On a Saturday for myself, I take some time to walk through Mussoorie, eat every two hours, and enjoy my independence in a new place. Dehydrated and too close to the end of my book to keep walking by this coffee shop, I duck in. Tucked into the corner, I start to read, but my attention is stolen. Bad Indian pop music is blaring, scattering my thoughts initially before they fall into a state of intent focus on a group of women and their teen girls against the window. Lip-synching with the performative flair and accuracy required to fill the biggest venues in Mumbai, the words to this song are sung as second nature. Articulate, well-coached English broadcasts the very vague, unmeaning lyrics. Plush, brown leather couches and the complementary earth-tone cushions comfortably support the onlooking women, creating a court scene; performers performing and their adoring patrons draped elegantly on an exotic fur as they drink exotic concoctions from far-off lands. Wearing saris themselves, their daughters don the most notorious name brands, the same ones bootlegged all over the world, available on Canal Street and Fifth Avenue. Daughter and mother alike are painted a certain complexion, their eyebrows maintained.

My mind is captivated, enraptured by their speech, enchanted by the scene playing out in front of me, a scene I just read about, was told about by the leading commentators on India. As the bill arrives, one of the mothers dismissively places a large bill on the check presenter and shoos the boy away. She doesn’t say thank you; she’s busy gossiping about the latest on Salman Kahn, what earrings she had on at dinner, or what clothes he was wearing on his day off from boarding school. Louder than the music, the composition of this scene far more telling of something bigger, more "Indian," these women represent the future of India and it is a frightening future that no amount of decadent leather couches can warm me to.

Converted from the theoretical to the real, Octavio Paz’s "In Light of India," Amaryta Sen’s "The Argumentative Indian," and Henry Luce’s "In Spite of the Gods," words enter my mind, their warnings of a rapidly growing population — growing in population and power — of wealthy, educated, privileged, consumer-crazed, well-connected, disconnected Indians. This burgeoning subsection of the population, vastly atypical of the average Indian, is a critical mass that is responsible in large part for furthering an obsession with money, products, packaging, labels, and the conveyance of status at the expense of the starving people who live in the shadows of their mansions.

Surely this is an overly simplistic diagnosis, reducing the economic problems of the 12th largest economy of the world to a sentence, to the people who go to Bollywood movies on a Friday night. But, it is undeniable that a pernicious classism is emerging and the rich are setting the agenda, controlling the flow of money, entertaining foreign investors. This isn’t different from the other countries I have been to and the larger trend of the world today. But, I think about why I am here. I arrived in this country on the wings of funding meant to prompt sustainable development, to cultivate a class of leaders who will try to reverse these harmful patterns, poverty. So, often, in the front of my mind are questions about how to do that, how to effectuate positive change in a meaningful, lasting, fair way and in this coffee shop right now the real question is: whose responsibility is this? This fellowship has one thought, suggesting me as a possible answer, and hearing that from them sounds nice, flattering to think that I might be able to do something so big. But, it seems, these women sitting there have also suggested me as an answer, seemingly unfazed by such questions, choosing instead to purport the exact system I am thinking about. In Delhi, on the train, in Mussoorie, on the billboards, in malls, in advertisements, it feels that the percentage of Indians who have "made it" do not care about where they have made it from, this history that has put them there, and the opportunity they represent going forward, instead choosing to blame the poor, caste differences, or varying state cultures as the reasons for the inability of other people to pull themselves up.

They are now taking pictures of the three girls, divas, sprawled on the couch, their shiny digital camera clicking away.

The Earth can’t support this growth; I know this. So, too, am I aware that it is hypocritical of me to sit here at the same cafe, paying the same inflated prices for a coffee, very much the product of a consumer-crazed country controlled in large part by class structures, to be passing judgment. Admitted. But it feels — thinking about ideas of development and the future and India somehow falling into this term, set to surpass China in 2030 as the most populated country — that there is an opportunity to reconsider these assumed thoughts of progress, material gain, etc. and change a course because the goal ought not and can not be an American lifestyle of consumption. There are things we can do better, cleaner, more inclusively, to not make the same mistakes that the "developed world" made and continues to make.

