The Problem With Pilgrimage

White Man's bleeding heart runs like sewerage down a poorly maintained road. An incessant need to show the poor maldeveloped just how it's done. Riding in on a calvary of Toyota Landcruisers and housed in five star hotels, we all can sleep easier tonight. The miracle workers have arrived. Their virtuous intentions are applaudable, but can you really save the third world from its biggest enemy - themselves?

It's a tough ask right from the beginning. The child born into a household with no electricity, poor nutrition, and uneducated parents now has to create a life for himself? Sleeping on cardboard, no room to study, no parents to help with homework. The NGO (non government organisation) lacks the community acceptance needed to storm into corrugated iron huts and lecture parents on how to raise their children. Despite being necessary, the response is likely to be a torrent of abuse followed by a chaser of 7.62mm bullets.

Because grass roots societal reform is so inherently difficult, NGO's resort to larger scale projects like tuberculosis eradication and construction of utility infrastructure. However these struggle to trickle down to the user. Still affected by untreated scheme water and hygiene related illness, people wonder what is the point if their child is uneducated and underweight.

This desperation drives many societies to another miraculous saviour - religion. Generations of little buddhas enter monastic life to find inner peace and suppress natural desires such as inquisition, knowledge, and experimentation. The hardship of street life is now replaced with free meals, robes, and accommodation provided by white pilgrims escaping their horrible first world lives to find "real" happiness. 

Does this all encompassing faith help society to progress? When your day is occupied with praying, chanting, and circumnavigating objects in a clockwise direction it's hard to make a positive contribution to basic infrastructure. Society falls apart around you while you sit in the lotus position focusing on abdominal breathing. Are you really finding happiness or just ignoring things that make you unhappy?

It's an exercise in futility. Your teenage daughter is moody and dysthymic because she enjoys it. She pretends she doesn't but that's part of her identity and no amount of time at the bookshop's parenting section is going to change it. Perhaps the destitute are merely fulfilling their own destiny, unaffected by bleeding hearts and four wheel drives.

Short of altering the DNA of every newborn, your efforts are going to be minimal and will always make you feel better than the people you are trying to help. Families that only know conflict will pass this unfortunate trait onto their children. Pride is a rare commodity in a society with corruption for leadership and hopelessness as its main aspiration. Without pride, there's no incentive to change things for future generations. It's far easier to don a robe and have dahl and rice slopped in front of you for the rest of your life.

Resistance to change is causative, not just symptomatic. Financial advisors repeatedly say past performance is no indicator of future gain however the third world clings onto conservative views out of fear that something new could upset their predictably pathetic lives. The brave amongst them who dare for progress are lucky to be alienated if they survive the beatings and assassination attempts.

There is hope though, small pockets of common citizens with overseas perspective have become uncomfortable waiting for their contemptuous government to pick up the pieces. Shiromani Dhungana (The Kathmandu Post 14/2/10) writes "We are becoming indifferent to the problems of the city. This culture of negligence and growing indifference towards the city's problems is not in favour of the greater good. Citizens themselves should look for proactive measures to improve the condition. We need the will power in us, we need to have a feeling that the city belongs to us."

It is up to these adults of today to create a life that the children of tomorrow will aspire to live. An existence where corruption and crime are replaced with opportunity and pride, a society that applauds contributors and shames detractors. The problem with this solution is it starts now. It requires immediate action by the very people that were let down by their forebears. Using history as a convenient excuse, generations propagate stagnation and unknowingly deny their society of a better future. 

This kind of change can only come from within. Lubricated by the blood of bleeding hearts but originating from the hearts of its people. People who have the courage to rally fellow countrymen to discover inner pride and actively work towards change. Not monastic outcasts using religion as an excuse to leach off society and contribute nothing in return. Positive action that completely overturns the cultural matrix of society to reset past belief and give people tangible hope that there is a better way.

Anything less is just humoring a process that could transform the lives of people long into the future.