Rwandatales

How to become instantly popular

2007-10-30T12:55:00.000+02:00

I'm running a project which involves hiring some smart but not necessarily experieneced people for temporary work, on what I consider to be a vastly over-paid daily rate.

Untill you have this kind of power, the power to engage people and pay them...you never know just how many friends you have. Suddenly everyone you know at work is being very nice to you. And by the way, do you have a job for their brother/sister/cousin ?

Fair enough I suppose but today this rather odious character hounded me...actually followed me out of the buidling. Last week sometime, my collegue A introduced me the odious character. As I was on sick leave at a critical juncture in the project, A helped out with a lot of the hiring. This guy's sister is on the wait list of people who could be hired if a position came up. Clearly A had had enough of the guy hounding him and since it was my project, passed him on to me.

I'm quite tired today and had my mind on other things (like sneaking off to somewhere will a good net connection so I could chat with the bf) and this guy just wants to annoy me about how I should hire his sister, how she has been recommended by the Rector, how she needs a job (her and couple of million other Rwandans), and how I should help him out cause we are collegues in KIST (he works in some satelite centre upcountry). I so do not want to deal with this guy. To top it all, he follows me into the office to "greet" the director of my unit, a move clearly intended to intimidate me. I'm tempted not to hire the girl cause he was such a pain in the ass!

Itangazo: Rwandatales has a little sister!

2007-10-24T12:06:00.000+02:00

I am currently writing on my new blog
Postcards from the Edge

Its more of a bloggy blog than Rwandatales, which I've tried to keep as a series of article style postings. I will keep posting here on various issue but if you've ever wondered what my day to day life is like here, then Postcards is the place to be!

“A day late and a dollar short”

2007-09-14T15:24:00.002+02:00

Friday, we’re back on generator power but the internet seems to have disappeared. But I’m not worried about that, because my mood has crashed and with it my motivation.

I have a fairly complex project to manage this month and I’m not doing anything. I’ve spent the last two weeks in work avoidance mode. Now, much of my gripes at work centre around having not much to do, or at least not much interesting work. So here I am with an interesting project, one which will let me feel like I’ve achieved something this year and I’m a lame duck. I conceived it, I developed it, I was instrumental in getting the funds to support it but when it comes to the implementation I’m nowhere. I wish that the project had got this far while I still had the energy to run it.

How have I got myself to this point? Well, here’s a brief narrative of the whole sorry affair, which I think is indicative of projects in this neck of the woods.

Early 2006:
In the beginning of 2006, I was asked along to a few meetings of the “then quite active, now defunct” ICT in Education committee to give inputs on spreading internet access in schools. The “then quite popular, now completely out of favour with GoR” Internet provider which was in discussions to provide said access, mentioned when they provided internet it would be up to the schools (or the ministry) to make sure they could use it properly, in terms of having trained teachers & technicians, adequate LAN infrastructure and such essentials as physical space of computer and electricity. This presented a whole load of interesting questions on which schools had what facilities, on their eReadiness.

One definition of creativity is the process by which a problem is turned into an opportunity, or so I claimed on my Berkely MBA application (they still didn’t accept me, the bastards). So I developed a little project for my university to conduct a schools eReadiness survey using final year students and/or recent grads. The idea was that as well as in inventory of IT equipment and general eReadiness, we’d also do a bit of Monitoring and Evaluation on the computers already deployed, as well as giving the students so real world experience and (if they were entrepreneurial enough) introducing them a potential customer base for their skills. And I could feel like I’d done something worthwhile, given that the report could also be used a basis for policy development and expenditure prioritisation.

Summer 2006 :
So the project plan was written initially Feb 2006 and presented to the Ministry in April. They agreed it was a good idea and much needed but said that due to procurement procedures it would be impossible to simple “hire” us like that, there would have to be a tender process. And of course they didn’t have a budget for it anyway, so the idea was shelved for the summer. Around the end of the summer I was approached by a private sector IT player with an offer to fund the survey phase of my project, via the university’s links with said IT player. All looked well but since promises are not cold, hard cash I didn’t move on it.

November 2006: We were asked for an invoice for the project in a real, big hurry and as a result of this I screw up the invoice amount. Even though I catch the error in less than 72hrs its too late although the Funder does suggest initial funds would be dispatched as long as I started using the first sum (this is because of the Absorption Capacity problem). Around this time an International NGO approach the Ministry offering to help with my little project. At this time I also tell the Funder to contact the Ministry to tell them they will support the survey with us as implementers. From a protocol point of view, we cannot inform them because they are our parent ministry.

Jan-April 2007: During this time there some to-ing and fro-ing between myself and the Funder and some unsuccessful attempts on my side to get senior management and the ICT people in the university involved in the project. Now that we are getting funds I will need help for the implementation, esp since my job has changed and I’m no longer with the ICT Centre.

May 2007 : The money for the survey arrives our account and we go see the Ministry about getting their blessing and support to implement. We cannot visit the schools nor are we likely to get cooperation from Headmasters without an official letter from the Ministry. We are told the Ministry cannot help us as they have not been officially informed of the Funder’s support. I thought this had all been taken care of in November, and now I’m exactly where I don’t want to be…in the middle of a political wrangle with some people’s noses out of joint. I give up on it for some months.

July- Mid Aug 2007: The NGO steps into the picture again to offer some much needed intervention in terms of back up on the survey development and as intermediaries between us and ministry – this is particularly urgent now as I may be leaving Rwanda in September. Starting the project appears to be more intractable than middle east politics. The Ministry have now been informed by the Funders and while we have been waiting for the written go-ahead from them, they then turn around and say that, in fact, they need a letter from us requesting a letter from them. Arrgh! I again get disheartened and try to ignore the project hoping I’ll be out of Rwanda before the pressure comes to implement.

Mid Aug- Present: I’m not leaving till Jan, so it looks like I have to deal with the project since, quite unfathomably, the university and ministry senior management seem to now be a big hurry to implement. I know the university is nervous about the Funders money being on our account for so long without being used. A chance meeting with the Funder’s representative shows that he also is getting pressure from above to show results from the donation by mid October. Le shit is hitting the proverbial fan. And I feel like I’m in a weird East African version of “Brewsters Millions”, having a considerable sum to shift through public coffers in an incredibly short time.

So I assemble a project team(not as easy as it sounds), send everyone the documents, inform them the timescales are tight and call a meeting. To which only the Ministry representative shows up, and he’s driven across town to get to us. Bleuch! I feel like giving up completely. Or not. I want to do this, I want to do something concrete and at the same time I want it as far away from me as possible. Its all a day late and a dollar short (actually several thousands but those counting?) and I wish to high heaven, I’d been able to get the project to this point sometime last year, when I was still enthusiastic about it.

Cultural Toxic Shock Syndrome

2007-08-28T16:39:00.000+02:00

Cultural Toxic Shock Syndrome: A condition arising out of operating in an alien culture over a long period of time, well after cultural adaptation has taken place, where anger and frustrations at the differences in operation start to turn inwards. At this point the cultural environment has, like a bacterial infection, become toxic to the subject.

It is around 19:00 and well after sundown when I leave the office. I walk to the gate of the institute and flag down a motorbike taxi, my preferred method of transport for the past few years. A few minutes in to the journey he asks me in French, if I can speak Swahili. I tell him no and he tells me in hesitant French that he doesn’t speak the language. This moto guy is now becoming a metaphor for why I must leave Rwanda. He hasn’t even bothered to ask if I speak Kinyarwanda he has already assumed that I don’t, in the same way later he will assume I live in the area of my neighbourhood with the fancy houses and the embassy residences. He then asks me if I’m a student at the university. Again he has assumed, I am white and taking a moto and therefore I cannot be staff. A keen anger rises in me against this stranger who is giving me a ride across town my home. I want to lash out, punch something or go home and cry or just pack my bags and leave. All these feelings some at once and its been happening far too often recently.

