Landing Strips and Final Thoughts

A couple of weeks ago I met an American woman in Kampala who told me she and her husband were living in far northwest Uganda, where they were running a seven-week training curriculum for semi-literature pastors. I wondered why anybody would think that was a good idea. Not training pastors—that’s a great idea. But for middle class Americans to do it when there are many, many Ugandans who have just as much knowledge of the Bible and much better inside knowledge of the cultural environment. Trying to find a gentle way of making this point, I asked her, “Have you guys thought of partnering with a Ugandan institution to accomplish this, maybe somebody like KEST (Kampala Evangelical School of Theology)?” She had not heard of KEST, but she offered that if KEST was interested she and her husband could train them as well. Not quite what I meant. Obviously I was engaging in too much of that American indirectness I wrote about awhile back!

About a week later, Jim and I met for breakfast with several friends, among them the principle of KEST. I asked him if his institution was interested in partnering with American groups like the one I have described. His response was that he was open to any partnership, the problem was that Americans always wanted to do everything themselves from start to finish. He went on to list a range of cultural misconceptions that American-originated programs like this one often brought to their work.  Someone else at the table suggested that many international groups were just looking for an African institution to use as a landing strip. They had their programs already fully planned from back home, and needed a way to get them onto the ground overseas. And by the way it’s not just Christian groups; international educational and development efforts are at least as bad, maybe worse because they don't usually have the longterm commitment to live among the host nationals the way this woman did.

Why are we Americans like this? I include myself here, because it struck me that I probably resembled this woman, when I have walked into African universities with my research plans already set, asking for collaboration. What aspect of the American psyche makes us think that we, who grew up ten thousand miles away, know so much what Africa (or other parts of the developing world) needs? Is it arrogance? Stupidity?

Thankfully, my perceptive husband provided an explanation that is more gracious, and also more enlightening. He suggested that Americans’ strength is also our weakness. Americans have historically been pragmatists. When we see a problem our first impulse is to look for a practical solution. It’s a wonderful part of our cultural persona and undoubtedly key to much of our innovative spirit. But the flip side of that is we have a hard time seeing a problem anywhere in the world and not thinking that we should be the ones to fix it. We need to be aware of the limitations of our national character, though, because many times the more sensible solution is for host nationals to identify and fix a problem themselves.

It’s fitting that I’m mulling over these big picture thoughts about how I should go about partnering in research with African colleagues, because today I’m closing out my five-month sabbatical in Uganda. It’s been a beautiful gift from the Lord (and the UCF College of Sciences!) in which the research team at UCU and I have accomplished more than I anticipated. I have gotten to know a number of impressive, gifted people most notably my amazing department chair, Monica Chibita. My children have integrated so well that Joanna has already begun adding up how long it would take her working at Publix to save the money up for a flight back. I find I’m a major fan of the Fulbright program, which in some ways is based on the antithesis of the attitude I’ve described above. It brings American faculty and experts from industry and places them in the midst of universities in other countries. Pretty much the only money provided is for the upkeep of the scholar him/herself, so one can’t come in with funded solutions ready to implement. What one can do is to try to listen and learn on the terms of ones hosts.  I recommend it highly. 

And now it’s time to thank you, my readers, for your comments, encouragement, and perseverance. It’s been fun to connect with you in what is for me a new format. I look forward to communicating again with you face-to-face in the U.S., Kenya, or wherever we next meet this side of heaven!

Photos:

#1 Ugandan Shrine of the Martyrs, four days before Martyrs Day on June 3. I thought it rather ironic that the entry tent has the Pepsi slogan "Live for Now" on it.

#2 The research team at our farewell event. 3rd from right, dept. chair Monica Chibita.

#3 A finger of Lake Victoria visible from the hill above our house.

#4 Luke and Joanna at Kampala craft market.

#5 Goodbye to the beautiful view. John Parker, lead pastor of Summit Church, Orlando, and his son Sam visiting us. I'm holding Starburst jelly beans from the stash John's wife Brandy sent for Luke and Joanna. They disappeared with astonishing rapidity.

