Emma Thompson on why she is an ambassador for ActionAid

Dearest Chas

You want to know why I work with ActionAid? Well, it all started when Mum and I went to a launch they had which was all about grandparents in the developing world. It focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, where the death rate from Aids was so high that most children were being brought up by their grandmothers, having lost both parents to the pandemic. This, of course, struck my mother forcibly since, as she put it, having to bring up Gaia, Ernie, Walter and Tindy on her own would kill her off in a matter of weeks. At the launch I was very much impressed with the rhetoric of the organisation, drawn as it was from the voices of the poor rather than the voices of people who aren’t poor themselves but think they know better than the poor people they’re trying to help. That, by the way, is my definition of bad aid. My definition of a useful activist is someone who has come from the kind of background that exemplifies the problem they are trying to solve. I, therefore, am not, by my own definition, an activist (although I am often described as one) but someone who helps and supports activists (see below).

When I started to travel I met legions of such people – rich in understanding, in pure motivation, in inspiration and in humour. I learned a great deal in very short spaces of time – I think one does when plucked away from all that is familiar and plunged into entirely new environments. My goal (I hate that word) was to come back with the kind of stories that might truly illuminate the challenges that people face and explain how they go about meeting them. Then those of us who aren’t “fortunate” enough to go and see for themselves can at least get a domestic view, uncluttered with development-speak (very off-putting, I find) and I hope entertaining in the best possible way. I am, I realise, profoundly privileged to have had these experiences and richer by far for them although I still live in that cocooned way we all do, mostly taking clean water for granted and not expecting to die before I’m 50. I’m already 50, slightly to my chagrin, and relatively hale, as you know.

I suppose, if I’m honest, the other reason for doing it was that I did not want my children to grow up, look around, see what was what and say, “Why didn’t you do anything, Mum?” I think that’s a bit self-regarding of me, frankly, but one might as well put one’s self-regard to good use. I hope that gives you the general idea – the diaries speak for themselves.

Enjoy, y’all.

Love from Emma

Mozambique

Day 1 – Monday 23 June 2003

According to Noerine Kaleeba’s instructions (Noerine took me to Uganda last year and found my wardrobe sadly lacking), I have packed a lot of floaty white clothes. No more wandering about looking as if I’ve just been released into the community.

Day 5 – Friday 27 June 2003

We’re visiting some agricultural programmes, which are the best examples of long-term responses to disasters. The simple distribution of food has a habit of breeding a strange atmosphere as people in Africa resent that kind of handout as much as the rest of us – but the giving of seeds and tools has an entirely different and positive effect. We stop in a field of friable earth where the mammas are digging for red sweet potatoes. I give it a go. After a few prods and digs I realise I’m not up to it and hand the hoe back to a woman with a baby strapped to her back.

Later: It’s freezing. We’re at the school, meeting teachers. The children come out with their beakers in a neat queue, some with shoes, some not. They look so cold in their raggedy outfits – they drink sweet potato juice and eat little doughnuts. Everything is made of the sweet potato – and hungry, we all try everything. It’s genuinely delicious. A group of singers in suits and gloves sing in Zulu to thank ActionAid for what they’ve made possible.

Ethiopia

Day 7 – Friday 8 October 2004

At the water kiosk, which has four taps, a woman doles out 40 litres per person, for which she is paid 0.15 cents. The transformations wrought by this amenity are profound – everyone here has energy and confidence and yet their poverty level is very similar. I ask about the past. A man speaks first: “Before the kiosk, we depended upon rain water, river water and digging ponds. We’d walk three or four hours to collect water.” A midwife chips in: “Pregnant women fetching water would give birth on the road. Sometimes they’d die. Sometimes the babies. Once, in my lifetime, a woman brought down a pot of water from the river. It was the dry season and she’d walked for seven hours. Her child accidentally knocked over the water and it was all lost. She beat him so badly that he died.”

Another woman says: “We used to be beaten by our husbands if we ever left the house for any reason other than to fetch water. Now there is no more beating.”

South Africa

Day 5 – Thursday 22 February 2007

We arrive at a well-attended, shabby school. Everyone is covered in dust and a lot of the kids are shoeless. We get into a gigantic circle and I teach them the Okey Cokey.

There, I talk with two mothers about the high incidence of Aids. Nobizo tells me she doesn’t talk to her child about HIV in case he repeats the words and is shunned by his friends. It emerges that stigma is a huge problem here.

The other woman, Nozamile Magaola, tells me that she isn’t really her boy’s mother. Her sister-in-law died of Aids when he was a baby and she took him in. She’s never told him that she’s not his real mother. She starts to cry. It turns out that the little boy is HIV positive. He gets very sick from time to time and she can’t bear the stress.

• The Power of the Invisible Sun
• Lights, Camera, Inaction
• I’m back!

Tags: Africa

One Response

1. Laura Says:
   January 5th, 2010 at 6:32 pm

   Someone needs your great sense of humor not to cry in these situations. I wonder what the people to you meet in Africa think about you, and if they know who you are.

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