In December I asked for your questions - I got a couple and I feel bad that I can't give great answers, but here are my thoughts at least. Thanks for the questions.
I'd be very interested in knowing what the people you encounter talk about with each other; typical topics of discussion between adults, kids, etc. What makes them happy, sad, concerned, etc.
Urban Adults
This is kind of a tough question and made me re-realize how big the language barrier can be. In the taxi when I kind of overhear Luganda I can sort of identify what the conversation is about, but not much more than that. A lot of what people talk about in the taxi (these are people who are a little more affluent, often urban) is common every day stuff - the weather, how the driver is driving (crazily), or commenting about things on the radio. Tone is often very jovial and people feel pretty free to make fun of one another or the stumbling mzungu. Many comment about stuff on the radio and joke about how ridiculous the politicians are.
Generally, if I am there, they will usually bring up Obama (without knowing where I am from, only that I am white) - Almost everyone here is excited about Obama. On the streets of Kampala people will shout Obama to me in excitement, kids here will talk about Obama, and the people who speak English will often strike up a conversation about Obama. The papers write about how important it is that Obama is president (there is a writer here claiming that Obama's grandfather was a Ugandan).
When I speak in English, generally the deficiencies of Uganda come into the conversation. If I speak to a school teacher they talk about the bad students and ignorant community, if I talk to the parents they talk about the mediocre teachers and the headmistress charging school fees, if I speak to a student they talk about Ugandans having no money, if you speak to a driver they talk about fuel prices increasing (even if they have not), etc. I definitely sympathize and witness a lot of these problems, but often the conversation directs itself toward me fixing the problem by giving money.
Village Adults
Outside the taxi conversations seem a lot more practical. A carpenter will see us planting peanuts and comment that we are a little late in planting, but that our peanuts will be okay. One of the main greetings is a thank you, so often you will hear, "Thank you for your work" rather than "Hello, how are you?" People show a lot of appreciation for hard work and work that benefits others. No one will bring up their work or discuss how hard they work, but it is fair game to tell someone they work hard.
Many of the conversations are based on observations or gossip in the village. I was sick for a couple days in November and, even though I never told a single person that I was sick, the entire primary school knew and liked to shout over great distances to me, "STEVE, OLI MALWADDE? MALARIA? STOMACH?" (Steve, are you sick? Do you have malaria? Stomach pain?) So word travels fast in the village and a lot of the conversations seem to do with how individuals are doing. In the village, radios are less common, newspapers are exorbitant (the nearest newspaper is 6km away), so conversations pertain almost exclusively to village matters (with the exception of Obama and a passing awareness of other American themes i.e. Osama Bin Laden - when my beard was bushy, I was referred to as Osama, Iraq, and, oddly, Arnold Schwartzeneger): When does school start? What is the fee? Are the rains early or late? This person passed away. This village beat this one in a football match. It is almost this holiday - we should stockpile some money to buy extra food.
Weather and health come up a lot, since they are pretty big factors in day-to-day life. Weather dictates how crops do, which impacts the food on their tables and the money in their pockets. Malaria and HIV effect just about every family I have met and can be really disruptive. Malaria is easily curable for roughly one dollar and HIV is very treatable if the villager can get to Masaka for treatment ($2 round trip as much as 3-5 times per week), but because of a lack of money or lack of education some people still try to self-treat (basically under-dose in quinine) malaria or cannot make it to Masaka (most people are very afraid to know their HIV status).
Kids
Kids are kids. Kids get excited about toys and games and often times I will hear them pretending to be driving a car, boat, or airplane. They make up silly stories and get excited and upset about silly things. "Kazungu, what's wrong?" "Peter is not playing well and he is jumping up and down too fast and he has two crayons, but I only got one" (probably with tears in his eyes). Everything is a game. If it is time to go fetch water, it is a foot race. If they have a bicycle they see how fast they can go with no brakes and without dying. Kids get excited about almost anything different - if there is a big truck on the dirt road, a plane overhead (this has happened twice that I can remember), a holiday that is approaching, going to school, getting to color, draw, or read are all things that are worth screaming in excitement over.
Older kids talk about studying (often more talk than action) and doing chores (more work than talk) around the house or garden. Older kids generally get mixed up with Arnold Schwartzeneger obsessions and will generally love Manchester United or Arsenal (probably having listened to a game occasionally, but never having seen a match before). If they have a radio, they will often get attached to different Ugandan, American, and British artists.
Becky has hung out with women about our age (low 20s) and told me that it is typical American girl talk - talking about men, hair, media stars, and life events (going to school, work, etc). When I hang out with some of the guys around my age they like to talk about football, namely Manchester United, or making fun of one another for something.
On a more topical note, what if anything, do they do for Christmas in Uganda?
Sorry for the delay in this reply. Holidays, especially Christmas and Eid, everyone gets very excited and talks about it leading up to the holiday. The holiday is celebrated with extended family making the trip from other villages or urban areas and lots of food. Christmas is the day when kids will eat chicken, goat, beef, bread, and drink soda (often all together). If kids get a gift, it is usually shoes, but they are usually reserved for special occasions (midnight mass and subsequent Sundays). John told me that on Christmas many of the kids get stomach aches from eating too much. Meat is pretty atypical in the diet, bread is almost exclusively for Christmas (for villagers), and sodas are also rare.
You never mention them being curious about you ... are they? Do they ask you questions? Plz tell us more about the adults and what they think about things. What do they think about their own prospects and prospects for future generations? How do they feel about all this?????
I think there is a bit of curiosity about the mzungus that dropped in from the United States to live in this particular village to try to be farmers and teachers. Typically I will get asked what I'm doing in Uganda, how long I've been here, how long I'm staying, what I think about Uganda, and then I will be thanked for coming and volunteering. Volunteers are not new to Uganda, so there is some understanding of the concept of strange albino coming to help, but for many this is the first time seeing a white person or hearing American English, so I'd imagine it would be something similar to a Chinese exchange student in a white suburb - a novelty, kind of fun, but you get used to it pretty quickly as this person assimilates.
I don't typically ask about prospects of future generations. Most people do not speak English so it is tough to ask these questions. When I asked about population growth, it is usually treated with some sense of denial (in my view). People are pretty realistic about the environmental and health pressures, but there is not a lot of action from the government to deal with these issues. Most adults have noticed climatic shifts in the length and timing of the rainy season, which is adding increased food pressure (along with decreasing available land) and water.
For the families who have kids in secondary school there is always some urgency to get the school fees for at least some of the kids, probably because they are educated about the challenges the kids face. In the less educated families, education is less of a priority, perhaps because they are less aware of these looming pressures. There is a clear divide - the well educated families have more money to try to keep educating their kids, have fewer kids, have increased awareness of health issues, and usually have a business besides subsistence farming (motorcycle driver, carpenter, shoe repair, wholesale coffee buyer/seller, etc.). The less educated families have more kids, have less understanding of health issues, have less money, and often place less emphasis on education.
I never tell Ugandans that population is expected to double in 20 years, 9 million don't have food as it is, Uganda is becoming increasingly arid, politicians are almost openly corrupt, and that Ugandans don't have decent schools or money for private schools and then say what do you think about that? But I do sense that some people are aware of some of these elements and fight to get kids into schools to help the kids "make it" (which often means going to Kampala). Unfortunately there is a bit of cycling of the families that "make it" and it is very tough for the families who don't have enough to break away from their own poverty.
What is the perception of America? Americans?
America is pretty warmly received - they hear about the terrorist fighting, rich, aid-giving America and it is a kind of characterization they would like to emulate. Most kids want to go to America ("Steve, I want America"). For them, America represents a better, more organized, and comfortable way of life. Ugandans think that Becky and I are ignorant about how to do anything. We have never cooked, cleaned, drove a bicycle, ran (honestly, they are surprised that I can run), or lifted anything. Robots and machines do everything, which I realize is true a lot of the time. We have stoves that are on with the flick of a finger, we have large farming equipment, back-hoes, cement trucks, microwaves, television, and light bulbs.
We live comfortably and everyone wants that. The majority of Americans have good health care. Hagar was talking to a doctor that visited America and his comment was that they don't let people die, "People can't die. They have ambulances and they keep people on life support for DAYS." Hagar didn't have the heart to tell him that some people are kept alive, at great expense, for weeks, months, or years. Even the problems are different - heart disease, cancer, and motor vehicle crashes versus malaria, typhoid, and HIV. At Union, as EMTs, the problem I saw almost every night was...too much alcohol...almost exclusively. That ambulance ride could probably pay a Ugandan's lifetime total for medical costs.
We have public schools that are good and go through secondary school and university is a very real possibility for many Americans. Scholarships are attainable for people who go to public schools. In Uganda, if you went to a public school you likely won't pass exams and you have very little chance of going to secondary school or university.
So Ugandans are loosely aware of all of this. They know we are better off, but maybe don't know the half of the day-to-day comforts we have. They believe we are all ultra-rich, which is relatively true. In all, they like Americans and appreciate our work in Uganda, but more so, they like what America represents and has achieved for its people.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
January
Various questions that people posed last month will be addressed in the next blog (Dave, mom)
I'm sitting with a lantern that flickers in the wind. Sitting in the darkness punching away at a keyboard filing away thoughts. A waterfall and cave sit quietly in the valley below my feet and an outhouse door is squeaking and slamming shut in the wind. I'm in Sipi, Uganda, alone, and the setting has all the makings for a horror movie. But if this blog makes it to you, I made it out alive.
I made it out alive. Medical mission (team of 20-odd doctors, translators, nurses, make-shift lab techs, and more are descending to treat hundreds of greater-Ddegeyan residents from February 1 to February 13. Becky and I will be busy scrambling to help them however we can as we begin to teach in what may be three different schools between the two of us.
Sipi Falls
Sipi Falls is supposed to have the most beautiful waterfalls in Uganda. I actually think the posters of another waterfall are more beautiful, but the setting of Sipi on top of a mountain surrounded by flatlands as far as you can see is pretty spectacular.
A couple things I realized here. Where I am now is way creepier than the creepy place in Australia where Liz "Snorkelborg" Nyberg freaked out (was it Lanceston?). And I'm alone. And there is a knocking that sounds very similar to a man with a wooden leg and a hook arm knocking/scratching on the wall I am resting against.
Second, geology should do a term abroad in East Africa. Rift valleys (I read that geologists are excited about Eritrea/Ethiopia, because they can "observe an ocean forming"), inactive volcanoes, active volcanoes, rocks, road cuts, etc. Lots of culture and environmental topics to study, too. Just throwing it out there. I know Rodbell, Shaw, and Garver would love it here (maybe not more than Australia, though).
Third, I miss my Tasmanian hiking buddies, Snorkel, Demanda, and McArdle.
Israel
I have to be honest that my sources have been 20 minutes of Al-Jazeera in the hotel I was in last night in Mbale (I am traveling this weekend to Western Uganda - 1/16 - 1/19) and 10 minutes of CNN two weeks ago. But come on Israel, the fact that Palestinian deaths are two orders of magnitude higher than Israeli does mean something. "But they started it!" There were protests in Kampala (police shot tear gas at the protesters and the protesters threw it back, causing police to flee the scene...). I'll keep this short, but the whole situation reminds me of a bumper sticker designed for Operation Iraqi Freedom: "Terrorist: What the Big Army Calls the Little Army."
Malawi
I spent December 23 through January 4 in Malawi with Dave Shulman (and his family), another Minerva Fellow. We had a pretty incredible time, traveling to Zambia to see some African fauna: lions, zebras, giraffes, hippopotamus', buffalo, baboons, monkeys, and much, much more. We also spent some time at Lake Malawi canoeing, getting into trouble with the parks service, going on a tiny sailboat for an hour or so, and hiking around. We also went through a season of The Office on Dave's computer, which I enjoyed all too much.
The bulk of the time, though, was spent in Neno where Dave works. I don't think I was really of any use in helping Dave carry out his work, but it was really great to tag along and take some mental notes for how we do things at the much smaller Engeye Health Clinic. I distinctly remember feeling very lucky to be able to sit in on conversations of some of the PIH staff and it was great to meet some of the incredible people that make PIH work.
The best thing about the trip, though, was getting to hang out with Dave after a five month absence. Hiking, antagonizing one another, cooking non-African food, and having some really good conversations (I think my English is getting worse only having one other native English speaker around).
More (Too Much) on Culture
One of the conversations we had was about culture and Americanization. I have tried to walk through the conversation in my mind a lot the last couple weeks, but can't really capture it all that well (the conversation was on New Year's Eve - we didn't make it to midnight and 2009). I've written about my concern about the erosion of culture, the homogenization of culture, and my reservations as a volunteer carrying pieces of this an imperializing culture. Dave points out that everyone deserves good health care, even if it means western medicine is serving up good health - health trumps culture. The same sort of thing goes for clean water, education, and other universal rights. Dave also points out that no one is in isolation anymore (you can call me, in the mountains bordering Uganda and Tanzania right now) and we all influence one another, even if it seems that America is doing a lot of the pushing.
I see all of these things and I always come away thinking that my concerns are probably unfounded after talking to Dave. But I'm not talking about whether Engeye and PIH should be there helping to provide medical care. I worry about the greater trends that we can't really resolve. It's like global warming - you can see that there is a problem, but it is seemingly unmanageable and may not be solved before it is too late. Cultures and languages are disappearing or at least becoming less distinct as the world flattens out and we may lose a lot of diversity before figuring out what to do about it. Western culture of materialism and consumption is addictive and it tends to run over the alternative cultures or at least marginalize them. But not everyone can have a car and when we hit the oil wall, or the landfill quota, or whatever, we may have eliminated a lot of the cultures and their customs that thrived without these materials (the type of cultures that would be good to have around when we run out of stuff). Again, I don't know how to address this problem, but I think it is a problem worth considering - like species extinction, global warming, world poverty and hunger, inadequate health care, etc. You can't suggest we stop teaching English, stop providing aid or healthcare, or stop selling satellite dishes and McDonalds to combat cultural losses without exacerbating other equally important problems.
Malawi, Mbale, and Notes from the Edge
Dave and PIH in Neno, Malawi are a handful of kilometers (~12) from the border of Mozambique. We tried to hike across the border, but it turns out that there is a huge river between Neno and Mozambique. When I suggested we ford it (recall Oregon Trail: "Would you like to A) Ford the river with x oxen B) Hire an Indian to take you across on his rickety raft or C) Wait for the river to go down while your second wife dies of cholera") Dave and I took a moment to consider the merits of wading across a river and then saw a log roughly 6 feet in diameter being dragged along the river bed. So we hired an Indian to take us across on his rickety raft (it didn't sink and kill our oxen!). Mbale, where I type right now, is about 40 kilometers from Kenya (and now I am in Sipi and can visualize the border off in the distance). I have no intention of getting in another taxi taking me farther from the Buganda culture I'm comfortable with (they speak a whole 'nother language out here).
Amanda Kern, Environmental Good-Deedery, Butterflies, and No Connection to Uganda at All
Amanda sent me a package of vitamins, arts and crafts supplies, pencils, and Vitamin C drink mix (how did she know on December 6 that I would have a cold in mid-January?) Among the mostly positive educational kid oriented things there was candy (no way I'm giving that out, the kids would never leave me alone, "STEVE! Webase? Webase? Webase? - Are you sleeping...? as they peer through my window) and a fair trade, 70% cacao, organic, "100% ethically traded" smooth, dark blend, with 10% of profits going to "species, habitat, and humanity" (this candy bar must have been like ten bucks!). I discovered all this environmental good deedery as I was licking my chocolate covered fingers and found the wrapper on the floor. It did remind me, as I read the bar's label, that even though I saw lions, zebras, giraffes, hippopotamus', impala, puku, elephants, crowned cranes, etc. in Malawi we still have a lot of good stuff in our own backyards to appreciate and protect (the inside of the wrapper highlighted the Karner Blue Butterfly native to New York State, among others). Did you know:
"Butterflies capture the hearts and curiousity of many people with their dazzling colors and grace"
"As pollinators, butterflies play an important tole in the reproduction of thousands of plant species."
"Approximately 20 species of butterflies are endangered in the US and more than 100 are endangered worldwide."
The smallest butterfly, the Blue Pygmy in California, has a wingspan of a half inch while the largest, the Queen Alexandria's Birdwing of New Guinea, has a wingspan of 11 inches!
I think something like 98 percent of America's primordial forests (the original ones) are gone and we killed off a lot of the cooler species (the American Bison, what a bad idea). But America still has a lot of good stuff left to protect and enjoy. So while "Endangered Species Chocolate" might be better than Hershey's in saving the Amazon or other far away forests there is still lots of good environmental stuff you can do back home (the candy bar suggests planting a butterfly garden, which I did in third grade with Mrs. Ulintz. Check, done.). The candy bar's connection to species preservation is a little tenuous - cacao grows in the shade of forests so if you buy our chocolate, which grows in the shade of forests, you are saving forests. I guess it probably works out...
The candy bar can be obtained in Pocatello (Pocawhere?), Idaho where Amanda works every Monday and every other Thursday as a co-op member (communist).
Physics, Finally
I was going to hold off on talking about my physics excitement until I had it all figured out, but I think that the next time I have a chance to sit down and write may be a little while.
A secondary school roughly an 1.5 hours away on foot or 45 minutes by rickety bicycle (we are buying a mountain bike, part of the reason I am traveling this weekend) wants teachers, especially in mathematics and science! And a physics teacher is retiring! I have been so excited about the possibility of teaching physics that I have been going through practice problems and finding alternative methods to the example problems in a physics text I bought. I may just be getting my hopes up, but I would really enjoy working with the Ddegeyan kids in the morning and then biking/hiking to the secondary school across the valley to assist in tutoring, reviewing, or lecturing the beginning physics classes (they are required to take physics over a few years so I think they might have more time to go over concepts).
The school takes a lot of orphans or "school dependents" and is a more affordable school than many of the other local secondary schools for the non-dependents (I think like $600 per year for room and board). We'll see if it works out - I will keep you updated.
Fundraised Funds
So we have distributed 10 chickens (and built chicken coops). I think we could have done more, but we have been wandering up to 2-3 kilometers to find chickens to buy. We are going to try to at least double that number in the coming months, hopefully more. It is a sort of long process - find kids who could use a chicken, get them together and explain what we're trying to do, have kids collect materials for the coop (this can take time), build all the coops, find chickens, deliver chickens over a couple kilometer catchment area.
Second, we're going to supply the St. Timothy's kids with pens, pencils, and notebooks for this term using the money fundraised at St. Eugene's (the American side of the pen-pal chain).
More ideas are churning, hopefully we can make them reality soon...Thank you for everyone who is making these programs possible (including all of those who have sent books and supplies, which are being used everyday).
I'm sitting with a lantern that flickers in the wind. Sitting in the darkness punching away at a keyboard filing away thoughts. A waterfall and cave sit quietly in the valley below my feet and an outhouse door is squeaking and slamming shut in the wind. I'm in Sipi, Uganda, alone, and the setting has all the makings for a horror movie. But if this blog makes it to you, I made it out alive.
