Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Workshop Post II

Tor and community memebers from the Batwa settlement of Kitariro setting a latrine floor in place.

Written by Tor Erickson on his four months building latrines with the Batwa.

“Just a quick update on my final stage of work in Uganda. Starting on Monday I'll be leading a one-month workshop on ferrocement latrine construction in the Batwa settlement of Bikuto. If I’m able to make a single contribution to our work effort here in Africa it will be this workshop, so that when I leave in April the knowledge on how to build these latrines will stay here with the Batwa people.”
- From a letter to my parents, dated March 1, 2009

Bikuto is the most beautiful of the Batwa settlements in Kanungu District, a double cluster of mud and thatch huts spanning a deep valley. From a high vantage point in the village you can see for miles in all directions, and it's possible to be sitting in the sunshine and looking out across four or five ridges to a distant peak shrouded in black clouds receiving a heavy rain.

Photo of Bikuto environs
The people from Bikuto are tough and out-spoken. In my time there I found them quick to laugh and joke, but just as quick to turn heated or angry if they sensed an injustice or a slight. There was Petronea and her husband Tegume, always active at some labor and always ready with a joke or a smile when I would show up in the morning. Or quiet Furjenz and his wife Generous, a strident defender of her family and village’s rights, and possessing one of the more impressive sets of biceps in East Africa. Then there was Jackson and Charles, both noticeably taller and more reserved than their neighbors. It was some weeks before we learned that these men had come from the south, from the district of Kisoro on the border with Rwanda, with their families several years earlier.

Generous with her grandson Sol, believe it or not.

Our plan for Bikuto was one that we had developed over the past three months of work in Uganda. It derived from conversations with a number of NGOs and individuals doing development work with the Batwa. It was also a response to our experience of building our first latrine in one of the villages of Kanungu District. That experience, during the month of January, was instrumental in opening our eyes to the potential of development work to disempower those very people you are trying to help. It was also a hint that without the correct strategy working with the Batwa was not always going to be a joyous partnership of hard work and shared accomplishment.

This last was a point that was driven home during the construction of our sample latrine. Most of our work had been theoretical up to this point, and this was going to be the first time that the Rotary 3H project was going to ‘get its feet wet’ and actually build something. Sol and I had a lot of different expectations and apprehensions going into this project but generally we expected to enjoy widespread community support. What exactly this support would look like, we couldn’t say exactly, but we felt certain that we would recognize it when we saw it and that it would involve some form of ‘chipping in’ on the construction project without expectations of compensation.

What can I say? In retrospect those were naïve assumptions to the core and Sol and I received a brutal, overnight lesson in the realities of development work. This was perhaps best illustrated the day the chairman of the village was to put in his labor to complete the latrine.

As part of the agreement we had forged with the village, every family that was slated to receive a latrine from the Rotary project would contribute a day of labor to the construction of the first latrine. This seemed logical to us as the sample latrine we were building would be used by the staff of the community clinic and by a community carpenter’s shop. It also seemed to make sense to us because by involving the community members in the construction process they could begin to learn some of the skills necessary to work on their own latrines. This labor was supposed to be voluntary and without compensation.

The women of Kitariro after plastering a section of floor for a latrine.

Every morning I would show up after an hour long motorcycle ride and meet with the Mukiga mason who was providing technical advise and experience to the project and see who from the village would be working that day. Work would then begin and we would set about accomplishing whatever that day’s task was, be it pouring a concrete foundation or framing the walls and roof. I felt that the best way to produce a good work ethic on the job site was to work as hard as I could myself and set the tone, hoping that others would follow along. It didn’t take long for me to realize this wasn’t producing the desired results. A couple of days into construction the chairman of the village, a man with impressive sideburns and a smile that suggested someone with a few too many responsibilities on his plate, took his turn to represent his family in the construction process.

I remember working my hardest to tie together the wire armature for the floor of the latrine, baking in the sun, sweat pouring down my back, and all the while the chairman squatting back on his haunches chewing a piece of sugarcane, watching with curiosity. Through a translator I suggested he help with tying the wire. He shrugged. A bit later, I asked if he could perhaps cut us lengths of wire to make up the wire ties. He worked for a few minutes and then stopped, resuming his observational stance. I explained to him that our agreement was for a full day of work. Eventually he grew tired of my nagging and wandered off.

From left to right Mahano, Solomon, and Muhzei tying together a floor armature just before plastering with cement and sand.

The chairman’s attitude though extreme was not atypical. Anyone who spent more than an hour on the jobsite would realize that something was not quite right. The Batwa had little to no sense of ownership of the process. They were interested in receiving the end product, a nice, permanent latrine, but their approach to the work said that they felt they would get it regardless of how much effort they put in themselves.

