Getting dirty in the grass roots

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Getting dirty in the grass roots

28^th August 2006
I recently spent a week with Travis, Ciarra and Lee in the small Ugandan village of Kitale

Where we stayed
MACRO has a house that it uses in Kitale. The house is one of about four enclosed inside a compound.

A couple of local ladies prepared all our meals. Typically meals included things like matooke (mashed green banana), rice, cassava, porridge and some type of meat dish. Carbohydrate rich foods seem to be par for the course in Africa. There were not many greens to be seen. We had three decent meals a day.

Most people in the village get one meal a day. Usually boiled cassava with a little salt and water sauce.

The rooms we slept in were pretty basic. Ciarra and Lee got the two mattresses available. I slept on the concrete floor with a sleeping bag, woolen blanket and flax mat for padding. It was very uncomfortable to start with, but I got used to it by the time we left.

Day One

Sussing out the problems
We spent the morning of the first day wandering around the village. Each international volunteer was grouped together with a couple of local volunteers. I was paired up with Godfrey and Jordan.

We spoke to six people in about two hours. Some of their stories can be found here.

We learnt the following:

Most people are surviving on one meal of cassava a day. They can't afford any sauce, so usually flavor the cassava with salt and water.

Malaria is the major health problem. Nobody had a mosquito net. Hospitals are far away, under-stocked and overpriced.

Some of the children also suffered from some sort of eye infection that caused extreme itching and caused their eyes to water for about a week.

Pests were a big problem to the farmers. Some have tried natural pesticides with little success. No one could afford commercial pesticides.

Many grandparents were taken care of their orphaned grandchildren.

HIV/AIDS has been particularly hard on Africa's middle generation.

Water is either got from the borehole at ush50 ($NZ 0.04) a jerry-can or from the free well.

The water from the wells should not be drunk, but is.

Most people walk about three miles to get their water.

I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the locals. Most of the time I had to use an interpreter.

None of this what we found out was much of a surprise. I'm not really sure what the point of it was as we never sat together afterwards and compared results.

I think I should be able to make MACRO a much more efficiently run organisation. One of the many suggestions I will make to MACRO will be take common question form to be taken to these interviews. At least that way we will be able to collate results easier and compare region to region.

Not Talking About Agriculture
I like the laid back attitude of Uganda. It makes for a relaxing country to be in. Uganda can still learn stuff from the West though. Not become the West and lose its identity.

One of the lessons Uganda - and MACRO - needs to learn is to be more organised.

Not the oh-damn-it's-5:06 pm-and-I-have-to-be-somewhere-at-5:12 pm attitude of the West, but, as the Dalai Lama says, "Somewhere in the middle".

A classic example of this was the agriculture talk Lee, Ciarra and I gave to various classes. We were told he topic would be crop rotation an hour or so before we gave the talk. I kinda understand what its all about. You cycle your crops around so that different crops feed on different nutrients and your soil stays fresh. Something like that anyway.

The phrase "Something like that anyway" is quite telling. If we knew what we would be talking about before we talked about it, we could of googled "crop rotation in rural Africa" and found out all sorts of useful stuff that we could of passed onto the farmers.

But we didn't.

I personally freestyled my way through my talk. I tried to explain the theory behind crop rotation using pretty pictures. I think I explained it quite well. I'm quite good at making complex things simple.

I could of done even better if I had known what I was talking about beforehand...

Simple Games. Lotsa fun
One thing Africans most definitely do right is know how to have fun.

Travis organised a running race between middle-aged men and middle-aged women. One of simplest games possible, but people just howled with laughter as the contestants hurtled up and down the field.

I think it was a very good idea of Travis' to get the middle-aged folk involved. All too often these type of sporting events involve the young. Everyone had a great time.

Once the races had finished, some African drums mysteriously appeared from nowhere and some grooves were laid down. The women shook their hips and the men did the shuffle. Even the muzungus (white people) did some bone shaking (dance).

Day Two

Not Teaching
On the very first day we arrived at the village, Travis explained what the schedule was going to be. The youth were due to meet us on the second morning and we were discuss sexual health and responsibility.

Nobody turned up.

Not sure why. I very much doubt that they were too embarrassed. Fellow volunteers have given numerous sexual health talks and everybody has been more than open about it.

Maybe it wasn't communicated well enough at the initial talk. Maybe they just got confused. Dunno.

We ended up spending some of the morning chillin' out underneath a mango tree and some of the morning visiting a big ol' sacred rock.

Travis informed us that we weren't allowed to wear shoes on the rock, so we slid off our footwear and tramped on up. An elderly lady showed us some of the sights on the rock. There was a bed where the gods slept, some pots where they drank and footsteps where they'd been. All very cool.

We each gave the lady ush1,000 ($NZ 0.83) for showing us around.

Teaching
We had arranged a talk in the school for the youth of the town in the afternoon and - joy of joys - they actually turned up.

The topic was HIV/AIDS.

HIV/AIDS has disproportionately ravaged the people of Africa and nobody is quite sure why.

