Advice welcome

I am a pretty well-off person in a pretty poor country. Lots of things I do, consume, and buy are outside of the reach, or even imagination, of a lot of Malians. My ability to make meaningful choices about my life - what kind of health insurance to get, whether to go to school, what to do with my discretionary income - far outstrips that of 99% of the people I see every day. I don't spend a ton of time thinking about this, because I'm going to spend my life doing what I can to redress it and I don't think I'll be any better at it if I disperse energy wallowing in guilt or being oversensitive (b/c it's definitely not about me), but sometimes the sheer fact of it strikes me with such poignancy, I catch my breath and feel sick.

Like, one of the beggars on the main drag near where I live had polio and now begs from his wheelchair. I noticed the other day a patch on his shirt and focussing on that one detail brought alive to me how close to the margins he (and thousands of others) must live, how threadbare and fraught existence is.

One of our drivers is one of my favourite people here. He is patient and clever and funny and just wants to do a good job. He has 3 kids, and he cares about their education, but he can't send them to private school - because it would cost $30 per semester per child, and he can't afford it.


I went to a hotel on Sunday to swim and read and relax. On the way there, I walked past a group of kids pausing in the middle of an errand to have sandwiches - a quarter of a baguette each, filled with some kind of miscellaneous meat. This was probably their lunch, and possibly counted as a treat.

Nobody here needs my pity, if this is what I'm feeling, and if I spend more on lunch than most people make in a day - well, it's better for the money to be spent and enter the economy than for me to live ascetically and feel virtuous, or something. I just hate the poverty and lack of choice, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do something about it, and to come to some sort of psychic accomodation with it, without being either callous or achingly sensitive.