I walk on the streets and I cannot stand feeling the judgements people are making about me as they walk past. You may wonder if this is paranoia…I wish I had the luxury of giving myself that option, but when people come and ask you for money, assume to don’t speak any of the language, start to tell you their life story in full expectation that you’ll care and want to do something about it, refer to you by the generic mzungu even though you’ve been working with them for a year, you have little recourse to telling yourself that its all in your head. With every one of these interactions my individuality is stripped away by other people’s assumptions of what I am. And I feel diminished as a person, dehumanised. Maybe I should be stronger; maybe if I was I wouldn’t be so affected by other people’s judgements. But whatever of that strength I had in me when I got here has long been drained. Now I feel somewhat like a sponge soaking up all these assumptions, these most invisible of put downs and yet at the same time raging against the insult wanting to battle out my frustrations.

What’s even more annoying is that the moto guy has not registered that when I approached him, I spoke to him in Kinyarwanda. Its so out of what he expects me to do that even though his ears have heard the words from my mouth, his brain has failed to register that I’m literally speaking his language. I’m so incensed by his assumptions that I don’t bother to tell him that I do speak Kinyarwanda. Its different, it’s so different from what he expects and so it has been blanked out. Someone once told me, or maybe I read it in a book, that one of the defining characteristics of Rwanda is the inability to deal with difference. It’s true that it permeates everything here…that cultural awareness that you must not stick out, you must not go against the grain, you must preserve the consensus. I stick out and it seems I must be told this one way or another, every single day.

I used to get angry at the frustrations here and it would be obvious that I was angry. I’d argue with people and get mad. So much song and dance just for something simple, like getting a bill paid or a wage cheque or getting someone in authority to sign a letter. So much energy for so little output. Now I don’t shout so much, but the anger is there and with nowhere to go it turns inside and makes you feel like you’re tearing at yourself.

And then there’s the men. The god-damn, stupid, mother-fucking men. From the moto guy who asks quite pointedly if I’m married, Why the fuck do you want to know asshole? You really think lack of a ring gives you a licence to try it on?, to the guy whose a friend of a friend who asks for my phone number, No I don’t want to give it to you, in fact I don’t ever want to see you again but I can’t afford to offend you yet until I find out who you’re related to, to the newspaper editor type who texts me to say I really turned him on, Oh, you thought it was cute that a woman could have an opinion eh?, to the Minister who concludes a conversation where he is giving me hassle over project delays he was instrumental in creating, by obviously flirting with me, Why don’t I come to visit you? Cause you’re a crinkly, pompous old rag and if I didn’t have to operate in this town I’d gladly stab you in the hand with my cocktail fucking fork. Honestly, it’s at points like these that I feel like the strung out junkie chick in that scene with her therapist in “Requiem for a Dream”. But like her, I’m just smiling my way through as the cold rage builds and poisons my system.

I’m going back to somewhere I don’t have to fight the gender wars and I don’t have to struggle to be treated normally. And I don't feel like being violent towards most people, most of the time. This place has become toxic and often I feel like I’m hovering on the edge. I don’t want to be this sensitive, I hate that every little thing affects me, I feel like I’m being crushed. Its time to leave. Seriously.

The Polyamorous Paradigm for an increasingly mobile world?

2007-07-06T17:31:00.000+02:00

Polyamory (from poly=multiple + amor=love) is the desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. Polyamorous perspectives differ from monogamous perspectives, in that they respect a partner's wish to have second or further meaningful relationships and to accommodate these alongside their existing relationships.

I haven’t seen the man I love for over 6 months. The likelihood is that we will never live together in the traditional sense, well not for many years in any case. Its not what I would choose if I had the choice but its something I am coming to terms with slowly. Maybe its my history in the research community but many of my friends spend most of their time on a different continent from the person they love. As the world gets more mobile, the need to have an interesting and fulfilling work life will make more and more of us used to be being on our own, in one way or another. Researchers and other global players are disconnected and mobile…how does this affect our intimate relationships?

I first picked up the concept of polyamory from a friend in Switzerland who was happily telling me that his new girlfriend was fully polyamorous, and by the way would I like to go to dinner with him. I became intrigued with the idea that a person could be in love with two (or more) people at the same time and that all could live together in an open and honest relationship and I did some research. There are a few community sites for people living in polyamorous relationships and even families. Many poly families cited the advantages to child rearing of have a bigger pool of wages earners and adult “energy” as one of the biggest advantages of their way of life. It harps back to an earlier concept of community upbringing for children. However polyamory is not to be confused with polygamy, the swinger scene or even with extra-marital affairs, and there are various types of polyamory involving various numbers of partners who may or may be sexually involved with other members. For example in the simplest case of 3 people, there is a poly-V, where two people are sexually involved with the third but not with each other. And there is a poly-tri where all three are sexually involved with each other. In fact poly-people don’t even frame their definitions in terms of sexual contact, they might simply state one relationship pair is closer than another, as 3 people are very much involved in each others lives regardless of sleeping arrangements.

Two interesting things struck me from the various stories of poly relationships which I found on the Internet. Naturally, there was a period of readjustment and jealousy and breaks-ups involved in most stories before they could settle and play happy families. However, in almost all cases, particularly when all 3 people in the relationship are heterosexual, I found that there was a first relationship and a period of geographic separation which allowed the third person to become close to one of the partners in the first relationship. Perhaps without the separation its quite difficult for most of us to have the “space” to develop deep feelings for a person outside of our relationship. Its face it, intimate relationships take up a lot of CPU time…if we are serious about someone it takes up our time, our emotional energy and our brainspace.

Not that this is a bad thing, just that for another meaningful relationship to appear, one which is not replacing or in any way subordinate or superior to the relationship we are already in, there needs to be some degree of separation. They way we are living our lives today, more and more people are mobile and this will allow or force separation on otherwise loving couples. Many of the contributors to polyamory discussions also cite a love of community, of sharing living beyond the nuclear family as both an unexpected advantage to polyamory and as a large draw to the arrangement. Mobility and the general culture of the individual found in many developed countries, tend to place people in situations where families are not close. But we are still social animals and this will drive us to create that sense of community in new ways.

So I wonder, as our lives are increasingly mobile and spending a lot of time away, or chunks of time away from our partners becomes the norm – will the separation, the need for individual fulfilment and the search for community edge polyamory towards the mainstream?

Pigeonholing and the problem of vertical job markets

2007-06-29T15:59:00.000+02:00

How can being refused a job that you didn’t really want in the first place, make you depressed?

Well, when you’re me, pretty much anything related to career has the potential to bring you down. I’ve never been very good at such things and although people have always told me I have a lot of potential, it never materialises into anything I would recognise as career success. And I’m getting a bit for potential – people want to see progress.

For some time now I’ve thought I was somehow caught in a catch 22. I don’t have enough experience to get contracts as an independent in Africa. So I need to return to Europe and get some experience. Except that in Europe by my age, employers expect to see 10 years experience in a very narrow field of application, for instance in testing of software for medical applications. What I have is breath but not depth. This works in Africa and to a greater extent in US/North America because those job markets are set up to put value in transferable skills – there is an attitude that if you can run a public sector insurance company, you can probably make a good stab at running a plumbing company. The European job market is more cautious and places emphasis on domain expertise.

