Bono, Africa and Everyday People
March 30th 2007 22:32
An Ithica, New York man once taught first grade school in Zambia. He found a way to re-gift used working Cornell University computers to Africa, without the association, stigma or fact of "technology dumping", the sending of useless non-working electronics, sometimes disguised and described as aid, to Africa.
Cornell University started a Computer Reuse Club in the fall of 2006. In the months since computers have found new homes in which they can contribute in local Ithica community organiziations and all the way to south Africa.
There is a lot of Cornell student partidipation, and, so far more than 50 computers have traveled to another continent.
Contact by the student group with the Society For Natural Resources Conservation has been important.
In Time Magazine (online), 3-22-07 Bono wrote, in part,
"Over the next 50 years, we might need a little more poetry. Europe is a thought that has to become a feeling--one based on the belief that Europe stands only if injustice falls and that we find our feet only when our neighbors stand with us in freedom and equality. Our humanity is diminished when we have no mission bigger than ourselves. And one way to define who we are might be to spend more time looking across the eight miles of Mediterranean Sea that separates Europe from Africa.
There's an Irish word, meitheal. It means that the people of the village help one another out most when the work is the hardest. Most Europeans are like that. As individual nations, we may argue over the garden fence, but when a neighbor's house goes up in flames, we pull together and put out the fire. History suggests it sometimes takes an emergency for us to draw closer. Looking inward won't cut it. As a professional navel gazer, I recommend against that form of therapy for anything other than songwriting. We discover who we are in service to one another, not the self.
Today many rooms in our neighbor's house, Africa, are in flames. From the genocide in Darfur to the deathbeds in Kigali, with six AIDS patients stacked onto one cot, from the child dying of malaria to the village without clean water, conditions in Africa are an affront to every value we Europeans have ever seen fit to put on paper. We see in Somalia and Sudan what happens if more militant forces fill the void and stir dissent within what is, for the most part, a pro-Western and moderate Muslim population. (Nearly half of Africa's people are devotees of Islam.) So whether as a moral or strategic imperative, it's folly to let this fire rage."
Sources: Cornell University, Zambians Children Fund, Ithica Journal, Time Magazine
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