"I ask you: How many of you would risk your precious lives to even assist someone of the same race as you?!! All we see here is people saying the West does this or that, but we don’t see enough Afrikans standing up to point out the many wrongs committed in Afrika by the West: i.e. by whites!!"

thank you for the kind question. i will truthfully say, in the spirit of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, that i work every day to assist first my people and family, Africa for Africans, and secondly I work to assist humanity. would i risk my LIFE to come to the assistance of someone that is the same race as me? that depends on the context of my assistance. i am sure most of us can save fo a while a few thousand and buy a ticket to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Mauritiania, Congo etc, and take up arms and/or work with oppressed people on the land. But how many of us do. The other argument may well be that you can risk your life in the hood, working with at risk youth, drug addicts and so forth. so it depends. I remeber when I was doing outreach for healthcare for the homeless in ohio, and a known drug addict and HIV patient threatened to poke me with one of his needles. was my life threatened, depends on if that needle carried the HIV virus. it is unfortunate that oftentimes, those that are of the same race, are the very ones that try to kill or hurt you.

Sure, many and arguably most of the NGO's in Africa are likely working in their own self-interest. But, if even one is doing good for the people, then that agency/person should be supported.

I personally worked for one of these afencies CWS-Church World Service, in the capacity of resettling refugees in the states. Was this agency paternalistic in it's approach. YES. Did it reek of missionary vibes? YES! Did it succesfully resettle refugees and reunite them w/ their families? YES! So in my view, in light of the negative vibes that emanated from this agency- I was able to still see joy in the eyes of a child who was reunited with his mother after years living in a refugee camp in Kenya, or a brother from Rwanda, a survivor of genocide, being reunited w/ his only living relative-a Somali lawyer who had become paraplegic because he didnt hand over a cigarette fast enough in Mogadishu-resulting in him being stabbed in the spine, BUT finally he was able to be reunited with his dawta, who petitioned for his refugee status in America etc..etc.. So, at the end of the day families were united and in many instances lives were saved. So, we can reason for days about the actions of the west-but until we Africans get our house in order-we should prepare ourselves to deal with these agencies nd NGO's.

bless