I made it out alive. Medical mission (team of 20-odd doctors, translators, nurses, make-shift lab techs, and more are descending to treat hundreds of greater-Ddegeyan residents from February 1 to February 13. Becky and I will be busy scrambling to help them however we can as we begin to teach in what may be three different schools between the two of us.
Sipi Falls
Sipi Falls is supposed to have the most beautiful waterfalls in Uganda. I actually think the posters of another waterfall are more beautiful, but the setting of Sipi on top of a mountain surrounded by flatlands as far as you can see is pretty spectacular.
A couple things I realized here. Where I am now is way creepier than the creepy place in Australia where Liz "Snorkelborg" Nyberg freaked out (was it Lanceston?). And I'm alone. And there is a knocking that sounds very similar to a man with a wooden leg and a hook arm knocking/scratching on the wall I am resting against.
Second, geology should do a term abroad in East Africa. Rift valleys (I read that geologists are excited about Eritrea/Ethiopia, because they can "observe an ocean forming"), inactive volcanoes, active volcanoes, rocks, road cuts, etc. Lots of culture and environmental topics to study, too. Just throwing it out there. I know Rodbell, Shaw, and Garver would love it here (maybe not more than Australia, though).
Third, I miss my Tasmanian hiking buddies, Snorkel, Demanda, and McArdle.
Israel
I have to be honest that my sources have been 20 minutes of Al-Jazeera in the hotel I was in last night in Mbale (I am traveling this weekend to Western Uganda - 1/16 - 1/19) and 10 minutes of CNN two weeks ago. But come on Israel, the fact that Palestinian deaths are two orders of magnitude higher than Israeli does mean something. "But they started it!" There were protests in Kampala (police shot tear gas at the protesters and the protesters threw it back, causing police to flee the scene...). I'll keep this short, but the whole situation reminds me of a bumper sticker designed for Operation Iraqi Freedom: "Terrorist: What the Big Army Calls the Little Army."
Malawi
I spent December 23 through January 4 in Malawi with Dave Shulman (and his family), another Minerva Fellow. We had a pretty incredible time, traveling to Zambia to see some African fauna: lions, zebras, giraffes, hippopotamus', buffalo, baboons, monkeys, and much, much more. We also spent some time at Lake Malawi canoeing, getting into trouble with the parks service, going on a tiny sailboat for an hour or so, and hiking around. We also went through a season of The Office on Dave's computer, which I enjoyed all too much.
The bulk of the time, though, was spent in Neno where Dave works. I don't think I was really of any use in helping Dave carry out his work, but it was really great to tag along and take some mental notes for how we do things at the much smaller Engeye Health Clinic. I distinctly remember feeling very lucky to be able to sit in on conversations of some of the PIH staff and it was great to meet some of the incredible people that make PIH work.
The best thing about the trip, though, was getting to hang out with Dave after a five month absence. Hiking, antagonizing one another, cooking non-African food, and having some really good conversations (I think my English is getting worse only having one other native English speaker around).
More (Too Much) on Culture
One of the conversations we had was about culture and Americanization. I have tried to walk through the conversation in my mind a lot the last couple weeks, but can't really capture it all that well (the conversation was on New Year's Eve - we didn't make it to midnight and 2009). I've written about my concern about the erosion of culture, the homogenization of culture, and my reservations as a volunteer carrying pieces of this an imperializing culture. Dave points out that everyone deserves good health care, even if it means western medicine is serving up good health - health trumps culture. The same sort of thing goes for clean water, education, and other universal rights. Dave also points out that no one is in isolation anymore (you can call me, in the mountains bordering Uganda and Tanzania right now) and we all influence one another, even if it seems that America is doing a lot of the pushing.
I see all of these things and I always come away thinking that my concerns are probably unfounded after talking to Dave. But I'm not talking about whether Engeye and PIH should be there helping to provide medical care. I worry about the greater trends that we can't really resolve. It's like global warming - you can see that there is a problem, but it is seemingly unmanageable and may not be solved before it is too late. Cultures and languages are disappearing or at least becoming less distinct as the world flattens out and we may lose a lot of diversity before figuring out what to do about it. Western culture of materialism and consumption is addictive and it tends to run over the alternative cultures or at least marginalize them. But not everyone can have a car and when we hit the oil wall, or the landfill quota, or whatever, we may have eliminated a lot of the cultures and their customs that thrived without these materials (the type of cultures that would be good to have around when we run out of stuff). Again, I don't know how to address this problem, but I think it is a problem worth considering - like species extinction, global warming, world poverty and hunger, inadequate health care, etc. You can't suggest we stop teaching English, stop providing aid or healthcare, or stop selling satellite dishes and McDonalds to combat cultural losses without exacerbating other equally important problems.
Malawi, Mbale, and Notes from the Edge
Dave and PIH in Neno, Malawi are a handful of kilometers (~12) from the border of Mozambique. We tried to hike across the border, but it turns out that there is a huge river between Neno and Mozambique. When I suggested we ford it (recall Oregon Trail: "Would you like to A) Ford the river with x oxen B) Hire an Indian to take you across on his rickety raft or C) Wait for the river to go down while your second wife dies of cholera") Dave and I took a moment to consider the merits of wading across a river and then saw a log roughly 6 feet in diameter being dragged along the river bed. So we hired an Indian to take us across on his rickety raft (it didn't sink and kill our oxen!). Mbale, where I type right now, is about 40 kilometers from Kenya (and now I am in Sipi and can visualize the border off in the distance). I have no intention of getting in another taxi taking me farther from the Buganda culture I'm comfortable with (they speak a whole 'nother language out here).
Amanda Kern, Environmental Good-Deedery, Butterflies, and No Connection to Uganda at All
Amanda sent me a package of vitamins, arts and crafts supplies, pencils, and Vitamin C drink mix (how did she know on December 6 that I would have a cold in mid-January?) Among the mostly positive educational kid oriented things there was candy (no way I'm giving that out, the kids would never leave me alone, "STEVE! Webase? Webase? Webase? - Are you sleeping...? as they peer through my window) and a fair trade, 70% cacao, organic, "100% ethically traded" smooth, dark blend, with 10% of profits going to "species, habitat, and humanity" (this candy bar must have been like ten bucks!). I discovered all this environmental good deedery as I was licking my chocolate covered fingers and found the wrapper on the floor. It did remind me, as I read the bar's label, that even though I saw lions, zebras, giraffes, hippopotamus', impala, puku, elephants, crowned cranes, etc. in Malawi we still have a lot of good stuff in our own backyards to appreciate and protect (the inside of the wrapper highlighted the Karner Blue Butterfly native to New York State, among others). Did you know:
I think something like 98 percent of America's primordial forests (the original ones) are gone and we killed off a lot of the cooler species (the American Bison, what a bad idea). But America still has a lot of good stuff left to protect and enjoy. So while "Endangered Species Chocolate" might be better than Hershey's in saving the Amazon or other far away forests there is still lots of good environmental stuff you can do back home (the candy bar suggests planting a butterfly garden, which I did in third grade with Mrs. Ulintz. Check, done.). The candy bar's connection to species preservation is a little tenuous - cacao grows in the shade of forests so if you buy our chocolate, which grows in the shade of forests, you are saving forests. I guess it probably works out...
The candy bar can be obtained in Pocatello (Pocawhere?), Idaho where Amanda works every Monday and every other Thursday as a co-op member (communist).
Physics, Finally
I was going to hold off on talking about my physics excitement until I had it all figured out, but I think that the next time I have a chance to sit down and write may be a little while.
A secondary school roughly an 1.5 hours away on foot or 45 minutes by rickety bicycle (we are buying a mountain bike, part of the reason I am traveling this weekend) wants teachers, especially in mathematics and science! And a physics teacher is retiring! I have been so excited about the possibility of teaching physics that I have been going through practice problems and finding alternative methods to the example problems in a physics text I bought. I may just be getting my hopes up, but I would really enjoy working with the Ddegeyan kids in the morning and then biking/hiking to the secondary school across the valley to assist in tutoring, reviewing, or lecturing the beginning physics classes (they are required to take physics over a few years so I think they might have more time to go over concepts).
The school takes a lot of orphans or "school dependents" and is a more affordable school than many of the other local secondary schools for the non-dependents (I think like $600 per year for room and board). We'll see if it works out - I will keep you updated.
Fundraised Funds
So we have distributed 10 chickens (and built chicken coops). I think we could have done more, but we have been wandering up to 2-3 kilometers to find chickens to buy. We are going to try to at least double that number in the coming months, hopefully more. It is a sort of long process - find kids who could use a chicken, get them together and explain what we're trying to do, have kids collect materials for the coop (this can take time), build all the coops, find chickens, deliver chickens over a couple kilometer catchment area.
Second, we're going to supply the St. Timothy's kids with pens, pencils, and notebooks for this term using the money fundraised at St. Eugene's (the American side of the pen-pal chain).
More ideas are churning, hopefully we can make them reality soon...Thank you for everyone who is making these programs possible (including all of those who have sent books and supplies, which are being used everyday).
Friday, January 16, 2009
Profiting from Poverty
I found this article in print while visiting Dave (electronic link), which I thought was pretty interesting. The tone and qualitative statements make me wonder if somethings are exaggerated or taken out of context, but I have the same thoughts about The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Profiting from poverty: How Western companies and consultants exploit Africa.
Publication: New African
Publication Date: 01-NOV-07
The manipulative operations of international financial institutions have opened up African economies to exploitation by rich multinational corporations and consultancy firms who are maximising their profits from Africa's misery. As Regina Jere-Malanda reports, Western corporate power in is a Africa monster with a thousand stomachs, insatiable for profit, profit, profit. For Africans, this is a hard stuff to swallow--but corporate greed knows no limits.
**********
The agonising reality of what the IMF, World Bank and WTO have done to Africa through their adverse economic and trade policies is, sadly, battered news. What is not is the story of how these institutions have given their blessing to multinational corporations to roam Africa willy-nilly, and trump African governments and populations, all for the sake of corporate profits. Some of these corporations are not only gaining increasing influence on African governments, but enjoy larger annual incomes than the countries they exploit.
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It is widely argued that Africa needs Western investment and that multinational corporations are not the cause of Africa's problems, but the solution. Well, the fact that Africa needs foreign investment cannot be denied. But over the years, this investment has, by and large, not enriched the majority of African people. The UN estimates that unfair trade rules deny poor countries $700bn every year, and 70% of that trade is controlled by multinational corporations.
As the British journalist George Monbiot puts it: "Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives."
It is well documented how International Financial Institutions (IFIs) were set up to provide financing to governments and private companies for social and human development, physical infrastructure projects, trade, investment, establishing new businesses, services delivery, etc. However, today many of these IFIs have taken on the mantle of main agents of economic globalisation.
For example, although the core IFIs--also called multilateral development banks, ie, World Bank, IMF and regional development banks such as the African Development Bank (ADB)--ostensibly provide loans, grants and technical support to developing countries for the purposes of national development and poverty reduction, significant portions of their operations are directed towards boosting the private sector.
According to writer Tony Iltis: "The lies and distortions of the power brokers ... [and how] they allow multinationals to exploit human and natural resources takes away freedom from people. DRCongo is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources, yet one of the poorest in terms of its population. This is because 32 Western corporations own the country's mineral wealth."
In a recent article published in Australia, Iltis revealed the length to which these corporations would go to protect their freedom of ownership. "This was demonstrated by an Australian company in the village of Kilwa in October 2004," he wrote. "To protect its silver and copper mines from impoverished locals, the company employed Congolese soldiers, transported in company vehicles, who killed and raped locals, leaving many dead.
He added: "The claim that free-market policies represent a strategy for ending world poverty is an extraordinary inversion of reality."
For sure, the unchallenged power of the IMF and World Bank to force poor countries to open up their markets to Western corporate and financial interests has generally weakened African governments.
In another example, when the IMF and the World Bank a few years ago insisted that Uganda privatises its water supply and sanitation systems, they deliberately created lucrative opportunities for Western corporations which gave the Ugandan leadership a short notice to remove government subsidies that gave ordinary citizens access to water. The result was that the people could not afford the clean drinking water while the Western corporations laughed all the way to the bank.
In the meantime, the privatisation of water supplies for the benefit of Western multinationals decreased access to clean water, while the biggest killer of children clearly are preventable diseases caused by lack of clean water.
The saddest thing of all is that these corporations are able to exert undue influence over African governments and economies, simply by influencing political decisions and public opinion in places that matter.
There are, for example, over 30,000 corporate lobbyists in Washington and Brussels, completely outnumbering the US Congress and European Commission staff that they lobby. The vast majority of these lobby groups represent business interests which spend billions of dollars annually advocating their main cause, which is market access in emerging economies and poor African countries.
In the US alone, corporations and their agencies spent $9.7bn lobbying Congress between 1997 and 2000, about $4.5m a year per each member of Congress. Meanwhile, many developing and African countries do not have the resources to send enough, if any, representatives to argue their case for fairer trade practices that would benefit their economic development.
In the UK, the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), founded in 1948, had operated as a UK government fund supporting both public and private initiatives in developing countries.
Alas after Tony Blair's government failed to privatise the CDC, it was transformed in 1999 into a limited company owned by the UK government's Department for International Development (DFID). The CDC then switched from long-term lending to direct equity investment in the private sector only. According to DFID, the CDC's main function is now geared towards "promoting the private sector in the developing world" through direct investment and the mobilisation of third party capital from other sources of finance.
Hence the CDC is now the equivalent of the World Bank's private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, which has been widely criticised for extending the reach of the private sector into public services, such as health and education, in most African countries. In the first five years of Tony Blair's government, five major international consultancy/accountancy firms were given contracts to the tune of [pounds sterling]118m in consultancy fees alone for work they had been hired to do on privatisation in developing countries, including that of water.
Privatise, my son
According to a still must-read report published by the NGO, War on Want, the UK government has positioned itself as a champion of privatisation in developing countries. Despite its avowed commitment to poverty reduction and realisation of the UN Millennium Development Goals, DFID has invested heavily in the international privatisation programme, creating new bodies and financing mechanisms to advance the cause of privatisation across the developing world.
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The 2004 report, titled "Profiting from Poverty"(the title which we have kindly borrowed as our cover headline), analyses the role of privatisation consultants in developing countries. It reveals how DFID channels large sums of the UK aid budget every year to multinational corporations such as Price-waterhouseCoopers and KPMG in order to drive forward the privatisation of public services in developing countries.
"DFID's commitment to privatisation has brought the Labour government into startling new alliances," the report says. "The consultancy arm of the Adam Smith Institute (the right-wing think tank behind the Conservative government's privatisation of Britain's public services in the 1980s) had in 2004 received over [pounds sterling]34m from the UK aid budget in six years."
In March 2005, DFID adopted a new policy on aid conditionality in which it pledged that it would no longer make the privatisation of public services, such as electricity and water, a condition of UK aid to developing countries. DFID acknowledged the damage which such privatisations have caused in the past, and recognised that conditions imposed by donors undermine democracy in recipient states. However, 40% of UK aid is still being channelled through the World Bank, IMF and EU, and much of this is still dependent on developing countries accepting harmful conditions such as privatisation of public services. According to War on Want, private sector consultancies have established themselves as indispensable partners in the international privatisation programme. And these consultancies earn huge sums of money from these contracts even though developing countries, such as those in Africa, can provide their own consultants and experts.
War on Want has also highlighted the lobbying activities undertaken by privatisation consultants in promoting privatisation of public services on their own account as an indication of the conflict of interests raised by employing such firms as advisers on public services reform in African countries.
"The UK government actively promotes British expertise in the field of privatisation in order to win overseas contracts for its own companies," says War on Want. "This includes a dedicated team advising British companies how to win contracts from the UK's own aid budget, through what the government terms 'aid-funded business'. The benefits of such business to private sector consultants are clear, yet it is far from clear that these companies are a suitable choice to provide pro-poor reform solutions in the developing world."
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While the World Bank and DFID develop these strong partnerships with private sector consultants to provide 'technical assistance' in developing countries on public sector reform, the use of privatisation consultants has become an integral part of the reform process, so that governments in the South are now commonly required to accept such companies as advisers, as part of the financial support package on offer.
As such, donors and financial institutions make sure that developing countries are not only steered towards privatisation but are also "helped" through the process by "experts" who ensure that public services are transferred into private hands.
Therefore, companies contracted to advise African governments on public sector reforms earn vast sums in consultancy fees. Often the money paid to these consultants comes directly out of the aid budgets of donor governments or from programme funds of financial institutions such as the World Bank and regional development banks.
The War on Want report revealed that DFID had not only turned to consultants for "more imaginative assistance in the programme to promote privatisation of public services in developing countries", the consultancy arm of the Adam Smith Institute, for example, was awarded over [pounds sterling]725,000 in contracts by DFID to assist the government of Tanzania in its privatisation programme, including the provision of [pounds sterling]430,000 to provide support to the public relations unit.
The consultancy company duly devised a number of ways in which to win over a sceptical Tanzanian public to the merits of privatisation, including a pop video shown on national television!
In a recent review of the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) admitted that privatisation of public utilities such as electricity had been characterised by "dramatic failures" to date, as "profit-maximising behaviour has led privatised companies to keep investments below the necessary levels, with the result that rural communities and the urban poor were further marginalised in terms of access to electric power". And as one editor of a recent UN survey of electricity privatisations points out: "The profits are privatised and losses socialised. This is a standard problem when multinational companies take over the public services of developing countries."
Going for energy
Energy privatisation is currently the second most common form of privatisation (after banking) imposed on developing countries by the IMF, with countries such as Benin, Ghana, Mozambique and Senegal being some of the major targets. According to Gerald Caplan, principal author of the acclaimed book, Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide and a senior consultant to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA): "Western governments, IFIs, and transnational corporations do far more harm than merely bolstering and arming tyrannical regimes ... Even when it seems the West is actually investing in Africa, the reality is almost exactly the opposite.
"With few exceptions," he says, "Africa's fabulous natural riches--from Nigeria to Angola to Chad to eastern Congo to southern Sudan--have become a 'resource curse'. Of Africa's less than 3% share of the world's foreign direct investment, almost all goes to extractive industries--oil, minerals (gold, diamond, coltan, platinum), and timber. Two-thirds of American capital entering Africa goes into mining and petroleum. But to label this 'investment' badly distorts the concept."
"Although there are exceptions," Caplan continues, "in the majority of cases foreign companies pay little or no taxes, increase corruption by bribing their way to their objectives, build no lasting infrastructure, pay starvation wages, destabilise communities, become involved in local conflicts, then disappear, leaving behind an environmental and social disaster."