Sounds at Chez Miller

I’ve told Jim that my biggest lasting impression of our house here in Mukono may be the sounds. This is a noisy place. For this week’s post I thought I’d paste in visuals to represent some of the most notable noises here at the top of the UCU campus. (It may be weird to post visuals about sounds, but I wasn’t sure how well I could catch the audio.)

Hornbill window slamming. These hornbills slam their beaks against the mirrored windows on our front door at least once a week. The first few times I leaped up and ran to see who was knocking.

Red-tailed monkey roof thumping, tree swishing, and chirping. I’ve written before about the troupe of several dozen adult, adolescent, and baby red-tailed monkeys. They make loud “thumps” on our roof as they drop from the trees at the back and “swish” as they leap off the porch overhang onto the small tree in front. The young ones make chirping, almost bird-like, sounds. Here Joanna beckons to one through the patio door.

Calls of gray-cheeked mangabees. These bigger, baboon-like monkeys also jump onto the roof and down to the tree. Their vocalizations are closer to stereotypical ape-like calls. We were watching one today calling from a tree branch; his whole back shook as his voice reached a crescendo. Think Tarzan.

Loud all-night disco down the hill and loud all-night prayer meetings up the hill. Most nights it's hard to sleep at our house. Somehow the acoustics of the hill we live on allow the loud music from "Satellite Beach" disco and bar in Mukono town to roll up in force from about 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. That's five or six nights a week. Many aspects of this are confusing to me. Do the patrons not have jobs? If they don't have jobs, how do they pay for their drinks and/or cover charge every night? Why doesn't the town rise up and force them to confine the wee hours stuff to weekends? I've asked several people but nobody has a clear answer. One would-be informant, grasping at straws, suggested that after Idi Amin was ousted people were so relieved to be able to be safe outside again they overcompensated. Amin was deposed almost 40 years ago, so I'm not going with that one. In addition, about two nights a week the preaching and drumbeats from all night prayer meetings on "Prayer Mountain" rolls down from the other direction. I appreciate their zeal for the Lord, I just wish it was a little quieter. (Photo from Satellite Beach website.)

Rain. When it rains all night we don’t hear either the disco or the church, but the gentle drumming on the metal roof of our house. In Uganda there are two rainy seasons. One, from around November to December, is the short rains. The long rains, from late February or early March through mid-May, are petering out as I write this. Incidentally here rain, not sunshine, is a sign of blessing on an event. When we had a celebration for our twins' adoption in Kenya some years back, there was a brief unseasonable sprinkle. People said God was blessing the occasion. Living in east Africa has shifted my views on Jesus's comment that "the rain falls on both the just and the unjust." I used to think that meant even good people have bad things happen to them. Now I think that He was rather saying that God graciously blesses both the just and the unjust out of his boundless mercy. 

“oooakakakaka woo woo” of the great blue turacos. They are beautiful. Somehow, too, when they run up the branches overhead they look like the giant bird Kevin in “Up.” I haven’t been able to get close enough to get a photo. This is from rwandasafari.com.

And many more sounds. The gravel driveway crunching at 5:50 a.m. on weekdays when Luke and Joanna head out to school in Kampala; the cat crying to get in at the door even earlier (I promise we never feed it); the guard dogs at the neighbors’ houses barking; human campus guards and gardeners passing by on their rounds conversing in English or Luganda; the pigs a few doors down (fortunately the smell almost never wafts this way); another, larger species of hornbill quarreling, “waaak waaaak waaaak,” from overhead; the humming of thousands of flies that meets your ear the moment you open the front door on these moist, post-rainy season days; and many other bird and cricket calls chirps, and songs. 

Much as I will be glad to get a good night’s sleep one of these days away from the all-night music and prayers, overall we live in the middle of a beautiful, cacophonous symphony of sounds. Of course anybody with a couple of preschool kids in the house can say the same, whatever culture you live in! 

So, noisy greetings from our house to yours.

Scanning a Document in the Two-Thirds World

Last week the director of my school of communication back in the U.S. asked me to sign, scan, and email a letter to him. Sounds simple enough, but I soon realized the request makes several assumptions that one can't necessarily make on this side of the world.

To sign a letter you have to first print it. To print a letter you have to have electricity.