Cue the violins. Sure this is idealistic, but there is no reason this music should be so bad — it is a product catered to a consumer class more concerned with communicating their status than listening to good music. A bottle of Jack Daniels costs $90, a sign that stinks of a desire to be American, not to drink good bourbon.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Sitting in class, I decided I was going to get my haircut after lunch. My self-cut and styled faux-hawk/mohawk was at a Eurotrashy point that needed to go. On top it was hanging on to cool, standing up, sorta stylin’, but the back had grown to look like a wet rodent, and, because the top didn’t exist without the back and the back didn’t exist at all, it was time.

Walking down the mountain, zig-zagging on the roads to the town of Landour, tunnel vision engulfed my eyes: people’s hair was all I noticed and this new country provided a lot of variate fodder for consideration. My last teacher of the day wears a bob, a Golden-Girls-middle-aged ‘do with little style, lots of natural curl, and the humid air. Voluminous always.

Approaching me was a nice-looking older man in a button-up shirt, grey slacks that looked to be about the same age as me, sandals, and a sharp part swooping his hair from left to right. It smelled nothing of a balding accountant or first communion participant in a white suit and doting mother. Clean shaven. Smart.

Zooming by on his motorbike, a young stud strut his stuff, his brown locks on full display, perhaps the only reason he bought the bike in the first place. Flowing behind, tended to with much time, loving comb strokes, overpriced product, and a constant dose of vanity, his hair matched his tight shirt, tighter pants, and designer sneakers. He too was clean shaven. Around the curve was an older man, seemingly wise because of his hair, venerable in grey. Long and kempt, his beard was wise in its own right. Nothing special in his style, organic, growing from the tested proteins of his oft-tested brain.

That beard opened a can of worms, blaring new tunes of facial hair styles at me in keys I’ve never heard. Paramount among them: the moustache — a style often made fun of in the U.S., at parties organized around the theme, pedophile jokes, and white trash punch lines. In India, the ‘stache is in. It is everywhere, cooler than bellbottoms, sliced bread, or what that guy on the motorbike thought of himself. Fruitseller, bus driver, tailor — a man assumed to have a sense of style, sporting the ‘stache without shame — another guy on a motorbike, one of my teachers at the school, businessmen in the newspaper. The list could go on. Pubescent boys do their best but need to wait their turn. The moustache, replete with wax, attention, trims, and a garish air, is hip.

Sikh men grow their hair long but rock their turbans with the same concern for appearance as the trendiest secular Bollywood star. Purple shoes, a violet shirt, and darker hue in the turban, one Sikh man struts his stuff like the coolest rooster in the pen, feathers puffed, chest out. There are an array of colors, but the most common are black and white — white is the new black once again, just after black was the new white, equally timeless despite the best efforts of marketers and fashion magazines to suggest something outlandish like earth tones. Simple, becoming.

Some men use henna in their hair, an orange like a tiger, fuming almost in the intensity. That color, if put on a dude in leather with piercings, is available on St. Marks Place, but here it is just right, fitting, and fantastic.

Women are far more understated, a part in the middle, their natural beauty does the talking, not highlights or bloated chests. Most schoolgirls put their hair in two braids, looping the bottoms with ribbon, but even still there are no bells or whistles, texture and natural beauty the expression here.

I’m ready to part with my current style. One week into Hindi language school, we’ve not yet learned, "Please shave my head." Turning into one shop, a storefront no more than four feet by six feet, I am met by a blank face. May I please have a haircut? Still blank. More blank. Then some hand waving, a two-handed, fast-forwarded hello. He is not the barber. Walking on, another sweet beard on another owl-like older man, the moustache featured but aware of its strong supporting cast. About the same size, two chairs, two mirrors, a small bench, some pictures of Ricky Martin, I feel good about this barber. May I have a haircut, please? Yes, please sit. Doing better already, I like where this is going, ready for this teen of about 14 to go get someone. Instead, this young man, unable to even enter as a contestant in the ratty 14-year-old moustache-growing contest, is, it seems, the barber.

