FINAL THOUGHTS
Faith: One of the last things I wanted to talk about with this play was what conclusions you’ve been coming to around this dam regarding the relationships that these countries have. I found myself so curious about this question of: how do we decide who the earth belongs to? I’m wondering what conclusions you have been drawing from the the interviewing and research you’ve been doing.
Kareem: It’s a great question. I think what surprised me, as I did more and more [research] is that there is a huge divide between the political stance that the countries are taking and the personal belief systems of the people within the countries. That is a really fertile place that I’m going to explore in the play. Because so much of what this conflict seems to be rooted in, which I didn’t know at the beginning, is nothing more than nationalism and pride. It is about saying I am bigger than you. I am more important than you. I am worth more than you, and therefore you can’t have the thing that I have. And how dare you even assume that I would ever share it with you? That is from the political perspective. That’s why this conflict has become so intractable. It’s gotten to the point where if one country capitulates even the slightest bit, they are perceived as weaker than. And in the end, while this is going on, the lived experiences of the people in those two countries are getting worse and worse.
So there is a gulf between what the countries think they have to do to save face versus what is actually in the best interests of their citizens and frankly, of the world as a whole. When you look at the Nile, there’s 15 different countries that are served that [it] flows through, right? And the way that that water supports agriculture and production, that affects the entire world. So, you know, you can look at this one hydroelectric dam in one country that most people haven’t heard of and not have realized the way it affects so many different countries all over the world for so many different people. And this perspective that I gleaned from my research is not something you necessarily get from the research on the page. But when you talk to people who are willing to be unfiltered, what you get is that this is about history and about pride. And within that, there’s also some racism in there, and there’s religious difference in there. There’s a lot in there.
Having that human perspective that I’ve collected from interviews has been really illuminating because it crosses boundaries. I’ve talked to people who are scientists whose expertise absolutely intersects with that. And then I’ve also tried to talk to people who are not scientists at all, who aren’t looking at the problem of water resources from a scientific lens. They’re looking at it from a purely humanistic lens. Being able to combine those various perspectives into play is really exciting to me because that is where the heart of this thing lies. We are talking about something that feels ephemeral. But then there’s also some really hard facts that we can look at that people are frankly just ignoring, because they’re too proud to do that. So that’s been so illuminating and such an exciting thing to discover.
Faith: What facts are people ignoring?
Kareem: Well, creating a clear sense of sharing of resources will basically prevent people in Ethiopia and Sudan and Egypt from facing the harshest consequences of either extreme drought or extreme flood, both of which are are very possible because of climate change. People think of the climate change effect like, oh, there will be less water. And actually it’s totally chaotic. Years where there’s just so much water that [it] creates catastrophic floods. Then there’s other years where it could be total drought. And the only thing the climate scientists know is that they don’t know. They can map and model these things, but there’s still so much chaotic uncertainty.
Better management of this dam and various other dams in the Nile that that require international cooperation between these countries can mitigate the human consequences of either drought or flood. So, we’re talking literally about lives, human lives that would get lost. We’re talking about the livelihood of farmers and people who live in villages along the Nile basin. It’s not rocket science. Literally all the countries have to do is coordinate opening and filling, opening and closing this dam at various points. You know, it’s real. And then you know that neither of them are also being forthcoming about the fact that what’s creating this stress in the system is incredible population growth in both countries that will eventually lead to sort of a breakdown of society.
When people don’t have water, they cannot live. Both of these countries have seen astronomical population growth in the last 30 years, which is causing more water stress as well. And that seems to be something that they don’t want to discuss on an international scale. But at the root of it, I was like, oh, wow, this is about nationalism. You know, the dam in Ethiopia is like a symbol of national pride, right? Like, that’s what I became. It became the sense, like there are jingles about it. There are cartoons about it. People buy these bonds to support the construction of the dam and frame them and put them up in their home, even though the government essentially forced them to buy these bonds. It has become a symbol of a whole country asserting itself on a world scale. And so, you think of this as a public works project, but it’s so much–
Faith Bigger than that.
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