We experience several power outages every day, for varying lengths of time. Thankfully, the campus has a generator that usually kicks on after a few minutes to deal with interruptions to the power supply, but our electricity was off for one 7-hour stretch earlier in the week.

After printing a letter you have to have a working scanner.

None of the departments I am associated with here have a working scanner so far as I know. One department did scan something for me awhile back, but it took about 30 minutes per page. In this particular case, I recalled hearing a rumor of an individual in a nearby flat who had a personal scanner. She graciously scanned the letter for me, but her scanner could not collate multiple scanned pages into single document, so I ended out with a separate pdf for each page.

After scanning a letter, you have to have working Internet to email it.
Our Internet on campus is intermittent at best. Frequently it’s out for an entire day at a time, and when it’s on there’s little bandwidth. Even as I write this we’ve not had Internet for about fourteen hours.

So it turns out that signing, scanning, and emailing a letter is a significant life event.

There are many other issues like this about which one can’t be certain on a given day whether they will be possible. When we lived in Nairobi, for example, water was never something you could count on. During one particularly bad drought we went without a drop of water coming into our house for 19 days. (Californians, don’t expect any sympathy from us!) The same uncertainty surrounds transportation, being able to locate products in the shops when you need them, and so on. This isn’t unique to UCU. In fact, life at UCU is relatively cushy what with the generator, indoor plumbing, and all. So I'm not complaining. This is just how life is in parts of the two-thirds world, but it makes a difference in your general orientation toward accomplishing these things.

In the U.S. you know just as surely as the sun rises every day, water will fill your sink and shower, electricity will flow through the wires into your home and power your microwave and hot water heater, when you log in to your email account you will instantly be able to communicate with the world, and if you go to buy a product (unless you were looking for an iPhone 6 last October) it will be on the store shelves. In east Africa you can never be certain from one day to the next how things will go, so you have to be flexible. East Africans are amazingly resourceful. They have to be.

I wish I could say God has cultivated in me that sort of flexibility and sanguineness of approach during my time here, but I'm not sure if I've learned my lesson well yet. This morning, though, I'm just grateful the Internet came back on a few minutes ago so I can upload this post!

Photos:

1.  Monkey walking across power lines to the house next door. The cumulative effect of that little trick caused a brown out at our house for three full days.

2.  A herd of mongooses in the yard today. Has nothing to do with the topic, but I thought it was cool. Black mambas are native to this area so the more mongooses the better.

Generosity Across Cultural Boundaries

The theme of this post is complications of generosity, and I will admit from the beginning I don’t have final answers to this one. I'll begin by recounting an incident that I recently heard from a North American neighbor here. This family has a daughter aged 11 who attends an international school over an hour away in Kampala, and has been desperate for playmates nearer to home than her classmates. So, she befriended a couple of girls from the small slum across the road. Her parents, learning a bit about these girls’ backgrounds, felt guilty sending their daughter to an expensive international school while the friends’ families could barely afford to buy school uniforms. They began to pay the girls’ school fees. This went on for maybe a year, I’m not sure, but a few weeks ago it came out that one of the girls had stolen some electronics from the North American family’s daughter. Needless to say, everyone felt betrayed.

Here’s another incident. Back when we lived in Kenya we had a North American friend, we’ll call her Lynn, who while completing her doctoral dissertation hired a woman to help her with word processing, translation, and a variety of other clerical tasks. This woman, Hannah, was so helpful and they had gotten along so well that Lynn had given her rent-free space in her house to start up a business. Lynn had been very free about cost sharing and had also lent Hannah money on one or two occasions.  After some time Lynn realized Hannah had been using the phone and other facilities for personal needs, to the point that Lynn was out hundreds of dollars. Plus Hannah never paid back the loans (we will not get into the wisdom of making this sort of personal loan in any cultural context, suffice it to say that made a bad situation worse.) The biggest issue for Lynn at the time was not the financial aspect, but the fact that she had thought they had a friendship and Hannah had used her.

Here’s a third example. An American couple we are acquainted with allowed a man who ran a street children's ministry to stay in their home for extended periods of time, along with several street boys. They helped set up a school for this man's work, and were shocked when he stole a new car from them.

