Serving and Learning with Amizade

Anyone who tells you exactly what is happening in Africa is either lying or naïve. The continent is immense, each community is complex, and each day is punctuated with moments of horror, hype, and hope – each pulling in different directions.

There are, and this is unfortunately what people often see with first glances, various shades of horror. These are the physical manifestations of being in a place where life expectancy is just a bit over half what it is in the US. In the Millenium Village we stopped to eat lunch and were quickly surrounded by children with bloated bellies, who happened to be extraordinarily polite about asking for food. We have interviewed some local women through our work with WOMEDA, and we know that husbands hitting wives is the persistent and common reality. Those same women still prefer boys when giving birth, because it still matters for status and familial success.

As a group we are constantly reminded of our wealth in contrast to the region, as we meet children who are good students but unable to afford $10 school fees. We see women and children without choices and outlets. We met a boy who had been first in his class but left school for lack of nominal funding. We see all of this happening even as several organizations do exist to help with school fees, and realize that lack of communications infrastructure and good information flow is a horror in itself. We see husbands treating wives (1st, 2nd, and 3rd) more as servants or machines than as people. We carry water feebly and weakly and realize the constant struggle for it may be a human rights abuse itself. We see children on their lunch breaks from school carrying water for an hour. And we hear of dreams from so many students – to be teachers, to be doctors, to succeed – and realize their odds at achieving their dreams are nearly zero.

And then we see all the solutions promised, all of the hype, just as people in this region see and hear day to day. We see NGOs (nongovernmental organizations = nonprofits in US parlance) promising services without following through. We interview a Muslim woman and learn of a Christian church turning her child away for assistance with school fees. We see microfinance – intended to reach the poorest of the poor – and learn that here it is structured in ways that will barely allow it to trickle into something like the upper middle class. We see imported solutions, vision without sustainability, and see more piling on of much of the same of 60 years of development history. We see governments going for quantity (more students in primary school!) without quality (no trained teachers). We met a young man who says his plan is to marry a white girl and move to the US. We see outsiders trying to come in and say they know and insiders trying to get out and away – and see that both of these efforts lack sustainability for the region’s success.

And finally, by looking carefully enough, by talking and exchanging enough, and by listening, we also understand that this region is actually brimming with energy and hope. Business here, as I wrote about several days ago, moves at a clip. Actually – and moving for a moment from the local to its interaction with the international – Chinese capitalists have realized this. The West still has a claim to much of the influence and resources in West Africa, but Chinese businesses are increasingly present – everywhere – throughout East Africa. In Kayanga a Chinese contractor built the main road. In Bukoba a Chinese factory is the main fish processing plant. In Kampala there is a Chinese community in its own right, and Chinese people and businesses positively populate the East African coast. The Chinese are investing because they see growth potential here, and they are being rewarded: cell phones in nearly every hand, expanding communications networks, busy and persistent efforts at growth, through whatever means.

Hope isn’t just in business efforts though, although I mention it first because it is the thing people often believe is most absent in Africa. Hope is also in children’s dreams in their schools. It is in them working so hard and dreaming so much that they are disciplined in school every day and they are willing to carry water at lunch break. It is in the incredibly welcoming disposition of people here, glad to have guests and share and invite others to share in their rich and deeply connected communities.

Hope exists in the women who are excited to answer questions about women’s rights, who want to share their stories, who wish to be interviewed for the radio – so that others may hear and learn about women’s rights. Hope is in the radio – locally developed news for the first time in regional history, through our community partner FADECO Radio. One woman we interviewed said, “I can see a bright future for women,” and along with her friends expressed energy for and belief in the steady march of increasing women’s rights and recognition.

Hope is in the people who are here to stay, who have committed to working with local assets and local perspectives to promote a kind of development that expands people’s options and gives them choices as to how they will live. Hope is therefore in our community partners at FADECO and WOMEDA, led by two individuals who are from the area, understand the area, have opportunities to work elsewhere, and commit to development here.

That is why we work as we do, with whom we do. We do not merely see horror and we do not wish to merely be outsider hype. We work to support what is already happening, what is already effective, on the ground and because of community partners here. Thanks to our partnership with WOMEDA and due to cooperation from many individuals in Morgantown, WV and WVU’s Center for Civic Engagement, we have been able to raise funding for home water harvesting systems for three women. And thanks to our work with Pittsburgh Cares and cooperation from many Pittsburgh, PA regional high schools, we’ve been able to raise the money necessary to support FADECO’s efforts to have a large water tank at its Eden Center for Appropriate Technology, where local farmers learn improved farming techniques and local women have access to vocational training classes. With that kind of continuous cooperation from our communities in the US, our community partners here are better able to press forward with expanding sustainable development and promoting women's rights.

