Sunday 16 January 2011

An Under-qualified Idiot's Guide to Development Consultancy

For a while my CV (as well as claiming I speak French and Swahili) also claimed that I was a Development Consultant working in Tanzania. After meeting an actual Development Consultant on her way to South Sudan (brave gal, place makes Tanzania look like Centre Parks) and learning what they actually do, I have decided to drop the claim from my resume and have pumped for a more modest ‘Project Supervisor’ tag (which is still rather generous). This, the penultimate post of my short-lived writing career (it’ll probably end up on the CV as well, next to my ‘languages’), will be dedicated to trying to explain just what we have been doing cocking about in Afrika for the past four months and prove that we have not just been hitting up social events and hassling the local wildlife.

(Not many laughs to be had in this blog I’m afraid, arguably there has been few laughs in any of the posts but that’s personal preference and if you don’t like it I’m sure Bryson is still churning out something about walking to ASDA or something. Development Consultancy is a rather sober issue, so please bear with me.)

We arrived in Tanzania at the beginning of October bright eyed and bushy tailed (much like Bambi before his mum got shot), ready to conduct some sort of research into education opportunities for children afflicted with AIDS for a local charity; Community Economic Development Empowerment (CEDE). Much like Bambi, we have had to change tactic to become king of the development forest, it is the end of January and the only ‘education’ we have provided was the dubious material given to the Catholic kids at the end of 2010. We decided within a week of arriving at CEDE’s office (Office is a generous term), that rather than conducting research into a topic which we knew little about and would serve little practical use to the charity itself, our talents (another generous term) would be better served working as full-time employees of the charity and focused towards expanding and developing it.

Our time with the charity (the days are 8:30-4ish, though my productivity after lunch is notoriously low and usually evenly split between games of Chess Titans and Hearts), is divided between working in the ‘office’ (which I will come to in a bit) and visiting the charity’s current projects up in the foothills of Kilimanjaro and the surrounding area. The groups with which we work (Farmers Groups, People Living with AIDS/HIV counselling groups etc.) are amongst the poorest in the region (average incomes can be as low as £400 a year, and they always seem to have loads of kids, rarely a good idea in England let alone Afrika), and it is our aim to work with them to create projects and initiatives through which they can diversify their incomes and thereby no longer rely on the charity or other agencies for monetary support. Our role in this is to come up with new projects (turns out the farmers aren’t good at thinking outside the horticultural box, and my degree in History has proved to be incredibly relevant here), and in the practical workshops the charity runs we help explain new techniques to the farmers. (This is where the under qualified bit comes in, we of course deal in the Queen’s English and our efforts at practical farming usually leaves the group rolling in the aisles, and despite knowing the techniques, I’ve never worked on a farm before, I’ve been on my Granddads, but I was chasing sheep, so don’t think that counts).

With these ideas, we get to work in the empty room we call our office, and get down and dirty writing project proposals and letters to various international donor agencies found on our limited time on the internet, (Nearest Internet is 25minutes away, as are the nearest Snickers). Productivity is hindered first and foremost by this chronic lack of internet (also by the lack of Snickers, but that didn’t arouse the same amount of sympathy), but also, and more annoyingly, the rolling power cuts which affect the region with daily regularity (just about the only thing in Njiapanda which arrives on time). According to local sources, power cuts in the Njiapanda region are more frequent because our little town voted for the opposition Tanzanian Labour Party (TLP) in October’s election, (ironic as ‘labour’ and Njiapanda are rarely found in the same sentence), but the upshot is that Tuesdays and Fridays are ‘power-free’ days, which hits productivity harder than my Chess Titans obsession ever could.

We write the project proposals (for development projects; basket-weaving initiative for HIV sufferers, a bee keeping project with a view to sell the honey commercially etc) either from scratch or heavily edit ones written by the charities directors. As, though well-intentioned, they have been known to create fanciful budgets and outrageous ‘facts and figures’ sections, (it doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, you can’t lie to the UN when asking for money, they aren’t the Students Loans Company, or your parents). After being a trio of killjoys and telling the directors we can’t spend £3,000 on a tree nursery, or more on the food and drink at a training session than we are paying for the trainer,  comes the most frustrating part of our role, securing funding. There are hundreds and hundreds of charities in the West gagging to throw money at Afrika, unfortunately there are thousands of charities in Afrika asking for the money to be thrown in their direction (and a fair amount of Presidents just waiting for the next lot of aid to put a new leather trim on their Merc), and we are just another name on a long list of NGO’s who want to save Afrika and stop climate change at the same time. (CEDE’s manifesto claims that ‘Eradication of Poverty’ is its sole aim. Optimistic, we suggested maybe electricity for the office and a better sign would be a better place to start.) But there is little we can do apart from search and apply to various donor agencies asking them to fund our wonderfully organised (and budgeted) projects, (turns out the Scandinavians are a generous bunch, the French are thrifty bastards, and the Americans insist on having a slightly off-putting religious edge to their charities)
One such project we have been running is entering a business plan run by the EU, with the top prize being $10,000. Excited, and never having done anything vaguely resembling a business plan before, we whipped up a twenty page epic proposal on bee-keeping, honey manufacturing and the distribution of the product about the country, (a terrific work of fiction). Ironic, and possibly flawed as none of us are experts in honey production, or development, or indeed business for that matter. We await the judges response with expectation.