These are all kind people, trying to be generous, for whom everything went wrong. (Do not ask me for my own confessions along this line, I am even at present trying to determine if I have placed myself in a similar situation, though on a very small scale.) Reflecting on these events, my first intuitive thought was, few Kenyans or Ugandans would find themselves in these circumstances. Something about it is a distinctly "American in Africa" problem. But I was perplexed as to why this is so. Partly, as I have mentioned before in this blog, I think that's because the ingroup/outgroup distinction here is stronger than in the U.S., as is the responsibility (including financial) to support the extended family. Ugandans do things for their families that most Americans would never dream of. (Remember the office assistant in a previous post who is building his mother a house?). That's not to say family members don't let people down, but the web of relationships involved would make it somehow different. 

But then again, could I imagine North Americans doing some of these things in their own cultures? Some of these actions seem naive. Maybe it's not so much an American thing as it is a thing that happens sometimes when North American values interact with the east African environment. Maybe it's a natural but unproductive reaction to two related issues:

1.  Most North Americans have never seen the extremely basic level of poverty like what is present in parts of Africa. For example, we have a Ugandan woman who comes in to cook Ugandan food for us once a week. She tells me she worked full time for the people who lived in this house previously and was paid about $80 a month. (I pay her $5 for a half day once a week, which is more than double her previous hourly pay, though I’m sure she’d rather have the full time work.) Many manual laborers make less than that.  It is hard to know how to deal with the total destitution all around when one comes from a society where the median family income is somewhere in the 40k's. Forget about a minimum wage of $15 an hour. $15 a day is unimaginable for many people here.

2.  A closely related issue. If, like me, you move from a high income nation to the two-thirds world you can hardly escape recognizing what has actually been true all along—on a global scale you are enormously wealthy.  It makes you feel guilty.  I recall vividly when some Kenyan friends of ours had a U.S. exchange student staying with them years ago. One day I asked how the student was doing and the wife responded, "Well, she's now at the stage where she wants to give away all her clothes.  We're trying to talk it through with her."  Apparently from the perspective of her Kenyan hosts, this young lady's reaction was to be expected, though not particularly helpful. It’s possible to assuage guilt by making heartfelt but inappropriate gestures.

Because of these issues we may get confused in our intercultural relationships. It’s not unusual to hear the occasional North American in east Africa talk about how “My house help/driver/cook is one of my closest friends.” It’s wonderful if that individual is the sort of person who makes no distinctions between social classes in his/her friendships, but I think sometimes these folk aren’t being realistic about the power differential that their wealth automatically places between them and these other persons. They may pretend it’s not there, but that won’t make it go away, and the other person--who will be quite aware of the gulf--will respond based on that disparity. 

Probably our best move as outsiders is to seek advice from someone at our same level of power, education, etc. in the host culture about appropriate ways to help. For most of us in an unfamiliar cultural context, the line between radical generosity and stupid generosity is hard to discern.

Photos below:

1, 2.  Roadside kilns for handmade bricks. The office assistant in the mass communication department (mentioned above) has already got the bricks fired for building his mother's house from this sort of place. I know I'm straying off topic, but these kilns are so fascinating to me, and they are all over the place. You first makes the bricks in molds and let them dry (see the unbaked bricks to the side of the kilns), then pile up the bricks in a particular configuration, light a slow fire underneath, and let them bake. Homemade and fired bricks are the way to build affordable housing here that's far more permanent than a hut. 

Female Circumcision or FGM?

When I first moved to Kenya about 25 years ago someone told me about female circumcision. I was perplexed (remember this was before what is now often referred to as “female genital mutilation” was something people were talking about). What’s to circumcise on a female, I asked? Most readers will know the answer to that question. The procedure can involve anything from a nick on the clitoral hood to removal of everything recognizable as a female sexual organ. In the most radical version, known as infibulation, the girl is sewn back together leaving only a small hole for passing urine and menstrual blood. A straw placed in the gap during healing keeps the final opening from scarring over. Health effects can include recurrent infection, cysts, pain at intercourse and childbirth, complications during pregnancy, and even death. There are no health benefits.

Let me quickly say this blog post is not a diatribe against female circumcision, although I am certainly opposed to the practice, and I hope it completely disappears. This post is about my objections to the international community’s approach to its eradication. 

