Baby goats!

Yesterday, two baby goats came out to world! They are already walking and chilling in a shade. Prossy named the boy (brown one) Motel and the girl (white one) Jean. The other goat is also expected to give birth-actually, she is granny of these babies-, so RASD will have lots of kids!

The hardest part of being here

Is not the toilets, lack of running water, strange food, sporadic electricity, language barriers, dust, parasites, bugs, or even the slow pace of work.

It is the drunk man who yells at Heehyun and I on the way to work in the mornings that Chinese people have small brains and starts following us until, hearing me yelling at the drunk, a passing boda driver intervenes while onlookers cackle in laughter. There’s nothing funny in this situation, and nonetheless it will happen again tomorrow.

My dear straight white men who complain about the children chanting "Mzungu": I feel no pity.

Picture Fix

Sooo...my blogger skills are not all I thought they were. It seems I've somehow been uploading pictures without them actually posting, which is not great in general but particularly confusing in posts that were intended to be pictures only. It's all fixed now, the updated entries can be found here:

http://dmli-uganda.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-our-ugandan-finery.html

http://dmli-uganda.blogspot.com/2011/06/by-mzungu.html

http://dmli-uganda.blogspot.com/2011/06/loans-for-fertilizer.html

The most productive ever

It is quite funny to post about being busy and productive right after the post about how it has been so hard to get things done, but I am just a type of person who crams for post uploading.. A little bit of understanding, please!

Anyway here we go.

After long weekend in Kampala and Entebbe, today has been the most productive, feel-good day throughout the summer. Actually, there were many other days that we had most of our stuffs done in the office, but visiting other places continuously, making arrangements for next meeting, and having a set of plans on my memo just make me feel more like real business, or working, person. After two weeks of us asking Moses if he had contacted the town council for our non-member focus group or the follow-ups on financial literacy class, we finally made some progress by visiting the town council and getting some useful contacts for our future focus groups. Also, we are waiting to meet Jackie, who is going to help us out with translating Jade's survey form and my evaluation question forms. I hope she can also help us visiting houses in terms of translation and finding a way.

We have three focus groups planned this weekend: two on Wednesday and one on Thursday. Hopefully, we can finish them this week and have two more next week; by then, we are already almost done. With our focus groups with non-members, agricultural loan risk assessment surveys, financial literacy tests and evaluation, and probably digitalizing the SACCO data, we will be busier-definitely good busy. So, wish us luck! Weeraba!

Football

It’s started to be an annual tradition: the Bazungu v. the local league. Highly anticipated in the day between its announcement over the town loudspeakers and the 5 pm game time, the Bazungu v. Baganda soccer/football game attracted a huge crowd last Thursday. Next time we want to hold financial literacy classes, we should lure people to the pitch (field) with promises of funny Bazungu running around flailing at footballs.

You know it’s a crowded village when you can front an entire 11-person team made up of aid workers. We should have had 3 SACCO interns, 2 Engineers Without Borders kids (also Duke affiliates), a returning SACCO intern/visitor, a Peace Corps Volunteer, a Red Cross Volunteer, an International Institute of Tropical Agriculture employee, and a physical therapist. Sadly, a few people were out of town, and that only would have added up to 10 anyway. We filled in with a few honorary Bazungu, including the SACCO manager and a few volunteers from the opposing team. By halftime, our team was definitely more local than foreign.

I was one of the people who got kicked out at halftime (this could be a reflection of my poor soccer skills, Ugandan disbelief that women would want to play soccer, or the fact that I wasn’t very secretive about the fact that I don’t know how to play soccer). Until then, I had played position #7. I don’t know what that translates to in American soccer terminology, but it wasn’t defense, the position I played in day camp when I was 10. #1 is goalie, and as the numbers get higher, so does the amount you’re supposed to be running around.

Though our original average soccer skill level was pretty low, between the friendly nature of the game, a large halftime infusion of skill, some luck, and the fact that we legitimately had a few pretty decent players, we tied, 3-3. I didn’t really watch the game very closely after exile because something far more exciting was happening offstage: adorable children were mobbing me!

I joked that I was going to kidnap one, but after the game he led me to his house and I began to joke (mainly to myself, because he couldn’t understand me) that I was the one being kidnapped. We had 3 words in common: Mzungu, yes, and ball.

The game was great fun and a success. Even if we can’t manage to hold another this summer so that those who missed the first one entirely can join in the fun, Nkokonjeru can look forward to another next year!

Made in China

The Economist has written a lot of articles recently about China’s investments in Africa, including articles about the prevalence of Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa. I got it in an overly-intellectual way that had to do with flow of money and tolerance for corruption. Then, I arrived in Uganda and started seeing the physical manifestations of it everywhere.