And whats the definition of an expert? Someone who knows more and more about less and less. I’ve figured out that I’m the kind of person that gets bored as soon as I get comfortable. As soon as I get a grip on how something works, I like to move on. I’m with another friend of mine who responds to the question “what can you do?” with “What is it you need done?”. I’ve enjoyed the times in my professional career where I get to look at something (a business, an organisation, a team, a project) figure out where the problems are and suggest ways to get around them. It’s the kind of thing that business consultants do most of the time….and you can probably bank on those skills in an African or North American context where being a generalist is valued. Unfortunatly, I need to go back to the developed world for a while, for professional development and for my own sanity. And I don’t have rights to work in North America (H1-B’s being rarer than hen’s teeth these days). So, I’m kinda stuck with where I can legally find work –Europe, where its not so easy to be 10 years are graduation and selling general skills.

But never mind, I thought I’d give it a go and asked an old college buddy in consulting where I should be looking for opportunities. I applied to one of the “Big 5” consulting companies based in Ireland. Not that I was particular about returning to the Ould Sod, but the firm were in the middle of a recruitment drive. That was a few months ago and after finally having a very detailed telephone interview, I got the feedback earlier this week. I was rejected on the basis of not having enough commercial experience in implementing IT systems, and while they recognised I had a willingness to learn, they advised me to reapply when I got more experience (presumably from a less picky company!). Then the HR person told me that the manager who interviewed me said I would be great for an NGO role.

God how depressing! He probably thought that was encouragement…I had experience, I had worked in Africa ergo I must be suitable for NGO work – case closed. Despite the fact that all of my experience in Africa has been working for Government not Non Governmental Organisations. Despite the fact that I don’t have qualifications or major background in International Development or any desire to work with NGOs – much work in international organisations, certainly in the UN, is glorified administration. It was good to have exposure to that but I need something new, something else. But I had been pigeonholed, and most inaccurately so. I could see I was going to get that problem in most places I tried to gain employment in Europe. There was nothing for it – if I wanted to progress, I would have to retrain…again….10 years after I left University with an MSc. I just had to hope I wasn’t going backwards.

The Rwandatales Recommendations for Visiting the Gorillas

2007-06-12T12:32:00.000+02:00

Some stuff to Consider

- Gorillas are further down the mountain in the rainy season, so if you’re not interested in the hiking try to go then BUT the trails are slippery and treacherous in the wet season.

- The rainy season brings bamboo which makes them more playful BUT Gorillas hate the rain, so when it rains they tend to just sit there and do nothing, so try to get a day when its not actually raining. This is very tricky cause you usually need to buy your permit well in advance.

- You may not get a choice of the group your going to visit but if you do, be aware the more famous one, Susa, is also the longest trek. Some people have trekked for over 5 hours to see them in the dry season!

- REMEMBER that under 16’s are not allowed to visit the gorillas, this is strictly enforced and ORTPN (the tourist authority) will not give refunds on permits for any reason.

- Pick a group that suits your fitness level and remember that bigger numbers don’t always mean a better visit. My group had only 8 members.

- Mine was a very good visit, but be prepared for the fact that the Gorillas might not do anything much or, in rare cases, you might not find them at all. A lady on my trek said they slogged for hours and saw only 3 gorillas sitting in the rain and not moving.

- STOP TAKING PHOTOS at a certain point. Many lower end “point and click” digi cams don’t take good pics without a flash anyway and you should take some time to relax and watch the gorillas without spending all your time clicking.

- Do what the guide says, when he says it – seriously! And don’t forget to make sure you’re not blocking others when viewing or taking pics.

- It’s possible to go there and back in one day from Kigali. I left at 04:30 and got back at 15:00, which included about an hour of messing around at the Park HQ and Ruhengeri, however my trek was very short. You can go with a tour for about 100USD per person (transport in 4x4 and lunch) or just hire a car and driver for a little less. This is a better option if you have people to split costs with.

- There are two places to stay near the park HQ at Kinigi but you still need transport to get you to the HQ and to get from HQ to the trail head. This transport will usually come from Ruhengeri anyway, so there’s no advantage to staying in Kinigi from that point of view.

- Don’t plan on doing much the night after your Gorilla visit, you’ll be tired!

The Inevitable Gorilla Posting

2007-05-29T16:28:00.000+02:00

Well, I guess it had to happen sometime but it took an impending price hike to finally motivate me to see the Gorillas for the first time, over 3 years after I arrived in Rwanda! There were some practical reasons for my procrastination…my visa and working permit, which allow me to get residents rates on the Gorilla visit, go into a 2-3 month renewal cycle every year during which I don’t have a valid work permit and can’t get the cheaper rates ($175 USD instead of $375). And then when I had the permit, no one I knew was going to see them. Being without a car and unable to drive (I’ve never learned), I was holding out hoping to hitch a ride with someone sometime, it just never happened. So, at the 11^th hour, being that the Gorilla visit price is going up to $500 USD for non residents and, I think, $250-300 USD for residents on the 1^st June, I made it up to Volcanoes National Park to see the beasts on Sunday.

Strangely enough the guide on our trip was trying to sell the line that the price increase was in order to have less people visiting the gorillas and hence help conservation. But after some questioning, he admitted that the same number permits would still be available after the price hike. Surely if the rationale of wanting less visitors would require that less permits were available at a higher price, rather than simply hoping a price increase would “put people off”? The economics are not right because when you have a monopoly (ie Mountain Gorillas), it is the provider that set the price. It’s more likely a move in line with Rwanda’s policy of pricing all but the very rich out of its tourist market. The government want low volume, high end tourism all the way. I do worry about how this will affect (ie worsen) the already strange relationship/opinon that most Rwandese have with foreigners (both visitors and residents). Especially in areas like Ruhengeri, around the Gorillas, where foreigners are see as a licence to print money and some cycling enthasit friends had rocks thrown at them by children, who also tried to pull them off their bikes! But I digress…the post is about Gorillas, not the future of tourism in Rwanda.

We’d had a rather successful BBQ on Saturday at a friend’s house and, after surviving a run in with the neighbourhood police at my house (more on that in another posting) I engaged in some serious wine consumption. Before I knew it, it was after midnight and I’d just left some friends at Cadillac nightclub, having decided that with less than 4 hours of possible sleep it was time to call it a night. It seemed like 10 minutes later, my alarm went and Robert, the car hire guy was outside my window. We picked up Gunther, a German intern working for Maurice (a regular commenter on this site), who was also taking advantage of the last weekend of cut price primates, and left Kigali around 04:30.

We made it to the park head quarters at 06:45, just in time for the 07:00 reporting time. Of course I knew there was no way we’d get under way before 08:00, as there needed to be sufficient time for the mandatory faff around involved in allocating the various visitors to the 7 groups of Gorillas, but at least there was tea and coffee on offer. There was quite a crowd as it seemed all permits were sold out for the day…this usually happens on weekends and in high season. We were asked to show our permit to the man behind the desk but it later occurred to me that none of the guides or people organising the visitors outside the office asked to see my permit receipt. I wonder if I couldn’t have see the Gorillas for free! I wanted to see the Sabinyo group, although I couldn’t remember why this group had stuck in my head I knew it was smaller than other groups but had more “children” gorillas and tended to be active. There was a guy allocating people to groups who initially wanted me and Gunther to join a different group but I figured if we just lurked around the Sabinyo guide and visitor group, he would eventually give in…and it worked.

