What I Learned in the Peace Corps

> Did a Former Peace Corps Volunteer Defend Trump’s Sh*thole ...
>
>
> Africa the Dark Continent.  This is horrifying, but needs to be known.  Makes us, as a nation,
> look unbelievably naive and pathetically stupid.
>
> All cultures do not share the same mores, ethics and standards.
>
>The real world….What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa:  Trump Is Right
>
> By Karin McQuillan
>
> Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a
> community center in a rural town.  Life was placid, with no danger,
> except to your health.  That danger was considerable, because it was,
> in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment"
>
>
> In plain English: s--- is everywhere.  People defecate on the open
> ground, and the feces is blown with the dust on to you, your clothes,
> your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not
> even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through
your skin and cause organ failure.
>
> Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades
> later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is
> no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations
> of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it
> are racism.
>
> Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand
> boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame
> Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his
> head not to see.
>
> I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant
> things are not true.
>
> Senegal was not a hellhole.  Very poor people can lead happy,
> meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our
> terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human
> relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.
>
> As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved
> Senegal.  In fact, I was euphoric.  I quickly made friends and had an
> adopted family.  I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man.
> People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew
> you, their innermost thoughts.
>
> The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly
> obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us.  The truths we
> hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese.  How could
> they be?  Their reality is totally different.  You can't understand
> anything in Senegal using American terms.
>
> Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people,
> extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one
> generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to
> four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I
> witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age
> ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did
> not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western
> ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a
> few cents to have cash for the market. What I did witness every day
> was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and
> fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather
> wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded
> grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had
> conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their
> co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.
>
> Yemily was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.
>
> The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed “ they were unknown."  The
> value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal
> everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some
> Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.
>
> We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa.  The
> kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical
> clinic donated by international agencies.  The medicine was stolen by
> the medical workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and
> didn't have money, drop dead.  That was normal.
>
> So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's
> Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't
> bathing him, I wasn't surprised.  It was familiar.
>
> In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom.  Go to the post
> office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.
> After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed
> or thrown out.  That was normal.
>
> One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the
> wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from
> the medical aides, who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree
> instead of working, collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads
> so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.
> Callousness to the sick was normal.
>
> Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as
> you would have them do unto you.  It's not.  It seems natural to us
> because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.
>
> We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town
> was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a
> government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business
> was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world
> bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It is also incompatible with Senegalese
> insistence on taking care of relatives.
>
> All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians.  If a
> Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country.
> The reason?  Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for
> free, and you would have to say yes.  End of your business.  You are
> not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives.  The
> result: Everyone has nothing.
>
> The more I worked there and visited government officials doing
> absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the
> idea that a job means work.  A job is something given to you by a
> relative.  It provides the place where you steal everything to give
> back to your family.
>
> I couldn't wait to get home.  So why would I want to bring Africa
> here?  Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on
> our shores with a visa.
>
> For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace
> Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever.  I take seriously
> my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on
> the American heritage to the next generation.
>
> African problems are made worse by our aid efforts  Senegal is full of smart, capable
> people.  They will eventually solve their own country's problems.
> They will do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.
>
> We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world
> immigration by the hundred million with chain migration.  They tell us
> we must end America as a white
>
> , Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation to prove we are not
> racist.  I don't need to prove a thing.  Leftists want open borders
> because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate
> America.  They want to destroy America as we know it.
>
> As President Trump asked, why would we do that?
>
> We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was
> happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor
> Senegalese.  I am not willing to donate my country.
>
> If ever there were an email that needed to be sent around the globe,
> this is it.  What a story this woman tells of what is actually happening in places we send our
> hard earned tax dollars.
>
> We are fools to do it.