You can pick up any piece of plastic in America and read “Made in China” stamped on the bottom, but here it’s more overt. Chinese characters are everywhere; walking through the taxi park in Kampala last week, we saw toilet tissue being sold in stacks, all labeled in Chinese rather than English. Half the matatus (minibus taxis) have Chinese on their sides, showing their origins. English lettering is expected: it’s the language of government thanks to the British, and the alphabet of Luganda thanks to the missionaries. The occasional “halal” sign in Arabic is old hat and targeted at the relatively small immigrant population. Somehow, seeing Chinese everywhere is more startling. It’s a reminder that globalization is a dynamic force, constantly rearranging the relationships of not just political bodies but also cultures and peoples.

It’s hard, though, to imagine what significance this has for people’s everyday lives. The development projects in Nkokonjeru are funded by international NGOs and governance bodies, American universities, and African governments. The fashion is a hybrid of African and Western styles; the radio plays Bugandan and American music; the televisions show Nigerian, Argentinian (dubbed into English), and American shows; the theaters play American movies; the bookshops sell books only in English; and no one has any idea what the characters on the sides of the matatus mean.

“China” is an abstract—though “America” is too, rich and peopled with blondes and rap stars. All Asia is China (Heehyun could not convince one bored teenager she was Korean) and all Asian-looking people are Chinese (my well-practiced spiel about how America is a nation of immigrants is only about 50% effective, though that beats its 0% efficacy in America). Not too many people could point to either country on a map, they just know that both are somehow very important to the world.

What is our role here?

Is it just an internship? Like the ones you can see in any kind of job, who help the company and learn the work, preparing for a future career? Or is it a volunteer like PCV who serve the communities with some organizations. Or researcher? I have seen some grad students (PhD or MD) coming here to get data for their research and project. They act quite independently from the organization.

I have been asking this question to myself recently quite a lot. If internship, I can do whatever the organization thinks helpful to itself and requires me to do. If volunteer, I am inclined more to the benefit of community and people in the village, for their sake. If researcher, I focus on getting the information helpful to myself. Well, I don't have to pick only one from them, but I guess I'm more like mixture of internship and volunteer. The reason why I'm asking this question is that I'm not sure about how much ownership I need to have here with projects and improvements here at SACCO.

Only three people have been working in SACCO, and since George stopped showing up for his surgery, the understaffed issue has been worse. When there were three staffs, one cashier, one loan officer, and one manager, it was not bad although George, our poor cashier, had to stay in the front desk for a whole time from 9 (or sometimes 8:30) to 4. I think he doesn't have time for lunch because people keep coming depositing or withdrawing money during the whole time, so he has to wait until there are no people in the front and eat food that he brought from home. Helen sometimes helps George with his work, but she has her own job to keep track of loans (incoming and outgoing ones), visiting loan applicants and check their requirements. Moses, our manager, is doing all the rest of works I guess. He meets with people (not all the customers but mostly important(?) people) and runs the business. Anyway, the point is that there is not much space for these people to work on extra projects with us-actually only Moses is working with us and Helen is focusing on SACCO work: both loan and cashier. They know we are bringing some mzungu power to this bank in addition to some new ideas to improve here, but we still need their opinion and help to develop those ideas into actual projects. We spent one whole semester, brainstorming different kinds of projects that we can pursue during this summer. And we knew that two months is not enough time to bring a change, but I thought it would be enough time to at least discuss and start on some grounds, of course on the assumption that it's easy to put into action with Moses. But it turned out it's not that simple and easy. Here are my conclusion about why it is so difficult and slow to do things here.

First of all, as I said above, Moses is too busy. He has to look after whole SACCO business with help of Helen, which means running this company in addition to sitting at the cashier at the times when Helen is absent for lunch or on-site loan examination. As a result, even though there are some projects that will help SACCO to expand and reach out to more business partners, most of the works have been on us. Of course, doing research online and contacting different fields of people was expected to be our job here because we are more familiar with surfing internet and stuffs, but I guess I expected Moses to be more active and engaged with our projects. But I understand him being already very busy with SACCO works, so I'm not blaming him.

Second, there are definitely different priorities between him and us. His focus is on increasing membership. Our focus is not only on helping SACCO but also on helping the community. Giving them more access to money. This is also goes with the point that I realized a gap between how we think and how he thinks microfinance (or SACCO) should function. Microfinance has been known for a perfect cure for poverty. An unparalleled method to drive away poverty. It has been recognized for its novel idea to give loans for the poor who could not be credited for loans. But here, SACCO is more like a local bank to Moses or other people in the village. By this reason, some projects are pushed to be the last priorities to him.