Thankfully just as the trek was about to start, my stomach settled down. It looked for a while like my overactive guts were going to be a problem…my intestines have never been the same since that time I had amoebic dysentery in Tz, and they tend to protest after heavily alcohol consumption…or maybe it was the dodgy burger at Cadillac. From the park headquarters, you need to drive another 40mins or so to the trail heads. Sabinyo are one of the nearer groups which require less trekking through the jungle to find, but I didn’t expect much of a hike as its also the rainy season and the Gorillas are further down the mountain. We need to walk for about 20-30mins through farmland before reaching the forest proper. Our guide had initially said we’d need about 40mins along the forest trails to reach the group, but in fact the Gorillas moved down to meet us and I’d say we barely trekked 20 mins before we came to the spot to leave our packs and cut our way to the group. Back in Kigali, P later claimed that he’d called the Gorillas to say that a mucchiro - the kinyarwanda word for old lady, equivalent to mzee for men, and P’s pet name for me - was on her way and that they shouldn’t give me a hard time. I find this claim a bit dubious as the DVB-T comms link on Mount Karisimbi won’t be operational till later this year J For more info on that for the technically inclined see Rwanda Gateway or the Ministry of Infrastructure page.

At the point where we left the trail, we were told to carry only our cameras and any small valuables (wallet, phone etc). At this point the tracker, as distinct from the guide, takes his machete and hacks a path for the visitors in the dense undergrowth. Less than 5 mins later two juveniles, brothers 8 and 5 years old apparently, sprung onto a vine right before us and began to get on with some monkey business, climbing above our heads, beating their chests and generally larking around. Some short time later they were followed by a third, much younger gorilla who followed them half way up but was noticeable less confident on the branches than the others. They moved on after 5-10mins and we moved around the in undergrowth a bit to where we could see some of the 3 females in the family with the babies. At one point, the tracker hacked some undergrowth to reveal a female who looked to be posing there for us, reclining a little and munching on a stalk.

We stayed there for some time watching them to their stuff while the tracker went off to look for the silverback and the guide made soothing noises…just like Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist. Then the first of many incidents which have led me to conclude that Gorilla tracking should more aptly be called Gorilla avoidance! The reclining female gorilla suddenly made a move along the track where we were standing…causing mass confusion as to what to do. We were told back at the park HQ to maintain a 7m distance from the Gorillas, but with 10 people in dense forest, having slippery slopes and vines to trap your feet there’s not a whole lot of places you can manoeuvre to real fast. It was quite exciting though – and they are so close to you all the time!

By then the tracker had spotted the Silverback, just 10-20m away but completely invisible in the surroundings. We went to a spot where we got an excellent view of him sitting, just like in the movies, then later rolling over and scratching his arse. One of the babies was rolling around near the Silverback and looked adorable. Later the 5 and 8 year old joined the Silverback for some play. The guide said it was rare for the Silverback to play, it only happened in Bamboo season (twice a year), as the bamboo has a mild alcohol content which lightens everybody up. I was gratified to hear, that as one of our closest relatives, Gorillas also like to get pissed. We stayed with the frocking father and kids for a while and moved up and around the forest to a position almost exactly behind the Silverback in his “nest” of vegetation. It was here that I noticed something they don’t really mention to you…the particular smell of a Gorilla. I thought it was some kind of vegetation we’d cut, someone else on the tour described it was almost vinegar like, but it was mustier than that. Certainly nothing like what I might have imagined a Gorilla would smell like…what ever that might have been.

After sometime viewing downwind of the Gorillas, we had the same female pass by us, causing confusion, movement and some adrenaline. But not long later the Silverback charged at us…now that was really something. He quite literally came out of nowhere and moved with a speed you wouldn’t associate with his size. He reared up to full height as we moved back – a formidable sight, esp since he is the largest Silverback on the mountain. Some minutes later one of the juveniles got playful and made a run at us, even dragging one of the visitors down an incline with him for about a meter. And with that our hour was up. I don’t think I could have asked for more from a Gorilla visit.

There had been a camera man with us, shooting for a Rwanda promotional video and I got interviewed on what I’d thought of the Gorillas and Rwanda. Wonder where it will end up? And if I’ll be used for propaganda?

On enforcing modesty...

2007-04-27T12:13:00.000+02:00

Last time I wrote about how culture is created, its seems fitting that a news article I read
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6213854.stm made me think about the effects of the culture that surrounds us. The article is concerned with the authorities in Iran clamping down on non-Islamic dress, specifically on women who are not covering their heads enough. It seems to me that the authorities have the wrong end of the stick entirely. A police forces power to enforce behaviours has nothing on how the culture you grow up in will shape everything about you: everything from your mindset to your three piece suit. What will truly change something as personal, and as unenforceable as what you choose to wear and how you choose to wear it, (sans major human rights violations) is not the written law of land but the invisible ties of culture – like the ether of old, they permeate everything but cannot be grasped. Growing up watching every women we know covering their hair or wearing a chador is what will lead us to follow suite, not the threat of prison. Sure, some will have to stay within the law to try to survive but what use is enforcing modesty through police intervention? Oppression will not succeed where culture fails when it comes to dress codes. At best it will only help promote a kind of lip service to the kind of dress the authorities wish to promote.

How else can we explain the millions of women and men (of many faiths, nationalities and persuasions) who choose to dress in a certain way – a way in which they have been brought up to feel comfortable – no matter where they end up living? And make no mistake this remark applies equally well to the Dutch lady I know with tight pants and necklines below sea level who works in Rwanda, as it does to those who dress more modestly than most in Europe. I was neither brought in a Muslim nor in an extremely religious family but I am not comfortable in a swimsuit in public. This is not a body image issue either, I’m no cover model and I’m comfortable with my shape, I simply feel rather naked in a swimsuit. Our sense of modesty, decency and comfortability with different levels of undress or overdress is, for the most part, something we have picked up and had drummed into us (in a very subtle way) all our lives. I doubt any amount of beach bumming in Brazil will ever make me adopt a topless thong in public. Over time I may become more comfortable in my one piece in Rio, but I’m likely still to feel out of it in Europe - just as some Malaysia women I saw at my university in Ireland gradually shed their veils only to happily take them up again on returning home. There was a very interesting article in Jeune Afrique magazine a few years ago, comparing the extreme cover-up of the female form, mainly in Arabic countries, with the extreme exposure of the female form in many Western countries. There was an insightful editorial probing the question as to whether both might be indicative of oppression.

I’m not entirely sure where my sensibilities come from – sure, some of it must be attributed to growing up in a reasonably cold and very rainy place, where skimpy was a heath hazard. But many more people I know from Ireland are ok with swimsuits and plunging necklines under their raincoats. Certainly much of my dress sensibilities were picked up from my family and neighbours. And no doubt I was affected by my time travelling as solo female, when it was materially advantageous to attract as little attention as possible. This theme has continued here in Rwanda, where a conservative local dress sense couples with the fact I will stick out anywhere no matter what I wear, conspire to keep in trousers, long skirts and modest tops. On one or two occasions when I’ve strayed from this even in a small way, like a knee length skirt or a top which shows a couple of inches below my collarbone, I’ve had more stares than I care to deal with. Sometimes I find the general leering at women here, might be enough to send me reaching for my chador …if things were just a little bit different. But try to tell what I should wear, modest or not, and like any person who values their free will, I’ll react strongly against it!

On culture, community and a sense of belonging

2007-04-17T11:59:00.000+02:00

M turns into the sofa where he has been sleeping…I’ve tried to get him to move to bed but he’s not interested…meanwhile I am watching a movie and A is in the half awake-half asleep fitful rest of the chronic insomniac, curled up on one of the armchairs as usual. P has disappeared somewhere and in the middle of all this I feel something that I haven’t felt in a long time….a sense of belonging, sense of family.

