by Jamie DeGregory Holaday '03

As we drive east through Togo in West Africa, leaving the capital behind, the countryside opens up. Vast coastal plains are tempered with towering mango trees hugging the road. Here and there the beginnings of buildings, or perhaps their ends, stand abandoned. The footprints of the buildings are outlined by four-foot high walls, the geometry of the rooms hinted at, while steel rebar claws the sky. The whole thing waits for a construction crew that may never come. Will never come.

I’ve seen these buildings everywhere since arriving in Africa. In the city they fade into a riot of outdoor booths, trash-filled streets, naked children, and the smell of sweat and garbage. Away from the city, with fresh air blowing on my face and the ocean sparkling to the south, these cement phantoms stand in open fields amid scrubby growth leading to the beach.

Dotted around the unfinished buildings, some lacking only a roof, are the homes of the poor. Instead of being half built, the homes of the poor are half destroyed. The woven-palm-frond walls are beginning to crumple, melting in the tropical heat.

I can’t help but wonder why the families living in the shade of these buildings don’t move in and finish them. Then I remember I’m in Africa. It seems that so many people live in one-room houses the Big Bad Wolf could blow down without breaking a sweat. They don’t own the land. They could never afford to finish the buildings. They can’t afford shoes — or food more nutritious than cassava root, which does nothing but fool bellies that only dream of being full.

The past 30 years have pushed the continent to its knees. Poverty isn’t something that happens here; it’s an inheritance.

Through the dirt and dust that my American eyes see as squalor are the smiling faces of children; their playful shouts of “Yovo! Yovo!” (“White man! White man!”) float on the van’s dust trail. Men and women everywhere are working. They are tending gardens, hawking wares, and minding children. The activity pulses in the margin between the road and the walls of the empty buildings, pushing the buildings to the fringe.

Amazingly, no one seems to notice the phantoms the way I do. They don’t terrorize them, as they do me. I see a decay too comfortable and too deeply ingrained. The woman walking toward us with the baby swaddled on her back, load balanced on her head, doesn’t see her salvation in empty slabs of concrete.

Maybe neither should I.

In February 2008 I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit West Africa with good friends who run a nonprofit. While we were there we got to meet so many people who were amazed that Americans would leave the comfort of the US to go all the way to Africa to help them. They gave me a lot of hope and a lot to think about.

— Jamie DeGregory Holaday