His hair is awesome, well oiled, trimmed, a meticulous part in the middle, not as slick as Alfalfa and without the cowlick, a little more air underneath it, wing-like. A sweet guy, yes, but I don’t want his haircut. Grinning in amusement, laughing at the absurdity of the situation and absence of my Hindi skills, I begin: Can you please cut it all one length? Reminded by his face and the mirror, I have a mohawk on my head. Touching the sides, he asks me something. Language barrier. I pick up the clipper and ask him for the #2 attachment. Nice, now we’re going. He shuffles through a drawer that doesn’t glide open, but in its worn wood that just fits, it sits in place, hanging down, its contents rushing forward. There are matches, papers from the Dark Ages, rusty scissors, magazine shards, and lucky number #2. Right where I put it, perfectly organized, a little smile peeps through from the barber, amused at what is going on. I’m right there with him, still smiling. One length please, all, cut it off… I try numerous approaches to the same end, taking the clippers and motioning them through my hair. Enter hands: not just saying "one length, #2" but pushing my hands through my hair as if I just surfaced from underwater, then scissorhands, back to the water motion again. Slowly, the boulder creaks forward; we are on to something, about to start rolling down the hill. The sweet buzz of a hair clipper, a soft hum like a blue mosquito light, my hair running to the blades and their dramatic end. Smoothly, the sides are crisply clipped. Now I really look ridiculous.

Getting the clippers through the thicket on top proves challenging, far more testing of the clippers, mosquitoes upgraded to Madagascar hissing cockroaches, a wild animal far more difficult to tame but not unconquerable. With great care, this young man, a young man with great experience but no frame of reference for this foreign species, crouches slightly, pauses, unplugs the weapon and calls for backup, reaching into a bag on the wall to produce another clipper. "New." My smile grows, as does his, and my mohawk quivers in fear, eyes darting like a cornered mouse, aware that it doesn’t stand a chance. This new clipper has been raring to go, a young colt pleading for the track, a Porsche feigning for the Audubon, no seatbelts, bets placed, harnessed with current, plowing ahead. There is a lot of hair, but his savvy enters here, the home stretch in sight. He saves enough for the straightaway and comes up strong to challenge and overtake A Few Stray Hairs, Precarious Ear Area, as well as the favored Encroaching Back Moss.

A deep breath on both our parts; little did I know we were just getting started. Those awesome rusty scissors jumped out of the drawer. I’m stoked to think that they are going to touch me with the intent of cutting things off my body. Sweet. But, young Luke Skywalker uses the force, shaping the hairs around my ear keenly. Nice. I think we’re done. Then, like a samurai wielding numbchucks, he does this crazy thing with a straight razor, like a ninja with a butterfly knife, too fast for a mere mortal to really understand, aided by instant replay and dramatic camera work. A new razor inserted, my neck is cleaner than a newly Zambonied ice skating rink.

Unknowingly, we had now arrived at the final frontier. With his palms down, arms bent at the elbow, and my body the location of a fire, he started fanning me and saying some words. Clueless, my face’s blank stare said that I didn’t know what was going on. More flapping and I finally got it. I crouched in my chair, deciphering the "can you please schooch down" motion that he was trying to tell me — there wasn’t actually a fire. Then, Spider Fingers went to work with a divine touch to rival that of Brancusi, massaging my head in ways I didn’t know were possible. Jammed into the chair in a proper crouch, I was delighted.

Baby powder, payment, and the awesome burst of air on my newly shorn head. One last look back, our smiles were mutual, entirely amused with what just transpired.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Since its release, An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary chronicling Al Gore’s quest against global warming, grossed $22,409,945 in the U.S. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby has grossed $127,806,521. Inherent in these numbers is Al Gore’s point: indeed there is something inconvenient about global warming and the truth in general — it is easier to ignore. Titled aptly, response to the movie shows that the truth isn’t sexy, funny, or a snake on a plane, and the public doesn’t care, more content to plod along in a land of digital cable, high-speed Internet and fast-food restaurants.  

But, it isn’t just a lack of entertainment value that makes the truth inconvenient. Box office numbers scream a larger problem, the reason why the truth is most inconvenient, not to the people in the theaters but the people who own them; the truth doesn’t sell, it doesn’t make money. Thus, I would like to ask a question, a question that might have an inconvenient answer.

Since 1981, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS. Each year, five million people are infected. According to UNAIDS/WHO data, there are over 39 million people living with HIV/AIDS right now.

Why hasn’t a vaccine been discovered yet?  

It is entirely possible that the science is not there yet. But, maybe that is too convenient an explanation. On February 9th, 2006, The New York Times reported a 45 percent fourth-quarter increase in profits for GlaxoSmithKline. The profit for the quarter was $1.96 billion with revenue at $10.33 billion. GSK manufactures and sells six types of anti-retroviral drugs and the average cost for a years’ worth of AIDS medication is $15,000. GSK is only one pharmaceutical titan. Combined, the market for AIDS medicines is a multi-billion dollar business. Maybe it is more profitable for enormous pharmaceutical companies not to find a vaccine for HIV.

