Sorry, your story is not tragic enough.

Sorry, your story is not tragic enough.

The other day I bumped into some Asoyamias (white people) at the guest house.  This guest house is run to support mama laadis and I often go and visit those working there to say hello.  Anyway, this film making couple were staying there from the UK.  They were very nice people, doing a documentary on Hunger.  It is to reflect the desperation of Africans after the short rainy season this year and henceforth the poor crop yield during harvest.  They are looking for tales that show the outcomes of people living on the poverty line, who have to rely on the weather/harvest, and especially the the effects it has on the children.

This documentary, once made, will be shown to people to raise money to help many of those suffering, ultimately providing aid/food to hundreds if not thousands of people. 
Which is great.

But something just didn't sit right with me.

They are looking for people's tragedy to tell a shocking story that will pull at consumers heart strings so they will ring a phone line, and give over cold hard cash.
They got sent to Bolgatanga to find such tragedies.  Of course all the locals rallied around finding them struggling families, and of course these stories are ripe for the picking..... but sadly none 'bad' enough. 
How awful..... They turn up to a house that is clearly dysfunctional, the occupants do not eat more than one meal a day and haven't had a protein product in the last week ... there is already illness lurking in the shadows.... BUT it simply is not bad enough?

This is someone's life - this is a family who are fighting against becoming a statistic, teetering on the edge - and the director has to try and explain to the locals and family who presented their story; "I'm sorry, I can see your child is very malnourished, yip she looks like a skeleton, yip she cannot walk by herself because she doesn't have the energy, but she is simply not 'skeletal enough', sorry.  It's not enough to get the white people who will see this film to help you".  Sorry.

What is this?

They termed it 'over-saturation-of-the-starving-child-advertisement-campaigns'.  In advertising you always need to manipulate the masses to give over their money to buy into something they are talked into 'needing'.   With so many starving-help-the-child-the-little-girl-waits-advertising-campaigns, us 'whities' have essentially been there and seen that, and now we actually need to see a child 24 hours away from death to do something? What can be the 'wow' factor when we have seen it all? What about a child dying on screen, this is bound to move a few television watchers to get up off their tv-dinner arses and make the call? No?

What is this?

Is this kinda fucked up? Or is it just me?  Is this just natural instinct of humans? I guess I'm just too close to the children of Bolgatanga to see this situation without judgement.

If it's any consolation it made the documentary makers feel wierd and uncomfortable, and they have aborted their mission and gone home.  However, they are coming back when it's really dry season, when the harvest has run out, to catch 'proper' malnourished suffering children.