Review: It's Not About Me by Sally Hetherington

Like a lot of young people, Sally Hetherington wanted to make a difference. And so, at age 25, she bought a one-way ticket to Cambodia, a country that she had previously visited and loved, where she hoped that she could help the locals. What she soon learned, however, was that travelling overseas with good intentions, wasn't enough. Many of the local programmes suffered through disempowered staff and an extremely unhealthy white savour syndrome. And so, Sally found a way to make a real difference--by developing a community centre, The Human and Hope Association, with the locals that could be run by the local people. The goal was to make herself redundant to the programme. And after a few years, during which she got to know many of the local people and to understand the local politics and culture, she did exactly that. It's Not About Me tells the story of her time there. 

Reading this book was one heck of an education. I'd always been wary of programmes where Australians volunteer overseas for a brief time, though I had no idea why. Surely helping others is less fortunate is a good thing. This book explains exactly why volunteerism isn't a solution, and why those in third world countries need to be empowered to help themselves. I was also interested to read more about the politics and culture of Cambodia.

Overall, this is an excellent read. 

Postscript: Sally Heatherington was awarded an OAM on June 11 for her work with the Human and Hope Association.

If you would like to make a donation to the Human and Hope Association, you can do so here: http://www.humanandhopeassociation.org/donate/

Thank you to the author for my copy of It's Not About Me.

This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Challenge 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more