Best friends

Continuous Theft

I know this may not be a happy post but it is real and it is true. One of the most unhappy things about living in a new culture is the initial price tag for being different. Organizations that raise money for this or that project in Africa, Asia, or wherever, may never tell you what percentage of your gifts are spent toward replacing what was stolen. How much of it was actually stolen and how much was wasted on paying people who have come to pose as skilled workers with fake documents, who have turned up to be damaging to the organization. I believe to not be transparent and real about these things is rather deceptive. It continues the bad cycle of filling Africa with beggars dependent upon western aid and western people believing that they are in fact helping when they are in fact harming.

If I could, I would become one of those people that don’t exit their homes for years at a time. I dread to drive anywhere. I don’t want to be peered at and seen. I realize how far it has gotten when I hear my daughters talk. Last night as I was sitting on the porch with them a neighbor came to peer at us from behind a banana tree. 

I waved and said, “Hello, can I help you?” 

Likely, she did not understand because she said nothing and continued to watch us. 

Why is she watching us? I queried out loud to the twins. 

“Because she wants to steal our monies and buy soda,” one twin responded. 

Stephen’s last remaining functioning business got robbed to the gills again last Friday. I don’t know how he will continue ahead. The business is now non-functioning and we owe what would consist of half my current stipend from Vision per month. If we don’t pay the loan, the bank comes after the land our house sits on.

To say this is as dark as it has ever been is an understatement. It only seems to get worse the longer I stay.

I spent the weekend at the house most of the day with Stephen and the twins. I now spend the nights at Vision for Africa, where it seems even the hoards of mosquitoes and the rats are a reprieve from the thieves. We didn’t have much to say to each other. He washed the clothes and cooked and tended to the garden. I slept, sat and stared into space and also cooked and washed dishes and tended to the girls. There doesn’t seem to be too much to say these days. After all, I doubt I will contribute toward anything new.

Contrast this to the days when we were apart, I in America and he in Uganda. We spoke often and with enthusiasm about the future. We spoke of our plans and aspirations. Things looked up for him. And they truly were positive and working in the upward direction. But now it seems that the presence of me and our daughters has cast a negative shadow over everything we had hoped for. We truly cannot live together here. We will be punished for it till we give up.

Is it a condition of the curse? The curse that was somehow put upon Stephen which dictates that if he is together with me, he will always incur continuous loss. Is it because we are white? Stephen now also is white and there are a limited amount of things that white people are allowed to do here. Giving out money and services being the primary thing. Failure to comply with those expectations necessitates that the community will force us to give the things they believe they are due, because we are simply stubborn and do not know our place. Is it because Stephen is Ugandan, behaving like a Ugandan in error, because he truly now is white to his own people. Like any white person, he is now no longer allowed to have a business, otherwise thieves will target it and continually plunder it. 

How can we be allowed to live in peace?

In the trenches.

Part of my job is to rectify what has been going wrong between the Western Volunteers and the teachers who are nationals. In the past, the relationships have been so awkward and strained that the volunteers given to every teacher, have been simply sidelined to do menial work. They paint pictures of the alphabet again and again and become incredibly bored doing so, while the class teacher tears down these amazing paintings every 3 months and puts them in the trash and requests another set of paintings to go with the alphabet.

I also was discouraged by bad use of young people who clearly had a lot more talent to offer. I also was one of these volunteers for some time and dealt with the menial task because I was also observing and taking notes.

At the beginning of the term, I began by revealing to the teachers how classroom delivery would be changed and how the use of volunteers would be changed. We did descriptions and demonstrations and even set up a trial classroom. Some of the teachers were catching on. Some were 50 miles behind and had no interest in catching up. Some complained endlessly about how this or that couldn’t work. But ultimately, it had to happen. Nursery children were spending their entire day being lectured to and trying to sit quietly and write in their notebook. The situation was begging for a more child friendly environment.

On the first day of class, I peeked into the classrooms to see what was happening. I was shocked to find that a number of teachers were doing the exact same thing they had been doing before the training. Not to worry, I simply pulled them aside quickly and said, “We are not doing it like that anymore, now we will do it like this…”

Now just recently we have been reviewing how things have changed and I’ve asked the teachers to tell me their success stories. One teacher got up and shared that she had turned over a lesson to the volunteer to teach. She expressed reservations about doing so because she thought the children would not do well with the accent of the volunteer. But she gave it a try. But this teacher was absolutely delighted by the results. The volunteer was understood and delivered the lesson well and the teacher expressed so much delight in how much she learned by turning things over to someone else and simply sitting back and watching.

I too was overjoyed at receiving this news. I had never expected this kind of speed of success, because it was success on so many levels.

Below are children playing with learning materials.