Its hard to say what caused the meltdown, but somewhere around my three year anniversary in Rwanda, I found I just couldn’t cope on my own anymore. Working environments here are a constant source of low level stress, mostly related to coping with frustration and bureaucracy. Eventually the frustration turns inwards and you no longer remember what it was like to not to feel frustrated. It was bad, real bad, and a few of my friends were worried about me. Having too much time on my own to think was making things infinitely worse, so I abandoned my quiet little house where I stayed alone and temporarily moved in with P and M. These days A is semi permanent visitor to the house and N stays when he is in town, which is 2 weeks out of every month. There are four bedrooms but there’s never really an overcrowding issue as A is mostly nocturnal and N has a habit of crashing on the sofa and forgetting to go to bed.

We all have our problems, we fight, we drink, there’s lots of drama in the house but we put up with each others shit and it feels like family. Albeit a somewhat screwed up, emotional, semi alcoholic, insomniac family – but we’ve kinda created our own norms of behaviour in the time we spend together. I have a few other close friends in Rwanda but I don’t know how many of them would have had me around in the state I was in. We eat, sleep and play together and its nice, I feel more balanced. I had never lived alone before I came to Rwanda and I’m pretty sure now that I’m not cut out for it.

As we spend more and more time together, we develop our own unique ways of communicating with each other and our own in-jokes. Often it will only take a facial expression to have two of us in hysterics and the others wondering what went on. We are creating our own culture, it’s a micro version of what happens to and with human societies everywhere…all you need to spend enough time with each other and culture emerges. It emerges out of a shared experience of living. This phenomenon is easiest to see with couples, they quickly develop a “culture of two”. The longer they are together the more developed it becomes and the less those external to it can decipher what goes on. If culture is a way of relating to people, a way of feeling connected, of having something exclusive…a feeling of belonging and inclusion in something bigger than yourself, what then might be the flip side, the alternate state?

I think it was Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, who described madness, insanity, as the Culture of One – the state of having nothing or no one who can totally relate to you, no one who can share your experiences. It must be truly awful to be stuck in a Culture of One despite having people around you…like solitary confinement, even in crowd. It certainly seems that people need people in order not to go crazy and certainly my recent experiences have shown me just how important a sense of community and the company of others are in keeping things on an even keel.

Over the last few months, I’ve also become aware of the effects of invisible process of adjustment and acclimatisation which I have undergone in the past three years. Its so gradual that I think it takes looking back over a long period to see just how far you have come from where you were. While on holidays in Europe last year, one of friends asked me when I was going home and I gave him the date. He paused for a moment and I asked me did I mean Ireland or Rwanda? To me in was a strange question, Rwanda was of course home. Ireland is “just” where I’m from. This feeling of belonging manifests itself it many ways. I used to squabble over moto fares, now I willingly give a couple of hundred francs (100rwf=10p, 15c) over the odds and I tip more. I feel some kind of belonging, that I’m part of what’s going on and it makes me more generous in terms of time, money and the almost daily frustrations of living here. Over the past weeks P’s house has taken on the role of home and where I pay rent is my house. Although I can’t easily explain why or when this change took place nor what exactly has been my trajectory on the path to acclimatisation. I have a feeling such things are never discrete events, more of a gradual shift in your thinking…like aging, you don’t see its effects until you try to compare photographs of yourself some time apart.

Hailstones on the Equator

2007-03-22T13:06:00.000+02:00

Oh yes, the rainy season was announcing itself in fine style. The rapid downpour which had trapped me in the staff canteen, was turning into a full scale hail storm. A hail storm wasn’t exactly an unheard of event, but not one I’d seen often either. Some students braved the wet to collect a sample of hail…probably the nearest any one of them will get to snow. In Rwanda you can tell with 100% accuracy what the weather will be in 30mins, you can see it coming over the hills…the clouds or the clear patches. You know when the rain will fall in bucketloads and wash everything down the hills…Rwanda is slowly flowing out its borders, I often wonder where it ends up.

Perhaps I am a true product of the West of Ireland, I can never stop myself watching rain. There’s something about watching rain that I find calming. It allows my mind to wander and think about things in a pleasantly detached manner. Finding detachment from things was becoming a rare prize these days. I thought I was recovering from my recent meltdown but every little setback seemed to unbalance me completely. Had I lost my ability to cope? Was it just that my patience was wearing thin? Was some kind of cumulative stress disorder? Was I just going crazy? I didn’t know. I knew something needed to change but I didn’t know what. I had recently been offered a job in Asia and I was going to take it, it was the first in a long list of potential “moves” that felt right at some fundamental level. But then the funding fell through and so a thread of my life was erased by a brushstroke in Brussels.

I’m tired, so tired I can’t even make the decision to get out and do something that will make me less tired. I tried to define exactly what it was that was tiring me. I remember talking to a BBC journalist about a project I worked on and when he asked me how it went, I said “it could so easily have been alright”. He laughed hard at the idea of aspiring to achieve mediocrity. But I wasn’t laughing anymore. Professional life here is like watching a slow motion car crash over and over and over again. You can see all the variables, you know the outcome, you’ve pointed out that everyone should be wearing seat belts, but there they go again…bodies out the window, blood on the road…so you get your sweeping brush out and pitch in with the clean up. You start by shouting about things and end by mumbling and failing to be surprised when no one pays any attention. You become just a little bit odd.

That didn’t matter in the old days, Kigali was one of those edgy places that attracted people who stayed in nightclubs every night till 5am just to have other people to drink with…hell, your idiosyncrasies were accepted as normal. If everyone is weird, then no one is - I think this is the basic principal of mental hospitals too! But even in my short time here, things are noticably changing – its now a nice town to bring up a family, it has hordes of nice embassy wives and people who make polite conversation in whose company I feel slightly scruffy and/or threatening. The oddballs are becoming odd again…a few times I jokingly referred to my circle of friends as the “lunatic fringe of Kigali expats”, I may have been more right than I intended!

Hailstones on the equator…just one of the many incongruences of life down here…large shiny cars running over the poor people they are supposed to be helping…the careful planning of the donor organisations upset by the realities they are surrounded by…the fierce dedication and enthusiasm of many well educated western liberals set against the relative apathy of the hordes of working stiffs in the industry…a reflection of the conflicts within me: the still-alive wish to improve things against the quiet despair of thinking nothing will ever really be achieved…the wish to have people to relate to and my lifelong tendency towards the cult of the outsider.

Three Years Later: Treading water in the nowhere zone

2007-02-21T12:53:00.000+02:00

I came here to feel useful, now I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Sitting in my immaculately clean house, the walls are closing in. Its been like this for a few weeks and I’m not sure how much more I can stand.

Perhaps it’s a particularly post modern problem. In the old days our lives were defined by roles, patterns and expectations and if at times they felt suffocating, for the most part they gave shape and structure to our time on this earth. For most people these days that structure is found in consumerism, debt, financial obligations and, in some cultures, family expectations. I look at friends at home with their nicely defined lives…most are financially comfortable although burdened by mortgages, most are reasonably happy being reasonably challenged by their jobs, many are or have started a family. My life is shaped around none of this, but it leaves the uncomfortable question as to what my life is shaped around. Its pretty hard to shape anything around the void of not having any strong material needs or obligations or overriding personal ties. In one sense, I realise that I’ve made my bed and I certainly don’t want the beds my friends and contemporaries have made for themselves, so I can’t really complain

These days I’m often reminded of some words of wisdom from literature. I may be caught in what Douglas Coupland in Generation X called “option paralysis”, which is the tendency when faced with many options to choose none….proof of what I’ve suspected for a number of years now that having too much freedom is as bad as not having any. Perhaps most of us are simply not equipped to deal with a life in which we only have our own expectations to live up to, only ourselves to please. Life is about checks and balances, you may not like your job but you need to feed your kids/pay your mortgage/save up for that trip, you may not like your location but you there to be with a wonderful person. With too much freedom, you only have your self to blame if things are not right, and nothing is ever completely right. So you change location, change your job, change your circumstance but you’re never happy. After a while you begin to lose hope that anything will get better, no matter what you do. You begin to lose enthusiasm for what lies ahead, for life in general. You feel bad and you lose hope that you will feel better.

