Doris Lessing: Is it so impossible to imagine such bare poverty? | The UNESCO Courier | ISSN 1993-8616UNESCO.ORG

“…I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this “school” was like.

On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and cooked it in a great tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast: boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was still going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.

I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.

The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens.

These children here have a visit from some well known person every week, and it is in the nature of things that these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils. A visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.

As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. […] I am sure that anyone who has ever given a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying, there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them – in this case the story of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end of term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?…”

Photo © Mark Taber
Child holding a Shona school book

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, Lessing, Unesco, books

Here’s a video I took on my Treo of a cool tunnel between concourses that they have in the new Detroit airport terminal (I was on my way to Salt Lake City for a computer conference). The walls have abstract colors changing and pulsing in time with music. Really out of the ordinary for an airport! (not to mention, sad to say, for Detroit)