Karin McQuillan's "What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right!

A different perspective posted by a friend - not all cultures are created equal:

“What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa:  Trump Is Right!
By Karin McQuillan  January 17, 2018

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.
Family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed as 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.”

National Biometric ID Cards in Africa

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is expressing today its support for the  meeting in Niamey, Niger, January 25-26, 2016, of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission Heads of Immigration on “irregular immigration and roll-out of the National Biometric ID Cards.” http://www.iom.int/news/iom-supports-ecowas-meeting-national-biometric-id-cards-task-force-irregular-migration-0

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) project called “Support to Free Movement of Persons and Migration in West Africa (FMM) is funded by the European Union (EU).

According to the IOM news release, the meeting focused on “high mobility from and within West Africa, where intra-regional and irregular migration feature prominently in the political agenda of most West African governments.”  South-South migration and irregular migration flows to Europe are recognized as a twofold challenge in Africa and the Middle East.

Because ECOWAS believes that intra-regional migration is essential in the African region’s economic growth and stability, the need for the “rapid development of a national biometric identity card” has been recognized. Such a biometric ID card would replace the travel certificate used in the ECOWAS member states.

Of the million migrants that crossed the Mediterranean into Europe in 2015, many of whom were from West Africa, approximately 3,700 died en route. To protect migrants and combat human smuggling, the ECOWAS Free Movement Directorate is going to establish a Task Force on “irregular migration.”

According to IOM, Irregular migration is the “Movement that takes place outside the regulatory norms of the sending, transit and receiving countries. There is no clear or universally accepted definition of irregular migration. From the perspective of destination countries it is entry, stay or work in a country without the necessary authorization or documents required under immigration regulations. From the perspective of the sending country, the irregularity is for example seen in cases in which a person crosses an international boundary without a valid passport or travel document or does not fulfil the administrative requirements for leaving the country. There is, however, a tendency to restrict the use of the term "illegal migration" to cases of smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons.” https://www.iom.int/key-migration-terms

In layman’s terms and law-abiding citizens’ logical understanding, citizens who respect borders and sovereignty, “irregular migration” is illegal immigration dressed up in United Nation’s progressive euphemism and bureaucratic-speak.

The Task Force will “combat irregular migration, fight trafficking and smuggling, and protect vulnerable migrants in the region.” People who abhor 21^st century slavery still practiced by a certain religion would like to know if the Task Force considers fighting the human slave trade and sex trade that ISIS is involved in.

The participants in the meeting in Niger are ECOWAS member states heads of immigration, ECOWAS Commission, Spanish and French government representatives, FMM staff, IOM staff, and the European Union Delegation in Niger.

A two-day visit to Agadez is also planned. Agadez is a “primary transit point for irregular migrants crossing from West Africa to Europe.” This begs the question, if all these organizations and the authorities know exactly where the primary transit point for illegal immigration and human smuggling is, why don’t they take measures to stop it?

The reason is probably the fact that the FMM West Africa project, an EU-funded effort implemented by the Consortium of Partners, “seeks to maximize the development potential of free movement of persons and migration in West Africa.” http://www.iom.int/

In layman’s terms, the ultimate goal is to erase borders and establish global citizens. To facilitate the free movement of persons across national boundaries, a U.N.-deemed “right,” a biometric ID card will speed up the process of controlling massive movements of people.

 

 

 

 

Lauren's Success and the Failure of Common Core

Lauren was really proud of her accomplishments. She belonged to the baby boom generation who had experienced hardship. She valued land and working with her hands. Every extra dime she saved, she invested in agricultural and forested land. When she won a coveted $25,000 award in the early 1990s, she bought more pasture land.

She worked hard to become a teacher, a black female in a male dominated field; Lauren got her doctorate in biology at a time when few people wanted to stay in college and graduate school so long, it was easier to go out into the world and make money. Few wanted to teach because the pay was low, the hours were long, and parents seldom expressed gratitude to good teachers for a job well done.

Professorships on the other hand were paid much better and hard to come by - one had to be a die-hard liberal with socialist or Marxist leanings.  But the work load was much easier – five hours a week in the office, teach 3 classes, attend the self-aggrandizing lecture and conference circuit, develop a “I love myself” resume, have graduate students to grade students’ exams and/or teach during the professor’s scholarly absence, and he/she had it made. But Lauren was not that kind of person, she was too conservative and conscientious for that, she was passionate about her work, her students, and it showed. She chose to teach gifted students.

A petite and graceful black woman, Lauren was outraged by affirmative action, a payback for the slavery of the past. She was bothered that the public could attribute her well-deserved success not to her hard work but to the color of her skin. Lauren wanted affirmative action to end, it had a good run, she used to say.

Lauren hid her conservative values - she only shared her views with few friends and relatives. It was un-American in the South to be black, a female, single, a teacher, and not be Democrat and a union member.

Before her premature death from skin cancer two years ago, Lauren worried about the direction our country was taking. She was upset by the academic monopoly liberals had around the country in all universities. She feared that race baiters and trouble makers who were inciting race division and class warfare would devastate the middle class and particularly the black middle class.

The government was doing a pretty good job of destroying the black family by becoming welfare daddy to millions of unwed black young women. Who needed a daddy to stay around and take responsibility for the life they’ve created when the financial rewards from government dole were greater in single households? Yet the children, boys especially, desperately needed fathers as role models to keep them away from crime.