This was discouraging. In fact, it was frustrating and disheartening to the extreme. We knew that at any point we could simply have spent a little more money, hired laborers and masons, perhaps even the same people who were supposed to be volunteering, and finished the latrine without a hitch. But there was something deep inside that balked at the idea, something that raised an eyebrow and cocked a head at the thought of paying people to do something beneficial for themselves, and something that asked the question ‘why wouldn’t they jump at the chance to help themselves and their community?’ So we hobbled through the first latrine, all the while vowing that the next one would be built under different conditions. In the meantime we had been slapped in the face with the question of ‘why’? Why were the Batwa acting this way? Why were they content to let a white-skinned foreigner labor away on one of their community projects while they sat idly by and chatted?

Sol and I simply refused to believe what the local Bakiga people would earnestly tell us at every possible opportunity--- that the Batwa were lazy by nature and would never make good workers. These comments stunk of racism and besides, we had both seen the Batwa move and work with impressive energy and force when they felt so compelled. There was something about our project that had failed to hook them. They wanted latrines, they understood the need, but they saw the work that we were doing as something totally external to them and their efforts. We had come from somewhere beyond and when we left there would be a trail of latrines behind us and the Batwa could work or not and it wouldn’t change a thing. It was at this time that we began to think of the nature of development work that had come before us, and the effects that it had had upon the Batwa. It also gave us a chance to reflect on the dangers of a development project that is conceived and initiated outside of the target community. One of the greatest chances for ownership, project conception, had already been taken out of the Batwa’s hands.

This was the fertile ground from which the workshop in Bikuto arose. We wanted a work environment with more accountability. We wanted a work environment that fostered a greater sense of community ownership of the construction process. And we had realized that the intangible things you leave behind you can be as or more powerful than the tangibles. In this case the tangible was going to be the latrine, and the intangible was how the community was engaged in constructing that latrine. Part of this engagement would be the learning of the skills needed to build it.

The typical approach when attempting some sort of a development project in a Batwa community in Kanungu district has been to hire skilled labor from the local Bakiga population and then utilize the Batwa to fill the role of manual laborers, carrying sand, water and other supplies, digging, and performing all the other odd ‘gofer’ jobs that a construction site demands. There are two main effects of this division of labor, neither one of them desirable from our point of view. The first was that paid Bakiga workers receive wages that were several times greater than the unskilled Batwa, effectively funneling a portion of the development funds out of the Batwa community. The second was a marginalizing effect on the Batwa as they watched outsiders do all of the ‘important’ work on the job while they themselves were left to do the menial labor.

Our hope was that a workshop whose purpose was to teach the necessary construction skills to build a latrine from foundation to roof to a motivated group of Batwa would circumvent both of these issues. We also hoped that a skilled Batwa workforce would go a long ways towards engaging the community and would give the Batwa people a greater sense of ownership of the project (imagine you live in a small town and a big construction job comes up, say, to build a new county library. In one scenario a local contractor gets the job and every day that you drive by the jobsite you see people you’ve grown up with and have known your entire life doing the work. You might feel like the new library was more a part of the community, or that by extension you had some stake in it because people you knew were doing the work. And if the day came when the library was asking for volunteers to help out, you might be more inclined to show up, since it was someone you knew who was asking. Now imagine how it might feel different if an out-of-state contractor were awarded the job and he brought in his own, out-of-state crew to do the work).

Batwa masons tying wires for a latrine floor.

This was our basis for the workshop. By the end of January we had committed to giving it a try. The only problem was that we had only a hazy idea of what the workshop would actually look like. Who would participate? How would those participants be chosen? What would the curriculum consist of? Where would it be held (this was before we had met with Bikuto and they had agreed for their village to be the host of the workshop)?

In the next blog entry I will go into detail about how we answered these questions and how the workshop itself played out in the month of March.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Such an eloquent description of the human condition, and how to deal with it without quitting. I love it.
Good luck...

I_H said...

nice post tor. suspenseful ending..

Ken and Joanne said...

What I'm seeing here, Tor, is "a failure to communicate." This is the inevitable result when two different cultures come into contact with each other. Things may go right 98% of the time. But that other two percent, wow.

When I first taught on Guam, I thought it was just like the States. But it wasn't, not even slightly. And the longer I worked there, the less I understood.

I anxiously wait for the next blog so I can see how the workshop idea turned out. I believe it was Metternich who said, "No plan survives initial contact with the enemy." I hope this project moved from the 2% to the 98% category.

Ken Harris

Unknown said...

What a provocative story. I'm looking forward to the next segment.

Unknown said...

Hey Ali,

Thanks for words, and keep reading there's more to come!

Irina and Tracy,

Thanks for reading, look for the exciting conclusion coming your way soon.

Ken,

Communication was a huge and literal problem when I was working in Uganda. Almost none of the Batwa speak English, and there's next to nobody doing development work who speaks their language, Rukiga (you on that, Sol?). Understanding someone's culture probably begins with being able to talk to them...

Didn't realize you taught in Guam, I'd be interested to hear more about that.

Thanks again, everyone, for reading,

Tor