My "sustainable development" rant and other things

Yes, I know it's been a very long time. I sort of forgot I had this thing. It's been a busy couple of months - working, traveling, and preparing for the big move to Portland. I'm flying there on Saturday to begin scoping out the job scene for a month. In the meantime, my company here will be letting me telecommute. My master plan to make myself indispensable to them seems to have worked. They were fooled!

Dave is good. Great. Fantastic, indeed. That's him there in all his manliness during my sister's wild wedding week in Austin, TX. It was a nice vacation, and Dave survived meeting most of my family without any permanent scarring.

I came back to this blog tonight, because I've been doing a lot of thinking about Africa recently. I've seen a fair number of fellow volunteers in the last few weeks, and have been having moments of nostalgia and heartache missing the Dark Continent.

Last week, I was chatting online with Hellene, one of the girls from my mentoring group. She is still in Narok, struggling to find a job or go back to school. Ledama has continued the mentoring program, but without them. Instead he's enlisted foreigners to come in and run the camps. Apparently, income generation has become more important than sustainable development. More on that topic in a moment.

I was telling Hellene how hard it was for me to adjust to returning to the US. She was surprised. Why would that be hard? I said that everyone's in such a hurry here. No one takes the time to sit and have chai and really talk to each other. There isn't that same sense of community. I was telling Dave all of this on the phone tonight, and I can't tell you how comforting it was to have someone who completely understood what I was saying. He misses Kenya too, and he's a lot fresher from the trenches.

Back to the topic of sustainable development, I got an e-mail tonight from a lady who stumbled across my website a few months ago. She is planning to volunteer in Narok this summer, and wanted as much information as I could give about the place. I've been corresponding with her for awhile now, giving her the standard traveler's advice: what to bring, how to cash money and mail packages, safety tips. Then today, I got this note from her:

"Hey Amy, how's it going? So, I am trying to find a donated used laptop for the girls centre in Narok; they asked me if I could find one. But I want to be sure that whatever I find for them (I've got the feelers out amongs friends, etc.) is useful. Do you have an idea of what is needed for internet access in Kenya on a laptop? Are they going to be able to take whatever I bring them and find the software, etc. needed to equip it the way they need? Of course whatever I bring will have word processing software on it already but I'm curious about internet hook-up over there, interfacing with a printer over there, etc. Any ideas?

Again, thanks so much for your input, its been tremendously helpful. Take it easy, " X

I didn't write back right away. I needed time to stew on this. She's only going to be in Kenya a couple of months. There won't be time for her to really understand the donor culture that's destroying the continent, and so in a way, I thought, "Why bother telling her?" Short-term volunteers tend to get exactly what they want out of their experience. They come to Africa with armloads of gifts, get smiles and songs from the downtrodden, and leave feeling good about themselves for being such humanitarians. The mzungu is happy, and a few Kenyans get a couple more shillings in their pockets. Everyone wins!

Probably, I should have let things go down that way. But I couldn't. So here's what I replied:

"...I'm not sure how to advise you on this. The first question that came to my mind when I read your e-mail is what does the girls centre actually need with a laptop? What do they plan to use it for?

The reason I'm asking this is that I suspect - can almost guarantee - that they have no plan for it. Chances are, they have little or no experience with computers, and don't even know what a laptop is. They are only asking you for one because they hear it's a good thing to have, and they know that as a foreigner you have the means to provide it.

I know that you are excited about the prospect of going to Kenya, and you just want to help out wherever you can. And I'm sure you don't see any harm in collecting things they've asked for before you go. But ultimately I think it can be harmful for a couple of reasons.

The first comes from my Peace Corps training. For 10 weeks before we went to our sites, we sat through intense training run by Kenyan nationals. The main message they wanted to get across was that everything we did, every project we started, needed to be sustainable. In other words, there had to be a way to continue it after we left. This means training local people to take over your work when you go, and making community members accountable for a project by investing in it themselves. The purpose is to create a sense that there is shared ownership in a project, and that they are equally responsible for its success or failure.

In my experience, if you give people something without developing a plan for it or asking them to invest in a portion of it, then they are unlikely to appreciate its value and give it the care and attention it needs. I saw this all the time in my work. The NGO I worked for had managed to get donations of 100 old Macintosh computers from the US to bring to schools in Narok. We tried to create a sustainable project by asking headteachers to build suitable laboratories for the machines. But we made the mistake of dropping off the computers before the laboratories were built, and we didn't have the manpower to provide any training to the school when the computers were delivered. Because the schools had no investment in the computers, they did not take care of them. In one school, I found the computers being housed in a barn, covered in spider webs with birds nesting in the rafters above. In another school, the computer lab was also being used for home economics, so they had a giant charcoal stove set up spitting smoke onto the machines.

My other concern in giving these donations is the message we're sending to Kenya, and Africa in general - that our money is more valuable than our time. I don't know if you've been to Africa before, but be prepared for this. Every day, everywhere you go, people are going to be asking you for money. I'm not talking just about people you know. Perfect strangers will not be shy about it. The first words of English tiny children learn are, "How are you? Give me money." You'll hear it every day until you want to scream. "Mzungu (white person), give me money." The tough lesson to learn is that they aren't always asking because they NEED the money. They are asking because the color of your skin tells them that you have it, and in their culture it's not rude to ask for what they want.

A lot of volunteers start out thinking, "Oh, it's only a few shillings, what's the harm?" But every time we hand over money, we perpetuate that stereotype that white people are rich. A few shillings quickly turns into requests for college tuition or visas to America. And it doesn't just affect you, but every volunteer who comes through that town. This was a continual frustration for me as a Peace Corps volunteer. My salary was $150/month, so even if I'd wanted to give money away, I couldn't afford to. But I was living in a town full of missionaries and well-funded volunteers who did give money away. And there was a constant expectation that I would too. As someone who spent two years of my life volunteering my time and living at their level, I wanted to be appreciated for that contribution, not the dollars I had in my pocket.

I'm sorry to sound so pessimistic, because I really WAS appreciated by many people for the time that I gave there. But to this day, I still get e-mails from my favorite students, the smart and wealthy ones, asking me to send them a laptop or find them school fees. And I never gave anyone money during my whole two years there."

I read it now, and think, "Wow, am I really that jaded?" But the thing is, I love Kenya. In many ways, it's still my home. But its salvation lies in its land and its people, not pretty, shiny things brought by the white man.