The chasm between African Americans and Africans was immense. As time passed, he began to realize that whenever he visited a new village, he would feel guilty. He began to understand that he was using the pain of others to alleviate his own. He couldn’t keep going, he told me. As much as he was helping, he could no longer live with the fact that he was using the suffering of poor villagers to satisfy his sentimental needs. He needed them to suffer, he told me, in order to feel needed, in order to reinforce his privilege.
