The Price of Bananas

  Sweet bananas are very hard to find in the US. These small bananas are wonderful and are grown all over East Africa. Upon finding a street stand that had five good looking bunches of these bananas with more bananas on each then in US bunches, I used my newly-honed bargaining skills to go from 5,000 Uganda shillings (about $2.5) to 3,000 Uganda shillings (about $1.5). Happy at my price, I awaited my fruit as the vender when to get a bag. With the bag in hand, the young lady put a bunch of bananas inside.
 Then she put another inside, and then another until I told her 
that I just wanted one of the five bunches. For my $1.5, I was 
getting five times more than I had expected. 

  Up until this point,
 most prices we had seen were low, but still heavily inflated for
 tourists. Now I saw the true economic position of the locals, and it
 was startling. Living in mud houses or having to farm for your food
 are obviously not the way of America, but most people who I had seen
 seemed to be eating and living just fine. But realizing how little 
money the locals must have based upon this deal of bananas that the
 shopkeeper seemed very pleased with, I finally understood how poor
 these people were. However, multiple experiences in Africa and the book "Dead Aid" have
 me critically assessing the best way to help an impoverished people,
 especially one that at least here seems to be able to feed itself. 
First, the dependence upon handouts must be detrimental to those 
Africans who are raised to expect handouts and thus not actively 
pursue economy building activities. For example, when we stopped for
 lunches and kids came out to get cookie handouts, I felt bad giving
 them food because I am not something that they can reasonably aspire  to become, i.e. a well-off American. When our tour cook gave bread 
(which was very warmly welcomed) I felt much better, because it was a
 Kenyan giving to fellow country members and the kids could aspire to 
have a good job like his. When we visited an orphanage that was also 
a school in the middle of the day, the kids all took over an hour out 
of their day to put on a show that they must repeat every day to 
impress us and get our donation dollars. The fakeness of the show only left me with the bitter feeling that I would have 
loved to see what they were really being taught, if anything (they  should have been learning English but didn't understand "how old are
 you"). Instead, I felt that they were being taught how to best ask 
for money from others outside of their community or sphere of 
influence.

I am excited to look for sustainable ways to help promote African
 economic improvement that gives jobs and improves infrastructure 
instead of providing aid that is consumed today and necessary again
 tomorrow from outside of Africa.