Travel, unfortunately, seldom broadens the mind, writes Hussein Ahmed Amin* "If thou wilt be perfect go sell what thou hast and give to the poor." When Jesus spoke these words he was thinking not just of a better society or of alleviating economic discomfort but rather of the spiritual good of humanity. I was walking in one of Cairo's poorest districts with a British Orientalist when he said something that reminded me of Jesus' words. "I feel sorrier for your rich than your poor," he remarked. "The more I see those symptoms of poverty in your country the more I become inured, less sensitive. It is the same thing with peasants walking barefoot. The soles of their feet harden to the point where thorns and pebbles no longer hurt." What he said is true even if one lives in a prosperous country. Poverty may almost have been eliminated in rich countries but it has not disappeared completely. And even if you live in a rich country you still know about the ordeals faced by the majority in the Third World. Television, newspaper reports, films, books and UN statistics all give a picture of the situation in poor countries. And the mere knowledge of poverty creates a certain responsibility, a responsibility people can only ignore if their feelings are hardened. Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1 million for doing a 30-second nude scene in the film Cleopatra. Now think of all the people who go about naked in India and other parts of the world. How can one reconcile the two? Some people from rich countries are aware of the fact of poverty and they try to do something about it, through donations to charity and relief organisations. Such donations are made out of a sense of responsibility. But, as Tolstoy once said in an angry exchange with Turgenev, it amounts to little more than Sunday charity. The making of a donation does not absolve one from further responsibility, though all too often it provides the donor with an unjustified sense of moral relief. In its fullest sense responsibility calls for active involvement in alleviating the problem, with or without donating cash. And the aim of such involvement -- as Jesus' words suggest -- goes far beyond the redistribution of wealth. The aim is spiritual as much as it is material. I am tempted to say that some of the evil in this world -- the dislike of immigrants common in rich nation, for example -- is the result of a breakdown in communication between the haves and the have-nots. In international terms the inability of the rich to comprehend the plight of the poor has grave consequences. Tourism may be expanding but it does not seem to further communication. The head of the Arab desk of the German Foreign Ministry told me that the more tourism grows and the more the media writes about foreign countries the less nations seem to know about each other. When I was minister plenipotentiary at the Egyptian Embassy in Bonn a German man wrote a letter complaining about something that happened to him during a trip to Egypt. He had gone to the post office in Cairo to send a telegram to his father in Munich who was celebrating his 70th birthday. A very polite employee took down the telegram and promised that it would be delivered. The man was charged LE20 pounds for the service and given a stamped receipt. The man returned to Germany to be greeted by an angry father who thought his son had forgotten his birthday. The telegram had not arrived. The employee in question, for all his politeness, could perhaps have kept the money for himself. The German was demanding the Egyptian Embassy pay back the fee the post office had charged or else, he said, he would lose respect for the Egyptian people and never visit Egypt again. I could not help smiling while reading the letter, for where else could one find a better example of the breakdown in communication among people from different cultures? On one hand is an underpaid Egyptian employee, probably far from venal. Had the telegram been about an accident that happened or some other crisis, with the man requesting help from the father, the employee would have sent it. But it was a telegram about an old man's birthday. And it cost LE20, a sum that could buy enough meat for the employee's family for a week or two. The German was going to leave Egypt soon. He would not discover that the telegram had not been sent until after his return to Germany. And he was unlikely to raise a fuss over LE20, a trivial sum by German standards. On the other hand you have a German for whom it was important to send a birthday telegram to his father and for whom it is unthinkable to pay money for a service and not get it. The German saw the employee as someone who had committed a crime and who should be dismissed or even imprisoned. Perhaps he believed that postal service employees in Egypt were as well paid as their German counterparts. Or maybe this was beside the point. Whatever, he was confident the Egyptian Embassy would sympathise with his letter and be outraged by the incident. Westerners read dozens of books and watch scores of films about China, Iran, Egypt, and other countries. They vacation in these countries. And yet you hear them describe the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a "mystery", Iran's Islamic revolution as "puzzling" and the conduct of Egyptian post office employees as "scandalous". Whatever scandal the German thought he had been party too, though, goes far beyond the conduct of post office employees and will not be resolved by punishing the employee in question. And real communication among nations calls for more than fast planes and comfortable hotels, more than a camel ride around the Pyramid, a guided tour of Taj Mahal, and the writing of postcards from overseas. Tourism is easy; knowledge is hard. Few people in rich countries know how much they are losing by failing to know other nations. As an ancient Arab poet once said, "your riches grow, and so does your ignorance." * The writer is a former ambassador and expert on political and Islamic affairs.
