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In a kind of take-off of the age-old admonition “eat your brussell sprouts, don’t you know there are people starving in Africa?”, I used to remind myself of Botswanan AIDS orphans, or of Sudanese refugees with dracunculiasis, every time I caught myself complaining about something petty. I guess there may be people on the other side of the world who are telling themselves the same thing, sort of.
Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt on arriving in America. Having escaped the horrors of the civil war and spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya, she was resettled, first, in suburban Atlanta, where she was sent to an all-white high school. “And I tell you,” she said, “American high school is the cruellest place I’ve been.”
–William Finnegan, “New in Town”, New Yorker, December 11, 2006
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