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He adds: "Oil companies grow fat from the Gulf of Guinea, increasingly a source of American oil supplies, while the citizens of half a dozen countries go without lights, clean water, good health, and jobs ... natural resources and cash are by no means the only items being drained out of Africa. As it did during the slave trade, the continent is once again giving the West its most precious resource--its best, brightest, healthiest, and most productive people.
"In effect, African countries are using their meagre resources--often from foreign aid ostensibly aimed at 'capacity building'--to train professionals who end up in Europe or North America. Thus, a good chunk of our [Western] foreign aid to Africa actually benefits us, not them.
"This includes university graduates and professionals in all fields, but is most extreme in the health sector. No African country can afford to lose a single health-care professional. The US has 937 nurses per 100,000 people, Uganda has 61. Canada has 214 physicians per 100,000 people, Ghana, one of the continent's more stable countries, has 15. Collectively, African countries already fall far short of the WHO minimum standard of 250 health-care workers per 100,000 people, while the brain drain continues to suck doctors and nurses out of Africa and into the developed world," Caplan laments.
We couldn't agree with him more, and amid this sad imposition, four major killers of children--diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, and measles--which are treatable with cheap, safe, available interventions, continue to cause havoc in Africa, while multinational corporations and their co-conspirators greedily milk the continent to the bone.
Indeed at every step, Africa finds itself the victim of double standards. The continent is routinely forced to play to the rules of free trade (which change all the time)--rules that are harnessed by Western governments and their corporate cohorts.
According to the Trade Justice Movement (TJM), world trade rules rob poor (African) countries of [pounds sterling]1.3bn a day, 14 times what they receive in aid. "We are giving pennies with one hand and taking pounds with the other," it says.
The TJM estimates that while world trade has increased ten-fold since 1970, the developing world's share of international trade has halved since 1980 as 70% of world trade is controlled by multinational corporations, depriving them of trade worth $700bn every year. And what is more, free trade forces rich and poor to compete on equal terms (as the TJM puts it). "It's like pitching Manchester United against a village football team. It's obvious who's going to win because one side has huge advantages over the other, even if the playing field is level."
Almost all rich countries use trade rules to force poor countries to open their markets to competition and uncontrolled foreign investment. Hence when the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) was established in 1995, it had been expected to reduce Western subsidies and protection in order to benefit developing countries that were supposed to expand their exports significantly.
However, to this day, this expectation has not been fulfilled. Instead the imbalances and unfairness of the AoA have been more glaring. The AoA has enabled developed countries to continue their high levels of protection, whilst many developing countries have liberalised and their farmers face severe and often damaging competition, often from imports artificially cheapened through subsidies from Western governments.
Under the market access rules of the AoA, all members have to abolish quantitative restrictions and non-tariff barriers and replace these with tariffs. Members have to reduce their tariff levels by 36% over six years for developed countries, and by 24% over 10 years for developing countries.
In the meantime, according to a report by another NGO, Christian Aid, sub-Saharan Africa is currently $272bn worse off thanks to the free-trade policies forced on it as a condition of receiving Western money.
At the same time, OECD countries spend $3bn per annum in agriculture subsidies (mainly to large agribusinesses)--more than the combined income of the world's poorest 1.2 billion people.
This causes overproduction by rich country farmers, who then sell their produce below cost, allowing them to flood Africa with commodities at lower prices than African producers can match. This protects their own farmers and makes it virtually impossible for African products to gain a foothold in Western markets. In reality, 2% of the world's farmers own two-thirds of trade in agriculture. US and EU governments spend six times more on agricultural subsidy per day than they spend on aid. This leads to the obscenity whereby every European cow receives $2 per day from governments while 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day.
It is indeed bizarre that it is cheaper for a Ghanaian to buy an imported European-raised chicken than a locally raised one. According to CorpWatch, in 1992 domestic poultry farmers supplied 95% of the Ghanaian market; by 2001, their market share had dwindled to 11%.
And when pressure from local poultry farmers compelled the Ghanaian government and parliament, under President John Kufuor, to pass a law restraining unbridled poultry imports in 2005, in order to protect the local poultry industry, the IMF forced Kufuor's government to cancel the law the very next week. As a result, uncontrolled poultry imports continue, destroying the local industry as Ghanaian poultry farmers cannot compete with the cheap chicken coming in from abroad.
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The pattern has been the same elsewhere--poor African countries lose substantial and sustainable local industries as they are forced to open their markets to cheap imports.
ODA's 'dirty little secret'
The much-touted Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) that all Western governments include in their budgets is another veiled gimmick which Gerald Caplan dismantles: "There's a dirty little secret about all those billions," he says. "It's not just that most countries could easily be far more generous, the real story of ODA is how much less has been delivered than almost everyone believes. It's often difficult to determine what constitutes ODA in any country's budget; debt relief, for example, is often lumped in as a form of aid, and some countries still commonly receive aid money for geopolitical rather than developmental purposes, badly distorting the data.
"Much aid, in fact, directly benefits the donor country, as it is tied to the purchase of goods and services from the donor. This makes little sense in terms of costs or efficiency: food purchased through tied aid, for example, is 40% more expensive than what could be acquired through open market transactions."
And Caplan is not finished: "Western commercial and financial activities in Africa, are not only overwhelmingly exploitative and destructive, figures show that sub-Saharan Africa effectively loses between $1.6bn and $2.3bn of the annual aid it receives." Lumped into this damage of poor African countries is the foreign exchange risk that occurs when multinational companies borrow in dollars on international capital markets and their customers pay in local currency. When local currencies weaken, consumers must pay more and more just for the companies to maintain constant revenue in dollar terms.
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According to Rajesh Makwana, director of Share The World Resources (STWR), an organisation campaigning for a fairer global economy, corporations have been so productive in recent years that of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are now corporations and only 48 are countries. "Unsurprisingly then, they have a significant impact on the global economy--70% of world trade is now controlled by just 500 of the largest industrial corporations," Makwana says.
STWR is resoundingly categorical: "Economic globalisation is progressively commercialising all resources and essential services. Market forces, not human needs, control their supply. The result is a global economy that sustains affluent countries and their corporate interests, whilst neglecting the majority of the world which still lives in poverty.
"Unsurprisingly then, the interests of rich nations and their corporations form the basis of WTO agreements and directly influence the global political and economic architecture. The corporate bottom line, espoused by the WTO, is to open market access in all countries to resources, services and intellectual property in an endless drive for greater profits."
According to STWR: "Many of these unaccountable corporations now have a greater turnover than the GDP of most countries ... they have sales figures of between $51 bn and $247bn ... The top 200 corporations have a combined sales equivalent to 28% of world GDP. However, these 200 corporations only employ 0.82% of the global workforce."
In recent years, says the STWR, corporations have realised that it is possible to dramatically increase profits by shifting their operations to developing countries where wages, costs and taxes are much lower, and regulation almost non-existent.
It adds: "The World Bank has proven to be profitable to large corporations based in the North, initiating large-scale development programmes in poor countries that attract private investment. Foreign direct investment now exceeds $1 trillion per year for projects such as privatisation of public utilities and creating banking systems.
"Such projects are clearly safe bets for corporate investors. Again there is a stark concentration of political and economic power here, as one per cent of all multinationals own 50% of the total stock of all foreign direct investment."
Whilst the World Bank inflates developing world borrowing for development projects, the IMF acts as the lender of last resort for the balance of payment deficits often experienced by developing countries. The combined result is massive indebtedness for impoverished countries. To guarantee returns, these same institutions impose structural adjustment programmes on borrowing countries to prioritise debt repayment. This proves lucrative for financial corporations based in the North, whose interests the IMF openly defends. When these corporations make bad loans to developing countries, the IMF provides multibillion dollar bailouts.
"As these corporations grow," says STWR, "they find it economically profitable to operate in multiple countries, seeking out favourable conditions such as low labour costs, fewer regulations and other financial or tax incentives. Many of these multinationals can now be described as 'transnationals' as they have 'globalised' their operations and retain no particular affiliation to any country. This allows them greater flexibility in operative structure and greater leverage over governments who compete for their business."
And as if all this damage is not enough, the growing monopolisation of intellectual property rights by multinational corporations is yet another affliction on Africa from which corporations are profiteering. According to STWR: "Corporate links with the WTO as well as with the IMF and World Bank, continue to negotiate access to emerging markets and to secure intellectual property rights.
"Through the free trade agreements such as NAFTA and WTO agreements such as GATTS (The General Agreement on Trade in Services) and Trips (Trade Related Agreement on International Property Rights), the potential for even greater corporate economic dominance is plain. Corporate rights continue to be enforced and essential common resources such as water, genetic material and knowledge are privatised, without regard for the sovereignty of developing countries."
Mention Africa's foreign debt and the mantra is that loans have been misused through corruption and poor governance. Concealed though is the fact that this is yet another way in which Western corporations profit.
According to Tony Iltis: "Debts are generally incurred by undemocratic Western-supported governments to pay for infrastructure that benefits multinationals and military expenditure to protect their investments. [There are] many self-congratulatory pronouncements about debt relief, but the amounts involved are no more than a drop in the ocean and are conditional on the implementation of poverty-increasing privatisation and austerity."
In actual fact, for every $1 of US aid to Africa, $3 is taken back in debt repayments. The human cost of this is illustrated by, for example, Zambia which spends twice as much on debt repayment as on education. Or in Malawi, where the government spends more on debt repayment than on health. But events change--all the time. Europe was in a hopeless state of war for centuries, until only 1945. Many Asian countries are changing beyond recognition. Latin America is turning the tables. Africa will change too. Except--Africa has no other Africa to exploit.
Profiting from poverty: How Western companies and consultants exploit Africa.
Publication: New African
Publication Date: 01-NOV-07
The manipulative operations of international financial institutions have opened up African economies to exploitation by rich multinational corporations and consultancy firms who are maximising their profits from Africa's misery. As Regina Jere-Malanda reports, Western corporate power in is a Africa monster with a thousand stomachs, insatiable for profit, profit, profit. For Africans, this is a hard stuff to swallow--but corporate greed knows no limits.
**********
The agonising reality of what the IMF, World Bank and WTO have done to Africa through their adverse economic and trade policies is, sadly, battered news. What is not is the story of how these institutions have given their blessing to multinational corporations to roam Africa willy-nilly, and trump African governments and populations, all for the sake of corporate profits. Some of these corporations are not only gaining increasing influence on African governments, but enjoy larger annual incomes than the countries they exploit.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It is widely argued that Africa needs Western investment and that multinational corporations are not the cause of Africa's problems, but the solution. Well, the fact that Africa needs foreign investment cannot be denied. But over the years, this investment has, by and large, not enriched the majority of African people. The UN estimates that unfair trade rules deny poor countries $700bn every year, and 70% of that trade is controlled by multinational corporations.
As the British journalist George Monbiot puts it: "Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives."
It is well documented how International Financial Institutions (IFIs) were set up to provide financing to governments and private companies for social and human development, physical infrastructure projects, trade, investment, establishing new businesses, services delivery, etc. However, today many of these IFIs have taken on the mantle of main agents of economic globalisation.
For example, although the core IFIs--also called multilateral development banks, ie, World Bank, IMF and regional development banks such as the African Development Bank (ADB)--ostensibly provide loans, grants and technical support to developing countries for the purposes of national development and poverty reduction, significant portions of their operations are directed towards boosting the private sector.
According to writer Tony Iltis: "The lies and distortions of the power brokers ... [and how] they allow multinationals to exploit human and natural resources takes away freedom from people. DRCongo is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources, yet one of the poorest in terms of its population. This is because 32 Western corporations own the country's mineral wealth."
In a recent article published in Australia, Iltis revealed the length to which these corporations would go to protect their freedom of ownership. "This was demonstrated by an Australian company in the village of Kilwa in October 2004," he wrote. "To protect its silver and copper mines from impoverished locals, the company employed Congolese soldiers, transported in company vehicles, who killed and raped locals, leaving many dead.
He added: "The claim that free-market policies represent a strategy for ending world poverty is an extraordinary inversion of reality."
For sure, the unchallenged power of the IMF and World Bank to force poor countries to open up their markets to Western corporate and financial interests has generally weakened African governments.
In another example, when the IMF and the World Bank a few years ago insisted that Uganda privatises its water supply and sanitation systems, they deliberately created lucrative opportunities for Western corporations which gave the Ugandan leadership a short notice to remove government subsidies that gave ordinary citizens access to water. The result was that the people could not afford the clean drinking water while the Western corporations laughed all the way to the bank.
In the meantime, the privatisation of water supplies for the benefit of Western multinationals decreased access to clean water, while the biggest killer of children clearly are preventable diseases caused by lack of clean water.
The saddest thing of all is that these corporations are able to exert undue influence over African governments and economies, simply by influencing political decisions and public opinion in places that matter.
There are, for example, over 30,000 corporate lobbyists in Washington and Brussels, completely outnumbering the US Congress and European Commission staff that they lobby. The vast majority of these lobby groups represent business interests which spend billions of dollars annually advocating their main cause, which is market access in emerging economies and poor African countries.
In the US alone, corporations and their agencies spent $9.7bn lobbying Congress between 1997 and 2000, about $4.5m a year per each member of Congress. Meanwhile, many developing and African countries do not have the resources to send enough, if any, representatives to argue their case for fairer trade practices that would benefit their economic development.
In the UK, the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), founded in 1948, had operated as a UK government fund supporting both public and private initiatives in developing countries.
Alas after Tony Blair's government failed to privatise the CDC, it was transformed in 1999 into a limited company owned by the UK government's Department for International Development (DFID). The CDC then switched from long-term lending to direct equity investment in the private sector only. According to DFID, the CDC's main function is now geared towards "promoting the private sector in the developing world" through direct investment and the mobilisation of third party capital from other sources of finance.
Hence the CDC is now the equivalent of the World Bank's private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, which has been widely criticised for extending the reach of the private sector into public services, such as health and education, in most African countries. In the first five years of Tony Blair's government, five major international consultancy/accountancy firms were given contracts to the tune of [pounds sterling]118m in consultancy fees alone for work they had been hired to do on privatisation in developing countries, including that of water.
Privatise, my son
According to a still must-read report published by the NGO, War on Want, the UK government has positioned itself as a champion of privatisation in developing countries. Despite its avowed commitment to poverty reduction and realisation of the UN Millennium Development Goals, DFID has invested heavily in the international privatisation programme, creating new bodies and financing mechanisms to advance the cause of privatisation across the developing world.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The 2004 report, titled "Profiting from Poverty"(the title which we have kindly borrowed as our cover headline), analyses the role of privatisation consultants in developing countries. It reveals how DFID channels large sums of the UK aid budget every year to multinational corporations such as Price-waterhouseCoopers and KPMG in order to drive forward the privatisation of public services in developing countries.
"DFID's commitment to privatisation has brought the Labour government into startling new alliances," the report says. "The consultancy arm of the Adam Smith Institute (the right-wing think tank behind the Conservative government's privatisation of Britain's public services in the 1980s) had in 2004 received over [pounds sterling]34m from the UK aid budget in six years."
In March 2005, DFID adopted a new policy on aid conditionality in which it pledged that it would no longer make the privatisation of public services, such as electricity and water, a condition of UK aid to developing countries. DFID acknowledged the damage which such privatisations have caused in the past, and recognised that conditions imposed by donors undermine democracy in recipient states. However, 40% of UK aid is still being channelled through the World Bank, IMF and EU, and much of this is still dependent on developing countries accepting harmful conditions such as privatisation of public services. According to War on Want, private sector consultancies have established themselves as indispensable partners in the international privatisation programme. And these consultancies earn huge sums of money from these contracts even though developing countries, such as those in Africa, can provide their own consultants and experts.
War on Want has also highlighted the lobbying activities undertaken by privatisation consultants in promoting privatisation of public services on their own account as an indication of the conflict of interests raised by employing such firms as advisers on public services reform in African countries.
"The UK government actively promotes British expertise in the field of privatisation in order to win overseas contracts for its own companies," says War on Want. "This includes a dedicated team advising British companies how to win contracts from the UK's own aid budget, through what the government terms 'aid-funded business'. The benefits of such business to private sector consultants are clear, yet it is far from clear that these companies are a suitable choice to provide pro-poor reform solutions in the developing world."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
While the World Bank and DFID develop these strong partnerships with private sector consultants to provide 'technical assistance' in developing countries on public sector reform, the use of privatisation consultants has become an integral part of the reform process, so that governments in the South are now commonly required to accept such companies as advisers, as part of the financial support package on offer.
As such, donors and financial institutions make sure that developing countries are not only steered towards privatisation but are also "helped" through the process by "experts" who ensure that public services are transferred into private hands.
Therefore, companies contracted to advise African governments on public sector reforms earn vast sums in consultancy fees. Often the money paid to these consultants comes directly out of the aid budgets of donor governments or from programme funds of financial institutions such as the World Bank and regional development banks.
The War on Want report revealed that DFID had not only turned to consultants for "more imaginative assistance in the programme to promote privatisation of public services in developing countries", the consultancy arm of the Adam Smith Institute, for example, was awarded over [pounds sterling]725,000 in contracts by DFID to assist the government of Tanzania in its privatisation programme, including the provision of [pounds sterling]430,000 to provide support to the public relations unit.
The consultancy company duly devised a number of ways in which to win over a sceptical Tanzanian public to the merits of privatisation, including a pop video shown on national television!
In a recent review of the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) admitted that privatisation of public utilities such as electricity had been characterised by "dramatic failures" to date, as "profit-maximising behaviour has led privatised companies to keep investments below the necessary levels, with the result that rural communities and the urban poor were further marginalised in terms of access to electric power". And as one editor of a recent UN survey of electricity privatisations points out: "The profits are privatised and losses socialised. This is a standard problem when multinational companies take over the public services of developing countries."
Going for energy
Energy privatisation is currently the second most common form of privatisation (after banking) imposed on developing countries by the IMF, with countries such as Benin, Ghana, Mozambique and Senegal being some of the major targets. According to Gerald Caplan, principal author of the acclaimed book, Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide and a senior consultant to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA): "Western governments, IFIs, and transnational corporations do far more harm than merely bolstering and arming tyrannical regimes ... Even when it seems the West is actually investing in Africa, the reality is almost exactly the opposite.
"With few exceptions," he says, "Africa's fabulous natural riches--from Nigeria to Angola to Chad to eastern Congo to southern Sudan--have become a 'resource curse'. Of Africa's less than 3% share of the world's foreign direct investment, almost all goes to extractive industries--oil, minerals (gold, diamond, coltan, platinum), and timber. Two-thirds of American capital entering Africa goes into mining and petroleum. But to label this 'investment' badly distorts the concept."
"Although there are exceptions," Caplan continues, "in the majority of cases foreign companies pay little or no taxes, increase corruption by bribing their way to their objectives, build no lasting infrastructure, pay starvation wages, destabilise communities, become involved in local conflicts, then disappear, leaving behind an environmental and social disaster."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
He adds: "Oil companies grow fat from the Gulf of Guinea, increasingly a source of American oil supplies, while the citizens of half a dozen countries go without lights, clean water, good health, and jobs ... natural resources and cash are by no means the only items being drained out of Africa. As it did during the slave trade, the continent is once again giving the West its most precious resource--its best, brightest, healthiest, and most productive people.
