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Thinking aback on my recent trip to Niger, I wonder about the weird juxtapositions of the haves and have nots.  Why do the haves, whose relative wealth should grant them some sense of satisfaction seem so riddled with stress, uncertainty and unhappiness? Why do the have nots whose abject poverty should make them utterly miserable, seem so carefree, so certain about their choices, and so smilingly happy?  I over simplify, of course.  There are happy rich people and people so utterly poor that they don’t know they will manage to live.  And yet, the contrasts between haves and have nots are sometimes stunning.

Here in the United States bad economic news has made us glum, perhaps a tad morose.  Millions of people have lost their jobs.  Housing foreclosures have put people, once solidly in the middle-class on the streets or in fast-expanding tent cities.  Here lack of resources precipitates stress. How will I pay my bills if my salary is cut, or worse yet, if I lose my job?  Where will I live if the landlord raises the rent?  How we my family stay warm when the power company shuts off the heat because we can’t afford to pay for our energy.  The way things are set up in the US anyone can be one accident away or one illness or one job loss away from poverty’s doorstep.  And if we should find ourselves confronting poverty, we tend to take it out on ourselves. Somehow failure is an individual responsibility.  Our heads hang low.  We blame ourselves for our limitations.  We lose ourselves in too much drink or too many drugs.

But what do we know of poverty in the US?  There are, of course, pockets of abject poverty in the inner cities as well as in rural areas.  Most Americans, of course, have little direct experience with the poor, who, for the most part, remain invisible.  What do most Americans know about the texture of life in American inner cities or on the plains or in the valleys of rural poverty?  Not much, I’m afraid to say.  And even if we did know American poverty first hand, how would it compare to the poverty you find in the countries that constitute West Africa?

In Niger, which is the second poorest nation in the world, the average individual earns about $200 a year–less than one dollar a day!!! Imagine what that means.  It means that you don’t necessarily eat three meals a day. It means you have little protection from the elements, which in Niger, means heat, dust, dirt and killer diseases like malaria and meningitis. It means that if you get sick, you probably won’t have the resources to treat your illness, which boils down the startling statistic that roughly one-half the babies born in Niger survive the first five years of life.

Most people in Niamey, the crowded capital city live in cramped quarters–mud brick and cement compounds.  In Niamey ,at least, there is running water, a reasonably functioning sewer system, pharmacies that sell medicines (if you can pay for them).  There are also wide paved boulevards and dusty dirt tracks filled with cars, trucks, camels, donkeys.  Niamey is a city of stark contrasts.  Along one major street you find hundreds of parked cars (along the dusty side of the road (Toyotas, Hondas and Mercedes) for sale.  On the other side of street, you find lines of mud brick houses in front of which are tables on which are sold individual cigarettes (it’s too expensive to buy a pack), chewing gum, and pieces of hard candy.  People dressed in rags beg in front of these tables asking passersby for a few coins so they can buy a piece of bread.  What do they think when they see a Mercedes for sale?

When you leave Niamey and venture into the bush, there are fewer such contrasts.  Niamey seems to be ringed with trash fields where garbage and plastic waste is dumped.  Further out, the population thins out and you come upon isolated villages consisting of mud brick or thatch houses.  On one trip we passed a young boy, no more than 10 years of age, in the middle of nowhere.  He wore only a tattered pair of shorts.  As he walked along side the road, he rolled a bicycle wheel–his toy. When he looked at us in our van, he waved and smiled.  Who knows where he lived or how much he had eaten that day?  And yet, he could still manage a warm infectious smile–the portrait, perhaps, of a have not.

This kind of portrait is not limited to the empty spaces of the Nigerien bush.  You can find it in Niamey just outside the entrance to the Grand Hotel of Niger, one of the more exclusive spaces in Niger’s capital city, a place where elite visitors pass much of their time in Niger.  There, you find a group of polio victims who live on the streets of Niamey.  They are perched on the seats of their hand-propelled bicycles.  They pump their arms and move forward on their bikes and say hello, with big, beaming smiles on their faces.  You talk with them, perhaps give them a few coins, and they laugh and joke with you and with one another.  There are hundreds of street kids in Niamey, many of them physically  impaired. But if you talk with them, as I did many times during my visit to Niger, you discover incredibly reslient people who do not resent their most difficult station in life.