On this line of thought, I started to wonder about the euthanasia debate. My appetite for food had drained away with my appetite for life, my nights were filled with strange dreams which did not allow me to rest. There were plenty of things I could be getting on with at work, but I couldn’t muster the energy to get out of bed. Experts on euthanasia talk about dying with dignity and of a rational decision to die. I’ve always believed there was nothing wrong with that thinking and that people in pain should be allowed to die if that’s what they decide or if they are alive only in a technical sense. But recently I began to wonder, if this applies to physical pain, why doesn’t it also apply to mental pain? At what level and over what timescale can the wish not to live with mental pain become a rational decision to die?

I guess the euthanasia debate rests on the fact that, physically, the person cannot recover, where its always assumed that mental illness always has some degree of curability. I wonder though, at what level of drug prescription/assisted living will a mentally ill person fall into the category of only technically alive? What makes not wanting to live in pain for one person a rational decision to die and for another a permanent solution to a temporary problem? It opens some difficult questions…

I guess one difference is that unlike the case of mental illness, assisted suicide cases bring up the intriguing ethical dilemma that, in many cases, the person wishing to die is not physically able to kill themselves. However and whatever the depths of depression I have sometimes felt, there is always, at least in theory, the possibility of escaping…I cannot imagine the level of hopelessness that the person can have being in pain, wanting it over and knowing they don’t have the choice to end it. This case at least seems pretty clear cut, but is it only the thin end of wedge?

On who we were, who we are and who we might become

2007-02-05T14:32:00.000+02:00

Perhaps there is too little entertainment here in Kigali and maybe I’m beginning to take my movies a little too seriously. I just sent out a few dvds from a friend in Europe, one contained last years Irish production “The Wind that Shakes the Barely”. The movie have been out in cinemas when I was last at home and a friend of a friend had recommended that I try to find time to see it, but I didn’t get the time then. The film is essentially about the background to the civil war in Ireland and paints a vivid picture of a fair recent and brutal past in Ireland.

It starts with the occupation by the “Black and Tans”, a military but quasi-mercenary force consisting mainly of troops too screwed up by experiences on the front line in WW1 to be used anywhere else. So called because of their uniforms, they were sent to quell the independence movement which were gaining momentum after the 1916 rising. Stories of the black and tans and the civil war were familiar to me, my grandmother and people of my parents generation often spoke of it and the civil war provided the historical beginnings of the unofficial two party system I grew up with in Ireland. We are multi party democracy of course, things are slowly changing these days but till practically the 21^st century it was either the Fianna Fail or Fine Gael party vying for the majority.

“The black and tans were wild dogs…” “Civil war is an awful thing” “Who does your family vote for?”

We grew up knowing that there was a time, before Independence, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were not so much armed terrorists and extremists but rather a resistance movement against British occupation, that enjoyed popular support with the vast majority of Irish people. This movie is set in such a time and I know my grandmother had hidden guns in her piano for the IRA and that two of her brothers were active members. We grew up with stories about Black and Tan atrocities. I was often told of the time they stopped my great uncle, asked his name and details and simply told him to run home. So he started running, but only a few yards later a local police man told him to walk as slow as he could home. Apparently, this was a favourite pastime, telling people to run and then shooting them for “running away from questioning”. I was told that same uncle, died in hospital aged 80, delirious from whatever will killing him and rambling about that episode. We later heard that the IRA and their tactics to oust the British are regarded as the first known incidence of modern guerrilla warfare. And just like the lead characters in the film, my grandmothers brother’s grew up together, fought the British side by side, took opposite sides in the civil war, both eventually emigrated to the US and never spoke to each other again. Terrible thing, civil war.

The civil war came about after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, by a treaty with the British which saw the withdrawal of all British forces. This same treaty gave the 26 counties a parliament under the British king, while keeping the 6 northern counties as part of Britain, sowing the seeds for the ongoing situation in Northern Ireland. Those who supported the treaty were tired of violence and felt it was the best deal available at the time, and that rejecting it would mean the return of the Black and Tans reign of terror. Those who opposed pointed to the 700 year long history of British treaties with rebels in Ireland, none of which lead to Independence. They felt it was selling the Northerners down the line and abhorred the clause requiring members of the new Irish parliament to swear allegiance to the crown. It was the quintessential clash of political idealism and realpolitik and it divided the nation, and divided families even into the future when the treaty was an irreversible fact. With hindsight, the classic British policy for Ireland and elsewhere, of divide and conquer had worked again. The Free State was far too much involved in combating anti-treaty forces (the republicans) to work at easing the concessions in the treaty. And of course, they depended on Britain for the arms to continue fighting. Much the same story has been playing out all over Africa since the 50s.

With the subsequent problems of northern Ireland and the cost to the British of fighting the Republican forces, its easy to think that the treaty was a sell out. But they didn’t know that WW2 was just around the corner and the end of the British Empire was in sight. The empire must have looked pretty formidable in 1920 and Britain’s need to keep Independence movements in check was critical – much the same story has been playing out between Taiwan and China since the 70s. After independence in 1948, we had strong personality leaders, civil war politics, a mini boom in the 60s followed by all sorts of corruption and chicanery in 70s and 80s, the extent of which was not known till much later. After years of fighting for the right to self determination and the right to our own language and culture, slowly we began to lose many elements we had retained in the face of colonisation. One of the things I have never liked about Ireland was how we gave up on our language. Much damage had been done by independence, that’s true, and the State keep it in the education system but it is we who, post independence, abandoned our culturally unique way of expressing ourselves en masse.

So our recent history is written in violence, brutality, fierce idealism in which people will die for their cause juxtaposed against political realism and pandering profiteers out for all they can get. But above all, ours a history of struggle - political struggle for independence until 1948, diplomatic struggles for unification and later compromise on the northern question and all this against a fierce economic struggle right up until the end of the 20^th century. If you are defined by struggle, what happens when its gone?

There is a stubbornness in our character which probably defines too much of what we are – almost like we forget who we are if someone is not telling us what we can and can’t do or if we have no one to blame for our troubles. Or perhaps, a better way to see it is to wonder what a blade might be without the stone to rub against. For a while there, after the boom it seemed as if we were really lost. When I was at university, few ever expected to have a good job and suddenly there was a whole batch of people who could afford a car, a house a few hundred beers…at 25! There was a lot of drink and drugs and fast living, and the rampant orgy of consumerism continues today, although many of my generation are spending their money in Ikea and their local wine merchant rather than the disco and the boozer. I was told that a third of the Irish economy comes from the property market…the gombeen men continue to make money for nothing, and run for parliament, as the Celtic Tiger profits go into the pockets of the developers while the country still doesn’t have a decent public transport system (not since we dismantled the stuff the British built in any case).

A cabinet member in the 90s noted that politically “we are closer to Boston than Berlin”. This may be true and we have certainly benefited from competitive business policies, but its no time to throw the baby (European style social programs and infrastructure development) out with the bath water (European style corporate incentives and labour markets). I doubt there is anyone in the country who wishes US style social problems and cut throat capitalism as a future for Ireland. It doesn’t much help that the educated, reasonably well off socially minded types in Ireland who might have the time and energy to give a damn are too busy running to keep up with their mortgage and childcare costs to get involved in politics.

