Recent Rice University graduate Jordan Schermerhorn, who won the New York Times “Win A Trip” contest with Nicholas Kristof this year, has begun her journey. Traveling to southern Africa with the intrepid humanitarian correspondent and Pulitzer winner, she has already penned several of her own articles published through his blog at the New York Times website.
Previously, Schermerhorn had no foreign experience beyond seeing the area immediately to the south of the US border in Mexico. However her travel diary shows already the power of firsthand personal observation in informing ones own mind, and the importance of sharing others hopes, needs, and triumphs with readers safely ensconced back at home. Here’s a little sample:
“Two of the places we visited in the southern African country of Lesotho couldn’t have been less alike at first glance.
The rural HIV clinic was filled with patients laughing and gossiping in the courtyard, calling greetings of “lumelah” and continually motioning for us to take pictures. In contrast, women employed in textile factories stuck dutifully to their work as we walked through aisles of sewing machines, and they spoke in hushed tones when we asked about how they came to this place of employment.
But both of these very different places provide concrete, tangible criteria with which to assess development goals. The nurses at the clinic knew how many HIV-positive mothers transmitted the disease to their babies for each potential intervention; they tallied which mothers showed up to each of six prenatal check-ups and tracked down the ones who didn’t. Compiling data with clockwork regularity made it abundantly clear which treatments worked well and which did not.
The factories – heavy on garment production, providing sales to Gap and Nordstrom and JC Penny – may very well have provided provide me with the jeans I wore that day, but also provided jobs for almost 40,000 workers in addition to supporting a booming industry of bus drivers to ferry these workers back and forth. The tasks assigned to these workers were just as perfunctory as every task performed in the clinic – as were paychecks at the end of the week. We asked two of the women what they would be doing if they worked elsewhere, and how much they thought they would be making. I was astonished that they opted to keep the factory jobs over the much higher wages they predicted from trading in the market, but they explained that the value of a steady eight-to-five job outweighed the glimmering alternative.
It’s easy to see results from these types of interventions. The transformation a HIV patient can undergo during the first two weeks of anti-retroviral treatment is frequently compared to rising from the grave: as hollowed cheeks fill, manual labor becomes once again physically possible. Likewise, a woman employed sewing in a textile factory may bring home wages, but can also secure in the knowledge that the job will be there the next week, too. The associated lack of stress and freedom to plan in the long term may be just as transformative.”
Read the full article at:
Win-a-Trip Diary: Seeing the Power of Foreign Aid (New York Times)