Media Presence

So I’ve been doing a lot with the media recently – relatively speaking.  I’ve helped guide two different PR trips organized by the Surinamese government, one similar trip by the US embassy, and I was asked to do a couple of interviews/whatever for Peace Corps.  I know, I’m kind of a big deal.  Like supersized.  Check out the magazine article if you are interested!  It’s a bit melodramatic, but pretty cool.  And the girl pictured in it is the dancer from my village (also the head of the day care center.  Also 19.) http://www.caribbeantravelmag.com/files/_attachments_articles/suriname_article_caribbean_travel_and_life.pdf

I really enjoy that type of work – suddenly you have a group of people that are hanging on your words and you seem really cool and smart and all of that.  Who would have thought?  It’s fun and probably highly useful for the country.  Any little bit of positive exposure to a North American audience which I can encourage is a pretty big thing, especially given how few of my gentle readers had heard of Suriname before I went here.

So PR work is fun, valuable, and you often get free stuff out of it – lunch, cold drinks, pretty Javanese girl’s phone numbers (she’s a model!), etc .  On the other hand, it also feels…just a bit off.  I think guiding people about like I was doing is probably a bit like mining.  It’s necessary if you want to get some good stuff introduced to the wider world and the market, but you know you are losing a bit of yourself and the environment in the process.

Showing people around spends social capital.  I have a lot of it, because building it is basically my job, but still you feel yourself spending it when you walk around a group.  Especially when that group wants to take a million pictures, no matter how respectfully they do it.

When I show outsiders around, I can often help them see and understand so much more than they would otherwise – and the same for the villagers they meet.  At the same time, I feel like I risk being lumped in with those outsiders as someone there to exploit or export.  And I honestly don’t know how I feel about the exploitation piece.

Take that picture of my friend Jacintha (the dancer from that link).  Yes, she was paid for that performance.  More than usual, even.  But tens of thousands of people will see that picture of her, read about her, maybe even see videos of her – and she will never realize any direct benefit from that huge increase in exposure.  That doesn’t seem fair.  Especially for an activity that has so much cultural weight, with elements of sex, religion, and the echoes of ancestors escaping into the trees wrapped up in it.

On the other hand, she may have encouraged those tens of thousands to come to Suriname – people that never would have heard of the country otherwise.  So she and every other cultural performer will very much benefit from that.  It IS exploitative…but that is the point isn’t it?

It’s something I’ve not decided how I feel about yet.  But I do enjoy guiding people around.  Especially if it is just a small group of one or two friends.  So come visit!  There’s still time!