Ex-pats in Uganda live a wholly different lifestyle than most Ugandans and a wholly different lifestyle than they might in their own home-countries. I think that I knew this in theory, but it didn't become a reality for me until this week. Maybe I was slow to realize this because I came here knowing a handful or so people, all of whom are Ugandans. I've yet to see another Muzungu in the neighborhood that I'm staying in. And I have yet to see a Muzungu in a taxi or in the car park.
This Monday, I went for my orientation briefing at the U.S. Embassy and I have yet to see so many foreigners in one place.
Going to the Embassy was my first venture out on my own. Joseph got one of the boda boda (motorcycle) drivers that he knows to come by the house and take me there, Mr. Kigozi (pronounced Chi-gozi) is his name. He drives nice and safely, no crazy weaving through traffic or speeding recklessly on bumpy potholed muddy roads, just nice and safe. It was sprinkling a little bit and I was wearing a dress, so I had to sit sideways, but I probably didn't even need to hold on, it was such a steady ride. Mr. Kigozi is also one of my Luganda teachers now. From him I learned how to say, "How are you?", "I'm good," and "goat." Well, I learned goat because he wanted to know what the animal is called in English, so naturally, I had to learn what it's called in Luganda.
The funny thing is that in both my orientation briefing and my security briefing, I was strongly advised to never take boda bodas. I didn't have the heart to tell them that I had arrived in a boda boda and was planning on taking one home. Apparently, the boda bodas are so dangerous that we're never supposed to take them at night and if we absolutely have to, we can maybe take them during the day. Thing is, unless you have a car in Kampala, you're going to need to take a boda boda at some point. There are many places that the taxis (minibuses or matatus) just don't go. So you either get on the back of a bicycle.....or the back of a motorcycle. If you're looking for some speed or are carrying anything even kind of heavy, I'd recommend the second option.
Thing is, many of the ex-pats that I've met here have cars...hence, they are not commonly found in taxis. Everyone at the Embassy that I spoke to drives themselves around. I didn't ask what kind of cars they drive, but I'm guessing parecida a (similar to) Barney. Barney is the big purple dinosaur that Robby and I were driving around in this summer. The one that John in Maine totally called me out on when he said, "Elaine, I didn't expect to see you driving an SUV. I thought you'd have one of those little environmentally friendly cars or something." All I could say in my defense was, "Well, I don't have a car. This one was offered to us for the roadtrip, so we took it." But John was right.
Another thing that I'm learning is that ex-pats tend to hang out with ex-pats. This is obviously coming from the limited experience or small sampling of ex-pats that I've come across in the past week and couple days, but even the people at the Embassy mentioned that a lot of U.S. citizens who come here to do Peace Corps or other programs find that they make very few Ugandan friends. Money is a dividing issue that has repeatedly been cited as a reason.
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Kampala (and maybe this is one of those generalizations that you can appropriately make about all of the African continent) is one of those places where you really see development/aid as an invidious globalized industry. There may be some ex-pats here for business, but a large number of them are here working with an NGO or some international organization. I've been in places in Central America where there are a good number of international organizations driving around their giant shiny SUVs with the organizational logo painted on the sides and signs up everywhere lauding the work of whatever whatever organization funded by whatever whatever donor in whatever whatever North Atlantic nation doing whatever whatever great thing in this whatever whatever poor town. But Africa....
Africa is a whole other level of development/aid intervention. It's the epitome of everything about international development/aid that I detest deep down from the marrow of my bones. That book "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo is something I really want to read, because I have a feeling she's going to say all the things that I think about aid and development in a much more eloquent and coherent way. I just see so much more bad than good coming out of this stuff that telling me that the intentions are good, just doesn't fly. I'm sorry (not really), but the ends do not justify the means.
When a person gets involved in some job that poisons the Earth, exploits people and natural resources, perpetuates some harmful institution or system and then tries to buy back their soul by "giving back" through charity....I'm sorry mubuntu, but it's just not the same. You can't expect to repay the damage that you never should've done and think that the universe is going to be right again.
I wouldn't be so quick to write it all off....because there are movements like Anti-Development, New Development or Alternative Development, maybe even Integrated Development that hold some promise. The ones that talk about what I call "Local and Organic" development. Problem is.....good examples are few and far between. When I was working on my thesis, I was really struggling to find examples of community development that did not involve a single external intervention.....no outside organization or expert trying to tell a community what they think is good for them. All of the professors and practitioners that I quizzed for examples were at a loss to come up with examples themselves. Most of us are meddlers.
I'm currently involved in the development of a proposal to facilitate the organization of community-based transboundary watershed management committees in the peace park area of Honduras and Nicaragua. I'm worried. I'll tell you why. Key is, they want the big dollars (a.k.a. WB/IMF kinda shady deals) so they claim that this means you need the big int'l experts who are used to dealing with big bank money and handling big scale projects instead of trying to promote the capacity-building of local actors and leaders who really know the situation on the ground and are used to getting things done there but no big bank would trust to manage a project or believes could do anything at the level of intelligence, efficiency and professionalism of a North Atlantic suit.
I can't help but feel all kinds of against it and have tried to promote local people, named a bunch of more-than-capable and deserving individuals, but instead, they want to bring in a bunch of North Atlantic experts who have never been to this place (the proposed peace park territory on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua) and don't speak the language or know anything about the local dynamics except for maybe what they've been briefed on. Every attempt I've made to have indigenous peoples mentioned explicitly has failed to make its way into the text. I'm sure that these experts are wonderful, genuinely nice, intelligent people with great expanses of experience in doing this kind of work.....but sometimes, it's nice to give someone else a chance, especially when so many of the problems of widespread and pervasive poverty are linked to limited access to opportunities.
What's even more disturbing is that I know that it can be done without all that fancy shmancy external aid. I did the field research last semester, I know how the systems work and I believe that they can work. The social and political mechanisms already exist for village-based transboundary conservation (including for watershed management and protection)....the patronatos, gabinetes del poder ciudadano, alcaldias and asociaciones de municipios, mambocaures, etc. All they need is a small amount of financial support - food at the meetings and transportation for the people to go. Maybe they already have all that available in their budgets already. When I spoke to the municipalities, no one said they needed a $5 million WB loan to start work on this. They just asked for a date and contact info. They could begin the organization so easily on their own. When they begin targeting technical issues beyond the scope of their knowledge, I'm convinced that in-country experts exist....and those are the people who we must support. Otherwise, why would in-country experts in "developing" nations ever have the incentive to stay in-country.....they would have such better career opportunities if they just abandoned their communities and moved "North".
If community-based means the communities themselves get together and discuss the issues and pinpoint actions or ways forward on their own, why is a whole team of international experts necessary for any of that? Maybe they will need to access international funds to execute the actions they want to take, but if that's something they can't do on their own, then it's the development banks that are failing to provide the services they were created to provide. There is no reason why a middle-person broker type must be coerced into the equation for "poor" people to get access to money set aside to help develop "poor" communities. I refuse to believe that international experts are the only people capable of doing these jobs. Every one of those international experts was at one point an uninformed inexperienced non-expert. Somehow, they were trained, taught, informed and given opportunities. Why should the local people of the Choluteca and Madriz mountain forests be any different?
I rant.....I meddle
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