I heard recently that the Irish language is making a bit of comeback…people are finally interested in being able to speak the cupla focal. This renewed interest appears to have stemmed from the increasing numbers of foreign migrants and immigrants, following the economic boom and our lack of barriers to freedom of labour from newer EU member states. Could it be that we may start to remember what defines us and acquire again a common vision of future, now that we have the new blade of immigration to deal with?

Anger with Enthusiasm?

2006-11-27T12:05:00.001+02:00

I had some many rages inside me, I felt almost catatonic. Depression is anger without the enthusiasm. Fucking A.

I had just finished reading “Geldof in Africa”, a nice little read consisting of
various anecdotes about Sir Bob’s travels. But it all went wrong in the end, he finished with a horrendously upbeat piece about the Live8 concerts of last year and of the 50 billion pledge to help the worlds poorest. Bob was ecstatic, something really had been achieved, a triumph over cynicism, “they” would make sure the 50billion didn’t get squandered by corruption. But who was going to make sure the cash didn’t get mostly squandered on consultants, admin, project delays and downright lack of care on the part of those involved in spending it?

How do you spend your 50billion?

Do you go straight to grassroots, after all the poor are the ones who really know what they need? But this is not sustainable, because in doing so you effectively create a paraellel administrative structure which serves to disempower the local government. After all, who needs to bother with a national health strategy when some philanthropists have decided to build and run a bunch of clinics for you?

Maybe you decide to split the difference and go for a grassroots based project in partnership with the government. Again much of your budget will be taken up with admin costs, specially with those nice fat ex-pat salaries to pay (you do have one of your own running the project, don’t you?), not to mention their travel costs and other benefits. The project funding will be guaranteed for a relatively short amount of time, say two years. Of course it can be extended, but only if results are shown from the initial operation, by which time the ex-pat team lead will have changed and very little of the lessons learned, working relationships and knowledge from the first phase will carry over to the new manager. Or maybe the funds get cancelled due to a policy change back home, activities are stopped and long term impact is dubious – the only guaranteed benefit is to the CV of ex-pat manager. Your local staff will have lived through enough of such scenarios not to bother pushing themselves too hard during the project start up phase. Maybe if you hang around with the same manager for 5 or so years, the local guys will start to trust that you’re in for the long haul. But how often does that happen?

Do you go straight to the national government and provide direct budgetary support? What if there is no functioning government? What if the government has endemic corruption? And what if you realise that even in the case of the functioning, non corrupt government, much of the donation will go on administration costs, endless workshops, transportation, training costs – the “machinery of the state” – and make take years to have a real impact on poverty?

No good deed goes unpunished. Fuck it! Maybe I need to get off this continent.
But I suspect Africa isn’t the problem, the problem is the West, the structure, those do-gooders who should know better and those desperately under-aware general publics in Western Nations who think throwing money at Africa is the solution. It’s the whole rotten system and no matter where I move I can’t escape that.

God, I’m pathetic…all this impotent rage and all I really wish is that I could go back to a time when I didn’t know about any of this, when I didn’t have to care.

I take it back….I don’t want to know how far down the rabbit hole goes…I’ll have the blue pill, thankyouverymuch. Now!

Africa's newest export: Children!

2006-10-13T04:31:00.000+02:00

If it wasn’t the truth, it wouldn’t be a partcularly amusing joke. This season’s celebrity must-have item : an African baby!

Having worked in Africa for almost three years and significantly mellowed my views on many issues with the passing of the years, there isn’t much these days that can really outrage me. But this is the only term I can think of to describe the current ongoings on in Malawi. Many commentators have referred to the one yr old child in question as an orphan, ignoring the fact that his father appears to be alive and well and commenting on how happy he is for his son to have a new life in America.

I wholeheartedly agree with one observer who pointed out that “Africa has many problems…family values is not one of them”. A child is seen as the responsibility of all the family and african children routinely grow up with or spend some time being cared for by their extended families (aunts, grandparents, distant cousins) if their immediate family have problems. There are very few circumstances where an African child needs to be adopted and taken to a developed country. Is such adoptions, which is foremost in the minds of those involved: the child’s welfare or the adoptive parents need to adopt?

In my experience most of the time a relative will be more than happy to take in the child if they can support the extra financial burden. Meaning that its very possible and even advisable to help a child by helping a carer with resources and school fees rather than taking the kid. Or course, there is always some danger that the carer will then take the child in just for the money, but I would expect these to be rare cases. There are a few cases where children may be better off adopted outside the country, mainly in the case of health or social stigma problems…but i don’t see the celebs lining up to adopt HIV+ orphans, children of prostitutes or kids who have spent years on the streets, do you?

The possible consequences of more widespread developing country adoptions are very nasty. As a poor family, would you give up your last born to feed the rest of the children? If you were desperate enough, might you even consider concieving a child for montary gain?

We in the West need to be very careful and very cautious in our approach to adoptions in countries over whom we have a very significant economic advantage. If we continue down this path, might we not end up in outsourcing childbaring to africa altogether?

My two Euros worth

2006-10-01T11:55:00.000+02:00

“Just 2 Euros a month…”
“Just 1 pound a week…”
“Give a little, it would help a lot”

Oh Christ. Oh Fuck no. I’m a holidaymaker, get me out of here.
It’s that time of year when I go back to Europe to catch up with friends, family and material goods. Only due to various factors it’s been almost a year and half. Things get stranger every time I go back but I didn’t count on coming face to face with Poverty Porn splattered like so many tabloid headlines all over the TV.

Pathetic little kids with flies in their eyes, images of the dirt poor used to manipulate you into thinking that making a ludicrously small (by your standards) contribution will save the world. Africa is poor, poor people need money => Throw money at the problem, that’s all it needs. Right?

Except that, for a start, the organisations which are soliciting your donations are ones I know to be primarily involved in development aid and the pictures they are showing look like they are from refugee camps, which is emergency/humanitarian aid: two very different beasts, each with their own set of problems.

Humanitarian aid provides food, shelter and basic services to a population at risk and is intended to be relatively short term in nature. Development aid for most International Non-Government Organisations (INGOs), is the long slow process helping people to help themselves. Within the confines of organisation wide policy and programs, agendas set in western capitals with no small influence of the INGOs largest contributors (usually Western governments). It will involve protracted negotiations with local NGOs on priorities – endless meetings, costing countless millions, with organisations who, for the most part, exist for the purpose of absorbing funds from INGOs. Then protracted efforts at capacity building in local organisation, and cajoling them into sensible planning and financial reporting. Finally, when the channels are set up, some money can be given to the projects, activities done by the poor for themselves. Then perhaps the INGO priorities are changed…no, sorry realigned…or their country rep moves on, or the staff at the local NGO move, in that endless circulation of local NGO staff looking to move up the ladder and maybe finally get the glittering prize of a job in somewhere like the UN…and the whole process starts again. Year after year after year.

This is the development industry, a sprawling parasitic monster that feeds on its own need for itself. Christ, in the West we now have full degrees in development studies ,what kind of madness is this? Western people qualifying solely to work in an industry which depends on others perpetual poverty. When our jobs start to depend on their misery, you can guess who’s going to win out.

That’s not to say that all of this merry-go-round achieves nothing. Over decades, the little victories are there and NGOs have helped millions of people to survive war and helped the poor to become just a little less poor. They also provide jobs for educated Africans in Africa, which also has benefits for the economies of richer nations. Still though, it smacks of false advertising to be using refugee camp images to collect funds for development. Why not try to educate the general public instead of hoodwinking them?