Is it too much of a simplification to ask whether the haves have something to learn from the have nots?

In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss a thriving market of trade in the impoverished context of contemporary Niger

There is much talk about the economic doldrums that have slowed global economies to a crawl.  People are suffering.  Tent cities have surfaced in Sacramento, California and Seattle, Washington.  In Indiana, people wait in long lines to received donations of food.  These are images that hark back to the dark days of the Great Depression.  My parents lives through tough times, and the struggles they experienced forever shaped their view of the world.  They managed their money with great care. They were loath to waste resources.  

How have we come to these dire economic crossroads yet again?  There are numerous economic theories that suggest the hows and whys of economic downturns.  Some people suggest there is no rhyme or reason for economic downturns; they simply come and go in cycles.  Other people blame lack of government regulation and laissez-faire neoliberal beliefs about economic processes.  There are sophisticated economic theories about rational choice s well as the ramifications of government stimulus packages.  

No one really knows, as far as I can tell, if one theory truly explains the irrationalities of the stock market or the dynamics of housing’s free fall into a deep bottomless pit.  Maybe the economists who are planning our recovery really haven’t any idea of how we got here or how we extricate ourselves from the morass.  They talk a lot of mumbo jumbo and this process and that and sometimes they seem like oracles, speaking in a language that seems to make little sense.  Maybe all economics has become Voodoo-like, a smokescreen that gives us the illusion of control of a set of seemingly uncontrollable processes.

Although I usually don’t understand their professional pronouncements, I like most of the economists I know. They are pleasant people who have maybe lost their way.  From the perspective of classical economics, economic behavior is about macro and micro-processes that can be modeled and re-modeled into predictive theories. The problem is that economic processes are not essentially about abstract models; they are about social relationships that involve relations of trust and fears of betrayal, which depend upon ongoing economic and social relationships built up over many years of transactions.  From my vantage as an anthropologist, economic relations are about relations of exchange between trading partners.  How do you establish that relationship?  Once it is established, how do you reinforce and build that relationship? How do you maintain trust between trading partners?  How do you reassure a person who is nervous about extending credit or accepting credit?  These are not abstract matters; they are central elements in the construction of social relationships.  The human element is missing from our economic thinking, and until it is re-established, our economic ideas and our economic policies will be misguided.

In my next post, I will discuss my recent experiences of West African traders, who believe that economic success can only occur through the construction and reconstruction of viable social networks.

President Obama today signed an executive order authorizing the expansion of stem cell research, an act that gives hope to millions of people who live in what I like to call The Village of the Sick, people who suffer from illnesses and disorders for which there is no cure:  many cancers, auto-immune disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, and so on.  For people in this village, the idea of a cure is such a dim reality that news that someone, somewhere is trying to help gives us hope.  In my case, I have Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, a blood cancer for which there is, as yet, no cure.  NHL is a disease that can sometimes be managed for long periods of time.  Research is ongoing and there are many more treatment options today than there were in 2001 when I was diagnosed with NHL

Today is a winning day for millions of people who live in the Village of the Sick.  If you live in The Village of the Healthy, you take health for granted and illness is seen as a temporary nuisance.  You take a pill and in short order, your health (the absence of pain, the absence of symptoms, the absence of the specter of your mortality) is quickly restored.  If you live in The Village of the Sick, you can never forget that you live with our illness, you travel with it, you live with it.  Your illness becomes your companion and in some cases, people can derive unimaginable strength from your infirmity.  Yet no matter the strength of your adaptation to chronic disease, you still want to be cured, you still want to return to the Village of the Health, you hope against hope that a new discovery will sweeten your life and make it more normal.

Thank you President Obama for fueling the fire of that hope.  Your gesture will give millions of people in the Village of Sick a strong and silent hope for the future.  Thank you.