While it is true that the cultural of sex differs from place to place - I've met several Ugandan men with more than one wife - it is not true that the promiscuity of African men is at the heart of Africa's HIV/AIDS woes. Men in Rio De Janeiro and Thailand (where HIV/AIDS isn't nearly as bad) were more likely to report having five or more sexual partners than men in Africa¹.

Several theories abound about why HIV/AIDS is so prevalent in Africa. It might be found in the details of the sexual networks - such as the timing of having multiple partners and the sexual habits of the migrant African worker. It might be that other diseases such as malaria make you more susceptible to HIV/AIDS. It might have something to do with male circumcision - you are less likely to get HIV/AIDS if you've been circumcised. It might because of a different strain of HIV/AIDS in Africa².

Nobody knows for sure though. It would be a great if someone could come up with an answer.

The most annoying thing about HIV/AIDS is that we know how to prevent it by following the good ol' A B C's.

Abstain from sex

Be faithful

Use a Condom

It was this message that Ciarra, Lee and Travis belted out to a group of young people. I sat back and watched.

It is both scary and heartening that the group was so receptive. "Scary" because they should of already have had this stuff drummed into them, but hadn't. "Heartening" because they were so interested in the message we gave.

I've given and been at several HIV/AIDS talks. Some of the questions and statements that come up are real eye openers.

Can I use a condom twice?

We're safe here on our island because HIV/AIDS can't travel across water.

I don't use condoms because Americans put the virus in the lubricant of the condom.

AIDS is a myth. AIDS actually stands for American Idea to Discourage Sex.

If you have sex with a virgin within twenty-four hours of contracting HIV, then the HIV will be driven from your system.

Then there is the classic story of a couple carefully putting a condom onto a banana before having sex. It is one of those stories that you're not quite sure whether you should laugh or not.

Not Being Lance Armstrong
In recent times, I've been quite happy with my fitness. I did not own a car in Dunedin and walked everywhere, including:

Walking up and down a sizable hill to get back and forth from work when I lived in Roslyn.

Walking the round trip of two-and-half hours to see my clinical psychologist, Tara Clark.

Walking for an hour-and-a-half to play board games at a friends place.

Walking the two-hour round trip, all uphill on the way there and all downhill on the way back, to see my psychiatrist at Ashburn Hall.

At one stage I was even running half-marathons.

This - coupled with all the walking you have to do in the Philippines and Africa - has left me with a reasonable standard of fitness. Enough to be healthy, but not enough to be any sort of sporting super star. At the very least it let me shed 40 kg from the 125 kg behemoth I used to be.

So, when I entered a village bike race, I was feeling confident that I would do okay.

Turns out that walking a lot is not match for years of hard farm labor. I came last. It wasn't even close. The locals were just far too good for me. I could blame it on the crappy brakeless bike that I had, but I would of still come in last with a modern full-suspension mountain bike.

It was good fun though. Villagers cheered me on as I puffed my way through the course. It reminded me the cheering crowds I got on my motorcycle ride on the Camotes Islands in the Philippines.

Ciarra did slightly better than me and came in second-to-last.

Day Three

I love hard work. I could watch it for hours
On the morning of the third day we wandered around with a bunch of villages constructing dish-draining tables for some of the more prone members of the villages.

Mama Africa - with elephantitis in her feet - was one of the recipients. This lady and this gentleman were the other two.

The dish-draining tables provide a way of hygienically drying dishes. Most people just leave their dishes to dry on the ground.

The tables were constructed from slender trees that were chopped down from around the home. They were tied together with vines. It was all very efficient and well done.

In the great traditions of community projects everywhere, a lot of people turned up to help build the tables. Which is cool, but it also led to the other great traditions of looking-at-other-people-work and I'm-the-most-humble-here-and-insist-on-doing-most-of-the-work.

Lee, Ciarra and I kept up the Muzungu (white people) tradition of looking-at-other-people-work. Lee and I carried one stick each, Ciarra managed two.

Talking about projects
The afternoon was spent talking to the community about the money making projects that MACRO offers.

Details of the projects we talked about can be found here.

The villagers really liked the idea of the projects. Every time we mentioned something like, "MACRO will give you five piglets to get you started," was met with a round of applause.

Between twenty and thirty people signed up for each project.

This is one of areas that I and other Muzungus think can add a lot of value to. Organising and "Thinking Big" is something that the west tends to be better at.

Wrap Up
The trip away with MACRO was an enjoyable one. Just hanging out with the villagers and talking to them about their problems was rewarding.

I can't help but feel that we could accomplish so much more. A lot of our time was spent just sitting around and either watching other people work or waiting for something to happen. I have been giving this a lot of thought and it will be the topic of future web pages.

¹ Daniel T. Halperin and Helen Epstein, "Concurrent Sexual Partnership Help to Explain Africa's High HIV Prevalence: Implications for Prevention," The Lancet Vol. 364, July 3, 2004, p. 4.

² Jeffery Sachs, "The End of Poverty", 2005 Edition, p. 322.

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