Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi (in Iran)

I ask, Who can dance Persian-style? …Sanaz begins shyly, taking graceful little steps, moving her waist with a lusty grace. As we laugh and joke more, she becomes bolder; she starts to move her head from side to side, and every part of her body asserts itself, vying for attention with the other parts. Her body quivers as she takes her small steps and dances with her fingers and her hands… There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western eqvivalent to compare it to.
--Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi


--And almost anything from What is the What, by Dave Eggers with Valentino Achak Deng – minus the violence and drama that comes from Sudan, you get a good idea about life in a developing country, and the view many people have of the States. Here’s one bit:

I was woken by excited talk outside the shelter
– You haven’t seen him?
No. You’re saying he’s a white man? His hair is white?
No, his skin, every part of him. He’s white like chalk.
…The first theory held that he had been sent by the Sudanese government to kill all of us… That theory was quickly debunked when we discovered that the elders did not fear him… He spent most of his time with a few of the elders, building a storage shed for food, which seemed like work too pedestrian for a god or even a minor deity. Thereafter, some of the older boys offered more nuanced views.
– You’ve never seen a white man? he laughed… The white people come to Sudan for many reasons, including their desire to teach us about the Kingdom of God… They also come for the oil, and this has been a source of much trouble for people like us; that is a story for another time. For now we’ll talk about one reason they come, which is to help people when they’re being attacked, oppressed. Sometimes the white men who come to inspect things here represent the armies of the white men, which are the most powerful armies on earth.
I decided to wait for a few days… He was here to help the elders build food-storage containers. If he liked the people he met, it was said, he would bring food to fill the containers. This information was accepted by most of the boys, though many of us still eyed the man warily, expecting anything from him: death, salvation, fire.


Two words describe our reaction on reading these various passages: Dead on.