"In effect, African countries are using their meagre resources--often from foreign aid ostensibly aimed at 'capacity building'--to train professionals who end up in Europe or North America. Thus, a good chunk of our [Western] foreign aid to Africa actually benefits us, not them.
"This includes university graduates and professionals in all fields, but is most extreme in the health sector. No African country can afford to lose a single health-care professional. The US has 937 nurses per 100,000 people, Uganda has 61. Canada has 214 physicians per 100,000 people, Ghana, one of the continent's more stable countries, has 15. Collectively, African countries already fall far short of the WHO minimum standard of 250 health-care workers per 100,000 people, while the brain drain continues to suck doctors and nurses out of Africa and into the developed world," Caplan laments.
We couldn't agree with him more, and amid this sad imposition, four major killers of children--diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, and measles--which are treatable with cheap, safe, available interventions, continue to cause havoc in Africa, while multinational corporations and their co-conspirators greedily milk the continent to the bone.
Indeed at every step, Africa finds itself the victim of double standards. The continent is routinely forced to play to the rules of free trade (which change all the time)--rules that are harnessed by Western governments and their corporate cohorts.
According to the Trade Justice Movement (TJM), world trade rules rob poor (African) countries of [pounds sterling]1.3bn a day, 14 times what they receive in aid. "We are giving pennies with one hand and taking pounds with the other," it says.
The TJM estimates that while world trade has increased ten-fold since 1970, the developing world's share of international trade has halved since 1980 as 70% of world trade is controlled by multinational corporations, depriving them of trade worth $700bn every year. And what is more, free trade forces rich and poor to compete on equal terms (as the TJM puts it). "It's like pitching Manchester United against a village football team. It's obvious who's going to win because one side has huge advantages over the other, even if the playing field is level."
Almost all rich countries use trade rules to force poor countries to open their markets to competition and uncontrolled foreign investment. Hence when the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) was established in 1995, it had been expected to reduce Western subsidies and protection in order to benefit developing countries that were supposed to expand their exports significantly.
However, to this day, this expectation has not been fulfilled. Instead the imbalances and unfairness of the AoA have been more glaring. The AoA has enabled developed countries to continue their high levels of protection, whilst many developing countries have liberalised and their farmers face severe and often damaging competition, often from imports artificially cheapened through subsidies from Western governments.
Under the market access rules of the AoA, all members have to abolish quantitative restrictions and non-tariff barriers and replace these with tariffs. Members have to reduce their tariff levels by 36% over six years for developed countries, and by 24% over 10 years for developing countries.
In the meantime, according to a report by another NGO, Christian Aid, sub-Saharan Africa is currently $272bn worse off thanks to the free-trade policies forced on it as a condition of receiving Western money.
At the same time, OECD countries spend $3bn per annum in agriculture subsidies (mainly to large agribusinesses)--more than the combined income of the world's poorest 1.2 billion people.
This causes overproduction by rich country farmers, who then sell their produce below cost, allowing them to flood Africa with commodities at lower prices than African producers can match. This protects their own farmers and makes it virtually impossible for African products to gain a foothold in Western markets. In reality, 2% of the world's farmers own two-thirds of trade in agriculture. US and EU governments spend six times more on agricultural subsidy per day than they spend on aid. This leads to the obscenity whereby every European cow receives $2 per day from governments while 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day.
It is indeed bizarre that it is cheaper for a Ghanaian to buy an imported European-raised chicken than a locally raised one. According to CorpWatch, in 1992 domestic poultry farmers supplied 95% of the Ghanaian market; by 2001, their market share had dwindled to 11%.
And when pressure from local poultry farmers compelled the Ghanaian government and parliament, under President John Kufuor, to pass a law restraining unbridled poultry imports in 2005, in order to protect the local poultry industry, the IMF forced Kufuor's government to cancel the law the very next week. As a result, uncontrolled poultry imports continue, destroying the local industry as Ghanaian poultry farmers cannot compete with the cheap chicken coming in from abroad.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The pattern has been the same elsewhere--poor African countries lose substantial and sustainable local industries as they are forced to open their markets to cheap imports.
ODA's 'dirty little secret'
The much-touted Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) that all Western governments include in their budgets is another veiled gimmick which Gerald Caplan dismantles: "There's a dirty little secret about all those billions," he says. "It's not just that most countries could easily be far more generous, the real story of ODA is how much less has been delivered than almost everyone believes. It's often difficult to determine what constitutes ODA in any country's budget; debt relief, for example, is often lumped in as a form of aid, and some countries still commonly receive aid money for geopolitical rather than developmental purposes, badly distorting the data.
"Much aid, in fact, directly benefits the donor country, as it is tied to the purchase of goods and services from the donor. This makes little sense in terms of costs or efficiency: food purchased through tied aid, for example, is 40% more expensive than what could be acquired through open market transactions."
And Caplan is not finished: "Western commercial and financial activities in Africa, are not only overwhelmingly exploitative and destructive, figures show that sub-Saharan Africa effectively loses between $1.6bn and $2.3bn of the annual aid it receives." Lumped into this damage of poor African countries is the foreign exchange risk that occurs when multinational companies borrow in dollars on international capital markets and their customers pay in local currency. When local currencies weaken, consumers must pay more and more just for the companies to maintain constant revenue in dollar terms.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
According to Rajesh Makwana, director of Share The World Resources (STWR), an organisation campaigning for a fairer global economy, corporations have been so productive in recent years that of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are now corporations and only 48 are countries. "Unsurprisingly then, they have a significant impact on the global economy--70% of world trade is now controlled by just 500 of the largest industrial corporations," Makwana says.
STWR is resoundingly categorical: "Economic globalisation is progressively commercialising all resources and essential services. Market forces, not human needs, control their supply. The result is a global economy that sustains affluent countries and their corporate interests, whilst neglecting the majority of the world which still lives in poverty.
"Unsurprisingly then, the interests of rich nations and their corporations form the basis of WTO agreements and directly influence the global political and economic architecture. The corporate bottom line, espoused by the WTO, is to open market access in all countries to resources, services and intellectual property in an endless drive for greater profits."
According to STWR: "Many of these unaccountable corporations now have a greater turnover than the GDP of most countries ... they have sales figures of between $51 bn and $247bn ... The top 200 corporations have a combined sales equivalent to 28% of world GDP. However, these 200 corporations only employ 0.82% of the global workforce."
In recent years, says the STWR, corporations have realised that it is possible to dramatically increase profits by shifting their operations to developing countries where wages, costs and taxes are much lower, and regulation almost non-existent.
It adds: "The World Bank has proven to be profitable to large corporations based in the North, initiating large-scale development programmes in poor countries that attract private investment. Foreign direct investment now exceeds $1 trillion per year for projects such as privatisation of public utilities and creating banking systems.
"Such projects are clearly safe bets for corporate investors. Again there is a stark concentration of political and economic power here, as one per cent of all multinationals own 50% of the total stock of all foreign direct investment."
Whilst the World Bank inflates developing world borrowing for development projects, the IMF acts as the lender of last resort for the balance of payment deficits often experienced by developing countries. The combined result is massive indebtedness for impoverished countries. To guarantee returns, these same institutions impose structural adjustment programmes on borrowing countries to prioritise debt repayment. This proves lucrative for financial corporations based in the North, whose interests the IMF openly defends. When these corporations make bad loans to developing countries, the IMF provides multibillion dollar bailouts.
"As these corporations grow," says STWR, "they find it economically profitable to operate in multiple countries, seeking out favourable conditions such as low labour costs, fewer regulations and other financial or tax incentives. Many of these multinationals can now be described as 'transnationals' as they have 'globalised' their operations and retain no particular affiliation to any country. This allows them greater flexibility in operative structure and greater leverage over governments who compete for their business."
And as if all this damage is not enough, the growing monopolisation of intellectual property rights by multinational corporations is yet another affliction on Africa from which corporations are profiteering. According to STWR: "Corporate links with the WTO as well as with the IMF and World Bank, continue to negotiate access to emerging markets and to secure intellectual property rights.
"Through the free trade agreements such as NAFTA and WTO agreements such as GATTS (The General Agreement on Trade in Services) and Trips (Trade Related Agreement on International Property Rights), the potential for even greater corporate economic dominance is plain. Corporate rights continue to be enforced and essential common resources such as water, genetic material and knowledge are privatised, without regard for the sovereignty of developing countries."
Mention Africa's foreign debt and the mantra is that loans have been misused through corruption and poor governance. Concealed though is the fact that this is yet another way in which Western corporations profit.
According to Tony Iltis: "Debts are generally incurred by undemocratic Western-supported governments to pay for infrastructure that benefits multinationals and military expenditure to protect their investments. [There are] many self-congratulatory pronouncements about debt relief, but the amounts involved are no more than a drop in the ocean and are conditional on the implementation of poverty-increasing privatisation and austerity."
In actual fact, for every $1 of US aid to Africa, $3 is taken back in debt repayments. The human cost of this is illustrated by, for example, Zambia which spends twice as much on debt repayment as on education. Or in Malawi, where the government spends more on debt repayment than on health. But events change--all the time. Europe was in a hopeless state of war for centuries, until only 1945. Many Asian countries are changing beyond recognition. Latin America is turning the tables. Africa will change too. Except--Africa has no other Africa to exploit.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Notes from Uganda
Breast feeding and Driving with Dean McEvoy
A few weeks ago I was in a typical taxi heading back from Masaka, piled in a sedan with 10 or so other people. It is pretty common for women to breast feed in the taxi or anywhere in public and it is also common to have a stranger sit on your lap so that you can all fit in the taxi. On this particular day, a woman was sitting on my lap while breast feeding. It didn't seem as awkward as you'd think and I even fielded a cell phone call from Catherine Davis, Devon Harrison, and WRUC while it was happening.
With Dean McEvoy on December 7, we had to take a public taxi back to Ddegeya from Masaka. It seems that I realize how far I've come when I am with mzungus new to Uganda. Dean McEvoy looked at the taxi we were getting into and said, "We can't all fit in that car." Becky laughed and the 11 of us squeezed into the old japanese car. A chicken was thrown in the trunk that opened and closed at each pothole. The speedometer stayed at 0 km/hr as we picked up speed down the bumpy road. Dean McEvoy feared for the bicyclist's life and commented to us afterwards that the driver almost hit three of them. I could only laugh when I noticed that the woman sharing the front seat with Dean McEvoy started to breast feed,
Flush Toilets
Flush toilets are surprisingly luxurious after several months without them. Actually, in Entebbe, getting internet ¼ the speed of internet in America has been pretty amazing, too. Speedy speedy.
Coffee
I was surprised that I could drink coffee on a daily basis - I thought our diet would be a diet of local staples, which it is, but it is not devoid of luxuries like bread and coffee (I was hoping to cure my coffee addiction, but have failed). Perhaps I was a little naive about the coffee seeing that Uganda is a major coffee exporter - I don't remember if I knew that before coming to Uganda, but I'm guessing that I was ignorant given that I thought I was going to be able to give up coffee.
Uganda, I am told, was once the world's largest coffee producer or at least it was close to Columbia. I read a headline that said that coffee production and exports is up somewhere around 20 percent from last year, so maybe the nation is rising to coffee prominence once again.
It was really cool to see a coffee plant - a big bush with green and red berries on it. The red berries (pods, really) contain the coffee beans that are ready for harvesting. The growers in the area pick all their beans and sell them to a local dealer who weighs them and sells them in larger quantities to the middlemen who process the beans and send them onto ... the UK? The US? I'm not sure.
The coffee tastes pretty weak to me, but it might be that I am not actually filtering the coffee. Most of the coffee I drink is instant coffee, which, again, is weak but still has all the diuretic powers of a cup of coffee from Green Mountain, Tim Hortons, Dunkin' Donuts or Starbuck's.
UPDATE: Had brewed Ugandan coffee in Entebbe today and it was the best coffee I’ve ever had, so I rescind my criticisms and will be smuggling back a duffel full of it in April…
On Giving
I credit Jon Hill for his candidness and I think that I couldn't have expressed a lot of these thoughts, as indicting as they are, much better. Here is a work from his blog.
You look at me the way
A communist looks at a bank
When you yell “took-took” or “motorbike, sir?”
My skin color is to thank
For this constant reminder
Of the revolution against me
Me, yes I am the oppressor,
The man, who wants a woman
Who changes me with her eyes
From what I am, to what I want to be
Who changes my skin from white to tan
Unlike a jersey girl, or the west
I think a tan is about experience
About hard work, about the truth
Of the fact that our history
Is a question of character and
We take pride in it like a young girl
Who hides her tanning cream in her purse
She and by she I mean we
Take pride in our fake tans
As a capitalist does “progress”
We search in our purses for
Orwellian tanning booths
Which speak to our history
This history is why dark skin
Is a blessing and a curse
Dark skin also means
Nothing will be handed to you
And when you take it
You’ll be labeled a thief
Or sketchy at best
Your sweat and blood
Are a part of everything
From your land to your history
We buy it and sell it back to you
The New York Times reads,
“Physician Assisted Suicide”
American made M-16s and Russian AK-47s are the recommended prescription.
It was the humane thing to do because of their terminal illness:
Tan-black, third-world people lead painful lives
We don’t need an autopsy to see this;
Just keep watching CNN.
The sketchy thief of western ignorance: I am an honest Westerner
And these are my rules
I break it I buy it
Money talks louder than your stomach grumbles
And the next time you yell “took-took”
I will tell you “Ah te acoun.” (No thank you sir)
The Infidels on Eid
Eid as translated to me by the only Haji I know through John is this: Someone had nothing to sacrifice for God and apparently wished he had a son, daughter, cow, or goat so that he could make a sacrifice for God. He vowed that when he did have something to sacrifice, he would. That came back to bite him when he had a son. Someone came to explain that God had called in his debt and that his son should be sacrificed. The man was reticent, but the son insisted that if God had asked for him to be sacrificed that he would be willing to sacrifice himself. A party of people went to a rock and laid the son down. When the father tried to decapitate his son, the sword was "too sharp" (perhaps a translation problem, because the sword would not cut the son). The father then tried the sword on the rock and it split like butter. Then it rained sheep (translation problem?) and they sacrificed one of the sheep.
The family we were with actually sacrificed a cow for the occasion. I got the feeling that, infidel as Dean McEvoy, Becky, John, and myself were, the hosts did not care; the focus of this occasion was eating. The Haji was in his 80s and his wife looked almost teary-eyed that we were willing to come and celebrate with them. We had a good time and struck up some broken English conversations with some of the kids who were able to go to secondary school. There was a lot of repeating "Nsonyase" (I'm very happy to be here or I'm very happy that you came).
Within the first half hour the hosts brought out what looked to be a large lunch. After a half hour, they brought out what should have been food for a small army (Becky has the pictures).
I'm one who generally avoids religious events, finding them mostly uncomfortable and boring (pews, I believe, are designed to be uncomfortable so that people stay awake). I had walked Dean McEvoy and and Becky to the Catholic Church the day before, took their picture in front of the big church, and then left them with God and walked home occupied by my own thoughts. For this celebration no one tried to convert me or lecture me, making Islam one of my current preferred major religions of choice. I was laughed at during a Seder after mis-pronouncing or over-pronouncing various words (thanks L-Yo) and I never really knew what was going on during the various Christian masses I've attended. I probably fall into the category of not really identifying with any major religion, being okay with anyone's devotion to them, but finding some inconvenient, cryptic, ornate, or depressing enough to avoid. My father has been discussing Po-Chedley family religious evolution in recent letters...
I did call Bilal to get a firsthand story of what Eid is about, but he has yet to return my call.
Lanterns, Electricity, and Tuning Your Body to the Sun
Dean McEvoy's visit marked the only time the health clinic has been completely without power. It gave us all a chance to break out the lanterns and pretend that we were camping, I guess. Generally there is enough power to run the light bulbs at night and charge a couple cell phones during the day. The problem really isn't the solar panel, but the inverter - the main inverter broke down sometime before our arrival.
Limited electricity has made me really cherish the hour or so I spend on the computer each week, but it has also helped tune my body to the sun. Because I am generally in bed a couple hours after sundown (sundown is 7:30 PM and bed time is generally 10:30 or so) I am up and ready to roll at sunrise or a little before (somewhere around 6AM or 6:30). I don't think this ever happened at Union, but I really like not having to set an alarm and being able to judge the time by the sun (my watch broke a couple months back).
This was written before the inverter was repaired…I don’t know how this will effect us…it will mean more internet and perhaps more news from online rather than BBC updates…I consider this a pretty dramatic change and I feel it might disrupt my solar sleep cycle…
On Race
ra•cism n (disapproving)
1. prejudice or animosity against people who belong to other races
2. the belief that people of different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior
So racism doesn't apply to the different treatment I receive here - I'm not sure what the word is. My skin color generally makes business persons jack up prices anywhere from 30 - 2,000 percent. I can always tell when someone has jacked up the price an order of magnitude and when I laugh at them they usually reply with the real price. It can be tough when they double the price though - sometimes we're talking about tens of cents or a couple dollars. I generally allow myself to be cheated a little bit - I have an extra 30 cents for food in a budget of a few dollars per day, but that 30 cents is a pretty big deal for that vendor, taxi driver, or whoever. At the same time, I don't like when I am blatantly cheated. Sometimes I just want to be like, come on, I'm a volunteer, I'm not making money here, which is countered by the fact that I do have money that would likely be better used here.
Sometimes my skin color, I believe, gives me an advantage. Some private cars will stop and take me to Masaka or Kinoni when I stand at the side of the road - I always wonder if it is because I'm white. When I attended Eid, the 80 year old wife of Haji seemed to have tears in her eyes and kept telling us how happy she was that we attended the holiday. When I went to a bank once, the manager came up to me and plopped me in a faster line.
I think that I am usually treated with such hospitality while simultaneously being ripped off (less and less often) not because I am white, but because white means 1. visitor and 2. money. I'm invited for tea in homes because I'm a visitor and people ask me for school fees, because white means money. They are right on both counts so my differential treatment tends not to bother me too much.
Poverty Cycling
What bothers me is when an affluent family with a car, cattle, electricity, better cell phones than I have invite me for tea and then spend the time lobbying me for money. Kids who are already boarding in Kampala or Masaka in the best private schools harass me for fees. The kids with nothing except, literally, the shirt on their backs ask nothing of me. One boy kept telling me to call the tycoons in America and have them Western Union money to him for school fees. Anytime you tell a kid that people donate to NGOs they ask you to start an NGO to sponsor them – it spurs and endless cycle of ideas to give that one person money.
