THE WOES OF AFRICANS IN THE DIASPORA (Your Family Matters from the Diary of Pastor Chanda) Thursday, 26 September 2013: Skype is a wonderful tool. It enables ordinary mortals like us to do what at one time was the preserve of Captain Kirk in Star Trek, i.e. talk to someone thousands of kilometres away while seeing them as if they were sitting next to us. That is how I felt tonight as I talked with Suwilanji, who now lives in New York with his young family. He has been there for ten years. The first few years were very difficult as they sought to find financial stability but now he says they are as good as settled there. Suwilanji had been asking to speak to me for a while and we finally got around to it tonight. After the greetings, he finally got to the point. He was frustrated because he had been trying to help the wider family back home but kept being swindled by his own relatives. “Pastor,” he said, “I do not know whom I can trust any more. Our first few years abroad were very difficult. After we stabilised, we decided to use the little money we were making to help the family back home and to build a small house for our retirement.” So what was the problem? “Whenever we send money to Zambia, we soon discover that the people we send it to do not use it for the intended purpose. They take liberties with the money and use it for their own ends. It is frustrating, I tell you.” I asked Suwilanji to give me a little more detail and the catalogue was as long as his arm. It always began with someone either enthusiastically offering to help or being suggested as highly dependable. But before long that person became a bucket full of holes. “Ala, ba Pastor,” he said, “we could have built our house by now if the people we were sending the money to had been faithful. Even sending money to our parents is tricky because you find that the person who gets the money via Western Union chews half of it!” “Kanshi, what’s wrong with our people? Proverbs 20:6 says, ‘Many a man proclaims his own steadfast love, but a faithful man who can find?’ This is what we are finding. Many show concern for us and want to help us, but before long they prove totally unreliable.” I thought deep and hard about what Suwilanji was asking. What is wrong with our people? I tried to put myself into the cultural shoes of those relatives of Suwilanji who were defrauding him and his wife. What made them steal their money with a clear conscience? My conclusion was that, first of all, we Africans tend to view ourselves as being somehow entitled to the possessions of a richer relative. We often say to ourselves, “Our family is very rich,” when we mean that some of our relatives have substantive wealth. Hence, when a relative entrusts us with their money we view that as our money also. Instead of being a conduit pipe to pass that money on to their intended recipient, we see nothing wrong with being a very porous pipe quenching our own thirst in the process. Secondly, there is the unspoken rule here in Africa that you never report a relative to the police or sue them to court for any crime—whether it is child abuse, rape, violence, or theft. If you ever did so, you would be viewed as an embarrassment to the wider family. Hence, when a relative is entrusted with money and helps himself to some of it, he knows that the worst-case scenario is that he will be chided in secret and the pipeline from New York will be rerouted. Depending on the amount involved, this is a small price to pay. Finally, many think that relatives who live abroad must be swimming in money. The photos sent home show bulged cheeks and waistlines, brand new cars, latest gadgets and wall-to-wall carpets in the homes, etc. So, a few dollars lost in transit cannot be too painful. I sympathised with Suwilanji. It was a no-win situation. If he stopped sending money back home, they would view him as being very selfish and unloving. If he continued sending money, leakages would continue until he found someone reliable. I could only sympathise! For comments or confidential counsel, write to: reverendchanda@yahoo Or send SMS to 0974250084 (This article was published in the Zambian Sunday Mail of 29th September 2013 and is used here by permission of the author)
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 19:15:18 +0000
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