Discussing Poverty - 2

One of the fancy places in town. A fast food chain, a bakery, internet café and little tables host lots of youngsters and elderly sipping their juices, chatting. I’m talking to Athman, a student of banking, working in his sister’s duka, shop, and always looking for new challenges. We discuss the differences between Tanzania and the Netherlands. He has been in Holland twice on an exchange project and is well acquainted with a Dutch family who treat him like a son.
“We have tried to imitate the European culture,” he says, “without knowing what it is all about. We see the outside of it, the leisure time that you have and spend so well, and then we want that too. What we don’t see is that you work hard, and efficiently to be able to afford that free time. And we try to have that leisure time without money. It doesn’t work. There’s no cohesion left in our society. In Holland my family would sit together every night and talk about what keeps them busy. They pay taxes to their government and they care about the environment. They believe that they can make a change themselves and don’t sit and wait for the government to act. All we do is care about ourselves. We no longer live as a community. This way we can never reach anything because nobody believes in the same goals. We gave up our way of living and replaced it with something that is neither yours nor ours. It doesn’t help us at all.”