Anyways, even the affluent kids need help sometimes - I think it bothers me because I see what would be the equivalent of upper middle class people asking for money versus people in mud huts content when I show them their picture on the LCD screen of my camera, when I throw them into the air, or simply sit with them in their mud huts, murmur some formalities and sit in awkward silence for some time.
The kids who do make it to secondary school are the same kids who have parents with shops, cattle, educated siblings, etc. which in effect just keeps the money and wealth structure static. There is no trickling down that I can see.
One of the most impressive programs that Engeye has implemented is its scholarship program. The kids selected are kids who wouldn't have been able to get to school otherwise, essentially locking them into a life of less - less medicine, less land, less money, etc. These are also the kids who appreciate it the most and they often aim to be doctors, nurses, and teachers - professions they may bring back to their village. Visit http://www.engeye.com for more information.
Mzungu Matters
The other day I was doing my laundry and one of my best students (she actually was the top of the sixth grade class) stopped by to say hi. A toddler, trailing behind, burst into tears at the site of the strange albino doing laundry. I really think when this happens (it has happened to Becky, too) it is out of sympathy. "What in the hell is that? There are diseases that do that to people?" Becky told me that when she walked toward a little girl, the girl started crying and ran for mom.
Being a mzungu is definitely a disadvantage when it comes to the sun. I think it is melanin that either keeps you from getting burned or makes you burn. Either way one of us (black people or white people) has a lot more of it and it causes us mzungus to turn red and burn. This really wasn't too much of a problem the first few months, but this December we have been lopping on sunscreen.
A few weeks ago I was in a typical taxi heading back from Masaka, piled in a sedan with 10 or so other people. It is pretty common for women to breast feed in the taxi or anywhere in public and it is also common to have a stranger sit on your lap so that you can all fit in the taxi. On this particular day, a woman was sitting on my lap while breast feeding. It didn't seem as awkward as you'd think and I even fielded a cell phone call from Catherine Davis, Devon Harrison, and WRUC while it was happening.
With Dean McEvoy on December 7, we had to take a public taxi back to Ddegeya from Masaka. It seems that I realize how far I've come when I am with mzungus new to Uganda. Dean McEvoy looked at the taxi we were getting into and said, "We can't all fit in that car." Becky laughed and the 11 of us squeezed into the old japanese car. A chicken was thrown in the trunk that opened and closed at each pothole. The speedometer stayed at 0 km/hr as we picked up speed down the bumpy road. Dean McEvoy feared for the bicyclist's life and commented to us afterwards that the driver almost hit three of them. I could only laugh when I noticed that the woman sharing the front seat with Dean McEvoy started to breast feed,
Flush Toilets
Flush toilets are surprisingly luxurious after several months without them. Actually, in Entebbe, getting internet ¼ the speed of internet in America has been pretty amazing, too. Speedy speedy.
Coffee
I was surprised that I could drink coffee on a daily basis - I thought our diet would be a diet of local staples, which it is, but it is not devoid of luxuries like bread and coffee (I was hoping to cure my coffee addiction, but have failed). Perhaps I was a little naive about the coffee seeing that Uganda is a major coffee exporter - I don't remember if I knew that before coming to Uganda, but I'm guessing that I was ignorant given that I thought I was going to be able to give up coffee.
Uganda, I am told, was once the world's largest coffee producer or at least it was close to Columbia. I read a headline that said that coffee production and exports is up somewhere around 20 percent from last year, so maybe the nation is rising to coffee prominence once again.
It was really cool to see a coffee plant - a big bush with green and red berries on it. The red berries (pods, really) contain the coffee beans that are ready for harvesting. The growers in the area pick all their beans and sell them to a local dealer who weighs them and sells them in larger quantities to the middlemen who process the beans and send them onto ... the UK? The US? I'm not sure.
The coffee tastes pretty weak to me, but it might be that I am not actually filtering the coffee. Most of the coffee I drink is instant coffee, which, again, is weak but still has all the diuretic powers of a cup of coffee from Green Mountain, Tim Hortons, Dunkin' Donuts or Starbuck's.
UPDATE: Had brewed Ugandan coffee in Entebbe today and it was the best coffee I’ve ever had, so I rescind my criticisms and will be smuggling back a duffel full of it in April…
On Giving
I credit Jon Hill for his candidness and I think that I couldn't have expressed a lot of these thoughts, as indicting as they are, much better. Here is a work from his blog.
You look at me the way
A communist looks at a bank
When you yell “took-took” or “motorbike, sir?”
My skin color is to thank
For this constant reminder
Of the revolution against me
Me, yes I am the oppressor,
The man, who wants a woman
Who changes me with her eyes
From what I am, to what I want to be
Who changes my skin from white to tan
Unlike a jersey girl, or the west
I think a tan is about experience
About hard work, about the truth
Of the fact that our history
Is a question of character and
We take pride in it like a young girl
Who hides her tanning cream in her purse
She and by she I mean we
Take pride in our fake tans
As a capitalist does “progress”
We search in our purses for
Orwellian tanning booths
Which speak to our history
This history is why dark skin
Is a blessing and a curse
Dark skin also means
Nothing will be handed to you
And when you take it
You’ll be labeled a thief
Or sketchy at best
Your sweat and blood
Are a part of everything
From your land to your history
We buy it and sell it back to you
The New York Times reads,
“Physician Assisted Suicide”
American made M-16s and Russian AK-47s are the recommended prescription.
It was the humane thing to do because of their terminal illness:
Tan-black, third-world people lead painful lives
We don’t need an autopsy to see this;
Just keep watching CNN.
The sketchy thief of western ignorance: I am an honest Westerner
And these are my rules
I break it I buy it
Money talks louder than your stomach grumbles
And the next time you yell “took-took”
I will tell you “Ah te acoun.” (No thank you sir)
The Infidels on Eid
Eid as translated to me by the only Haji I know through John is this: Someone had nothing to sacrifice for God and apparently wished he had a son, daughter, cow, or goat so that he could make a sacrifice for God. He vowed that when he did have something to sacrifice, he would. That came back to bite him when he had a son. Someone came to explain that God had called in his debt and that his son should be sacrificed. The man was reticent, but the son insisted that if God had asked for him to be sacrificed that he would be willing to sacrifice himself. A party of people went to a rock and laid the son down. When the father tried to decapitate his son, the sword was "too sharp" (perhaps a translation problem, because the sword would not cut the son). The father then tried the sword on the rock and it split like butter. Then it rained sheep (translation problem?) and they sacrificed one of the sheep.
The family we were with actually sacrificed a cow for the occasion. I got the feeling that, infidel as Dean McEvoy, Becky, John, and myself were, the hosts did not care; the focus of this occasion was eating. The Haji was in his 80s and his wife looked almost teary-eyed that we were willing to come and celebrate with them. We had a good time and struck up some broken English conversations with some of the kids who were able to go to secondary school. There was a lot of repeating "Nsonyase" (I'm very happy to be here or I'm very happy that you came).
Within the first half hour the hosts brought out what looked to be a large lunch. After a half hour, they brought out what should have been food for a small army (Becky has the pictures).
I'm one who generally avoids religious events, finding them mostly uncomfortable and boring (pews, I believe, are designed to be uncomfortable so that people stay awake). I had walked Dean McEvoy and and Becky to the Catholic Church the day before, took their picture in front of the big church, and then left them with God and walked home occupied by my own thoughts. For this celebration no one tried to convert me or lecture me, making Islam one of my current preferred major religions of choice. I was laughed at during a Seder after mis-pronouncing or over-pronouncing various words (thanks L-Yo) and I never really knew what was going on during the various Christian masses I've attended. I probably fall into the category of not really identifying with any major religion, being okay with anyone's devotion to them, but finding some inconvenient, cryptic, ornate, or depressing enough to avoid. My father has been discussing Po-Chedley family religious evolution in recent letters...
I did call Bilal to get a firsthand story of what Eid is about, but he has yet to return my call.
Lanterns, Electricity, and Tuning Your Body to the Sun
Dean McEvoy's visit marked the only time the health clinic has been completely without power. It gave us all a chance to break out the lanterns and pretend that we were camping, I guess. Generally there is enough power to run the light bulbs at night and charge a couple cell phones during the day. The problem really isn't the solar panel, but the inverter - the main inverter broke down sometime before our arrival.
Limited electricity has made me really cherish the hour or so I spend on the computer each week, but it has also helped tune my body to the sun. Because I am generally in bed a couple hours after sundown (sundown is 7:30 PM and bed time is generally 10:30 or so) I am up and ready to roll at sunrise or a little before (somewhere around 6AM or 6:30). I don't think this ever happened at Union, but I really like not having to set an alarm and being able to judge the time by the sun (my watch broke a couple months back).
This was written before the inverter was repaired…I don’t know how this will effect us…it will mean more internet and perhaps more news from online rather than BBC updates…I consider this a pretty dramatic change and I feel it might disrupt my solar sleep cycle…
On Race
ra•cism n (disapproving)
1. prejudice or animosity against people who belong to other races
2. the belief that people of different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior
So racism doesn't apply to the different treatment I receive here - I'm not sure what the word is. My skin color generally makes business persons jack up prices anywhere from 30 - 2,000 percent. I can always tell when someone has jacked up the price an order of magnitude and when I laugh at them they usually reply with the real price. It can be tough when they double the price though - sometimes we're talking about tens of cents or a couple dollars. I generally allow myself to be cheated a little bit - I have an extra 30 cents for food in a budget of a few dollars per day, but that 30 cents is a pretty big deal for that vendor, taxi driver, or whoever. At the same time, I don't like when I am blatantly cheated. Sometimes I just want to be like, come on, I'm a volunteer, I'm not making money here, which is countered by the fact that I do have money that would likely be better used here.
Sometimes my skin color, I believe, gives me an advantage. Some private cars will stop and take me to Masaka or Kinoni when I stand at the side of the road - I always wonder if it is because I'm white. When I attended Eid, the 80 year old wife of Haji seemed to have tears in her eyes and kept telling us how happy she was that we attended the holiday. When I went to a bank once, the manager came up to me and plopped me in a faster line.
I think that I am usually treated with such hospitality while simultaneously being ripped off (less and less often) not because I am white, but because white means 1. visitor and 2. money. I'm invited for tea in homes because I'm a visitor and people ask me for school fees, because white means money. They are right on both counts so my differential treatment tends not to bother me too much.
Poverty Cycling
What bothers me is when an affluent family with a car, cattle, electricity, better cell phones than I have invite me for tea and then spend the time lobbying me for money. Kids who are already boarding in Kampala or Masaka in the best private schools harass me for fees. The kids with nothing except, literally, the shirt on their backs ask nothing of me. One boy kept telling me to call the tycoons in America and have them Western Union money to him for school fees. Anytime you tell a kid that people donate to NGOs they ask you to start an NGO to sponsor them – it spurs and endless cycle of ideas to give that one person money.
Anyways, even the affluent kids need help sometimes - I think it bothers me because I see what would be the equivalent of upper middle class people asking for money versus people in mud huts content when I show them their picture on the LCD screen of my camera, when I throw them into the air, or simply sit with them in their mud huts, murmur some formalities and sit in awkward silence for some time.
The kids who do make it to secondary school are the same kids who have parents with shops, cattle, educated siblings, etc. which in effect just keeps the money and wealth structure static. There is no trickling down that I can see.
One of the most impressive programs that Engeye has implemented is its scholarship program. The kids selected are kids who wouldn't have been able to get to school otherwise, essentially locking them into a life of less - less medicine, less land, less money, etc. These are also the kids who appreciate it the most and they often aim to be doctors, nurses, and teachers - professions they may bring back to their village. Visit http://www.engeye.com for more information.
Mzungu Matters
The other day I was doing my laundry and one of my best students (she actually was the top of the sixth grade class) stopped by to say hi. A toddler, trailing behind, burst into tears at the site of the strange albino doing laundry. I really think when this happens (it has happened to Becky, too) it is out of sympathy. "What in the hell is that? There are diseases that do that to people?" Becky told me that when she walked toward a little girl, the girl started crying and ran for mom.
Being a mzungu is definitely a disadvantage when it comes to the sun. I think it is melanin that either keeps you from getting burned or makes you burn. Either way one of us (black people or white people) has a lot more of it and it causes us mzungus to turn red and burn. This really wasn't too much of a problem the first few months, but this December we have been lopping on sunscreen.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Comments from Dean McEvoy
Happy New Year everyone! Here are some thoughts from Dean McEvoy on his visit in Uganda with us on December 5 through December 9...
Steve and Becky have offered me space on their blog to report in on their doings. For family and friends who don't know me I am Tom McEvoy, who along with Professor Hal Fried, works with the Minerva Fellows. Our intuition in putting Steve and Becky in this particular spot was good.
I will be straightforward with anyone applying for a Minerva Fellowship that this is one tough, but hugely rewarding, site. If you can survive the taxi station in Kampala and the ride of your life to the Village, then you have passed the first test, which I think the word 'harrowing' was made to describe. I have never ridden in the same motor vehicle with a chicken, 18 or so people in a van built for half that, rolling down the highway (with no shoulder or lighting, and people biking and walking on the side) at about 90 mph. Shock absorbers and tire treads aren't on anyone's mind.
Arriving in the small village where Steve and Becky call home was a stark contrast. Tranquil, pastoral, relaxed, and welcoming all describe Becky and Steve's home for the last few months. This really is a special place. It is a place once you see, you will never forget. Even with no running water, electricity, and other comforts we také for granted, Becky and Steve are having the experience of their lives.
As this is our first year of running the Fellows program, we at Union did not have things nailed down to a degree that we would know what the day - to - day lives of the Fellows would entail at any of the NGO sites. Becky and Steve have created something special from nothing. I can imagine them thinking back in August: "so we are here, now what do we do? " Unlike the other Minerva Fellows sites, here there was NO structure, or boss (although John does a wonderful job guiding and supporting them.) Through their own determination, imagination, and sense of service, they have made something exist where it had not before. The garden they have planted with cabbage, onions and carrots is an apt metaphor for what they have done for the village and kids through their teaching. Lots of water, mulching, and everyday care. They know what they have to do, and they do it.
As I talked with Steve and Becky and watched them, I realized we really threw them into a pond and cried "swim." They have picked up a language they did not know, and that is no easy task. They both downplay that challenge, but to watch them talk with a villager or barter in the market is an example of what I believe is part of the Minerva Fellows mission: to allow talented new graduates a transformative learning experience that will not only enrich their souls, but also greatly increase their wordly confidence and - navigational skills as they move on with their lives.
My impressions and memories of this leg of my journey will always be remembered. What sticks with me most are the kids. They are devoted to and respect Steve and Becky. That respect has been earned-- is not because they happen to be a novelty in rural Africa. As we walked through the paths and roads of the village, soft smiles and voices, and shy or wide smiles -- "hi Becky, hi Steve." While school is out of session, and I could not see the students in a class, sitting in the fading light of Steve and Becky's one room abode, I was able to read neatly written letters back to pen pals in the United States at Saint Eugene's School in Yonkers, NY. The letters were so well formed and neat a few asked a question that would bring me close to a tear: "Are you parents alive?" There is a softness and reality here that is felt, but hard to put into words.
Steve and Becky know exactly where each student villager studies outside their own school program. "He's in P6; she's in S4." They were interested in, and knew, it seemed, each child's story.
I was lucky to meet Fred, Peter, Masa, John and Jeff. They were thrilled at the prospect of playing with a simple balloon for an hour. Things are simple for them: no x box 360s, no ipods, no cool clothes. Just a sense of happiness. They show respect and joy. They may never leave the village, drive a car, ski a slope, go to a movie theatre, sail a boat, ride a jetski, have a television, or see the ocean. But, they seem content.
So let's talk about food. When I was leaving for this trip my wife, Anne, said that I'd probably drop seven pounds and have a good time gaining them back over the holidays. Steve and Becky may be deprived of running water, but there is no shortage of food. Starchy food at that. I had a problem with a few things, but Steve and Becky somehow pack it in and still look great and fit. The food is extremely fresh, and there is little meat. Mangoes, pineapple, pumpkin, fried spaghetti, and cabbage were my favorites. Matooke, cassava, and yams (not the yams we know) are another matter.
For those of you who know Becky and Steve well, it's no surprise to you that I had two reliable guides. Becky led the charge through crowded, insane, Kampala and Steve insisted on carrying my heavy duffel bag for miles. These are two of our most solid graduates who have a determination I have the greatest respect for.
I have only scratched the surface here. There are other moments of long visits with village elders, a few beers in the hostel and catching up on Union, fetching water from the local hole, celebrating an Islamic holiday with the locals and all that went with that, to quiet times in their quarters just before bed, and talks of NGOs, America, economics, and a few good laughs. I will also remember Becky and Steve squabbling like my wife and me balancing our checkbooks, as they accounted for every penny of the money they were spending on food, taxi service, and other small items that our finance office will never see a receipt for, as those don't exist in place like a food market.
For those at Union and Saint Eugene's who have raised nearly $1300, you could not have your gifts in better hands. Rest assurred that these two are making the difference and we are lucky and blessed to have Steve and Becky on our team. So is Uganda.
Steve and Becky have offered me space on their blog to report in on their doings. For family and friends who don't know me I am Tom McEvoy, who along with Professor Hal Fried, works with the Minerva Fellows. Our intuition in putting Steve and Becky in this particular spot was good.
I will be straightforward with anyone applying for a Minerva Fellowship that this is one tough, but hugely rewarding, site. If you can survive the taxi station in Kampala and the ride of your life to the Village, then you have passed the first test, which I think the word 'harrowing' was made to describe. I have never ridden in the same motor vehicle with a chicken, 18 or so people in a van built for half that, rolling down the highway (with no shoulder or lighting, and people biking and walking on the side) at about 90 mph. Shock absorbers and tire treads aren't on anyone's mind.
Arriving in the small village where Steve and Becky call home was a stark contrast. Tranquil, pastoral, relaxed, and welcoming all describe Becky and Steve's home for the last few months. This really is a special place. It is a place once you see, you will never forget. Even with no running water, electricity, and other comforts we také for granted, Becky and Steve are having the experience of their lives.
As this is our first year of running the Fellows program, we at Union did not have things nailed down to a degree that we would know what the day - to - day lives of the Fellows would entail at any of the NGO sites. Becky and Steve have created something special from nothing. I can imagine them thinking back in August: "so we are here, now what do we do? " Unlike the other Minerva Fellows sites, here there was NO structure, or boss (although John does a wonderful job guiding and supporting them.) Through their own determination, imagination, and sense of service, they have made something exist where it had not before. The garden they have planted with cabbage, onions and carrots is an apt metaphor for what they have done for the village and kids through their teaching. Lots of water, mulching, and everyday care. They know what they have to do, and they do it.
As I talked with Steve and Becky and watched them, I realized we really threw them into a pond and cried "swim." They have picked up a language they did not know, and that is no easy task. They both downplay that challenge, but to watch them talk with a villager or barter in the market is an example of what I believe is part of the Minerva Fellows mission: to allow talented new graduates a transformative learning experience that will not only enrich their souls, but also greatly increase their wordly confidence and - navigational skills as they move on with their lives.
