Good Works, Here and There

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — Blame Canada. For it was a half-dozen daft nationals of that northern land who caused me to reconsider what charity means.

During a term abroad in East Africa, I acquired the impolite habit of asking non-Tanzanians why they’d come to Tanzania. My own reason was to learn Swahili and to get a sense of the place whose history I’d begun to study seriously.

The Canadian contingent, by contrast, was populated by the type of starry-eyed wanderers who come to the poorest continent to learn about themselves—and to make a difference along the way. Their demeanor was not new, nor unexpected. But there was something annoying about how they got their jollies from feel-good humanitarianism blended with a touch of delusion and a generous helping of sanctimonious outrage.

Take my neighbor, a Québecois who repeatedly insisted to Tanzanians who spoke of their desire to emigrate to America that it was a “racist, abusive place.” He himself professed to be frightened to cross the American border. (The Patriot Act, he explained, had turned the U.S. into a police state.) And why, he wondered, would anyone want to go to America when Africa was such a paradise?

Paradise, of course, is a relative term. And in their African paradise, the Canadians saw little besides fresh mangoes and a swinging ex-pat nightclub scene. Amidst all their caring, none of them studied Swahili, preventing them from communicating with those they ostensibly wanted to help.

In short, there was something tragic about the Canucks. Their experience and abilities were incommensurate with where they had ended up. The most they could hope to accomplish was to distribute willy-nilly used clothing—which depresses local textile manufactures, I sourly noted at the time.

But so long as one ignored suspicions that their charity had more to do with them than the people they thought they were helping, you might say the Canadians’ hearts were in the right place.

And, to be fair, if they were at least resolute about their harmless acts of charity, I found myself altogether flummoxed about how I might make a difference. My volunteerism was limited to kicking around a few soccer balls with children at a Catholic orphanage once.

The Aesopic moral to this story might be: Canadians are at their best when they’re in Canada. Or to put it broadly: if your real aim is charity, endeavor to make a difference where you best can, where others may not have looked, where your efforts will not go to waste.

Amongst the Canadians, my own thoughts returned to all the unexamined aspects of Great Falls, Montana, the distant and dull place where I grew up and attended school.

Many students feel ambivalent about their hometowns, and mine is no exception.

One need only look to The Great Falls Tribune, where in past months editors have thrice given front-page coverage to Molly, the cow who escaped a packing plant, went on a many-hour rampage through town, and eventually eluded her fate by winning enough hearts to buy her amnesty in a pasture in my hometown’s outskirts. The Molly mayhem subsided, but then there was the “problem badger” who took up residence in the lower South side, a saga which produced such headlines as “Woman Can’t Get Rid of Burrowing Beast.”

My town, in short, is not a happening place.

And in this non-happening place, there are few things less interesting than school politics. But they are more important than they seem. In Montana and many other states, local school boards are vested with expansive powers over curriculum and taxation. The high-minded authors of the state’s constitution thought that elected school boards would make for the greenest of grassroots, a flowering of democracy and “local control.”

The ideal has not come to pass in Great Falls and many other places. In the district which educated me, most school board trustees have called home an affluent area that accounts for only 12 percent of the school district’s total population.

And so, my charitable undertaking was a wholly unsexy attempt to correct this—a ballot initiative to change the way trustees were selected, from at-large to single-member district elections, so that trustees might be spread more evenly across town.

Over six months, I spoke at dozens of small meetings in the city, convinced many that the change was a good thing, and with the help of 50 hard-recruited volunteers collected over 3,000 signatures in a single day so the issue could be forced to a ballot.

As the project I toiled on now enters a phase of legal wrangling whereby incumbent trustees search for a way to keep it off the ballot—a nuisance that has called me back to Montana from Harvard to parse the frustratingly dull technicalities that surround such issues—I feel remarkably unredeemed.

Unlike the Canadians in Tanzania, I have not found myself in a balmy, tropical place. Nor has my project been as gratifying as ladling out soup in the Bronx or rebuilding homes in New Orleans would be. My undertaking has alienated me from powerful people in my community whose help might’ve come in handy in the future. It has gained me a wholly undeserved reputation locally as a “progressive.” The Tribune now refers to me as a “community activist”—a term I don’t relish nearly as much as others might. While I earned academic credit in Tanzania, I won’t be graduating with classmates this spring because of time off in my hometown.

I have no conclusions on charity—whether I should aim for efficacy or temper productivity with self-gratification. But the hassle of good works in a well-known place makes one daydream of absconding to the blissful tropics, like those bright-eyed Canadians.



Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears regularly.