My friend and Neighbor Sue Konig quoted in the NY Times
Sue Konig lives about six doors down the street and is a good friend of ours(she and her family took care of Trinity, our guinea pig and watered the plants while we were away in Pennsylvania). She is also a noted author Amazon.com: Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road (and Other Lies I Tell My Children): Books: Susan Konig and speaker.
Sue was quoted this morning in the NY Times Into Africa - New York Times about a fundraiser she helped organize:
And people are being inspired to start small charities of their own. In June, for example, 125 people, who in another time might have been content to mail Halloween pennies to Unicef, banded together at a Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., restaurant and held a silent auction to raise money ($30,000) for a hospital in Tanzania.
“To build a hospital, the tangible evidence of where your money is going is very satisfying,’’ said Susan Konig, an organizer of the event. She added, “It was not some amorphous thing, but a tangible cinderblock building where in Tanzania people can get their eyes checked, receive AIDS medication, they can get pregnancy care.’’
Oddly enough, this article was in the Fashion and Style section, presumably becuause it was mostly about celebrities aiding Africa, and perhaps that is "fashionable."
For more excerpts from the Times article, hit the link below.
Into Africa
AS the house lights dim for the second act of each performance of Madonna’s “Confessions” tour, the singer, wearing a crown of thorns, begins her 1986 anthem, “Live to Tell,” while her body hangs in mock crucifixion on a cross glittering with the mirrored tiles of a disco ball.
Madonna has been riffing on crucifix imagery for two decades. What hauls the entire tableau vivant into the present are the images flickering behind her on screens: close-ups of African children, staring with mournful eyes, superimposed over crackling flames and a running ticker, which tallies at 12 million the number of children orphaned by AIDS in Africa.
That Madonna should suddenly be casting an ice-blue eye toward Africa should hardly be surprising. After all, she has always known how to spot a trend.
And much as it may strain the limits of good taste to say it, Africa — rife with disease, famine, poverty and civil war — is suddenly “hot.”
Beginning early in the decade with a trickle of celebrity fact-finding missions to strife-torn sub-Saharan nations (Bono in Ghana, Bono everywhere) that became a torrent within the last couple of years (Clay Aiken in Uganda, Jessica Simpson in Kenya), Africa has now been embraced by the masses. ...
Those newly interested in the continent have been motivated by different atrocities. For some it has been the genocide in Darfur; for others, AIDS orphans. But regardless of anyone’s specific interest, most people consistently describe being attracted by what they see as a clarity — both political and moral — in Africa’s problems. ...
In Africa, Ms. Parker said: “there are a lot of problems, but you can group them in together. I can organize Africa in my head, in terms of poverty, droughts, even governments.’’
And for many, at a time when the United States is divided into red and blue, for and against, cease-fire and bombs away, the seemingly unambiguous nature of Africa’s needs can be unifying. ...
“The issue is very popular because it can attract people from both sides, whether they support the war in Iraq or not,” Mr. Millenson said. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the movement to divest from Sudan is one of the most active movements on college campuses in at least 20 years.
Still, why all the interest now? Yes, celebrities probably deserve much of the credit, but the bridge from Hollywood to Africa was constructed long before Angelina Jolie was born. Danny Kaye was running off to Africa for Unicef as far back as the Eisenhower years, and Bob Geldof pointed legions of superstars toward Africa in 1985 with his Live Aid concerts.
Some Africa experts believe that the continent could be benefiting from an American public that is antsy to feel its goodness and influence, yet is simultaneously feeling itself shunned around much of the rest of the world.
William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University and author of the recent book “The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” sees Africa as filling a sort of existential vacuum for Americans struggling in a post-Sept. 11 world.
“We had this sudden awareness that there were all these people out there who hated us, and we needed people who, as far as we know, don’t hate us, and are in great need and we can help,” Professor Easterly said. “It’s the perfect meeting of needs — an intersection where we need Africa and Africa needs us.”
Regardless of the exact reasons why Americans are responding, say educators, philanthropists, and activists, there is little doubt that the current burst of interest in Africa is markedly different from those of the past. Rarely, they say, has the popular interest in Africa spanned so many different issues and countries and inspired so many different people to take action. ...
The fact that dollar-wielding Bills — Clinton and Gates — are on the loose, traveling to support their foundations, doesn’t hurt.
Individually, many smaller charities say they are experiencing unprecedented generosity. “The response to our outreach has been dramatically improving — it’s risen fivefold” in the past few years, said Paul Newell, a director in the New York office of the Ubuntu Education Fund, which helps South Africans.
A recent celebrity-dotted fund-raiser at the Puck Building in Manhattan featuring Kevin Bacon as the master of ceremonies — Donna Karan and Iman attended — blew past its initial fund-raising target by 50 percent, to raise $600,000, Mr. Newell said.
And people are being inspired to start small charities of their own. In June, for example, 125 people, who in another time might have been content to mail Halloween pennies to Unicef, banded together at a Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., restaurant and held a silent auction to raise money ($30,000) for a hospital in Tanzania.
“To build a hospital, the tangible evidence of where your money is going is very satisfying,’’ said Susan Konig, an organizer of the event. She added, “It was not some amorphous thing, but a tangible cinderblock building where in Tanzania people can get their eyes checked, receive AIDS medication, they can get pregnancy care.’’ ...
But where does all the good will leave Africa? When it comes to celebrity interest, it’s not hard to find cynics, especially since rarely does a day go by that some Page Six personalities are not draping themselves in some African cause — Jay-Z on clean water, Gwyneth Paltrow on aid to children, and Lucy Liu on AIDS.
Michael Musto, the Village Voice celebrity columnist, dismisses the current interest in Africa as merely the cause-of-the-moment among A-listers and charities.
“Celebrities,” Mr. Musto said, “have added a glamorous patina to it.” And to themselves, he said, especially if they need a little good press, like Lindsay Lohan, who has suffered through a year of rough tabloid treatment for her party-girl ways and has vowed to visit Kenya in support of the One Campaign.
And Paul Theroux, a writer who served in the Peace Corps in Africa in the ’60’s, cautioned against ennobling oneself through grandiose gestures there in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last December.
“Because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs,” he wrote, arguing that Africa needs to cultivate its own saviors.
But, said Morgan Binswanger, a former liaison between performers and philanthropies for Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles: “There’s self-interest and there’s enlightened self-interest, and the fringe between the two is gray. I think those that step forward and really carry out enlightened self-interest move an agenda.”
Alyssa Milano certainly hopes that is true. The actress, who toured civil-war-torn Angola in 2003 (and strayed into an active minefield, without incident), said Africa is one way celebrities can transform an unprecedented level of scrutiny into their lives into something productive.
Don Cheadle, the star of “Hotel Rwanda,” declined to pass judgment on whether Africa had indeed become a self-serving celebrity fad, now that even the youngest stars like Ms. Lohan are getting serious about it.
But, Mr. Cheadle said he feels that celebrities can have an impact: “People in Rwanda told me personally that the movie had a huge impact. They said people always used to come to see the gorillas and now they’re coming just out of interest in Rwanda itself.”
The larger question is whether soccer moms and flyover people will continue to care about Africa once the celebrities move on. As Mr. Musto said, “Just like a trendy restaurant lasts 18 month, so will interest in Africa.”
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