The poor people.

I didn’t enter Africa on a mission trip or some other humanitarian outreach. I came with my husband, which puts me in an entirely different experience. In some ways it feels like I’m coming through the back door. I’m held at arms length—there’s fear and intimidation under the polite greetings. I came with my own limitations and needs. I didn’t come holding a banner saying, “Free help for all,” or “get saved here.” So, naturally people wonder and have no category under which to receive me and neither do I. Somehow that puts me through the back door and I see things the mission trips and delegates don’t see. The stories I cite below are just a small sampling of what I have seen so far. There are many more I've heard and encountered like them. If I would write them all out, they would fill 20 pages.

What worries me is the distinct difference between the poor people I see and the poor people I have heard about. I see the poor people and I wonder if I am seeing the same poor people as the ones who are seen on mission trips and humanitarian outreach. This is not some trumped up right wing monologue about how the poor are poor because they have done it to themselves or that they are poor because they are lazy. I never take that position. There are those who are genuinely poor because they are caught on the bottom side of a macroeconomic cycle. There are children, hundreds of them here who by no choice of theirs suffer from their parents’ choices or simply suffer the situation they were born into. For the powerless, I feel empathy and compassion. But mostly I don’t see or interact with these women and children. I see the people my husband interacts with and does business with. I see the people he works with and helps and quite frankly, I’m not so impressed.

Slowly, over the years, I have gotten the back-story on this or that person. There is the “cousin” who some years ago approached my husband about buying a taxi for him so he could make an income and make Stephen a profit as well. In concept it sounded good I’m sure but after financing this thing Stephen discovered the cousin was regularly loaning out the taxi to a third party for enough money to drink himself silly for the day. Meanwhile the third party would drive the taxi into the ground or into another vehicle so that it needed to sit in a repair shop for the next week all financed by the guess who—not the guys who did it! Everyone on the road knows to avoid taxis at all costs because the guys driving them are mere patsies who run when a serious incident occurs which implicates them, which makes for some horrible driving conditions because 50% of the vehicles on the road are taxis, who don’t care if they get into an accident. So, there is one system and rules which makes one person responsible for 3 people’s negligent behavior in the process toward the 3 people getting an income.

There is another relative who needed to make an income and wanted to have Stephen finance a brood of chickens for him. This involved building a chicken house but Stephen decided to build it on his own property so that at least he could retain the structure if all did not go well. Incidentally, one brood of chickens was raised and sold, after that not one coin was repaid to the financer nor was there ever another chicken raised.

There were some poor farmers “renting” the inheritance land in my husband’s family. They had been paying ground rent reluctantly for some years. But recently there had been interest in mining the area. The renters struck it big when they made a deal with the miners to turn their field into a miners quarry. The miners paid this poor farmer an equivalent of 40 million shillings for the privilege to mine. But when it came down to paying for ground rent to his landlord or even notifying the landlord that his property was being completely destroyed, the poor farmer couldn’t seem to cough up a single coin anymore. Although, one could point out that he was able to pay rent when he farmed. There were hints of a rumor going around about how he sat with the local council and police force and they all agreed how much of a cut/bribe every important person in the local community was supposed to get. (So, it may be a combination of 1,3,4 and 6 below).

So, the question is always, what happened to the money that was earned? Often it disappears into thin air. My main concern is, what happened to the wife and children of the guy who handled the money? If you go to the village of the poor farmer, you will see others like him who have raked in just as much income or more. You will see their children and wives dressed in the same tattered, dirty clothes every day. You will see their lives have not improved much or at all.

Truth is I’m not sure what to think. I’m not sure what has happened to the money. I know I have just become quite a lot more skeptical about those doing the business deals and handling the money.

I’ve heard numerous back-stories behind where the money went. They range from mere vice to the ridiculous. Here’s the start to a list.

1. It disappeared at the local tavern.
2. It got distributed amongst the locals in last night’s gambling match.
3. It truly got stolen by someone. This happens way more often than it does in the US. Someone gets wind of the funds someone else is carrying. A gang of guys shows up with machetes to relieve him of his life savings. This might actually contribute to the “spend cash now” mentality because if you keep it, you will be relieved of it.
4. Someone swindled it. It’s a dog-eat-dog world where instead of watching television, people entertain themselves by creating live soap operas, involving all the intrigue and deception.
5. Ghosts came and stole it.
6. Not sure if this is ever a cited reason but the guy has 3 wives and 23 children. Wives and children tend to survive without income from the male species that sometime chooses to neglect or abandon.
7. An employee mishandled the money. My husband has repeatedly had a whole month’s worth of income disappear because an employee has either stolen it or was negligent and had it stolen from them.
8. Bad investment. I’m told of the story of a few family cousins who have repeatedly sold family property to someone else—including the very property under their relatives’ own homes. They get a down payment from someone and then disappear when title transfers are scheduled to take place.

The rampant taking of things one did not work for seems somehow involved in making people poor. Because somehow the taker in his taking becomes schooled in taking again and again. He creates a shortage in the life of the one he unexpectedly takes from, Sometimes the shortage is so severe, the one he steals from is completely ruined. The taker learns no work ethic. He does not encounter the value of a thing, through working for it. He begins a pattern for himself that has no positive consequences and creates expense in the lives of those he takes from. A farmer understands the value of work because he is consistently rewarded with harvest for work put into the ground. But here, I have known of farmers who have cut down their mango tree to save a crop of corn. The mango tree was like a pot of sweet irresistible bait for the entire village, who came to feast at the tree in a young cornfield. So, the farmer cut down the tree to save the corn. 

Greed and poverty. The two usually go hand in hand. Where-ever one finds extreme poverty, one also finds an intense amount of greed in the house next door. Greed causes the poverty and destruction of one's neighbor. Sometimes it destroys one's own family.

While I was in the US. I rarely had to worry about having things stolen from me. Most people have the same sorts of things and don't covet another person's stuff. That is the beauty of the middle class. Here, unless you have absolutely nothing, what you have more than likely will be taken from you. The maid we had, before she was relieved of her duties went through the house and took the things she most coveted, a phone battery, my husband's hair brush, little stuff which didn't matter too much. But I've noticed even the relatives come to your house and take this or that or go into you wallet and take a bill or two. But then there is the big stuff people take: land. I have never heard of so much land grabbing and stories of deceit and theft and ruin, and murder, with respect to land grabbing.