*Sentence at the end of the story captures it all - "/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."/*


*What I Learned in the Peace Corps in
Africa: Trump Is
Right FECALIZED ENVIRONS DO EXIST....*

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
- onto 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.


Yet family 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.



http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/what_i_learned_in_peace_corps_in_africa_trump_is_r ight.html