Senegal

We are going to leave a very depressing inheritance to our children. My baby boomer childhood, which was shared by the generation born 1945 to 1955, has been blessed. Let us count the many benefits we’ve had. Unprecedented financial success enormously increased private ownership of homes, more cars and freedom to use them, allowing us access to an enormously enhanced road system. Our education system is immeasurably bigger and better resourced than ever before for a far bigger number of students. We have color television with hundreds of stations, computers, the internet, as much food as we can eat, several holidays a year, cheap air travel, and yet, this is all a great big emotional doughnut, hollow at the centre and almost totally unfulfilling.

Whilst this is the case on the surface I have friends who have followed a different, less obvious, less materialistic path and they seem happier. A lady I know has just spent a year in Senegal teaching the young local kids. She earned terrible money, lived far less comfortably in material terms and seems happier than most people I know.

About a decade ago a series of circumstances found me working as an Associate Lecturer in the Bournemouth Film School. Naturally this paid about 95% less than the going rate for making films, but my family and I were happier for those few years than I have ever been. Of course we had to live within those means, and that meant our life was simplified and less complex.

Is this a reflection on me and my friend, or a larger comment about the society we inhabit? I know that my energy, enthusiasm, ambition and drive compel me forward. But is this the drive to be a lemming or are some of us just hard wired to reach out as far as our arms can stretch?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting for one second that the school system in Senegal or the academic jobs I’ve had were in any way some kind of heaven sent sinecure of sheer wonder and joy. There were, and there always are, a million things wrong in every place. But there’s something good about being forced to live the simpler life, as long as you can avoid poverty you aren’t able to deal with.

I’ve often pondered what it must be like to work in the VSO and to give of yourself so completely. I don’t think it’s for me, as much as I wish I were built that way. Maybe I’m not good enough, or perhaps its simply because I’m too focused on me and not enough on others. I well remember working as a volunteer in a Moshav in Israel when I was a teenager. Moshav is the Hebrew word meaning a co-operative, semi-collective settlement whose members work together to develop the land, increase the economy of the state and defend the nation. The concept of the Moshav, along with that of the Kibbutz, was born out of a time when Israel was facing a severe crisis in its endeavor to solidify its position in the Middle East and provide a haven for world Jewry.

My job was to pick plums for the collective and next to me was a middle aged Israeli man who turned out to be a nuclear physicist. I questioned him as to why a man with his enormous mental gifts should labor next to me, the group’s diarist (what else?) when clearly we should both be doing the things that fate had ordained we were good at. His answer was founded around the spirit of socialist endeavor being for the common good. I had already decided that I was not a true socialist and was therefore unconvinced.

Perhaps the answer lies in the old saying, horses for courses. What is idealistic and wonderful for some, is, anathema to others. However I am suggesting that all our lives would benefit from a little simplification and occasional re-evaluation. We might all enjoy a little more peace with a little less stuff to clutter up our horizons.