Arjun in Kakamega

Note:  While this post was uploaded on June 30, 2009, it was written on June 29, 2009.

RECAP OF THE DAY:  Woke up late, ran to work, did a review for the training today, went home, got ready, headed to town, had lunch with Poe, visited a bunch of shops, checked out some prices, went to Yakos, headed back to Iguhu, got permission to use the hospital vehicle tomorrow to go to town and get wood and stuff for the construction of backboards, went home, started working, made movie from the team retreat, read up a bit on Microsoft Access, prepared for training tomorrow, eat, sleep.

REFLECTION

The mid-term retreat was last weekend, which is why I was unable to blog.  The entire team went to Hell’s Gate National Park, and it was a lot of fun!  I think we definitely all needed a break, and it was cool to be able to regroup as a team, discuss what we think about our internship so far and where we want to take our internships in our remaining time.

The park itself is phenomenal.  The first day, we woke up early to go rock climbing and then biked across the entire park to go to a large gorge.  The park has wild giraffes, zebras, ostriches, water buffalo, and more just walking around it, so we literally biked through herds of zebras and the like as we made our way across the park.  I was actually cut off from my group as a herd of zebras crossed the path in front of me.  It was a very unique experience.  The gorge was also amazing; words can’t do it justice, so check out the pictures I’ve posted below.  We also filmed a movie in the gorge, and I spent the majority of today editing it, but unfortunately the speed of my internet connection prohibits my uploading it until after I return to the States.  Stay tuned, though.

I had an opportunity to have a very long and very interesting discussion with Angie, our project coordinator, about her ideas regarding development in general and development in Kenya.  I wanted to talk to her about this because us interns have many discussions about the theory and practicality of what we do, and I figured that given she has done development work for many years now in several different parts of the world, her opinion is one that matters more than most.  I want to discuss her thoughts here, and just so you know, I asked Angie if I could blog about our conversation, to which she agreed.  But because this is a secondary source, I want to make sure that no one draws firm conclusions about Angie or her thoughts based on this recollection of a conversation.

We started out with a general question.  If you had complete control over everything in Kakamega or in Kenya, what would you do?  Angie would remove every foreign aid presence in Kakamega, because aid in any form creates a sense of entitlement and wrongly teaches the local society that foreign presences will always be there to step in and solve their problems for them.  From there, societies should be forced to supply in-kind contributions to any development program that is implemented.  Interestingly, Angie seemed less interested in ideas of sustainability and more concerned with instilling in the people the concept that they must work hard for their own development.  In fact, she said, there has to be a balance between aid and sustainability.  Yes, we should encourage the proliferation of sustainable solutions which require people to use their own resources to solve their own problems.  But when the people lack the resources or have the wrong resources, sometimes you have to bring in the resources through aid in order to achieve the long-term development that you are looking for.

This is an interesting way of looking at it, but one that makes a lot of sense.  In fact, every sustainable development project has within it an element of aid that plays a critical if not pivotal role.  In my very own project, for example, the time and knowledge that I offer the staff at Iguhu can be considered direct aid that is involved in a longer-term project of enhancing emergency responsiveness.  Why is this aid – a donation of my time, free of charge – necessary?  Because in this situation, the resource that was lacking – namely, trainers – needed to be supplied in order to get the development the hospital sought.  But what is important about this aid, though, is that it is only supplied given a significant in-kind contribution

We then spoke at length about the political situation in Kenya.  We’ve all noticed that people are in general very cynical about their government, that corruption is rampant, that people feel out of control of their politics, and that the government itself is plagued with tribalism.  Emily, Liz, and others have stressed the fact that they feel that a top-down political reform is absolutely required for development, since the current government is fractionalized, inefficient, and corrupt.  Mama Joyce has told me about campaigns to get elected – how politicians literally hand out money to people, which is a sign of power and wealth that is taken by the people and results in election.