Thanks for the comments! My access to the internet is much more limited than might seem to be the case. I'll respond as soon as possible, but may not be able to do so until after returning to the states in mid-August.

Wednesday we carried water. We carried the same volume that local women and children carry, up the same slopes and on the same trails, and we were floored. One of the students, 6'1'', 240 pound Chris Drescher, Adventure West Virginia leader, high school football captain and, as is he is commonly called by kids here, 'big man', had as much trouble as anyone else. He took breaks, he took turns, he sweated, grew tired, and complained about aches – as we all did, and all the while a local woman steadily moved up the mountain, 5 gallons of water balanced on her head.

We were gathering the water to help the local masons with cement mixing. The cement is to finish the outside of the cement Water Tank at the Eden Center. (The plastic tanks we purchased the other day were for local women's houses). The local masons buy bags of cement, then mix the cement with sand to make the mixture go farther. On the inside of the tank they mixed at a ratio of 3 parts sand, 1 part cement, but on the outside where we're working now they mix at 5:1. The water comes from the valley behind the Eden Center.

As we walked down to fetch it we could see trails coming down from each of the nearby hills, converging on this point, and there were women and children coming and going. We did see one young man. He was carrying one can on his head with another tied to his back (this is twice the amount any one of us carried). Joseph suggested he was probably going to sell it, as men more commonly gather water to sell, while women and children gather it for familial use. I do know that the people one regularly sees getting water are women and children.

The cement mix came from a hardware store in Bukoba. But the sand was another story. At the Eden Center, over time, Joseph has had people dig down through sandstone. The sandstone is then steadily broken into pieces. We used a piece of wire mesh to sift the sand from the remaining bits of stone and then we carried the sand over to the mixing area.

After that – and unexpectedly – we went directly to Joseph's neighbor's wedding. The couple had been together for many years and had nine children. They were excited to make it official. They welcomed us, offered sodas and beers, and we danced. There were plastic chairs set out under tarps. The dance floor was straw. The music system was essentially a boom box reminiscent of the 1980s, and it was running off of a car battery.

One of the tarps over our heads had UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees) printed on it, signifying two things. First, we are close enough to Rwanda here that there were tens of thousands of refugees in the area following the 1994 genocide there. Second, materials in Africa get reused. Scarcity discourages waste.

I have a geographer friend who has done research in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He once pointed out how quickly things change in developing countries, how he has occasionally lost guides or interpreters to better opportunities, and how he really couldn't blame them for that. Since I first came here three years ago, cell phone networks have developed, the first ATM machine has been added to Kayanga Town, the town's first two radio stations have started, and the first large cement-and-stone water tank has been built in place of the small water line and hand pump that burst last year. Not only do things change quickly, doing any business is a constant effort to find the right resources, negotiate, cajole, improvise, and cooperate. Yesterday was another lesson on the pace of business in the Karagwe Region.

The day started with difficulty. One of our community partners, the director of FADECO (Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation), Joseph Sekiku, couldn't find the local mason who was to lead the students on the construction of the water tank at FADECO's Eden Center for Appropriate Technology. Joseph and I had planned to go together to Bukoba in any case, where we would buy additional materials for water harvesting systems for the homes of women identified by our other community partner, WOMEDA (Women's Emancipation and Development Agency), led by Juma Massisi.

I set about finding Mr. Bonaface, a teacher we had worked with last year who had approached me on the street the day before. He was hoping the students could return to his school for a bit of English conversation time with the students there. And this group of university students has a particularly strong interest in working with children, so they were anxious for that. We made the connection with Mr. Bonaface and the group went with our class facilitator Brandon Cohen to spend the day at Ndama Secondary School. After Joseph and I dropped them there we picked up a smaller car at his house, finished changing the tire and replacing the spare (a constant concern with the state of roads) and left for Bukoba, two hours away.

Our first visit was to immigration. There had been some disagreement over the costs of our visas at the rural border. The officer was a friend of Joseph's so we left the passports there for processing.

