Accompanying me for the last week has been Chris Edwards, an eighteen year old volunteer from Nevada City who has signed up to put his shoulder to the Rotary 3H millstone for three months. He has jumped into the language lessons with me and is also assisting with the startup and design of our new Rotary 3H website (coming soon)! I was impressed by Chris’s ability to immediately pick up the Rukiga number system which in my mind has only been surpassed by his ability to down Coca Cola at a blistering pace.
A view of the Backpackers Hostel, where Chris and I stayed in Kampala.The Rukiga language is one of several Bantu languages spoken across Southern and Western Uganda. Many tribes share the same core Bantu language. The language of Southwest Uganda is Rukiga of the Bakiga people (note the addition of an “R” to change the people name to the name of the language). The language instructors are a married couple Richard and Doreen who teach with great humor and with great pride of their people and language (Doreen is of the Bakiga tribe and Richard of the Banyankole). The at times grueling six hour daily lessons are often intermixed with conversations about American and Ugandan culture. The days are punctuated with hourly frisbee throwing breaks that Richard and Doreen have taken such a liking to I’m not sure if they will let me return to Bwindi with my old Ultimate Frisbee disc.
From left to right, Doreen, Richard, and Chris at our Rukiga lessons.Starting the classes I immediately began making connections in the language that had eluded me for the past year. Just working on the pronunciation alone has provided me the opportunity to use the vocabulary that I already possessed from studying notes that I had found online. It is literally a key, unlocking these words that I had been struggling to use for so long.
The Rukiga language is filled with twists and turns that at times frustrate me and at other times provide me with new insights into the culture I have lived with for a year. What I have found is that the language is not so full of exceptions but filled with a vast multitude of options and ways to say what you want to say. Prefixes, suffixes, and infixes! litter the language changing the subject and meaning of verbs at right hand angles. There are scores of ways to greet people and ways to check in with how the day is going, how was the night, and how is the family doing. The language accurately represents the importance in the Bakiga culture for checking in on how your neighbors are doing. Ironically there is only one word for apologizing (and I think it is rarely used) and if you are looking for words of politeness you can forget it. Another interesting note is that the proper way to introduce where you are from is to say where your people are from because there is always an unbreakable link to your people that anchors you wherever you travel to.
Armed with an improved understanding of the language and a year of experience under my belt I am chomping at the bit to get back to Bwindi and to the communities. Understanding the reality and the complexities of conducting humanitarian work sits at the forefront of my mind. Thinking back I arrived in Bwindi with a masters degree in hydrology, a water testing kit, and the ability to say ‘how are you” in Rukiga. My ability to greet, I quickly realized, was the most important of those three items I carried with me.
What one sees when they visit Bwindi is that humans are the exact product of their environment and the way they interact with that environment. Recent arrivals from the West are invariably struck by the masses of people seen walking on the roads. On market day in the nearby town/trading center of Butagota, you might pass several thousand people just walking: to sell baskets or mats, to buy food for the week, to collect debts or pay debts, to make business deals, to buy clothes and on and on. There are virtually no overweight people. When you do pass someone with a few extra pounds around the waist you take note. They are the wealthy and influential people in the communities and are both respected and feared.
Just as there are no fat people you see few of the physical ailments that you often encounter in the West, like the back or joint pain associated with sedentary lifestyles. It is reasonable to ask whether the typical Ugandan villager suffers fewer muscle and joint ailments because of the physicality of life there or whether they are just able to ignore discomfort and pain because there is no alternative. Most likely it is a combination of the two. One invariably encounters women and adolescent children carrying 20 liter jerry cans of water or men hauling sacks of cement long distances on their heads or people working under hot and dusty conditions. I have a great deal of admiration for this type of physical work. When I express this to my partner Paul he will barely raise his eyebrows and nonchalantly state that these people are “used.” His meaning is not that the people are being used but that they are used to the hard work and the harsh conditions and that this type of work is what they know.
Batwa women carry large bags of sand for a spring restoration project.I have found that being ‘used’ is something we can all relate to. We are all “used” in one way or another. Whether it is to commuting three hours a day and sitting in front of a computer for another eight or pushing 300lbs of matoke (green bananas) on a bicycle 4 miles a day we are all adapted to our current situation. I think we all know this but in Bwindi it becomes overtly obvious. Communities are also “used” in the way they are set up and organized which is based on village leadership, local government leadership and by the resources available to them. In a sense these communities exist in a type of equilibrium, which is to say that people know their roles in the community and work hand in hand to sustain their families with the skills they have and the few resources that are available to them.
By adding new outside resources or information to a community this equilibrium becomes disrupted. These disruptions can be positive, like in the case of effectively educating a community on the benefits of good hygiene and sanitation behavior. And they can be negative. I’ve seen a whole community collapse into angry quarrelling over being loaned a couple of hoes and shovels. (As a side note I believe this is one of the main reasons that the Peace Corps relies almost entirely on education of communities vs providing physical resources). One problem with providing resources is that they can be provided unequally. And even when they are provided equally they can still be perceived as being provided unequally. And perception can be an incredibly difficult thing to overcome where information is spread almost exclusively by word of mouth (one false rumor spread in Rukiga can take weeks if not months to sort out, stalling projects and creating arguments between community members).
