Today I went to the gym and did 15 minutes of cardio and 10 reps on each of the 6 weight machines in my circuit.
There, now that that’s out of the way, on to my rant.
Every other show on the discovery health network:
Some missionary/DWB/nurse/good samaritan goes to a 3rd world country and finds Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang, generally a young child, who has some horribly disfigurment that has caused them to be social outcasts in their small dirt hovel town. Phone calls are made, camera crews are readied, and young Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang is whisked off to America in order to get treatment for this horrifying disfigurement. While there, they stay with Happy American Family! Happy American Family does not live in a hovel. They live in the suburbs. With running water and a big back yarn YARD and a fridge full of junk food. Over the course of the next 5-12 months, Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang has multiple painful surgeries, and every painful tear is caught on film. In between surgeries, however, Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang is treated to every good thing America has to offer. Nice clothes, healthy meals, UNhealthy meals, candy, the zoo, Disneyland, X box, iPod, and every other excess we take for granted. Little Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang is showered with gifts and love and adoration.
Then comes the day when Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang is all better. The horrendous deformity has been fixed, and now comes the time they have eagerly awaited - the return home to the hovel, to be reunited with their parents and 12 brothers and sisters. Where we can watch ON CAMERA, the slow realization that they will never again be able to go to disneyland, play x box, or even turn a faucet to get water any time they want…because now they are home. And while the many painful surgeries have allowed them to become members of the society that shunned them, they will, in reality, ALWAYS be outcasts. Because they have seen life better…got a small taste of it, and then been returned to the squalor from which they came.
It is almost cruel. I watched a show in which a little boy, happily reunited with his family, tearfully asked his mother if the Doctor would take him back to America.
I suppose the optimist would say the child’s experience with a better life, even for a short period of time, might inspire them to do better for themselves. To try to get a better education, to leave their village, to become more than a simple farmer. But in reality…what are the chances of this? I suppose maybe the chances are slightly better than being found by a missionary/samaritan/etc in the first place.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t help these kids. God knows, giving them the medical treatment they would never get otherwise saves their lives and helps them for the better. But part of me feels so damn sorry for them afterwards. Will they ever truly fit back in to their society? Will they ever be able to re-accept their old way of life? As soon as those cameras are shut off, I have to believe Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang is stripped of their nice clothes, farewell gifts from their american hosts taken away and redistributed throughout the village, and it’s business as usual. Little Mutambe/Paco/XiangXiang grows up, something that might never have happened otherwise, and does no better or no worse than his/her parents…but with the devastating awareness that a better life had been dangled in front of them like a carrot, then jerked away.
Anyone besides me find this just a little cruel?
I haven’t watched any of those shows but it does sound a bit sad.
I did get a smile out of “a big back yarn”. I only laugh because I’ve done it myself.
D’OH! fixed. Thanks!
I guess the actual hard work of helping poor communities in developing countries to become self-sustaining doesn’t make for very good television; you can’t fit a simplistic aren’t-we-just-the-best-people-on-the-planet message into half an hour when the humanitarian task is one that takes slow decades of grunt work.
Highways. What —— needs now, more than ever, are highways, and railways. It’s not impossible, or impractical, to help develop transportation systems. The kids with the deformity cannot wait for their society to provide them with medical care, but after they have received such care…
THEY HAVE THEIR ENTIRE LIVES TO USE MODERN TRANSPORT, AND THE TRADE THAT IT BRINGS.
Digging a well for a village is a wonderful thing. Shaving off hours of treacherous over-country travel so that well water can be used to the most optimal effect… is better.
Highways=good, but water without poop in it trumps highways any day. Parasites seriously freak me out. I’m getting the willies just thinking about it.
It’s a chicken and egg thing, Jen. Highways will help provide clean water, clean water will help highways be built…
I saw one where the girl went to a hospital in Africa, got her treatments for a disfiguring facial growth, and when she went home, she was still rejected by many, and it took them a while. She never did marry,and died a year or two later of an infection. They thought God had cursed her, and many were afraid of being close to her.
She had thought she was going to get a perfect face back, and I think that the doctors and tv producers led her to those grand thoughts, when it was obvious it wouldn’t happen just looking at her.
Yeah, those shows are sad for so many reasons.
And as far as the highway/water argument, I have no idea. But once you build a highway, you don’t just walk away. You have to keep it up, repair it, rebuild it, and that costs money. If you let it go, nobody can use it in a few years, and that money was wasted, and in many African countries, there is so much corruption it makes this sort of organization near impossible.
Even in the US you can tell which counties/states are poor by the state of their roads, I cannot imagine them doing better.
There are times when “observe but don’t interfere” is a better policy, however cruel it may seem.
I can’t watch them. I refuse. It’s starting to get to the point where I can’t even watch the fiction-based shows because they have enough bits of reality in them that I lay awake wondering about all the shit that goes down in this world. If it weren’t for the Wii, I might try to ditch the television altogether.