Angie added onto this by saying that it was in fact the youngest generation – including (if not especially) those who have university degrees – who are especially prone to voting along tribal lines, a fact that is startling, especially given that I have generally assumed that education is the key to incite a bottom-up political reformation.  (As I understand it, Angie did her Masters degree in Kenya, and part of her thesis included an exploration into these political questions.)  The reason for it is that when university students graduate with degrees, they often cannot find jobs and end up loitering at home doing nothing.  Therefore, they tend to vote for politicians of the same tribe as them, because they are led to believe that the politician will take care of his own and offer them jobs.

While that may go to say that economic development will be critical in eradicating tribalism in Kenyan politics, Angie has another interesting idea.  She says that many of these problems arise from people feeling too far removed from their government, and that political apathy due to a highly centralized government often manifests in tribalism, since ethnic divisions are the strongest ones that exist.  While more personal government exists in name, it is virtually powerless.  Angie says an interesting idea to toy with would be instating a far more federalist state, with local, state, and national governments having clear and distinct objectives and jurisdictions.  In this way, people can begin to be divided along lines other than tribes, and people might start to take a far more interested role in their local and state governments, since they would be closer to the people themselves.  In national elections, people might start feeling united by their locations and by extension their common problems instead of solely by their tribe.  Finally, decentralizing the government might also have the effect of giving people more direct control over their day-to-day problems instead of depending on a massive, inefficient, central government.

We also touched briefly on two other interesting points.  Angie has a unique perspective on Kenyan politics because she was here during the post-election ethnic violence following the last election, where ethnicities collided with massive force while politicians fought over seats of power.  Angie said that the sheer length of the violence and the unwillingness of politicians to budge despite the high death toll were telling to the people – telling that their leaders actually did not care about them, and that governmental reform was necessary.  She went on to say that violence like that, though devastating from a human rights standpoint, may have actually accelerated or incited a political questioning of leaders, which in the long run can lead to powerful political reform.

We talked about democracy itself and its role in Kenya.  Angie had a really interesting point – she said that post independence, land and property owned by the British were sold in bulk to whoever had money because the British did not have the time or the will to allocate it more fairly or give custody of it to the government itself.  Therefore, the resources owned today in Kenya by Kenyans are lopsided and very unequal, and it is not a result of fair competition through years of capitalism.  Perhaps a different form of government, and perhaps temporary, might be effective in redistributing resources to the people in a more fair manner that encourages fairer competition.

Lastly, we talked about globalization in Kenya.  I’ve talked briefly before about my views on globalization – I go so far as to say it is the ultimate “goal” of development work in Kenya and around the world.  And though Angie agreed that globalization was a good thing, she also cautioned that there are some aspects of globalization that inhibit the Kenyan people from tackling their own problems, because in an increasingly globalized world, Kenyan issues become everyone’s issues.  The example she cited was the post-election violence, which she said could have been a powerful force for political reform.  The forces that stopped the violence were foreign, which stopped the political movement in its tracks.  Why did foreign forces intervene?  Because Kenya is a critical trade route in the region, so problems in Kenya have economic implications elsewhere.  By stepping in to resolve the situation, these foreign powers reinforced the heavily-ingrained idea that foreigners will come in to solve all of the problems in Kenya, and that Kenyans themselves have a smaller responsibility to work for their own betterment.  Thus, we have an example of when globalization can actually slow down development work.

We then wrapped up the discussion with Angie telling us about one of her professors and a term he used called “revolutionary patience.”  All of us interns, I think, are increasingly frustrated with the slowness with which everything works, and with the feeling that our small contributions in single organizations scattered across Kakamega won’t actually make a difference.  Angie told us about her same sentiments she experienced during her three-year tenure in Bulgaria with the Peace Corps, and how a professor she later had told her that she must have “revolutionary patience” – meaning that revolutions take time, and revolutionaries must have inhuman patience to wait for them.  As we struggle for the change we seek with the fire of revolutionaries, we must remember the long road ahead and recognize the place of the step we are taking down that path.

A long conversation, but a fruitful one, I think.  Liz was about to kill me afterwards and maybe Angie was too – no way to be sure.  In any case, it gave me a lot to think about, and it definitely changed my perspective on the work I’m doing and development work in general!