Tor Erickson teaches a seminar to Batwa masons.Batwa are often the intended recipients of outside resources as they are the focus of NGO’s and Missionaries because of their recent eviction from the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and because of their apparent squalid living conditions. What many people do not understand is that the neighboring Bakiga suffer from many of the same issues caused by poverty such as poor sanitation, malnourishment, and HIV and their communities are interwoven with the Batwa. Projects focusing on the Batwa must often include the Bakiga as well.
Because the Batwa are the target of so many humanitarian resources the Bakiga living in the same communities also look to benefit from the projects, and rightly so in many cases. Unfortunately the Batwa end up putting immense energy into projects, carrying bags of sand, cement, rock, and jerry cans of water and excavating large volumes of earth while the Bakiga refuse to work at all. However, when the projects are completed the Bakiga use the resources as if they were involved all along. Not surprisingly this causes deep frustration among the Batwa and leaves serious questions about where ownership lies with the project and who is responsible for maintenance.
One example of this occurred when we built a water tank in the Batwa settlement of Byumba. It was a resource where the majority of the community were Batwa, but there were 10 Bakiga families (about one third of the total families using the resource) who gathered water there, as well. It was a constant struggle to engage the Bakiga beneficiaries and in many cases they would only reluctantly work on the project, all the while knowing they would benefit from the resource. To this day the Batwa struggle to engage the Bakiga in the maintenance of the resource. The spring committee formed to manage the project is currently working with the local government to set up a system where the spring taps are locked and only those active in the maintenance of the spring have access to the resource. One can see how tenuous a process this is when you consider that all it takes is one angry villager, denied access to the water source, to come in and break the taps to ruin it for everyone. It is now up to the people to make the hard decisions on how to involve the entire community and we can only provide suggestions and continue to monitor the water tank.
Another challenge we have faced in the last year and will continue to face is trying to engage the Batwa in their own projects. Right now there are four Batwa settlements preparing to build family latrines on the Rotary dime. Our expectation is that community contribution includes digging the 15ft deep latrine pits and assisting with the unskilled labor during construction . In the past the Batwa have always received some sort of compensation for any work they have performed, even when they were the direct beneficiaries of that work. This compensation usually came in the form of food. The assumption was that the Batwa are so impoverished that food needs to be provided to support the labor because the families are too poor to provide it themselves. And the Batwa will agree wholeheartedly.
Providing this sort of compensation, however, adds a major complication to the process. The question then becomes are the Batwa digging their latrine pits for food or to have a latrine? And thus, if we provide food, is the community buy-in sufficient for ownership of the project, or can we tell if there is any community buy-in of the project at all? I’ve had many long, difficult meetings about this very topic with the Batwa where there has been a fair share of bitterness and anger. Many Batwa angrily tell me, “if you want to help the Batwa then help them in all ways.” Meaning, if you are going to help the Batwa build latrines, then pay them to dig the pits. Others, however, agree that the pit should be the responsibility of the families before Rotary gets monetarily involved.
Although, in the end we have the final say whether or not to provide food for this labor our intention is to engage the Batwa in dialogue to understand what keeps them from embracing such a great opportunity to provide sanitation for their families. We are trying to move at a slow enough pace so that so that we can understand what their capabilities are and so that they can understand that we cannot justifiably lay these projects into their laps. In an attempt to commiserate I once told the Batwa of the settlement Bikuto that I understood that it was hard to dig latrine pits without being provided food. As soon as the words left my mouth I realized it wasn’t true. I had no idea. The next day I showed up at Bikuto at 8 in the morning with a pick and a shovel and a gallon of water and began working on one of the pits that had been moving very slowly. The work was intensely hard and as expected my hands, unused to digging, blistered badly throughout the day. I learned two very important pieces of information that day: 1) that a pit can be dug in clay soil at a rate of 1 ft per hour and 2) this work can be performed on an empty stomach.
One must consider what the Rotary contribution to these projects will be. Rotary would be providing thousands of dollars of materials to build these latrines, we have trained 4 Batwa ferro-cement masons to build the latrines after the pits are completed (see the previous two blogs written by Tor Erickson), and we are paying the skilled labor to complete these projects. Where ,then, is the community’s opportunity to demonstrate buy-in to the project and to show that they are committed to sanitation. If they won’t dig their pits will they ever buy soap when they have some spare money? If they don’t participate in the construction of the latrines will they keep them clean down the road? Demonstrations of commitment now are the only clues we have that the projects will succeed in reducing water borne illness in the future.
Two Batwa makakuru (respected elderly women) hold bars of soap.