For example, financial literacy class. Financial illiteracy was one of the problems that the first interns pointed out the need in the town, so the second interns (last year) started the financial literacy class. It was successful and apparently Moses was a good teacher by what people have said. After the first class last summer, there have been two more classes held by Moses himself and decent number of people have participated them. To see how the classes were going, we decided to do some follow-ups on the participants of last classes, but to reach out those people, we definitely need some help from Moses in terms of getting the address (the recorded address of members are mostly just the name of town but no more specific details) and translation. Also, we are planning to have one more class while we are here to make sure we can implement some improvements that were made after follow-up evaluations. Arranging this needs Moses because after all he will be teaching the class and communicating with the people after we are gone. I've been in charge of following-up the participants and holding another class, but I'm still waiting for Moses to get the actual address by calling their phones. We all agreed that it seems like his last priority among the agenda lists because the class means after-work hours and no one welcomes that. Also, the class does not bring much money to compensate for that, so there is weaker business motivation. But the class has been one of the successful projects from last year interns, and we really want this to continue happening. So I will do my best to push this project no matter what. After all, this not only helps people to be sensitized but also raises SACCO's reputation and engagement socially with people.

In Our Ugandan Finery

Focus Groups

A few lessons:

1. In Uganda, time is relative. We’ve been planning focus groups for 1:30 and not a one of the three we’ve held so far has started before 3:00. This, while predictable, actually adds another layer of difficulty: at what point is it no longer worthwhile waiting for another person who might just be very, very late?

2. No one likes Coke. I’m actually kind of shocked. (Coke here is delicious and made with real sugar instead of corn.) We serve soda at the focus groups and no one yet has taken a single Coke. I may need to drink them myself just so we can return the bottles and get our deposit back.

3. The SACCO has no reliable way of getting in touch with a huge percentage of its membership. Application forms don’t even have a space for phone numbers, though most people have them now, and no one comes in to update their account information. We can contact about half of the inactive SACCO members.

Most importantly, the message we’re getting from the people who do participate in the focus group is that no one actually knows what services the SACCO offers. People with means don’t know about the long-term savings account and people without them don’t know about ledger fees. No one knows what interest rates or dividends are. Loans are easier to come by than many participants believe. Of course, some people have unrealistic expectations: SACCO is not getting an ATM this year or next, and people will always need some kind of collateral or guarantee in order to get loans. However, it is clear while that SACCO has done an admirable job attracting people to its services, once people are enrolled, SACCO has not done its job educating people about how they can get the best use out of the organization.

Bye Mzungu!

Of all the things that have ever been shouted to me on the street, I mind “Mzungu” (and its other Bantu equivalents) least. In America, we would think this rude beyond imagining, a barefaced contradiction of the noble lie of a colorblind society. Here, for me, it’s a reminder that our foreigness in Nkokonjeru is privileged, that no matter how good our intentions or hard our labors there is always a degree of voyeurism in short-term work, and that there is a reason (historical and exploitative) why visitors are viewed as oddities, wealthy, or targets.

Nkokonjeru has a platoon of aid workers here at any given time, staying for anywhere between 2 weeks to 3 years. The longer you stay, the more the community should know you: at a certain point, you’d like the children in your neighborhood to yell (if they must yell) your name rather than your foreigness. If your stay lasts months upon months, you can learn the language, build real relationships, and attempt as much you can to be a member of a community. Still, though, you are privileged: you chose to come here and you will leave when your contract is up.

For shorter stays, it is arrogant to believe that you can be accepted as a member of the community rather than as a transitory oddity. Why learn to recognize the Westerners (they all look the same anyway) you’ll never speak to when they’ll just leave after 2 months or 3, only to be replaced by another few? Better to refer to “Mzungu” or “Abazungu” than to try and keep them straight. People here know what we sometimes forget: our time here is short and we are both stranger and less unique than we would like to think.

Of course, as soon as it's not a small child doing the yelling, things change. It's still pretty rude for one adult to randomly yell at another on the street.

Being (o)mzungu here

Culture shock is everywhere. It happens in every transition you make from place to place. It's even in one country, although the extent you feel will be less radical and easy to adjust (or ignore). Coming to Uganda was actually not much different from my transition to America from Korea. Whether the place is developed or developing is not really important, but how much you are ready and willing to accept new ideas and new rules is much about everything that matters. Once I learned that I should not be freaked out or judgmental about new custom, it becomes easier to discover that people in Uganda (or any other places) have more in common than different with us. The only difference is that they just have lived that way. It's just the way it has been, it is, and it will be.

Saying so, though, does not mean I have no curiosities or questions popping up everyday. There are always some parts that need explanation. Not like 'Why are they doing so?', but more like I want to listen to their stories.

"Bye mzungu." is one. No matter we are walking toward or alongside the kids, they just yell at us 'Bye, mzungu.' There's no 'Hi' or 'Hello, mzungu,' but it's always 'Bye.' I'm not trying to make this sound more intriguing anyway, but this is actually out of pure curiosity.