We then attempted the main hardware store in town. It was closed. A passerby who knew Joseph reflected the constant presence of stereotypes around the world, offering that the place was closed because, "That's the problem with working with Indians, they take long lunches." We drove up the street to another hardware store, actually run by another Indian merchant, which was open. We priced the water tanks – a bit over $250 for 1000 liters, a bit over $300 for 2000 liters, and a bit over $400 for 3000 liters. But there were no 3000 liter tanks in stock, and in any case the shop could not provide transport for the other tanks, and suggested we hire a truck. At some point in a series of phone calls about a truck Joseph discovered a truck already en route, shipping tanks from Mwanza to the Karagwe Region. Without other transportation alternatives, we offered to buy the tanks off of the moving truck, so long as it would deliver them. The driver agreed over the phone. We would add a bit over $100 to the price of each tank to make this happen. As I may have mentioned, the roads are rough and gas is over $6 a gallon here. Actually the day following this we had to fix a flat on the van we use.

As we conversed with the truck driver we also went into the small grocery store next door. In Bukoba it's possible to buy cheese, various kinds of candies and 'sausages' (basically hot dogs), but those things are not readily available in Kayanga. Joseph was buying some sausages when a tall mzungu (white person) walked in and started asking the merchant (also Indian) questions about the regional coffee traders. He said he was working with the World Bank and was hoping to do a study about regional coffee, and he had heard a rumor that it was largely controlled by Indian merchants. It turns out he is finishing a PhD in Economics at Cornell, and is interested in learning more about the structure of incentives in the local coffee market.

Joseph was excited to talk with him, because Joseph is currently quite upset that the local coffee cooperative and Tanzanian government offer growers a lower rate for their beans than what they can get if they would sell in Uganda. There are coffee checkpoints all along the road, preventing growers from selling to the north. Tanzania wants them to sell and export from within Tanzania because it increases the country's intake of foreign currency. But Ugandan buyers are willing to offer a higher rate, so there is currently a coffee smuggling problem in the region, complete with police confiscation and smuggling bags of coffee at night by bicycle and motorcycle.

We returned to the hardware store next door, having worked out the water tanks issue. And we purchased all of the pieces of aluminum gutter this store had – 31 pieces. That would be just enough for our cooperative efforts with FADECO and WOMEDA. We are constructing basically rain-water based harvesting systems, ensuring that all of the water that falls on the house during rainy season may be collected for use during the remainder of the year. We stuffed the two meter gutter pieces cross-ways in the cabin of the car, giving me a seat in the back. Then Joseph found an air conditioner man.

Joseph and FADECO developed the first radio station to exist in the Karagwe region. It turns out that in Tanzania the government requires an air conditioner in the radio equipment room in order to get full permission or government certification. Joseph had attempted to fix the air condition unit himself, but to no avail. We found the air conditioner man and Joseph convinced him to come with us. He got into the car with a screw driver and a wrench. They communicated in Swahili. We drove across town, dropping him off along the way. We met briefly with the Regional Chief of Internal Security. We picked up the repairman. He had two compression tanks and some copper piping. We again drove across town, dropping him along the way. We met the immigration officer at a gas station. He had our passports, all stamped and ready. When we returned to the air conditioner man he had a power drill and complete tool set.

While we rode around town Joseph mentioned to me that he expected the man to work hard because he was a Ugandan. We drove the two hours back to Kayanga. We had gotten our passports processed, located water tanks on a moving truck and purchased them, bought all the aluminum gutters a store had to offer, met with an economics PhD working with The Bank, made a courtesy call to the Regional Chief of Internal Security, hired an air conditioner man away from his job for 24 hours, and found all the tools he needed to complete his work.

Joseph and the Ugandan worked through the night on the air conditioner installation. It was working when I visited FADECO's office the next morning.

Friday we set out for Mbarara from the capital city of Kampala. Mbarara is the second-largest city in Uganda, and we therefore had paved roads the whole way from the capital. They were two lanes and filled with pedestrians, bicycles piled with bananas and other freight, and cars passing vans and trucks in opposing traffic. The air was comfortable and mild, and we made steady progress southwest throughout the day, stopping only at the Equator and later for lunch at Masaka, where everyone who ordered fish received it whole with head, scales, and tail, as is the regional custom to prove its freshness.

