I remember those Miss World – or Miss whatever contests where all the girls said their hobbies were literature, fashion, sport, traveling and animals. Or those interviews in horrible local newspapers where aspiring models who dreamt of making it in the big city had the same standard answer. I think that if they wanted to make the list of hobbies more 2012, they should also add “saving kids in Ethiopia” or “fight poverty” because these are the kind of “after school” activities that I see quite a lot of girls practise nowadays.
I’ve always been sceptical when it comes to charity, saving the world and anything along this line because I have met only a few people who actually did good things in a genuine manner. I think there are those who give lots of money and actually help making a difference, those who go and take photos with a bunch of African kids but probably wash their hands a few times afterwards, and those who don’t wash their hands but probably wipe some kid’s ass. And those who are total hypocrites. I cannot put all the blame on them because our society is sick enough to teach us that there are things worth doing and there are shallow and superficial things we shouldn’t do. What I believe is that nothing is shallow if it’s done with passion and dedication. But wanting to save the kids in Africa because working in fashion will make people judge you, that’s truly shallow.
There are also too many misconceptions around the whole notion of helping others. I for one know what is like not to have money. I’ve never starved, but I had a few times in my life when although I was working my derriere off I lived for almost a week with £10. This doesn’t seem so scary, but for someone who didn’t grow up in poverty, it wasn’t easy either. None of my rich friends helped me during that time and now I wonder whether if I were from Somalia they would have done it. However, this is how I learned that in order to help others, one must first help himself. And by this I mean being able to stand on his own two, be able to learn something in order to make a living, know how to write and read properly, learn a few things about this world, be a nice person and the list could go on.
When I see all these girls my age going to “top universities” to learn about poverty, hunger and the Third World, I really feel like throwing up. If you want to help, you can’t study that in university. But there’s a pattern I’ve observed: daddy’s girls who need to go to top universities in order to validate themselves and also avoid to think -at least for a couple of years- about the fact that they have no clue what to do with their lives. Except from saving the world, of course. If they feel so guilty about having and spending too much of daddy’s money, why don’t they stop buying Burberry boots for half a year and send the money to some starving child? Oh, but they first need to study and find out why that kid is poor and what does the government do about it and more ridiculous blah blah. If you really want to know about it, you can surely learn outside university as well. And that’s the great thing about knowledge, there is only one thing standing between you and it: your willingness to keep curious and always learn about the world.
Under no circumstances I would claim that charity does not exist or that anyone who dedicates his life to humanitarian causes is a fraud. But for those who are doing it for real, meeting Bill Gates doesn’t qualify as dedicating time to a cause, but simply as a nice opportunity. And surely they don’t brag about it on Twitter. They probably don’t even exist on Twitter because they’re too busy actually saving the world.