The millions of abortions since Roe v. Wade saddened Lauren because many of the aborted babies were black babies. Planned Parenthood was thriving by killing the innocent unborn, teaching mothers-to-be that fetuses were an inconvenience and a choice.

Lauren ran an activities center associated with her church to steer young men and women in the right direction and keep them out of trouble. She also ran the donation center that raised money to pay for scholarships for black kids in the community. She never married or had children of her own but she had many students and neighbors whose kids needed advice and help with homework.

Every year, liberal academics invented new teaching methods, models, and adopted new goals to advance their agenda, defining and redefining themselves. They were social engineers, social justice enforcers, manipulators, and imposers. Parents and the public were paying scant attention – everyone was too distracted by life, work, family, entertainment, and sports. Nobody was “watching the watchers.”

Lauren wanted to visit Africa someday, not because she considered herself African American, she always said, “I’ve never been to Africa, I was not born there, how can I be African American? I was born in the South; I am American through and through.” But there was a curiosity flaming inside her to visit a place that seemed so alien and foreign to her yet so many considered themselves more African than American although they had never set foot in Africa.

She was a prophetic visionary in her own way, fearing and worrying about the future because she witnessed the opportunity to succeed in this country after college become dimmer for all groups. The opportunity for the American dream, which is what brought millions of immigrants to this country, was growing more distant.

Lauren’s role model was George Washington Carver (1864-1943), “The Black Leonardo,” a genial scientist, inventor, botanist, and educator. He thrived at a time in history when it was very hard for a black man to succeed, especially the son of slaves born in Missouri in 1864.

Lauren’s lab walls were covered with posters about Carver’s accomplishments in alternative crops such as peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and how he taught farmers to rotate crops in order to avoid the devastating effects of cotton crop-destroying boll weevils. Among the many products made from peanuts he developed and promoted were cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.

During one of her conference tours, Lauren visited Ames, Iowa because that is where Carver studied botany, at Iowa State Agricultural College. He received his B.S. and Master’s degree in plant pathology and mycology in Ames and was the first black faculty member there. Booker T. Washington, the first principal and president of the Tuskegee Institute, invited Carver in 1896 to be the head of its Agriculture Department - he taught there for 47 years.

Lauren would have been terribly disappointed and heartbroken to see how things have changed in the last five years and how fast. All the progress made since the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal” and its subsequent repudiation in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education, is now being reversed by the Common Core national standards imposed around the country in education. She worked so hard to shape and inspire the next generation of black teachers, biologists, zoologists, botanists, doctors, and researchers!

Sending white and black students to separate but unequal schools harmed children in so many ways, not the least being the undisputed fact that it made black students feel inferior. The federal Common Core bases standards on race and holds minority students to a lower standard from K-12. Is this not discriminatory, harmful to students, and labeling them into separate but unequal groups for the rest of their education? Why dumb down education even more?

It is embarrassing when the MSM glorifies an obviously mal-educated young woman who speaks Ebonics and cannot read cursive writing, excusing her glaring lack of education as something hip. It is a sad example of the state of education today when social promotion has become the norm and semi-literate people receive degrees.

The Tuscaloosa News reported that “Beginning this fall, Alabama public schools will be under a new state-created academic accountability system that sets different goals for students in math and reading, based on their race, economic status, ability to speak English and disabilities.”  Alabama’s Plan 2020, adopted in November 2010 and replacing the No Child Left Behind, has different standards for American Indians, Asian/Pacific Islanders, blacks, English language learners, Hispanics, multi-racial students, students below the poverty level, special education, and whites. http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130630/NEWS/130629743

The problem is that the new educational Common Core mandates did not come from the states, they came from the federal government which strong-armed states into accepting grants via The Race to the Top competition, and allowing states to replace the hated No Child Left Behind with the federal Common Core and Universal Design for Learning, the brain child of two think-tanks in D.C. I wrote two articles on this topic in 2012 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44875 and 2013. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/54196

Lauren would have been proud that The Alabama Federation of Republican Women strongly opposes “race-based standards in student achievement” but sad that education in this country has fallen so low.

We’ve moved from our stellar education system prior to the establishment of the Department of Education in 1979-80 under Jimmy Carter to “everyone is a winner” education, to “let’s be more sensitive to illegals” education, to “let’s coexist” education, “to let’s shove sex education, condoms on bananas, abortion pills, and sexual preferences down our throats” education, to “let’s dumb down education and graduate everyone as idiots” education, to “let’s worship Gaia and environmental stewardship” education, to the current Common Core values of “let’s graduate everyone who gives wrong answers in math and everything else as long as they can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it” education. http://www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-common-core-shill-says-new-education-does-not-require-students-to-have-right-answers-only-that-they-explain-how-they-got-answer/

My suggestion would be to place all these liberal educators who are eager to adopt Common Core standards on an airplane, in a building, or on a bridge designed by students who were taught that it does not matter that they got wrong answers, all that matters are the feelings and the explanations how they arrived at the wrong answers. Still, if they don’t understand what they are doing to public education, perhaps liberal teachers should undergo laser surgery performed by a graduate of Common Core standards or take drugs developed and measured by such students.