I spent this morning working at a school in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea. A crew of volunteers from the CGC Bear painted and cleaned two classrooms. It was hard, hot, difficult, dirty work. At one point I found myself sweeping feces from beneath a broken desk. Typical of many schools in the developing world, electricity and running water were conspicuously absent. One element, however, was not absent: evidence of the America’s corrupting cultural influence. On a wall, an Equatorial Guinean school child had written in bold letters a list of his\/her favorite American rappers: Nelli, P Diddy, Ja Rule, Tu Pac, and the like. I wish children in far away lands would admire and seek to emulate the more noble parts of our culture. I wish they would say, “I want to be hard-working and industrious like Americans,” instead of, “I want to have bitches and ho’s, gold teeth, and a job selling crack like Americans!” I put four coats of paint over that spot. But the list of names kept showing through, despite my best efforts. I fear this situation is sadly symbolic of the nature of America’s culture influence overseas…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent this morning working at a school in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea. A crew of volunteers from the CGC Bear painted and cleaned two classrooms. It was hard, hot, difficult, dirty work. At one point I found myself sweeping feces from beneath a broken desk. Typical of many schools in the developing … Continue reading Erasing culture?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdZlL-1E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewandlisa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}