Junior biology major
As a teenager entering college, all I wanted to do was volunteer in a medical brigade, travel to foreign countries and help impoverished people. Now, three years later, as an adult with the means to embark on such a trip, I am no longer so enthusiastic.
I only realized that the transactions these medical brigades make are not always ethically sound when I looked at a photo of another volunteer, who could very well have been me, holding up a young Peruvian boy. It was not the boy who struck me, but the ominous face of a Peruvian young man in the background, much too easy to miss. He was looking straight into my eyes, and I knew at that moment he was looking not at a savior but an intruder.
Consider Norma, a 7-year-old girl from Ecuador whose story is publicized on one medical brigade’s website. Norma lives in a remote village where extreme poverty is the norm and local medical practices are centered on healing through spiritual leaders, with a distrust of modern medicine.
To the outsider, Norma’s village lives in poverty and her culture’s view of health care is flawed, but Norma has accepted this reality because it is the only reality she knows.
Suddenly, a group of Americans sets up a clinic in her village and tell her she has a congenital heart defect that needs to be treated. Against the initial wishes of her parents, who distrust modern medicine, Norma is shipped off to be treated using money provided by the medical brigade, an amount Norma knows her family could never make in her lifetime. When she returns, the brigade has built sanitary latrines and left supplies in her village to improve the residents’ “living conditions.”
To most, the story ends here, and the mission is accomplished. However, we must be capable of perceiving Norma and other children like her as more than deprived people who will gratefully take any help that comes to them. We must realize that children like Norma will also try to rationalize the miraculous events they have witnessed in almost a blink of an eye.
At the age of 7, Norma might not understand that money is not the only predictor of wealth and superiority, or the multitude of other factors that led her village to its current state. Norma only makes connections to what she can see. She sees that only the foreigners who have money are able to swiftly build sanitary facilities and treat diseases. Because her own people do not possess such financial holdings or provide similar services, she might conclude it is because they are incapable and inferior. She perceives that the foreigners bring a solution to remedy a problem that can only be created by her own people.
This is not, of course, to suggest that villages like Norma’s should not be helped, but we must be careful of being too enticed by the obvious results and ignore the fact that some of these actions threaten a people’s cultural integrity.
Although Norma’s family does not live an acceptable life by our standards, her parents genuinely care for her and her father makes an honest living to feed her family. Should these factors, though not as objective but equally as important as money, be neglected when determining how or if to provide aid? Should we not care whether the aid Norma receives in a week overshadows everything her father has provided her whole life? Or that she might compare her father to the foreigners?
In retrospect, I get the impression that the young man who stared back at me in that photograph does not believe his people are impoverished at all. Perhaps we should start entertaining the thought that maybe he is right.
Patrick An is a junior biology major. He can be reached at patandbk@gmail.com.