In Mbarara we stayed out Hotel Classico, where we had a brief dinnertime visit from a representative of the United Nations Development Program, stopping by to say hello in anticipation of our visit to their offices and to Ruhira the following day. In the morning we went to those offices immediately after breakfast, meeting with the Water Facilitator for the project, the Administrative Assistant, and several others who happened by. The Water Facilitator, Raymond, was from the opposite side of Uganda, but had applied for and taken the job because he thought it a good opportunity. An engineer by training, he had previously worked with a diamond mining operation in Botswana. Raymond was full of smiles, a sharp dresser and clear communicator, and he remains the only person we’ve met in this region so far who is a supporter of John McCain in the upcoming US election.

At the UN Offices we learned a bit more about the Millennium Villages we’d been reading about, and about this village in particular. The initiative springs from Jeffrey Sachs’ arguments that intensive and holistic development has never really been attempted. A great deal of money has been spent, but often (1) for strategic rather than humanitarian reasons, (2) in ways that supported governments and not people, and (3) in ways that attempted progress without looking at the whole system. There are many examples of each of these points, but for the moment I’ll just further develop the last one. In the past there have been many interventions to improve education, but without improvements in water quality children either get sick or can’t take the time out of fetching water to attend school. A water system intervention, without education, may create a situation where people begin to have infrastructure, but do not have the technical background to maintain it or do not have the knowledge to manage its volume over the year, so that water remains during the dry season. The Millennium Villages, by investing only $110 per person per year in holistic development, address hunger, water access, health, education, environmental stabilization and preservation, market access for enterprise development, and energy access.

Shortly after leaving Mbarara we were on dirt road, then rutted, then remote, rutted, and rapidly ascending a mountain. As is often the case, its remoteness was accentuated due to the state of infrastructure. It was only about 60 kilometers (roughly 37 miles) away from Mbarara, but the roads were severe, the electricity grid did not run out to the village, and few people had access to motorized transport to carry them, if needed, into Mbarara. It took us a bit over an hour to get there, and we were covered in a thick layer of dust when we arrived.

As we entered Ruhira we first visited the school. There were water harvesting systems for each building, each of the buildings had been updated, and there was a satellite internet connection via the UN’s Mbarara office. We talked with the local teacher, Mr. John, who was assigned to work in the village this past September. He said for him the main differences in working there as opposed to other schools where he had taught within the Uganda Public System previously were that the internet link greatly improved access to information about any topic, the windows and doors were updated and worked, the students and he had access to water and were able to concentrate on learning, and he had to work harder because – with all this outside investment and effort – students and families were asking for classes on Saturdays to take full advantage of their situation.

From the school we drove into the town center, where the first thing I noticed was the litter – or the lack of it. We were stopping at the village office to meet the local UN Coordinator, Elly, and in town there was very little trash strewn about, a common site in much of the developing world. Here (in the shadow of the British) the word for awareness-raising is sensitization. I asked Elly if there had been a good deal of sensitization around rubbish and he confirmed there had been.

Currently there are 78 Millennium Villages in 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. They were chosen based on three criteria: (1) located in a hunger spot (at least 20% of children under 5 were underweight), (2) located in a relatively well-governed country, and (3) located in one of 12 distinct agro-ecological zones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Intervention in Ruhira began in 2005. Of the $110 spent per-person per-year, $10 is provided by village members, $30 by local and national governments, and $70 by donors and other nongovernmental organizations. About 5,500 people live in Ruhira, so over $600,000 is invested in this village during every year of this effort. The first burning question for this and other Millennium Villages is whether the intervention is enough of a catalyst and empowerment experience that the improvements in health, education, crop yield and overall quality of life will continue after the funding is no longer available.

The second burning question is that of community ownership. It is hard from our brief experience to understand the extent to which local people and local leaders feel ownership over the project and are part of designing strategies to sustain the efforts after funding disappears in a few years. At the health center we did meet an extraordinarily informative nurse midwife who was from the region. Elly was local, as we was the UNDP Admin Assistant we met at the office. This question of local or distant ownership and initiative is at the heart of the disagreements between Sachs and another Professor of Economics whose book we reviewed for this class, William Easterly. Easterly is staunchly opposed to anything approaching top-down development interventions. After a career spent working with the World Bank and other development interventions, he is a proponent of supporting the searchers in each community. For Easterly the planners are the top-down intervention-oriented individuals, while the searchers are the individuals who are looking for local solutions to pressing problems on the ground. Searchers make efforts based on locally available resources, while planners bring resources from the outside.

The Millennium Village was inspiring in many ways and it will come up in our discussion for the rest of the trip I’m sure. But for the moment we’re heading on to Kayanga, where we partner with several searchers on the ground.