My impressions and memories of this leg of my journey will always be remembered. What sticks with me most are the kids. They are devoted to and respect Steve and Becky. That respect has been earned-- is not because they happen to be a novelty in rural Africa. As we walked through the paths and roads of the village, soft smiles and voices, and shy or wide smiles -- "hi Becky, hi Steve." While school is out of session, and I could not see the students in a class, sitting in the fading light of Steve and Becky's one room abode, I was able to read neatly written letters back to pen pals in the United States at Saint Eugene's School in Yonkers, NY. The letters were so well formed and neat a few asked a question that would bring me close to a tear: "Are you parents alive?" There is a softness and reality here that is felt, but hard to put into words.
Steve and Becky know exactly where each student villager studies outside their own school program. "He's in P6; she's in S4." They were interested in, and knew, it seemed, each child's story.
I was lucky to meet Fred, Peter, Masa, John and Jeff. They were thrilled at the prospect of playing with a simple balloon for an hour. Things are simple for them: no x box 360s, no ipods, no cool clothes. Just a sense of happiness. They show respect and joy. They may never leave the village, drive a car, ski a slope, go to a movie theatre, sail a boat, ride a jetski, have a television, or see the ocean. But, they seem content.
So let's talk about food. When I was leaving for this trip my wife, Anne, said that I'd probably drop seven pounds and have a good time gaining them back over the holidays. Steve and Becky may be deprived of running water, but there is no shortage of food. Starchy food at that. I had a problem with a few things, but Steve and Becky somehow pack it in and still look great and fit. The food is extremely fresh, and there is little meat. Mangoes, pineapple, pumpkin, fried spaghetti, and cabbage were my favorites. Matooke, cassava, and yams (not the yams we know) are another matter.
For those of you who know Becky and Steve well, it's no surprise to you that I had two reliable guides. Becky led the charge through crowded, insane, Kampala and Steve insisted on carrying my heavy duffel bag for miles. These are two of our most solid graduates who have a determination I have the greatest respect for.
I have only scratched the surface here. There are other moments of long visits with village elders, a few beers in the hostel and catching up on Union, fetching water from the local hole, celebrating an Islamic holiday with the locals and all that went with that, to quiet times in their quarters just before bed, and talks of NGOs, America, economics, and a few good laughs. I will also remember Becky and Steve squabbling like my wife and me balancing our checkbooks, as they accounted for every penny of the money they were spending on food, taxi service, and other small items that our finance office will never see a receipt for, as those don't exist in place like a food market.
For those at Union and Saint Eugene's who have raised nearly $1300, you could not have your gifts in better hands. Rest assurred that these two are making the difference and we are lucky and blessed to have Steve and Becky on our team. So is Uganda.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
A Day in the Life
One year ago I was on winter break from Union living at my brother's home, just a few miles from the UPS sorting center. I worked the night shift sorting packages for UPS and then the day shift running packages to doors with the same UPS driver I had worked with the previous two years. Stumbling back to my brother's after work, fueled only by Tim Horton's coffee, I wrote too many graduate school apps for my own good, encouraged by Emma in early evening phone calls. Now one year later, I am encouraging her application process and reflecting on a typical day in the life of a volunteer in Uganda...
I wake up to the sun's early morning glow or from the Luganda streaming through my mosquito net, which I'm not sure. It is another day in Uganda, a handful of kilometers beneath the equator. I can easily recall the first days in Africa when the sun did not wrestle me out of bed at dawn and when the Luganda was strange and invoked loneliness. But now, 5 months in, I slip out of bed and into the day easily.
After fetching water I start pouring it onto the cabbages, tomatoes, carrots, and onions that I hope will grow big enough to reach one of the pot-bellied kids lips. I pause to track the sun bubble over the morning clouds; the sun always rises so quickly and I feel lucky when it isn't too cloudy to witness it. This morning, the sun sets the dew covered grass ablaze with glistening. It will be hot - there are few hard and fast weather rules here, but dew and low hanging clouds in the morning means that I will likely be clinging to the shadows during the day. As I wander back to grab my cup for breakfast I catch a glimpse of Fred, our bicycle milk-boy, delivering milk for Susan to boil. Fred seems timeless as he glides down the dusty road. He hooks the day's milk deliveries onto the handlebars of a bicycle that most would conclude had been left by the British Empire missionaries.
I sit down with some paper. The table is permanently coated with a layer of mud from the kids who climb all over it no matter how many times we tell them to get off the emeeza. I tell myself that the mud, now dusting my letter, gives the correspondence an air of authenticity. Often times, Becky or I will have a letter to finish, a thought to record, or when we work with the kids, tests to grade or workbooks to wade through. When neither of us has anything to work on we plot the future, comment on the news, or reminisce about Union, Ugandan kids, or on current projects. The BBC gives us what seems like a small window to the outside world as kids voices, invariably and incessantly, work to evoke some good morning waves or some small talk in Luganda. Sometimes, if we catch the BBC at the right time, it will elegantly paint a picture of American lunacy - sending a reporter to Detroit to use public transportation in America or commenting on just about any environmental topic having to do with the Bush administration. Other times, stark contrasts are painted. Perhaps, "The cholera epidemic following Laurent Nkunda's raid of Goma will likely infect thousands, aids workers have predicted. In the United States, a woman was crushed to death outside a Wal-Mart, trying to shop the day after Thanksgiving." FIll in the first sentence with any number of African reports: Cholera in Zimbabwe, Kony refuses to sign peace deal in Uganda, 9 million starving in Uganda, US food assistance programs and bio-fuels create starvation, Zimbabwe opposition leader ignored by Mugabe. The second sentence is what usually consumes most of the in depth reporting - Bush explaining that we need to continue to concentrate on economic growth, the latest third party report stating that yet another developed economy is slipping into recession, another economic summit, another case of corporate welfare, even if the mismanagement has been obvious (we are bailing out Detroit!).
Past the BBC, these contrasts are even more personal. The four shirts, three shorts, underwear that I folded over the clothesline flap in the breeze as I wash pineapple and bread down with coffee and milk. Peter is in the distance, hiding behind an anthill calling my name in the same shirt he wears everyday. It is a Bugle Boy shirt that proudly declares "Happy Boy" in English as if his parents had expected him to be approached by Mzungus wondering if he is happy. "Are you happy? Oh, you don't speak English - but wait, your shirt, ah, you are happy. Good." The shirt is greenish brown, although I am not sure if that is the original color. Anyways, this is a game we play almost everyday - Peter hides and calls my name, I look up, usually spot him, but pretend not to, and call back to say good morning. Peter always wanders to the clinic in the morning, after we eat breakfast, as he waits for his breakfast at 11AM when they have enough food, or, if not, he waits for his meal at 4PM. Perhaps the only meal of the day and probably just matooke, posho, and beans. Everyday.
There is butane in Kinoni for the first time in a month and we need cooking oil, so I head to the road after BBC and breakfast. The trip is just six kilometers, but sometimes the public taxis can leave you waiting in the hot sun. Today is one of those days when the taxis seem content leaving me to bake - I feel my skin burning for the first time since August, wishing I brought a hat or sunscreen. Much of what Becky and I could want is available in Ddegeya Center, a one kilometer walk from Engeye Health. Coca-Cola is available and requires a 15 minute walk and 30 cents - we really don't rough it as much as we sometimes imply. Anything we could need, except floss, is in Masaka, which is only a 40 minute taxi ride away. I study the dirt shoulder. In Uganda, the sun always seems to beat on you, leaving the roads, or the dirt around people's homes cracked and completely dry. In the rainy season, now over, it is the other extreme, leaving boots and gardens supersaturated. When the taxi pulls up - a mid-sized car - I throw the butane tank in the trunk and climb in the back with five others after making sure that the price is bitanu, 500 shillings or 25 cents. The driver packs me in and then slams the door on my hip. The six of us in the back fuse together and our hips clank like magnets. Any amorphous flesh searches out its own space like jello around fruit. There are four in the front - I've seen as many as 14 people in a car at one time, although there is always debate about whether babies count. On longer trips to Masaka I lose the feeling in my legs and drives can actually be a pretty painful experience. I am usually willing to settle on 2,500 shillings if the car isn't packed on trips to and from Masaka, paying 25 to 33 percent more than I need to. As we leave, I noticed the speedometer does not budge and droops at 0 km/h. Typical.
With no police checkpoints and no stops we are in Kinoni in five minutes. Everyone in Kinoni is hiding from the sun. I walk past the general stores to the gas station that sells butane. The general store across the street is where we get our staples and have built a nice rapport with the saleswoman. 3 kilos of maize flower, 3 kilos of beans, 3 kilos of rice, and a loaf of bread that won't be moldy tomorrow, please. We are the only mzungus in Ddegeya and everyone has learnt our names - Kinoni is larger, but I have never seen another mzungu there, either, so there is some familiarity with us around Kinoni as well. Mzungus are few and far between in this area of Uganda. Last month a child started crying upon seeing me. I understood it as a sympathetic gesture, "What the hell happened to him? Is he sick? Is it contagious? What in God's name is that - arm hair? Why isn't he black? Will he hurt me?" I hide my chest hair for fear that it would be too much, inciting riot or deep uncontrollable sympathy for the mutant. Despite my skin color impairment, I feel somewhat accepted when kids point to my upper arm and declare mzungu and then point to my wrist and declare Buganda, the regional tribe. I stare at my arm, compare it to theirs, and realize that I am a little darker than when I started, a testament to five months along a sunburnt equator.
After the taxi drops off the shoulder-less highway at Ddegeya I peel myself off the man next to me and climb out. Starting down the dirt path I am greeted by an entourage of kids who ask where I have been. I've learned that when I say Congo or Rwanda or Tanzania they don't get the joke; they don't know Congo, Rwanda, or Tanzania. A few steps down the path I feel a soapy hand trying to grab hold of a finger. Aksom. Aksom is a three-year-old goober and since he hasn't wandered to the health clinic in awhile he follows me back to hang out for awhile. He grabs for my backpack since he wants to help carry things. I know it is too heavy, but I throw it on him and watch him stumble with my hand making sure he doesn't hit the dust. We laugh together and he settles on just hanging onto my hand.
When I get to the clinic I un-peal Aksom's fingers and help Becky weed for an hour. Aksom follows "to help." Even though I joke, by the time they are seven they are better at weeding than Becky and I put together. Weeding always make me realize two things: 1. Weeds thrive in the exact conditions you try to create for your crops and 2. everything I do, cook, clean, wash, wear, weed is wrong. Weeding also reminds me of my parents garden and the Union's Octopus Garden. I make a note to self that I am sure to forget - ask about yields in the school garden. We weed in the late morning or early afternoon - something that is forced on us at times when our mornings are consumed at the school or we have other things to do in the evening - Ugandans almost always garden only in the morning and evening. Our technique with the hoe is wrong and kids and adults will sit at the edge of the field, stare at us in disbelief and amusement and sometimes even try to teach us. Even washing or cooking - no matter what you do, it is wrong. I noticed that Dean McEvoy weeded correctly without any prompting - I realize our own insufficient skills might be a product of not only our suburban American roots, but also our generation. Generation Apathy. I could swear that my Grandma wrote in a letter that she ate corn mush (as compared to Uganda's own posho) and that "Ugandans got nothing on us." Maybe the quote was misread or I rearranged it unconsciously to "they got nothing on us," but I know that many of my Grandmother's experiences in the great depression parallel the experiences that I am currently enjoying (if only temporarily) - no power, no automatic washer, no processed foods, no running water, no internet, and, of course, a lot of corn mush. Weeding also always makes me question the idea that a highly developed economy has a lot of service sector work and decreasing agricultural labor (as people urbanize and farming mechanizes, presumably using fossil fuels). It is good for a person to be able to weed their own garden and grow some of their own food.
The day's objective is not weeding, though. Today is a day of chickens. Union College, members of Schenectady and Albany, and students from Yonkers all helped raise money, giving Becky and I the opportunity to obtain and distribute chickens to help families increase protein and income generating opportunities. Today we are building chicken coops. We had initially hoped that the coops would ensure the chickens were kept outdoors, but that is apparently too inviting for theft. The coops are useful, though, since we are using native chickens, which have a tendency to run - the coops will help keep the chickens off the neighbors land when they are not grazing, even if the chickens snuggle up inside the mud huts at night.
After lunch, we begin to move from Engeye deeper into the village. At the first house we work with a boy called Umaru. We decided to work with kids because the kids can learn a lot from the project, be the main recipients of the protein filled eggs, and perhaps make a little money to help the family, too. Umaru makes us realize this was a great approach as he excitedly helps us build his coop. The coops are truly of Ugandan construction and if John hadn't taught us the Ugandan way, I think the coops might have fallen apart. We plant six 2.5" diameter tree limbs into the hard soil in one of the two locations Umaru had considered for his coop. Umaru is probably not yet ten, but he is more responsible for his age than any American I know. I remember when we had finished and were deciding when to drop the chicken off he told me that he would likely be working in the garden when we came, but we could just drop the chicken off in the coop and he would take care of it from there. So goddamn mature.
We laced reeds to the tree limbs on the four sides and the roof using banana fiber. Most would probably guess that banana fiber (the sinewy fibers in the banana leaf) would seemingly give in to the wind, an angry chicken, or a trip and fall into the coop - and they would be wrong. Banana fiber is strong. The mud huts where most Ddegeyans live are constructed in much the same way. Lace sticks together with banana fiber and then pat it with mud, which bakes and solidifies in the sun. As we lace the final reeds to the coop I take a peak around - Umaru's hut and a mango tree on one side with the other sides surrounded by large, mature banana plants. That is Ddegeya - mud huts and banana trees - and I find it quite rustic and beautiful.
Carrying the chicken to Umaru's house is a sort of unique experience. I had never carried a chicken before. After some chase, squawking, and flapping Richard managed to captured the beast and showed me how to grab it behind the wings (I made sure to wash my hands when I got back to Engeye). It looked uncomfortable, as if someone tied my wrists together and carried me by my elbows. I could feel the chicken's heartbeat as she looked around, confused, unhappy, but resigned to her fate whatever it may have been. Umaru carefully picked up the chicken in my hand weighed it, picked up Becky's chicken, examined them, consulted his mother and decided on the chicken in my hands. Umaru told us that he was happy and we told him we would be back to visit and see how the chicken is doing.
On the walk back I began to construct a mental map with little colored dots popping up. Dots for kids we taught at the health clinic in the morning, dots for the kids we teach or tutor at Bunyere Primary School, dots for the kids who know a little bit more about other cultures because of pen pal programs, dots for the kids who we are helping to build chicken coops for, dots for people who have received vegetable seedings from us, dots for the people we have been able to help in smaller capacities - helping to fix bicycles, helping to carry water, buying something from their store. More, dots for the people who work at the clinic, dots for the people who have used the clinic's affordable services, dots for kids who receive shoes. Future dots for distributing vegetables and seedlings, peanuts, more education, more chickens, information tailored to the community from health surveys, income from crafts projects, clean water after repairing the well. This is a connected community, they are close to one another and they see a problem as a community problem, not an individual problem, and on this mental map it was clear that Engeye was part of the community solution. Engeye touches nearly every home, every dot, in small but important ways.
We get back to Engeye a little before dusk after building two chicken coops from scratch, helping finish another, and checking the progress of the seven other coops. Sophia, the new nursing assistant tries to clap with one hand, a symbol I have learned to mean that I should come there. She pulls up a chair and tells me to sit down and play Matatu, a game that is almost identical to Uno. I realize that, intentionally or not, she is dealing me more cards and, as a result, is winning most of the games. I have sort of come to realize that, in Ludo and Matatu, cheating is acceptable as long as your not caught. I hear Francis and Joseph arguing for what seems like twenty minutes about some English language question. The argument rolls out right in front of me and I have to joke to Joseph, "Yeah, probably best not to ask the native English speaker about an English question." He poses the problem to me and, to Francis' dismay, I side with Joseph. He continues to argue, seemingly ignoring my ruling. The sun sets to my left and, because of the slope the clinic sits on, we only see the silhouettes of the banana plants. Further down the hill, someone probably sees our silhouettes.
I excuse myself so that I can go immerse myself in cold water and scrub the hell out of my feet, tan and constantly caked with a thin but dark layer of dirt. Sophia is not happy despite winning seven games to my two. I have never met a Ugandan who has said, "Okay, we've played enough. Let's quit." They can play for hours. Maybe it's cultural - can you play Sorry or Candyland all afternoon?
I quickly water the vegetable garden and step into the shower. I forgot to fill the shower and put it in the sun so I awkwardly pour a bucket of water onto my head. Becky isn't tall enough to reach the solar shower and everyone else just boils water and puts it in a bucket. I am stubborn and refuse to waste the coal or butane on a hot shower - we are in Uganda - it is 80 degrees everyday and never drops below 65.
I fill in the hour between 7 and 8PM making fun of Best FM, Joseph's favorite station, asking if the song that is playing at the moment is the one song they play for the day. The station is 90 percent ads, 9 percent annoying commentary, and one percent music. If you thought The Edge (or that station in the low 100s that plays guilty pleasure music that we all know Bilal listens to) was bad, you wouldn't be able to tolerate Ugandan FM radio. Sophia asks me what my favorite radio station is and I grumpily tell her that I like the BBC. They laugh, but I have been in music withdrawal, an unexpected side effect of coming here, for five months.
At 8 PM, we have an unspoken ritual. Susan readies the buffet line on the floor, Becky throws the headlamp on her head, and we ease into the kitchen to tear through Susan's delicious food. Tonight it is posho, matooke, and peanut sauce - one of the simpler meals we have. Every week or two, Becky or I will go to the market and pick up as many delicious extras as we can carry - pumpkin, cassava, yam, sweet potato, greens, cabbage, spaghetti, kivuvu (a kind of banana), egg plant, tomatoes, green pepper, carrots, and the list goes on. Generally, dinner is a combination of posho, matooke, and rice with either beans or peanut sauce plus a couple vegetables for good measure. The milk in the morning, the vegetables we buy, and our multivitamins seem like enough - we're not losing hair, getting weak, or rapidly changing body content. I am done with the food shortly after I start and before I know it I tell Susan she has cooked well and goodnight, "Ofumbe nnyo, sula balungi." Even though the routine is unvarying, Susan seems to appreciate our customary meal ending, perhaps because I consciously try to instill sincerity in my eyes when I say it.
Waddling back to our house, waka, room, dorm, bed, or whatever I collect my thoughts some. At times, I hang out in the open air waiting for a shooting star. It's almost a sure bet that I will see one within the first couple minutes. Heat lightning almost always punctuates the northern sky and the moon is generally only visible for half the month. During that time the moon can cast shadows - when it is gone Ddegeya is as dark as you can get. No wonder Africa with population densities far exceeding the US has no bright spots on the "Earth at Night Satellite Photograph - there is no power and few have propane lamps. I climb into bed read a little and blog a little, conserving a little computer battery for later. Then I reflect on the day.