Consider the response to avian flu where there is no market in treating the disease but an ever inflating one for a vaccine. As an airborne disease, there is certainly a need for this vaccine, but the market is waiting to be monopolized without any threat to current market shares. Since 2003, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed 140 people. Today, 6,000 people under the age of 24 contracted HIV.

Maybe the science is not there, or maybe the truth is inconvenient.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

It is official. Today at 8:57 a.m. it was empirically proven that there is no correlation between intelligence and the capital letters postdating one’s name. In the university setting and the world over, there is a gross assumption that an individual’s smarts can be equated with the prestige of his/her major, profession, or number of degrees held. The majority of the people who believe this have the Ms, Ds, PHs, Js, and BAs after their names and send their children to college, perpetuating a self-fulfilling societal farce that masks pedanticity as intelligence.  

My appointment is at 8:15 a.m. Blood pressure, no pain, a solid temperature, (and) I am ushered into the exam room. Crappy cologne first, then the doctor himself; sporting a navy blue polo shirt with vertical rows of sailing flags, a detective’s moustache, and high school county championship ring, he asks me if I am ready.

I am as ready as I am going to be.

He escorts me to another room where he confuses my right foot for my left foot several times, finally drooling iodine all over my ingrown toenail. Running before walking, he now puts on his exam gloves. Clumsily, he fills the syringe and proceeds to jab my foot six times, obviously unsure about what he is doing, like a toddler who struggles to play with a toy that is meant for a child three years older, a Looney Tunes character trying to blow out its tail.

His plastic hospital I.D. card shimmers on the counter: First Name, Last Name, M.D.

Twenty minutes and my toe is numb. Hunting for the scissors and gauze, he puts gloves on and does the procedure. At one point he yelps, “Wow! Look at all the pus,” the medical professional response to an infected wound. Gloves bloody, he pours through every cabinet in the room, wiping blood on all the handles and some of the cabinet doors. My toe hurts, but I pinch myself to make sure this is actually happening. A doctor wiping blood all over a room, surely unsanitary and surely an 11-year-old knows not to do that.

He can’t find the bottle of alcohol he is looking for, so he picks up a can that is lying around. Holding it upside down he flips it in the air, displaying that he’s still got his high school finesse, reads it, chuckles, proud of himself, and squirts some white soap on my foot.

No, not actually empirical, but telling. This man has being practicing medicine for decades. He told me so. He has those prestigious, awe-inspiring initials after his name, yet he is one of the least competent individuals I have ever met.

Coming off a week of orientation for incoming freshman where I met countless pre-med students, students who want to be lawyers and joint J.D./Ph.D.s, today was a harrowing experience that typifies a crippling lack of creativity within the adolescent/young professional mindset. Intellect, pursuit out of curiosity and not a teleological, career-obsessed, money-making impetus for learning, is lost. Students care about their grades but not their minds. The majority of undergraduates obsess over internships, jobs, grades, and graduate school before they ask questions that might make them better writers, thinkers, or more holistic young adults. Such is the climate of college campuses today, and it is blinding, rendering most students unable to function in non-traditional capacities and non-traditionally in professional careers. Able to pay for Kaplan and get into med school sure, but to think for themselves, take a risk, read a book that is not assigned or on Oprah’s book club list, no. Worst of all, this literally mind-numbing set of expectations has become the norm — the laudable norm, the revered doctor, the brilliant lawyer; you must be smart if you have a Ph.D.

My toe knows better.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

It is hard being back. Sensory overload would be a stab in the right direction but a phrase that comes painfully short of the confusion in my mind. Walking up 5th Avenue, exhausted, my mind doesn’t know what is going on as it undergoes a mental marathon, a grueling test of endurance and contrast. With each step, I get a second farther away from my work this summer, friends, a burgeoning slum with no end in sight, a place of eternal contradiction where smiles and destitution tango to the rhythm of 90s rap lyrics.

Fatigue is not the reason I stumble forward but rather a jet-lagged mental incompetence, no way of reconciling the disconnect between what I am living now and was living 48 hours ago.