"Give me money." is another thing. I just do not wish to hear kids saying it. Kids like us, or at least, they like to be around and observe foreign people. Whenever we pass some school, kids just run out of school and follow all the way to wherever we end. I'm pretty sure all teachers would hate us. Anyway, there are some kids who just push their hands toward us and say 'Give me money' as though they are saying something innocent with no intention like 'Bye, mzungu.' It's just bold and guiltless or shameless that I feel like I somehow owe them money and need to give some. Apparently, many of kids just learned this from their older siblings or even their parents by hearing them so many times from young. I've heard and seen many parents push their kids, even very little ones, to ask money to those on the street in Kampala. When I'm in a matatu on my way back to Nkokonjeru and the vehicle stops, some girls usually come beside window on my side and put their hands together in front of me. Also, women on street put their children in front of them when asking for some favorable donations.

There must be many different stories beyond them acting these ways, but poverty should hit one of them I assume. And this sometimes creates an invisible wall between foreigners and locals. Difference in wealth between us and them can be an excuse for acting innocent while asking for money. Also, we, foreigners, can be blamed for giving out one-time help, gifts, too easily to locals. No matter what lies as reason, it is really sad we are still not looking through each other as we are. I feel like there are always pre-formed description on each of us. We have some prejudices and opinions that were already formed toward one another part.

Not getting light or using outhouse is just a simple thing. You just go with it and bear with it. You will become used to whatever, but this thing is the real cultural barrier, the one that we need to overcome.

Martyrs' Day, and Religion in Uganda

Friday was Martyrs' Day in Uganda. Though there seem to be some special celebrations to commemorate it in Kampala, to most people this is just another bank holiday, like Memorial Day or President's Day. Now, since we work at a bank, between bankers' hours and the word "bank" being in "bank holiday," we clearly didn't have to go to work that day. Our consequent weekend journey to the Crater Lakes was very well documented (see Pictures 2011 link in the sidebar), and I'm pretty sure David and Heehyun will be writing about it.

Martyrs' Day, according to the font of all knowledge (Wikipedia), commemorates the murder of a group of Ugandan saints by a Ugandan king in the mid-19th century. Unsurprisingly, Uganda is a very religious country and a high percentage of its population is Catholic. You can hardly walk a few feet in Nkokonjeru without seeing another church or church-sponsored project. The only other credit union in the area, Caritas, is a church-sponsored organization. Many organizations, including the government, may be secular in the minds of their participants but you would never start or end a meeting or event without a prayer.

Mosque in Fort Portal

What's interesting, though, is the relative interchangeability of religions. At one meeting last week, we bent our heads for the prayer to begin and I fully expected to understand exactly zero of what was being said--but then the man leading it began with "Bismi Allahu Rahmani Rahim ..." and proceeded with a Muslim prayer in Arabic. About 12% of the population is Muslim, and it's not uncommon to see people wearing traditionally Muslin clothing. More than half the people in the room were Christian, but nobody minded. A prayer is a prayer. I certainly can't yet understand the nuances of the religious relationships in town and I would never presume to say that there is complete harmony and tolerance, but things have come a long way since Muslim traders and Christian missionaries competed for converts in the 1800s.

Loans for Fertilizer

Moses explaining the project

The SACCO is currently developing a pilot program for agricultural loans. The loans give farmers—here, everyone is a farmer—money to buy fertilizer for matoke crops. Matoke, the staple food in Uganda, looks like a banana but is starchier. Though most people grow it primarily for personal consumption, there’s a large outside market for the crop that could make any surpluses quite profitable. Fertilizer that is specifically targeted to each farmer’s soil quality could improve the yield of a given matoke plant several times over. Before offering the loans as a product, however, the SACCO wants to run a pilot assessing local yield increases and profit increases, as well as expected default rates, to best structure its interest rates and loan repayment timetables.

Rather than laboriously counting the actual matoke at each harvest, the SACCO has an ingenious method of very accurately predicting plant yield. If a plant’s stem is measured during flowering, there is a direct relationship between the girth of the stem and the number of matoke it will produce. Part of the pilot program, then, is recruiting volunteers to measure matoke girth on the pilot participants’ farms over the course of the next year. The measurements will then allow the SACCO to predict how much additional matoke each investment of fertilizer creates, and then use market prices to estimate how much additional profit a farmer could make with a fertilizer loan of a certain amount.

The SACCO held a meeting this week with potential volunteer recruits. About 9 people showed up, more than the SACCO needs, although of course we also expect some attrition. Everyone was really enthusiastic, though it’s unclear that they understand what their duties will be yet. It was a promising start to a program that’s a new venture for the SACCO, in high demand locally, and has a lot of potential to benefit both the farmers and the bank.