I wake up to the sun's early morning glow or from the Luganda streaming through my mosquito net, which I'm not sure. It is another day in Uganda, a handful of kilometers beneath the equator. I can easily recall the first days in Africa when the sun did not wrestle me out of bed at dawn and when the Luganda was strange and invoked loneliness. But now, 5 months in, I slip out of bed and into the day easily.
After fetching water I start pouring it onto the cabbages, tomatoes, carrots, and onions that I hope will grow big enough to reach one of the pot-bellied kids lips. I pause to track the sun bubble over the morning clouds; the sun always rises so quickly and I feel lucky when it isn't too cloudy to witness it. This morning, the sun sets the dew covered grass ablaze with glistening. It will be hot - there are few hard and fast weather rules here, but dew and low hanging clouds in the morning means that I will likely be clinging to the shadows during the day. As I wander back to grab my cup for breakfast I catch a glimpse of Fred, our bicycle milk-boy, delivering milk for Susan to boil. Fred seems timeless as he glides down the dusty road. He hooks the day's milk deliveries onto the handlebars of a bicycle that most would conclude had been left by the British Empire missionaries.
I sit down with some paper. The table is permanently coated with a layer of mud from the kids who climb all over it no matter how many times we tell them to get off the emeeza. I tell myself that the mud, now dusting my letter, gives the correspondence an air of authenticity. Often times, Becky or I will have a letter to finish, a thought to record, or when we work with the kids, tests to grade or workbooks to wade through. When neither of us has anything to work on we plot the future, comment on the news, or reminisce about Union, Ugandan kids, or on current projects. The BBC gives us what seems like a small window to the outside world as kids voices, invariably and incessantly, work to evoke some good morning waves or some small talk in Luganda. Sometimes, if we catch the BBC at the right time, it will elegantly paint a picture of American lunacy - sending a reporter to Detroit to use public transportation in America or commenting on just about any environmental topic having to do with the Bush administration. Other times, stark contrasts are painted. Perhaps, "The cholera epidemic following Laurent Nkunda's raid of Goma will likely infect thousands, aids workers have predicted. In the United States, a woman was crushed to death outside a Wal-Mart, trying to shop the day after Thanksgiving." FIll in the first sentence with any number of African reports: Cholera in Zimbabwe, Kony refuses to sign peace deal in Uganda, 9 million starving in Uganda, US food assistance programs and bio-fuels create starvation, Zimbabwe opposition leader ignored by Mugabe. The second sentence is what usually consumes most of the in depth reporting - Bush explaining that we need to continue to concentrate on economic growth, the latest third party report stating that yet another developed economy is slipping into recession, another economic summit, another case of corporate welfare, even if the mismanagement has been obvious (we are bailing out Detroit!).
Past the BBC, these contrasts are even more personal. The four shirts, three shorts, underwear that I folded over the clothesline flap in the breeze as I wash pineapple and bread down with coffee and milk. Peter is in the distance, hiding behind an anthill calling my name in the same shirt he wears everyday. It is a Bugle Boy shirt that proudly declares "Happy Boy" in English as if his parents had expected him to be approached by Mzungus wondering if he is happy. "Are you happy? Oh, you don't speak English - but wait, your shirt, ah, you are happy. Good." The shirt is greenish brown, although I am not sure if that is the original color. Anyways, this is a game we play almost everyday - Peter hides and calls my name, I look up, usually spot him, but pretend not to, and call back to say good morning. Peter always wanders to the clinic in the morning, after we eat breakfast, as he waits for his breakfast at 11AM when they have enough food, or, if not, he waits for his meal at 4PM. Perhaps the only meal of the day and probably just matooke, posho, and beans. Everyday.
There is butane in Kinoni for the first time in a month and we need cooking oil, so I head to the road after BBC and breakfast. The trip is just six kilometers, but sometimes the public taxis can leave you waiting in the hot sun. Today is one of those days when the taxis seem content leaving me to bake - I feel my skin burning for the first time since August, wishing I brought a hat or sunscreen. Much of what Becky and I could want is available in Ddegeya Center, a one kilometer walk from Engeye Health. Coca-Cola is available and requires a 15 minute walk and 30 cents - we really don't rough it as much as we sometimes imply. Anything we could need, except floss, is in Masaka, which is only a 40 minute taxi ride away. I study the dirt shoulder. In Uganda, the sun always seems to beat on you, leaving the roads, or the dirt around people's homes cracked and completely dry. In the rainy season, now over, it is the other extreme, leaving boots and gardens supersaturated. When the taxi pulls up - a mid-sized car - I throw the butane tank in the trunk and climb in the back with five others after making sure that the price is bitanu, 500 shillings or 25 cents. The driver packs me in and then slams the door on my hip. The six of us in the back fuse together and our hips clank like magnets. Any amorphous flesh searches out its own space like jello around fruit. There are four in the front - I've seen as many as 14 people in a car at one time, although there is always debate about whether babies count. On longer trips to Masaka I lose the feeling in my legs and drives can actually be a pretty painful experience. I am usually willing to settle on 2,500 shillings if the car isn't packed on trips to and from Masaka, paying 25 to 33 percent more than I need to. As we leave, I noticed the speedometer does not budge and droops at 0 km/h. Typical.
With no police checkpoints and no stops we are in Kinoni in five minutes. Everyone in Kinoni is hiding from the sun. I walk past the general stores to the gas station that sells butane. The general store across the street is where we get our staples and have built a nice rapport with the saleswoman. 3 kilos of maize flower, 3 kilos of beans, 3 kilos of rice, and a loaf of bread that won't be moldy tomorrow, please. We are the only mzungus in Ddegeya and everyone has learnt our names - Kinoni is larger, but I have never seen another mzungu there, either, so there is some familiarity with us around Kinoni as well. Mzungus are few and far between in this area of Uganda. Last month a child started crying upon seeing me. I understood it as a sympathetic gesture, "What the hell happened to him? Is he sick? Is it contagious? What in God's name is that - arm hair? Why isn't he black? Will he hurt me?" I hide my chest hair for fear that it would be too much, inciting riot or deep uncontrollable sympathy for the mutant. Despite my skin color impairment, I feel somewhat accepted when kids point to my upper arm and declare mzungu and then point to my wrist and declare Buganda, the regional tribe. I stare at my arm, compare it to theirs, and realize that I am a little darker than when I started, a testament to five months along a sunburnt equator.
After the taxi drops off the shoulder-less highway at Ddegeya I peel myself off the man next to me and climb out. Starting down the dirt path I am greeted by an entourage of kids who ask where I have been. I've learned that when I say Congo or Rwanda or Tanzania they don't get the joke; they don't know Congo, Rwanda, or Tanzania. A few steps down the path I feel a soapy hand trying to grab hold of a finger. Aksom. Aksom is a three-year-old goober and since he hasn't wandered to the health clinic in awhile he follows me back to hang out for awhile. He grabs for my backpack since he wants to help carry things. I know it is too heavy, but I throw it on him and watch him stumble with my hand making sure he doesn't hit the dust. We laugh together and he settles on just hanging onto my hand.
When I get to the clinic I un-peal Aksom's fingers and help Becky weed for an hour. Aksom follows "to help." Even though I joke, by the time they are seven they are better at weeding than Becky and I put together. Weeding always make me realize two things: 1. Weeds thrive in the exact conditions you try to create for your crops and 2. everything I do, cook, clean, wash, wear, weed is wrong. Weeding also reminds me of my parents garden and the Union's Octopus Garden. I make a note to self that I am sure to forget - ask about yields in the school garden. We weed in the late morning or early afternoon - something that is forced on us at times when our mornings are consumed at the school or we have other things to do in the evening - Ugandans almost always garden only in the morning and evening. Our technique with the hoe is wrong and kids and adults will sit at the edge of the field, stare at us in disbelief and amusement and sometimes even try to teach us. Even washing or cooking - no matter what you do, it is wrong. I noticed that Dean McEvoy weeded correctly without any prompting - I realize our own insufficient skills might be a product of not only our suburban American roots, but also our generation. Generation Apathy. I could swear that my Grandma wrote in a letter that she ate corn mush (as compared to Uganda's own posho) and that "Ugandans got nothing on us." Maybe the quote was misread or I rearranged it unconsciously to "they got nothing on us," but I know that many of my Grandmother's experiences in the great depression parallel the experiences that I am currently enjoying (if only temporarily) - no power, no automatic washer, no processed foods, no running water, no internet, and, of course, a lot of corn mush. Weeding also always makes me question the idea that a highly developed economy has a lot of service sector work and decreasing agricultural labor (as people urbanize and farming mechanizes, presumably using fossil fuels). It is good for a person to be able to weed their own garden and grow some of their own food.
The day's objective is not weeding, though. Today is a day of chickens. Union College, members of Schenectady and Albany, and students from Yonkers all helped raise money, giving Becky and I the opportunity to obtain and distribute chickens to help families increase protein and income generating opportunities. Today we are building chicken coops. We had initially hoped that the coops would ensure the chickens were kept outdoors, but that is apparently too inviting for theft. The coops are useful, though, since we are using native chickens, which have a tendency to run - the coops will help keep the chickens off the neighbors land when they are not grazing, even if the chickens snuggle up inside the mud huts at night.
After lunch, we begin to move from Engeye deeper into the village. At the first house we work with a boy called Umaru. We decided to work with kids because the kids can learn a lot from the project, be the main recipients of the protein filled eggs, and perhaps make a little money to help the family, too. Umaru makes us realize this was a great approach as he excitedly helps us build his coop. The coops are truly of Ugandan construction and if John hadn't taught us the Ugandan way, I think the coops might have fallen apart. We plant six 2.5" diameter tree limbs into the hard soil in one of the two locations Umaru had considered for his coop. Umaru is probably not yet ten, but he is more responsible for his age than any American I know. I remember when we had finished and were deciding when to drop the chicken off he told me that he would likely be working in the garden when we came, but we could just drop the chicken off in the coop and he would take care of it from there. So goddamn mature.
We laced reeds to the tree limbs on the four sides and the roof using banana fiber. Most would probably guess that banana fiber (the sinewy fibers in the banana leaf) would seemingly give in to the wind, an angry chicken, or a trip and fall into the coop - and they would be wrong. Banana fiber is strong. The mud huts where most Ddegeyans live are constructed in much the same way. Lace sticks together with banana fiber and then pat it with mud, which bakes and solidifies in the sun. As we lace the final reeds to the coop I take a peak around - Umaru's hut and a mango tree on one side with the other sides surrounded by large, mature banana plants. That is Ddegeya - mud huts and banana trees - and I find it quite rustic and beautiful.
Carrying the chicken to Umaru's house is a sort of unique experience. I had never carried a chicken before. After some chase, squawking, and flapping Richard managed to captured the beast and showed me how to grab it behind the wings (I made sure to wash my hands when I got back to Engeye). It looked uncomfortable, as if someone tied my wrists together and carried me by my elbows. I could feel the chicken's heartbeat as she looked around, confused, unhappy, but resigned to her fate whatever it may have been. Umaru carefully picked up the chicken in my hand weighed it, picked up Becky's chicken, examined them, consulted his mother and decided on the chicken in my hands. Umaru told us that he was happy and we told him we would be back to visit and see how the chicken is doing.
On the walk back I began to construct a mental map with little colored dots popping up. Dots for kids we taught at the health clinic in the morning, dots for the kids we teach or tutor at Bunyere Primary School, dots for the kids who know a little bit more about other cultures because of pen pal programs, dots for the kids who we are helping to build chicken coops for, dots for people who have received vegetable seedings from us, dots for the people we have been able to help in smaller capacities - helping to fix bicycles, helping to carry water, buying something from their store. More, dots for the people who work at the clinic, dots for the people who have used the clinic's affordable services, dots for kids who receive shoes. Future dots for distributing vegetables and seedlings, peanuts, more education, more chickens, information tailored to the community from health surveys, income from crafts projects, clean water after repairing the well. This is a connected community, they are close to one another and they see a problem as a community problem, not an individual problem, and on this mental map it was clear that Engeye was part of the community solution. Engeye touches nearly every home, every dot, in small but important ways.
We get back to Engeye a little before dusk after building two chicken coops from scratch, helping finish another, and checking the progress of the seven other coops. Sophia, the new nursing assistant tries to clap with one hand, a symbol I have learned to mean that I should come there. She pulls up a chair and tells me to sit down and play Matatu, a game that is almost identical to Uno. I realize that, intentionally or not, she is dealing me more cards and, as a result, is winning most of the games. I have sort of come to realize that, in Ludo and Matatu, cheating is acceptable as long as your not caught. I hear Francis and Joseph arguing for what seems like twenty minutes about some English language question. The argument rolls out right in front of me and I have to joke to Joseph, "Yeah, probably best not to ask the native English speaker about an English question." He poses the problem to me and, to Francis' dismay, I side with Joseph. He continues to argue, seemingly ignoring my ruling. The sun sets to my left and, because of the slope the clinic sits on, we only see the silhouettes of the banana plants. Further down the hill, someone probably sees our silhouettes.
I excuse myself so that I can go immerse myself in cold water and scrub the hell out of my feet, tan and constantly caked with a thin but dark layer of dirt. Sophia is not happy despite winning seven games to my two. I have never met a Ugandan who has said, "Okay, we've played enough. Let's quit." They can play for hours. Maybe it's cultural - can you play Sorry or Candyland all afternoon?
I quickly water the vegetable garden and step into the shower. I forgot to fill the shower and put it in the sun so I awkwardly pour a bucket of water onto my head. Becky isn't tall enough to reach the solar shower and everyone else just boils water and puts it in a bucket. I am stubborn and refuse to waste the coal or butane on a hot shower - we are in Uganda - it is 80 degrees everyday and never drops below 65.
I fill in the hour between 7 and 8PM making fun of Best FM, Joseph's favorite station, asking if the song that is playing at the moment is the one song they play for the day. The station is 90 percent ads, 9 percent annoying commentary, and one percent music. If you thought The Edge (or that station in the low 100s that plays guilty pleasure music that we all know Bilal listens to) was bad, you wouldn't be able to tolerate Ugandan FM radio. Sophia asks me what my favorite radio station is and I grumpily tell her that I like the BBC. They laugh, but I have been in music withdrawal, an unexpected side effect of coming here, for five months.
At 8 PM, we have an unspoken ritual. Susan readies the buffet line on the floor, Becky throws the headlamp on her head, and we ease into the kitchen to tear through Susan's delicious food. Tonight it is posho, matooke, and peanut sauce - one of the simpler meals we have. Every week or two, Becky or I will go to the market and pick up as many delicious extras as we can carry - pumpkin, cassava, yam, sweet potato, greens, cabbage, spaghetti, kivuvu (a kind of banana), egg plant, tomatoes, green pepper, carrots, and the list goes on. Generally, dinner is a combination of posho, matooke, and rice with either beans or peanut sauce plus a couple vegetables for good measure. The milk in the morning, the vegetables we buy, and our multivitamins seem like enough - we're not losing hair, getting weak, or rapidly changing body content. I am done with the food shortly after I start and before I know it I tell Susan she has cooked well and goodnight, "Ofumbe nnyo, sula balungi." Even though the routine is unvarying, Susan seems to appreciate our customary meal ending, perhaps because I consciously try to instill sincerity in my eyes when I say it.
Waddling back to our house, waka, room, dorm, bed, or whatever I collect my thoughts some. At times, I hang out in the open air waiting for a shooting star. It's almost a sure bet that I will see one within the first couple minutes. Heat lightning almost always punctuates the northern sky and the moon is generally only visible for half the month. During that time the moon can cast shadows - when it is gone Ddegeya is as dark as you can get. No wonder Africa with population densities far exceeding the US has no bright spots on the "Earth at Night Satellite Photograph - there is no power and few have propane lamps. I climb into bed read a little and blog a little, conserving a little computer battery for later. Then I reflect on the day.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Notes on Culture, Language, Sustainability, the Metastasizing Cancer of the West, and some Rambling
First some quotes:
Standing here, the old man said to me, "Long before these crowded streets here stood my dreaming tree." He'd know where he would sit for hours at a time. Now progress takes away what forever took to find. And now he's falling hard; he feels the falling dark. How he longs to be beneath his dreaming tree.
Conquered fear he'd climb, a moment frozen time when the girl who first he kissed promised him she'd be his. Remember mother's words, "There beneath the tree no matter what the world - you'll always been a baby."
Momma come quick - the dreaming tree has died. The air is growing thick. Fear it cannot hide. The dreaming tree has died.
- Dave Matthews Band, "The Dreaming Tree"
It may seem absurd to believe that a "primitive" culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.
-Helena Norberg-Hodge from Three Cups of Tea
...Little girls from sweden dream of silver screen quotation
And if you want these kind of dreams it Californication
It's the edge of the world in all of western civilization
The sun may rise in the east, at least it's settled in a final location
It's understood that hollywood sells Californication...
-Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Californication"
The Earth is not dying - it is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses.
- U. Utah Phillips
What seems like ages ago, Professor Pease posited the following question:
Here is my question for you. Beyond overt proselytizing, there are many ways to influence local attitudes and culture. I understand you and Becky have a "Prime Directive" that your mission be "accomplished free of the imposition of any foreign social, political or spiritual values." But don't you think that your mere presence somehow affects those around you? The way you treat each other, for instance; the way you dress, talk, read, etc., must have an impact on the students you teach. Do you worry about that? Do you strive to minimize your social influence?
Our Cultural Nudges
I have delayed answering this question because I really don't know all the answers. I think we strive to minimize our impact and respect local customs wherever we can. The fact is that we are very different - we look different, speak different, act different, eat different, and so on. I think the kids take us for what we are - strangers in a strange land.
When John first arrived I thought that he acted so overtly "western" in the way he gets things done, dresses, and thinks that his influence probably did more to influence kids than anything Becky or I did. John dresses casually often donning Nike running shorts and a t-shirt, something that I had not seen on any of the older villagers (besides myself and infrequently Richard) before John's arrival. John whips out a computer or the latest cell phone to get things done, something that we rarely did. John is jovial with all the villagers and you often see smiles pop up when John is around. His interactions are a far cry from the many courtesies and signs of respect that John detests. He hates being called "sabo" (sir) or being kneeled down to, something that is fairly commonplace in rural Ddegeya. I'm not attacking John or saying he should act differently - his practices are based on need. He manages a health care clinic that has him constantly communicating with Americans and shuttling between Masaka and Kampala (and a few months ago the United States). It just seems that John, the Headmistress, politicians in the village are the leaks from the urban to rural areas that nudge cultures.