Herein lies the problem, the true challenge to vitriolic blog postings, grand notions of social activism, and self congratulating college groups: how do I mend that gap, live in the U.S. knowing what I know? Slogan t-shirts are one thing, but consistent lifestyle is another, telling of a commitment to an idea that goes beyond the hip Urban Outfitters version of its commercialized self, somewhere uncomfortable at some point.

It is hard being back. I ask myself, well aware of the problems that face some people, one small community in a specific city, what am I going to do about it? Better yet, what am I going to live about it? Truthfully, I am a little afraid of the answer because I know it is a lot easier not to.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Complete with soda, too much food, cake, and extended family, the pomp of the birthday celebration August 1 was the same as any other I’ve been to but the circumstance was different. It wasn’t my birthday, but it was the anniversary of the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. The coolest thing by far.

During the summer of ’05, I volunteered for an NGO in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Nairobi and East Africa. My project finished before the date of my departure, so much of my time was dedicated to letting children pet my milky skin, spending time with people, and doing my best to lighten the mood whenever inappropriate. Up to nothing of note, the head of the organization summoned my volunteer title and volunteered me to paint the clinic. Situated within the slum, the clinic provides basic health care on a sliding scale for residents of the community and was in the process of formal registration in the hopes of getting free vaccines from the government. Regulations stipulated that the clinic be white.

Replete with a coverall, paint and brushes, turpentine, no clue, drop clothes, and a foot stool, I set to work. Unlike my jokes or vague development lingo, painting the clinic was a tangible contribution. It made me feel good. The work I did in the clinic on August 1, 2005, however, made me feel even better.

Hopped up on turpentine fumes, I was brushing away, a veritable painting machine—the Arnold of slum clinic painting like you’d never believe. Most of the patients just stared at my like I was nuts. One patient was different, in far too much pain to notice the connect-the-dots pattern spackled on my face, eight centimeters preoccupied.

Another volunteer burst into my studio—“There is going to be a baby!” she effervesced. Flashing back to the “Miracle of Life” video in Mr. Aptekar’s class, my initial reaction was “eww.” Another couple of minutes, and I poked my head in to ask the nurse to ask the woman giving birth if it would be ok for me to sit in. She said yes. With the paint still on my face, I gloved up, put on a white coat, and did what I thought I was supposed to. “You are doing great momma,” I cooed in English to a Kiswahili-speaking woman in labor. She froze me with a look: “Shut up boy, this is not a sitcom, this is number six and the last,” curtly communicated her wrinkled face. My pit stains continued to grow.

I meant well but took the hint, content to hold her hand and wipe her forehead. With a strong push, there was another life in the world. In that moment, there was a presence in the room bigger than any individual—in the balance of the Earth, creation, destruction, life, death, I saw a child born. There was no conservation of mass in this equation. A new baby in the world, a new person. Slimy, gross, and more beautiful than anything I have ever seen, the recently converted amphibian was handed to me. Thirteen seconds old. My hands were quaking. A new person in the world, and I was holding him, before the mother, before the father, as he was taking his first breaths.

As the nurse focused on the mom, I focused on the baby, wrapping him in a sweatshirt, cleaning him up, in awe. Newborn topped with a hat, the mother in recovery holding her new son, I was now up to effervescing, writing the word “baby” all over the walls of my masterpiece—a best attempt at trapping a the enormity what just happened.

At the end of the day, exhausted, I cleaned up, washed my hands, got dressed, and went to thank the mother. Babbling in a mixture of English and almost Kiswahili, I told her thank you, thank you, and thank you, my best attempt failing again, unsure of what really just happened but knowing I was forever indebted to her sharing his birth with me.

“Asante sana, mother. I can’t thank you enough.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, in a tone of voice that told me how tired her soul was. HIV positive, like her husband, neither employed, there was now another mouth to feed.

“What is his name?”
She looked up at me, her eyes glowing, a smile more sincere than any I’ve ever seen. “Baby Aaron.”

August 1, 2006 was baby Aaron’s 1st birthday—happy birthday, baby Aaron.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Experiencing turbulence, I awoke startled. Tired, cramped, I was ready to land in Kenya, but the map said we were just crossing over the Mediterranean. To my left snored a middle-aged man wearing a black shirt with bold orange letters that read: Baptists for Botswana.

Missionaries speckle the Kenyan landscape—roaming in Range Rovers, rivaling the cheetah population—wild creatures in their own right as they Bible-thump their way into the slums proselytizing predatorily on the starving poor, poaching tribal traditions towards the brink of extinction. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the world. Kenya is a Christian country. Most mission work that is done in East Africa is headquartered in Nairobi, the largest city between Cape Town and Cairo, the control center for thousands of sentinels seeking to civilize the barbarians, redeem them in Christ.