First, some background. In many sub-Saharan African cultures the foreskin of boys is cut as a rite of passage. In  a swath of countries across sub-Saharan Africa, of which Kenya and Uganda are at the southeastern edge, some (by no means all) ethnic groups have also traditionally cut the clitoris as a rite of passage for girls. This can happen at various ages, but in east Africa it’s usually sometime between 13 and 18. Boys are circumcised and they become men; girls are circumcised and they become women. 

European and African Americans maybe don’t relate too well to the idea of formal rites of passage. We realize that Jewish boys and girls among us go through bar and bat mitzvah around age 13, and in recent years as the Latino/a population in the U.S. has grown non-Latino Americans have become more familiar with Quinceañera. But many Americans have nothing like that of our own. I can remember a Kenyan friend asking incredulously, “But don’t you have any kind of formal rite of passage for your children? What about getting a drivers’ license? Or prom, maybe? How do you mark the point at which a boy becomes a man?” Um. We don’t. Not really. Their 18th birthday cake? The thing is, circumcision was more than an individual surgery. It has traditionally been done in groups, with all of the young people who were circumcised taken out to the bush together for days of training about their role as new adults as they healed. When they returned to the community they found expectations of them in terms of responsibility and maturity had noticeably changed. In these ethnic groups no self-respecting girl would marry an uncircumcised guy and no guy would marry an uncircumcised girl.

 (Aside #1: Evidence that male circumcision is a strong protective factor for HIV has made uncircumcised men less plentiful than they used to be.)

(Aside #2: Our children, having grown up in Africa, understood this concept from a young age. On one occasion when we were back in the U.S. visiting our extended family, my then 8-year-old daughter was heard arguing with her male cousins. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re probably not even circumcised.” The adults in the room were nearly rolling on the floor with laughter but unfortunately for Joanna her cousins were oblivious to the insult.)

So what happened when the international community latched onto this issue?—and here I grow a bit heated, sorry—the renaming says it all. With a single rhetorical stroke they reduced a rich tradition to a biological horror. From “female circumcision” or the vernacular equivalent, the practice was now “female genital mutilation.” As some anthropologists have pointed out, African parents who wanted to follow cultural practices could now be labeled mutilators of their own children. In recent years the more descriptive term “female genital cutting” has been introduced in some circles, which is an improvement, but it still doesn’t capture the fact that in most cultural groups the practice was in parallel to male circumcision. It wasn't designed specifically to subjugate women. Therefore “female circumcision” is the term I prefer.

I am not arguing that Kenyan and Ugandan communities that practice female circumcision should continue to do so. For example, the daughter of some dear Masai friends of ours, Neema Ntalel (see photo and website below), was the first girl in her village not to be circumcised. She has shared this publicly so I am not breaking a confidence here. It is a beautiful milestone. I am arguing that Westerners need to take a step back from issues like this and be sure to understand and respect before we attempt to import change from the outside. If we import change from the outside. I don't throw this term around lightly, but I think we Westerners are frequently guilty of health neo-colonialism. Feminist theorist Obioma Nnaemeka, herself a vehement opponent of the practice, observes that in the term "female genital mutilation" there is "a subtext of barbaric African and Muslim cultures and the West's relevance (even indispensability) in purging the barbarism." Amen. One is tempted to ask when we will ever learn.

For a contrasting example of a visionary grass roots approach to change on this issue, see http://tanaritrust.org . Muhia and Marcy Karianjahi incorporated Muhia’s experience with NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership Schools) in Kenya and created an alternative to negative aspects of rites of passage like female circumcision. Primarily working with kids who are about to enter high school, the biblically based program they started has become a popular option for many Christian parents in Nairobi. Our older daughters were upset when they missed going through the experience with their age set because we happened to be in the U.S. the summer before they went to high school.

Photos below: 1, 2. Tanari Trust (photos from Tanari Trust Facebook site)

3.  Neema Ntalel, also now an award-winning gospel/RnB musician. Photo is from her website: http://neemantalel.com/Welcome.html. Those of you interest in global music, will want to listen to her gorgeous, rich voice.