Having been in Europe, late November to early December made me realize why our compatriots in the North love coming down south for some fun in the sun during the Christmas season. The temperatures in Dar Es Salaam were in the 30s, but over there, it was below freezing.
In the southern parts of the world, this is the high season for international tourism as well as domestic tourism. Locals love to take their families to the coastal towns and spend time frolicking on the beaches and swimming or just plain chillaxing. The international visitors spend most of their days in the sun (a thing we take for granted considering that I missed it terribly during the short time I was up North).
Their level of sun worshipping may be equated to that of Egyptians and I always wonder why we humans always seem to yearn for what we do not have. We are never satisfied with what we have!
The visit also made me think about what impact these seasonal migrations to our coasts cost us and our offsprings:
I visited some schools in Malindi, Kenya where I was informed that every holiday season, female students miss school for 3 months out of the year because they are “taken” out by European men who take them all over the country as their companions, give them alcohol and sometimes drugs. My question was why the parents let this happen to their beautiful girls?
Malindi has a clear distinction between abject poverty and excessive wealth. Along the beaches are the most opulent hotels that offer the guests everything under the sun and a few streets away are the local residents living in mud huts. The parents therefore are given funds to build a house or buy a car for a business. After this, the ‘mzungu’ (white person) has free reign over their teenage daughter. The parents thus yearn for what they don’t have and use their innocent daughters to try to get it.
The mzungu’s age is usually around 50 to 75years of age. They supply these girls with alcohol, teach them to smoke and introduce them to other drugs. The decay of the girls starts at the tender age of 13 – something that would be unheard of in the North. That would be statutory rape! These girls see this as their only way out of this poverty-ridden life. Therefore they starve themselves (yes because mzungu likes them bony). They learn how to hold their liquor because they have to fit into the booze-filled way of life they are introduced to.
Malindi has a really serious problem of drug use and this stems from the abandoned girls who – once they turn into women – are discarded like yesterday’s news. In recent years, this moral decay has crept over to the boys as well. The boys learn to party i.e. use alcohol, smoke and take drugs at a very early age as well. No one in the West or North would look kindly to a 13-17 year old child having sexual relations with a 40-75 year old!??? That is a recipe for jail time! Yet over here this happens all the time and the families go along with it. Just because a people is poor doesn’t mean that the rules cease to apply.
Poverty should not be used as an excuse to abuse our children and rob them of their formative years by getting them addicted on alcohol and other drugs or just be in these kinds of relationships with people old enough to be their grandparents. The rules regarding morality, defiling a child, pedophilia should be upheld throughout the world.
Globalization has made the world a lot smaller regarding a lot of issues except in cases such as these. There needs to be a way that this type of behavior can be punishable in one’s country even after being perpetrated in the developing world. We have a responsibility to protect our children from such predators who roam our world.