The presence of Christian missionaries is undeniable, but it is easily eclipsed by the bigger cars, budgets, houses, egos, and bolder t-shirts of the secular missionaries that occupy the gated neighborhoods surrounding the city center. Forget cheetahs—we are the wildebeest. Like the religious work that is headquartered here, any news agency, NGO, micro-credit scheme, fair trade organization, women’s empowerment group, or foundation has an East Africa office here. I am a disciple of the secular gospel, doling out condoms, pushing women’s rights, starting sustainable enterprise, empowering youth, in command of all the jargon, the development testaments new and old.

With a faith as strong as a Baptist for Botswana, I believe that the work I do is right, part of a larger plan that will help positively impact the lives of those same starving poor. I choose not to think of my work as predatory, but when I walk through Kibera on a Sunday and hear the sermons, revival meetings, and exorcisms my scoffing at religious mission work doesn’t make my white skin, my presence in the largest slum in East Africa any less obnoxious. Neither condoms nor communion are helping in the long term.

Both sets of missionaries are equally culpable, both to blame for the problems that aren’t fixed, for living a lifestyle that is entirely disharmonious, prowling the slums by day—be it to convert or to vaccinate—and eating $15-dollar meals by night before retreating to a gated compound. Doctrines aside, there is a common baseline that indicts missionaries of all belief systems. There are no simple solutions, and while both sides insist they are right and the other wrong, neither is consistent. Lifestyle is a choice. Inevitably, the most religious and the most secular, both passionate, live disconnected from the work they do, keeping them in business by driving, buying, living, socializing, drinking, and sleeping the system that causes the problems they work to solve.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Without a doubt, political profits from poverty are deplorable, exploiting the very people who need help the most. As three white congressmen stumbled along the muddy, winding paths of Kibera, East Africa’s largest slum, on walking tours guided by residents in flip flops, the absurdity of their presence was as egregious as the contrast in skin color. Without a doubt, their change in schedule, their inclusion of a trip to the slum, like their closing remark of, “Thank you for the work you are doing here, ” was a calculated maneuver. That said, their visit was invaluable; for people to change poverty, they don’t need to just watch videos or read brochures, they need to smell what it means not to have a toilet.

As part of a “democracy building initiative,” seven U.S. representatives visited Kenya, Liberia, and Lebanon during July, meeting with ministers of government in an attempt to better understand the headline issues: poverty, AIDS, corruption, etc. Five minutes in Kibera and it was obvious that neither the headlines nor the text of their briefs understood the reality on the ground. Dire poverty, yes. Despair, no. Warm welcomes were extended to the visitors who wore their trepidation in the furrow of their brow. Despite the accompanying security detail, the congressmen were clearly out of their comfort zones, pushed to the brink of political neutrality by the stench of human feces constant in the hot air. That said, you can’t let a good PR moment pass; a photo opportunity with children from the slums is surely something worth painting on a smile for. So, flashes flashed.

The flashes continued to flash, no less nervous, but clearly aware of the media mileage bound up in such an excursion, the congressmen posed and postured. With each click, it was as if you could see the prints being uploaded onto their websites.

Surely their visit was dominated by handlers and armored cars, power suits and post-colonial English, but their time in Kibera is in and of itself a necessary step in combating Western ignorance when thinking of solutions for global poverty. People need to see it. Without tasting the actuality of the figures, the idea that 40,000 people die each and every day from preventable diseases is unfathomable. However, maneuvering around a carpenter diligently staining coffin after coffin nails it home.

One young boy asked one of the aides not to take his photo. Brushed off because she didn’t understand and young African boys don’t count anyway, the aide took the photo. Political profit from poverty. A horrendous idea. Another congressman treaded carefully. When he got back to the office, he said: “This is simply unconscionable. ” Thus, it is clear that travel alone is not a strong enough impetus to change. It can drive people to change, but it is not sufficient. Seeing the reality on the ground allows people to better understand the nightly news, but disconnected slum tourism and photo opportunities often lead to stories that quell the conscious, not to follow-up.

Congressman Clueless proved that you just don’t get it until you travel, but you really don’t get it unless you want to.

Aaron Charlop - Powers