At home, when I railed against the adverts and the NGOs using them, pointing out that much of the operating funds are eaten up before they get to the poor, people often asked me where they should donate. Many showed me leaflets where X or Y NGO stated they had only 5% of administration costs. I countered that it depends on how you count admin costs, usually those figures relate to the costs associated with the NGOs operations in their “home country”(eg Ireland), which allows them to rate any costs related to a country office (eg Rwanda) as spending on development. However, whats not clear is how much of the operating fund for a country office is spent on salaries, meetings, logistics vs how much is donated directly to local NGOs. And then of course, you have another layer to the onion in considering how much of that donation is spent by the local NGO on their salaries, meetings, logistics as opposed to the amount going directly to their beneficiaries (ie the unfortunate fly-ridden, muck-rakers that you see on TV).

Some in the industry might worry that the complexity of the issues will not be understood by the public and that the net effect might just be to discourage them of donating. The public may not realise that as wasteful as the development system, it consists for the main part of people and organisations trying to their best to alleviate suffering within the present confines of that system. I say, it is upon those of us who do know to demystify aid and get the public, get the electorates involved. Let them know there are no quick fixes, let them know there is a lot of overhead, show them the mechanics of aid and let them decide based on full awareness, not cheap Poverty Porn. Hopefully it might get them off their arses to campaign for a better system.

To those who asked me about where they should put their 2 Euro, I asked them if they really cared about the kid on the advert. Like, really, really. Then they should find out about the trade tarrif structures made to protect our fat farmers at the expense of African producers and exporters. Examine EU over fishing off the coast of West Africa, literally taking food out of the mouths of the starving Africans, as seen on TV. Lobby the government and the EU and the US for change, put this shit on election agendas.

They should ask themselves why the conditions on the big bucks from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and other such institutions are tied to opening up developing economies totally, while our markets are closed to them?

While you’re at it, ask why the development agenda has been completely hijacked by the concept of economic development (ie higher GDP) over the need for growth and developing social systems at the same time. Ask why, most of the time the people who care least about the African poor, are the African rich? Ask if its any accident, that South Africa and Kenya are the economic powerhouses and cities like Nairobi and Jo’burg are essentially warzones?

They should look at big business practises in Africa (eg Shell in Nigeria) and put pressure on their important customers in the West to get them to force big business into more ethical partnerships with African nations. Failing that, lobby for supporting African nations (or regions) to organise themselves and stand up to big business…I’d love to see an OPEC for diamonds, gold, coltan, copper and any or all of the precious natural resources here.

They should find out how their government is spending their personal invisible contributions to international development, via their taxes. If a government screws up with an unwise or unpopular education policy or program, they will pay for it at polls and in the headlines – what happens if a Government fucks up on foreign aid? Does any western electorate know what a foreign aid fuck-up looks like? Who is holding your government to account for the billions of tax money they spend on your behalf in developing countries?

Find out if your government’s aid policies are empowering local governments to set their own policies and manage their own funds, rather then imposing our ideas, filling the civil service with our advisors and generally helping by domineering. Find out if local governments can compete with the army of high wage International organisations for bright locals to move developing countries forward. Find out if your government is supporting corrupt and/or repressive regimes, why they are supporting such regimes and what steps they are taking to try and mitigate this.

Oh? What? Did this all seem like a little too much effort?
Then the best thing you can do with your 2 Euro is frame it, put it beside the telly so that when the wide-eyed kid in the shit pit comes on, you can remind yourself that you don’t care about him. Not really, really.

Seeing Red

2006-09-27T11:05:00.000+02:00

A few months ago when I read that Bono had launched a new fashion label called RED, to which many of big fashion houses had signed up to, I was disgusted. Just another in a growing number of fashion fads selling itself on what might generously be described as Ethics Chic. Not only are you wearing the latest fashion in clothes, you can also proclaim your adherence to the latest fashion in mindsets – ethical consumerism. Be fashionable, help the poor…oh and salve your consumer conscience by buying into all things RED.

And while im in the middle of contemplating Bono and his henchmen’s forays into Africa, I have quite a surreal experience: My former worker calls up to ask my forgiveness. Again!

Patrick was, to use the local parlance, my houseboy, employed to guard the house and perform odd jobs like clothes washing, house cleaning and shopping. For this he gained a place to stay and the equivalent of USD$30 a month. I was “willed” Patrick by the French guy who lived in the house before me. Apparently the French guy had been “willed” Patrick by the Kenyan who had lived in the house before him. Both had been satisfied with his work and I took him on. He had already worked in the house for over 2 years and everything went well for about a year and a half. During that time he had gotten married and his wife was living in a different area of the country with the baby. Then one day he mysteriously disappeared, taking USD$100 with him. By rights, I should have reported him to the police, but the hope that he would come back, coupled with a certain laziness on my part resulted in my non-reporting him.

For some months I heard nothing, then I got a strange phonecall from him asking to come to the house. I agreed to this but he never showed up and ever since then, I receive calls from him every few months asking for forgiveness…for stealing the money I assume! I know that he was a quite a fervent 7th Day Adventist, I’m wondering if he is being told to seek forgiveness from church elements.

I wonder what Bono and his band of celebrity development tourists might think of employing someone and paying them less than a good shirt from Red might cost per month, and having thought about reporting to the police for stealing the price of a fashionable pair of shoes?

I read some of the articles which were written about Bono’s visit to Africa. In one, after visiting a hospital he is quoted as saying “We come from a place where Rock stars are seen as heros – these are the real heros” (meaning the doctors and nurses). Is this trite tripe really necessary? I found it not a little ironic that his next stop was in Ghana, looking at the shortage of medical personal in rural areas. The irony is that Ghana’s education plan went so well that yesterday’s medical students are servicing the health sector…not in Ghana or Togo or Nigeria but in the UK. For most young educated Africans, this is what development means: the chance for a better life and a chance to get out.

In another article he talks about his maturing views on aid, “To think when we started Live Aid, it was the first kind of aid, the response to famine in Ethiopia. Look how a whole generation has educated itself off the back of that to move from charity to justice and then to move from justice to debt and trade. It’s quite an arc and I think I’ve gone through that. That is the arc of my whole involvement.”

Finally a move towards a libertarian model of development. That’s real progress, and in only 20 years too.

Although there may be a few holes left in his thinking:
“For what was once called foreign assistance, we now need two names: one you can call mercy and response to pandemic-type aid and you can’t hold people ransom to their governments on that. Then there is other aid called investment.”

I’m not sure about not holding governments to ransom on emergency aid. Often emergency aid is profoundly disturbing to economic ecosystem of a country or region. And besides which, didn’t humanitarian aid aggravate tensions in Southern Sudan and practically cause all the mess in Somalia? As much as it is hard hearted to watch people die, there is a question of greater good. What use is it to save someone today, if in doing so you contribute to a situation which will blight their children and grandchildren.

Elsewhere in the article he states “The problems are much more complex than we thought they were and I think Africans must have been smiling and cringing at times when they saw us just thinking that money could solve their problems.”

Well Amen to that Brother Bono. Good Man. But this also applies the Holy Grail of African intervention – Emergency Aid.

But I think the point about complex problems has been slightly lost on the masses in the Make Poverty History campaign. Those without deeper involvement in Africa or African issues, are still labouring under the delusion that think can save the world by wearing plastic bangles of many colours. It’s very easy to get people excited about helping Africa and the possibilities for easing collective guilt about our relative comfort. It’s less easy to hold people’s attention for the painfully slow pace of progress, assuming progress is even made! And this is where I worry about Make Poverty History and Red, they make development a fad, a headline, a fashion. And we all know how long fashions last.