Becky and I were initially very weird eaters - just ask Dean McEvoy how he handled the tiny piece of yam or posho and you will get a feel for how hard it was to adjust to the massive servings we were initially given. I think I can handle a plate of matooke now, but we still eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner too early (7AM, 1PM, and 8PM instead of 11AM, 2PM, and 10 or 11PM). Our breakfasts are pretty fancy compared to almost every other villagers - fruit, coffee, milk (sometimes) and bread with either peanut butter or butter. Even though we can be a little bit weird, we rarely stray from the normal village staples and our eating is largely hidden away, so influence is minimal.
What I did notice one day is that we are responsible for tiny differences. The kids use their Christian names around us and respond to our pronunciations of them. We don't hit the kids, which I think is part of the reason that the kids run all over us at times. They are tiny and tiny people can be tough to deal with, but when their parents are around or there is a threat of going home the kids snap to attention. One member of the Engeye clan once told me that Ugandan children listen with their butts - a cultural component we have failed to adhere to (although sometimes I think it would be convenient). We are also fairly willing to let the kids hang off us and grab a finger, which is something that I have not seen very often in the village - to be honest sometimes I have to pry kids, one at a time, off my limbs and it can be tough to keep them from grabbing my shirt. So maybe we are a bit more willing to be physical with the kids, having them give us high fives, try to punch my hand, run with them, pick them up and spin them around, have them try to push me or grab something from me, etc. I dress in shorts, whereas most villagers are in khaki pants, even while working in the blazing sun. This along with a lot of the clothes seemingly being shipped in as second-hand American clothes likely influences the dress of children, whom dress more casually than their parents. Perhaps most striking is that, even though I live fairly simply, I can buy something at will. Becky and I can celebrate monthly Ugandan milestones with a Coke or a beer (recall a long time ago one "affluent" boy celebrated his birthday with a coke, only). I have more clothes out on the line drying than some families have in total. I have a legal pad, a notebook, and looseleaf paper to write on when a thought crosses my mind or when I need to make a list to buy more stuff. I have stuff, which can be quite seductive, I imagine, to a four year old villager who celebrates the car he models out of a banana fiber, plastic bottle that he probably got from the Engeye trash pit, and four coke tops.
There are probably a million influences that I don't see or realize. I think that our impact is partially minimized because we don't speak their language and they don't speak ours. There is definitely a small risk that they will pick up broken Luganda from us, but I think they laugh at us enough so that I can be sure that they know that we just don't know Luganda. There is also the risk that they pick up on English bits, like when a swarm of kids run toward me, "Here comes trouble" I mutter, sometimes jokingly. At school I dress somewhat casually - a nice shirt and shorts, but I teach physical education along with mathematics.
So, in all, I think there are influences, but I'm not sure if they are positive or negative. Not beating the kids when they forget a protractor is probably reasonable, but spreading Luganda slang by accident should probably be avoided. Influencing kids to start referring to one another by their Christian name is something that is probably a form of cultural erosion. Most of the changes in culture cannot be attributed to Becky and I: Coca Cola ads dot the highway, cellphones are commonplace in the village, villagers use steel roofing instead of grass, and villagers with radios rock out to the latest hits. Much of this change radiates from the large towns and cities where the Buganda culture is even more drained - women don't kneel in the cities when greeting you or use the Buganda triple handshake or wear traditional outfits (western business suits are the rule). So the influence is from relatives who have migrated from the village. The roots of this cultural dislocation are likely rooted in western business culture of today, the English missionaries of yesteryear (Things Fall Apart is a nice fictional history of that unfolding), and Mid-East traders of the past. At one point the Buganda (the largest tribe in Uganda) wore traditional middle-eastern long white robes with black business jackets.
Global Cultural Nudges, Trends
This cultural progression, erosion, or evolution (however you may feel about it) is part of an important trend - westernification. In the 1830s, Charles Darwin, upon discovering the Fuegians in South America stated that: Their language does not deserve to be called articulate." When they were researched by Thomas Bridges, Bridges' incomplete dictionary had 32,340 entries, comparable to Japanese and certainly more words than a well-read English speaker. Similar languages all over South America were likely equally complex, highly evolved to the needs of the population (mamihlapinatapai, for example, means that two people are looking at each other hoping the other will do something they want, but not wanting to do it themselves), but were wiped out as primitive or barbaric (implying inferiority in a time period where people rationalized the eradication of cultures with Darwin's mantra "Survival of the Fittest").
Today, there are 362 critically endangered animal species and 438 critically endangered languages with fewer than 50 native speakers (Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken, 94). In just the Americas there are 6,800 languages that are intertwined with cultures (94). As language dies, culture, at least in part, evaporates with it. According to Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest cultures are disappearing at a rate of 30 per year (94). This information was more than enough for me to realize that, despite the importance of English, our students would know the Lugandan alphabet and numbers alongside the English system. Luganda has interesting cultural quirks and although it is not endangered at the moment it is being marginalized - the national language is English and when I stumble over a few words to greet a villager, I am told that I am good at Luganda because it is such a simple language. English is considered the gold standard, even though most Ugandans natively speak Luganda or one of the related languages. The same is true of cultural practices, English speaking Ugandans have started sentences time and again, "When the primitive people..." or "In this area they still live primitively..." These practices marginalize a language and culture that are symbiotically intertwined. I noticed that there is no word for "need" and that "to want," "to like," and "to enjoy" are the same verb (at times causing some confusion). There are several words for banana and a word for each species of banana in a culture where bananas are so important. Languages are tailored to cultures, which evolve with place. "Despite language preciousness, one perishes on average every two weeks" (Hawken, 94).
Globalizing
"Extinction of species and cultures is driven by globalization, the pursuit of progress through resource extraction and economic expansion" (Hawken, 102). Uganda is no different - they adopt English to speed up connections to the west, strive to increase cash crop exports (one Ugandan told me that the name for coffee means to be beaten, because the British-imposed government used to beat those who did not grow coffee, vanilla, bananas or other cash crops), and explore their country for oil. Globalization pushes the western way of life, western values (relative to Americans, few drink coffee), and English language in the name of progress. I recently picked up The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedmann over Confessions of an Economic Hitman and other similar (although most more formal) books to get a taste of the other side of the globalization spectrum...
Progress Needs Metrics
A Western bias about belonging to a superior culture is only valid if we use selective yardsticks. Rather than assuming that people want to surrender to Western values (and overlooking the impossibility of everyone's jumping onto the bandwagon of rampant materialism, given planetary constraints), we would be wiser to consider the loss of language as yet another indicator of the worldwide collapse of ecosystems, as well as a byproduct of the cultural hegemony that represses or punishes those who continue to use local language (Hawken, 95).
If we measure Western culture by how it treated people of different ethnicity and race, it is anathema. If we judge by the treatment of its own people, it is an embarrassment. And if we calibrate American superiority by its treatment of the environment, the United States is one of the least intelligent civilizations in the history of the planet. English, when scientific and technical terms are taken into account, has more than 3 million words. 'Brilliant' is hardly sufficient to describe such an achievement. But how do you describe an American administration that will spend $1 trillion on winning a war for Iraqi oil while refusing to allocate any funds to reduce dependency on oil? ... To invert Trevor-Roper's logic, indigenous cultures may show us an image of a future by which we can escape our present. If a culture does not become like us, it may not be a failure but a gift to what is now an uncertain future. (Hawken, 99).
By allowing our multinationals to continue to squeeze out the indigenous (or semi-indigenous? in Ddegeya) peoples of the world in the name of "progress" we are "placing our cultural eggs in one basket." There is no doubt that western medication saves lives in the short term (although Zinn points out that the Americas, before the Europeans, were had more advanced medications and a diet so varied and vast that almost no one went hungry, unlike Europeans), but western culture seems to steamroll the values that indigenous peoples often hold over the long term - sustainability in place, regard for the environment, regard for those around you. Western culture, almost by definition, cannot continue indefinitely, yet we are erasing the cultures and, in turn, the ecosystems beneath their feet that were previously oasis' of sustainability. We are destroying the planet by sweeping away the people that can live on land indefinitely, subsequently raping lands of resources, and then instilling western culture that churns through limited resources. Hawken ends his chapter, quite fittingly (no religious connotations intended):
Jesus was very clear about who will inherit the earth; so, too, are most indigenous people (114).
Standing here, the old man said to me, "Long before these crowded streets here stood my dreaming tree." He'd know where he would sit for hours at a time. Now progress takes away what forever took to find. And now he's falling hard; he feels the falling dark. How he longs to be beneath his dreaming tree.
Conquered fear he'd climb, a moment frozen time when the girl who first he kissed promised him she'd be his. Remember mother's words, "There beneath the tree no matter what the world - you'll always been a baby."
Momma come quick - the dreaming tree has died. The air is growing thick. Fear it cannot hide. The dreaming tree has died.
- Dave Matthews Band, "The Dreaming Tree"
It may seem absurd to believe that a "primitive" culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.
-Helena Norberg-Hodge from Three Cups of Tea
...Little girls from sweden dream of silver screen quotation
And if you want these kind of dreams it Californication
It's the edge of the world in all of western civilization
The sun may rise in the east, at least it's settled in a final location
It's understood that hollywood sells Californication...
-Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Californication"
The Earth is not dying - it is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses.
- U. Utah Phillips
What seems like ages ago, Professor Pease posited the following question:
Here is my question for you. Beyond overt proselytizing, there are many ways to influence local attitudes and culture. I understand you and Becky have a "Prime Directive" that your mission be "accomplished free of the imposition of any foreign social, political or spiritual values." But don't you think that your mere presence somehow affects those around you? The way you treat each other, for instance; the way you dress, talk, read, etc., must have an impact on the students you teach. Do you worry about that? Do you strive to minimize your social influence?
Our Cultural Nudges
I have delayed answering this question because I really don't know all the answers. I think we strive to minimize our impact and respect local customs wherever we can. The fact is that we are very different - we look different, speak different, act different, eat different, and so on. I think the kids take us for what we are - strangers in a strange land.
When John first arrived I thought that he acted so overtly "western" in the way he gets things done, dresses, and thinks that his influence probably did more to influence kids than anything Becky or I did. John dresses casually often donning Nike running shorts and a t-shirt, something that I had not seen on any of the older villagers (besides myself and infrequently Richard) before John's arrival. John whips out a computer or the latest cell phone to get things done, something that we rarely did. John is jovial with all the villagers and you often see smiles pop up when John is around. His interactions are a far cry from the many courtesies and signs of respect that John detests. He hates being called "sabo" (sir) or being kneeled down to, something that is fairly commonplace in rural Ddegeya. I'm not attacking John or saying he should act differently - his practices are based on need. He manages a health care clinic that has him constantly communicating with Americans and shuttling between Masaka and Kampala (and a few months ago the United States). It just seems that John, the Headmistress, politicians in the village are the leaks from the urban to rural areas that nudge cultures.
Becky and I were initially very weird eaters - just ask Dean McEvoy how he handled the tiny piece of yam or posho and you will get a feel for how hard it was to adjust to the massive servings we were initially given. I think I can handle a plate of matooke now, but we still eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner too early (7AM, 1PM, and 8PM instead of 11AM, 2PM, and 10 or 11PM). Our breakfasts are pretty fancy compared to almost every other villagers - fruit, coffee, milk (sometimes) and bread with either peanut butter or butter. Even though we can be a little bit weird, we rarely stray from the normal village staples and our eating is largely hidden away, so influence is minimal.
What I did notice one day is that we are responsible for tiny differences. The kids use their Christian names around us and respond to our pronunciations of them. We don't hit the kids, which I think is part of the reason that the kids run all over us at times. They are tiny and tiny people can be tough to deal with, but when their parents are around or there is a threat of going home the kids snap to attention. One member of the Engeye clan once told me that Ugandan children listen with their butts - a cultural component we have failed to adhere to (although sometimes I think it would be convenient). We are also fairly willing to let the kids hang off us and grab a finger, which is something that I have not seen very often in the village - to be honest sometimes I have to pry kids, one at a time, off my limbs and it can be tough to keep them from grabbing my shirt. So maybe we are a bit more willing to be physical with the kids, having them give us high fives, try to punch my hand, run with them, pick them up and spin them around, have them try to push me or grab something from me, etc. I dress in shorts, whereas most villagers are in khaki pants, even while working in the blazing sun. This along with a lot of the clothes seemingly being shipped in as second-hand American clothes likely influences the dress of children, whom dress more casually than their parents. Perhaps most striking is that, even though I live fairly simply, I can buy something at will. Becky and I can celebrate monthly Ugandan milestones with a Coke or a beer (recall a long time ago one "affluent" boy celebrated his birthday with a coke, only). I have more clothes out on the line drying than some families have in total. I have a legal pad, a notebook, and looseleaf paper to write on when a thought crosses my mind or when I need to make a list to buy more stuff. I have stuff, which can be quite seductive, I imagine, to a four year old villager who celebrates the car he models out of a banana fiber, plastic bottle that he probably got from the Engeye trash pit, and four coke tops.
There are probably a million influences that I don't see or realize. I think that our impact is partially minimized because we don't speak their language and they don't speak ours. There is definitely a small risk that they will pick up broken Luganda from us, but I think they laugh at us enough so that I can be sure that they know that we just don't know Luganda. There is also the risk that they pick up on English bits, like when a swarm of kids run toward me, "Here comes trouble" I mutter, sometimes jokingly. At school I dress somewhat casually - a nice shirt and shorts, but I teach physical education along with mathematics.
So, in all, I think there are influences, but I'm not sure if they are positive or negative. Not beating the kids when they forget a protractor is probably reasonable, but spreading Luganda slang by accident should probably be avoided. Influencing kids to start referring to one another by their Christian name is something that is probably a form of cultural erosion. Most of the changes in culture cannot be attributed to Becky and I: Coca Cola ads dot the highway, cellphones are commonplace in the village, villagers use steel roofing instead of grass, and villagers with radios rock out to the latest hits. Much of this change radiates from the large towns and cities where the Buganda culture is even more drained - women don't kneel in the cities when greeting you or use the Buganda triple handshake or wear traditional outfits (western business suits are the rule). So the influence is from relatives who have migrated from the village. The roots of this cultural dislocation are likely rooted in western business culture of today, the English missionaries of yesteryear (Things Fall Apart is a nice fictional history of that unfolding), and Mid-East traders of the past. At one point the Buganda (the largest tribe in Uganda) wore traditional middle-eastern long white robes with black business jackets.
Global Cultural Nudges, Trends
This cultural progression, erosion, or evolution (however you may feel about it) is part of an important trend - westernification. In the 1830s, Charles Darwin, upon discovering the Fuegians in South America stated that: Their language does not deserve to be called articulate." When they were researched by Thomas Bridges, Bridges' incomplete dictionary had 32,340 entries, comparable to Japanese and certainly more words than a well-read English speaker. Similar languages all over South America were likely equally complex, highly evolved to the needs of the population (mamihlapinatapai, for example, means that two people are looking at each other hoping the other will do something they want, but not wanting to do it themselves), but were wiped out as primitive or barbaric (implying inferiority in a time period where people rationalized the eradication of cultures with Darwin's mantra "Survival of the Fittest").
Today, there are 362 critically endangered animal species and 438 critically endangered languages with fewer than 50 native speakers (Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken, 94). In just the Americas there are 6,800 languages that are intertwined with cultures (94). As language dies, culture, at least in part, evaporates with it. According to Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest cultures are disappearing at a rate of 30 per year (94). This information was more than enough for me to realize that, despite the importance of English, our students would know the Lugandan alphabet and numbers alongside the English system. Luganda has interesting cultural quirks and although it is not endangered at the moment it is being marginalized - the national language is English and when I stumble over a few words to greet a villager, I am told that I am good at Luganda because it is such a simple language. English is considered the gold standard, even though most Ugandans natively speak Luganda or one of the related languages. The same is true of cultural practices, English speaking Ugandans have started sentences time and again, "When the primitive people..." or "In this area they still live primitively..." These practices marginalize a language and culture that are symbiotically intertwined. I noticed that there is no word for "need" and that "to want," "to like," and "to enjoy" are the same verb (at times causing some confusion). There are several words for banana and a word for each species of banana in a culture where bananas are so important. Languages are tailored to cultures, which evolve with place. "Despite language preciousness, one perishes on average every two weeks" (Hawken, 94).
Globalizing
"Extinction of species and cultures is driven by globalization, the pursuit of progress through resource extraction and economic expansion" (Hawken, 102). Uganda is no different - they adopt English to speed up connections to the west, strive to increase cash crop exports (one Ugandan told me that the name for coffee means to be beaten, because the British-imposed government used to beat those who did not grow coffee, vanilla, bananas or other cash crops), and explore their country for oil. Globalization pushes the western way of life, western values (relative to Americans, few drink coffee), and English language in the name of progress. I recently picked up The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedmann over Confessions of an Economic Hitman and other similar (although most more formal) books to get a taste of the other side of the globalization spectrum...
Progress Needs Metrics
A Western bias about belonging to a superior culture is only valid if we use selective yardsticks. Rather than assuming that people want to surrender to Western values (and overlooking the impossibility of everyone's jumping onto the bandwagon of rampant materialism, given planetary constraints), we would be wiser to consider the loss of language as yet another indicator of the worldwide collapse of ecosystems, as well as a byproduct of the cultural hegemony that represses or punishes those who continue to use local language (Hawken, 95).
If we measure Western culture by how it treated people of different ethnicity and race, it is anathema. If we judge by the treatment of its own people, it is an embarrassment. And if we calibrate American superiority by its treatment of the environment, the United States is one of the least intelligent civilizations in the history of the planet. English, when scientific and technical terms are taken into account, has more than 3 million words. 'Brilliant' is hardly sufficient to describe such an achievement. But how do you describe an American administration that will spend $1 trillion on winning a war for Iraqi oil while refusing to allocate any funds to reduce dependency on oil? ... To invert Trevor-Roper's logic, indigenous cultures may show us an image of a future by which we can escape our present. If a culture does not become like us, it may not be a failure but a gift to what is now an uncertain future. (Hawken, 99).
By allowing our multinationals to continue to squeeze out the indigenous (or semi-indigenous? in Ddegeya) peoples of the world in the name of "progress" we are "placing our cultural eggs in one basket." There is no doubt that western medication saves lives in the short term (although Zinn points out that the Americas, before the Europeans, were had more advanced medications and a diet so varied and vast that almost no one went hungry, unlike Europeans), but western culture seems to steamroll the values that indigenous peoples often hold over the long term - sustainability in place, regard for the environment, regard for those around you. Western culture, almost by definition, cannot continue indefinitely, yet we are erasing the cultures and, in turn, the ecosystems beneath their feet that were previously oasis' of sustainability. We are destroying the planet by sweeping away the people that can live on land indefinitely, subsequently raping lands of resources, and then instilling western culture that churns through limited resources. Hawken ends his chapter, quite fittingly (no religious connotations intended):
Jesus was very clear about who will inherit the earth; so, too, are most indigenous people (114).
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