After two days, we met in the same coffee house. Her boyfriend is called Aleris. He is from São Tomé and Príncipe (聖多美普林西比), an island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Africa. Rex and I simply presented our project. Then we started to talk about life in West Africa.
Aleris mentioned one big problem in Africa is the inefficient government and poor educated people. There are many natural resources in Africa and there are also many tribes. As usual, the natural resources belongs to the people who live there. However, government may confiscate from people without reason. In this case, people may fight against the government. Then the tribe where president comes from may start to fight against the other tribe which is against the government. It is so called tribal conflict or civil war.
Why do people fight? Aleris said it is because people are lack of education, so they can not tell what kind of things is good to follow. They just follow their friend or family but not the good policy.
The other big problem in Africa is water shortage. If one thing we can do there, that must be constructing the water well. People are always lack of water there. However, Rex mentioned about the problem of over extraction of groundwater. We must be careful about it. He also thought of sea water desalinization. Maybe we can try it in Sierra Leone.
I am so glad that I found at least on African partner in Taiwan now. I hope we can make a difference for people to see Africa in a different way, not always in the dark side. I also hope that people from Africa can get together and share more about African stories to Taiwanese youths here. Only if we start to communicate, we can know each other more and do more good things for each other.
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