If you didn’t watch the TED video at the top, you should do that now.
I remember being really upset as a kid because of the video’s I would see about Bolivia. I saw documentary bits, ads, and fund raising campaigns that would feature Bolivia, but not the Bolivia that I knew, at least not all of it. I remember seeing a lot of starving children on these videos, and they always went to the worst parts of town. As a kid I had a dream to make a documentary about all the stuff that they missed. I would film happy children playing in the parks, old people having tea together while teenagers play soccer, and it would all take place in a train station. I’m not sure what my fascination was with the train station, but I thought it would make a good backdrop to my documentary.
“All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”
The problem I saw with many good intentioned people and organizations was that their portrayal of Bolivia stopped at a single story, the story of people who had nothing. I was at a conference last year where they were talking about sponsoring children around the world, and right before they asked for money, they showed a 5 minute video clip of some of the work they were doing around the world. The video started and I was really surprised that it was a video about Bolivia. We usually never get picked, we’re the underdogs in poverty. Usually countries in Africa get more attention, so we’re all a bit jealous of them. The video had a couple of Dutch Christians who were very tall, sitting in a small shack with a Bolivian family in extreme poverty. It was awkward to say the least. The foreigners had guitars and were singing English spiritual music to them while the mother of the family cried. The tallest man reached for the smallest little child and held him, and the boy cried. He said “what is this man doing? I’m scared”, which was translated as “thank you.”
I’m glad they tell part of the story of Bolivia, and I know in a 5 minute clip you are never going to be able more then that, but we need to tell more stories, different stories. When we just see Bolivians as people crying in small shacks, we miss their beauty. When we see people just for what they lack, we forget what they can offer. And when we don’t see people as having something to offer us, we rob them of their humanity.
When I was 9, I had a friend named Peter Pan (seriously, that was his name) who lived a few houses down. Although the term house might be a bit of a stretch. He lived under a makeshift house made of garbage with what seemed like thousands of other people. We always played soccer together on the street, and we would do stupid things like throw rocks at birds and see how far we could kick the soccer ball. He was a friend, a good soccer player, he had a family, he was talented and occasionally funny. And when he was hungry, he’d come over and I’d share my food with him and his little sister. If I had just thought of him as the poor kid down the street, our friendship would have never existed.
Stories inform our culture, they shape our practices, and they determine our focus. When we tell bad stories we end up with bad culture, bad practices and out of focus. We start believing that these poor Bolivians in the video have nothing to offer, that they are defined by poverty. When we see someone as only hungry, all we can do is feed them. Our focus ends up being misguided from the person to the problem. But when we tell better stories, when we share people’s beauty, their dignity and their humanity, their talents and abilities, their humour and quirks, we not only want to feed them, but we desire to be in relationship together, and that’s the beginning of community.
“When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise”