As with all third world charities, the ultimate aim of CEDE is to get an international donor and a sustained period of funding whereby the projects I mentioned can gain momentum and begin to make a real change in the lives of the people we have been meeting every week. Whilst we have begun small scale funding projects in about Njiapanda, it is unlikely that we will have achieved international funding for the charity by the time we leave Tanzania. Hopefully, future volunteers will use what we have done over the past four months and have more success in that respect than we have had.

Apologies for the rather sober nature of the post, in one of my earliest posts I was keen to point out that our 100 day jaunt in the sun was not a holiday (If I go on holiday and end up shitting down a hole I’d be having words with Thomas Cook), and the work has been both greatly enjoyable and hugely nackering at the same time. We have left CEDE in a better state than we found it, and will be arranging for future volunteers to come out when we return in the UK (hoping to tear up the Sheffield Grad fair, slap bang between the British Airways and Sainsburys stalls). And you never know, the next lot of volunteers might be actual ‘development consultants’ instead of these fake ones who have been running around Tanzania with dodgy visas and irrelevant degrees for the past 4 months.

Wednesday 12 January 2011

A Jumped up Ex-Pat's Guide to Kenya

Apparently the Brits used to have some business in Kenya, back when Marmalade was racist and everyone wore top hats, so with our visas fast running out and Njiapanda offering very little in the way of New Year’s entertainment we made a sprint for the border and to Tanzania’s northern cousin of Kenya.
Our first stop was the beautiful Diani Beach just south of Mombasa, popular with European tourists and rich Kenyan youths from Nairobi, (think Newquay but with more sun and less Essex). The beach front was lined with massive all-inclusive hotels with their palm trees and their pool bars, they took one look at me and Ben and sent us to the campsite down the road. A place where the showers only produced salty sea-water, the ‘restaurant’ took hours to make a sandwich and the wake-up call was provided by stray cats and cocky monkeys wandering into the tent, (the monkeys also seemed to help out with the laundry, but they might have just been stealing clothes, difficult to say).

One thing we learnt whilst smelling of salt and monkey was that apparently the language of Kiswahili is dying out in Kenya (good for us as we are still shit), and we saw evidence of this as we boozed (repeatedly and heavily) with the local rich-kids from Nairobi. It seems these white/British Kenyans are about as racially and culturally confused as Jan Molby after he picked up his ridiculous Scandanvian-Scouse accent or Wes Brown with his bizarre ginger bonnet. Being the children/grandchildren of British colonial families, they were born and raised in Nairobi but sent to the UK for secondary school (leaving their accents a lot better than mine) and often returned to Kenya afterwards, leaving them with two nationalities but a somewhat confused cultural identity, and less Swahili than the trio of Sheffield graduates propping up the bar in the corner. (Embarrassing for them, but a proud moment for us and also the reason why these cultural insights should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt).

Having spent New Year’s on the beach irritating tourists and locals alike we headed to Mombasa proper, Kenya’s second largest city (after Nairobi) and a place with a peculiar smell due to the rubbish dumps about town placed directly in front of the ‘No Dumping’ signs, the sense of irony must be a hangover from when our lot were still making trouble over there. We stayed in a Somalian-run hotel which had a big ‘No prostitution’ sign on the corridor (killjoys) and were many of the staff didn’t speak Swahili either, preferring to natter in Arabic instead. So conversation was limited to broken English, broken Swahili and the names of Arsneal footballers, silly Somalians.

Mombasa town itself offered some cracking highlights including its Old Town, which is a bit like a more exciting York with it winding streets and historic buildings, a pair of giant elephant tusks arching over the road on the way into the city, a gift from Queen Liz in nineteen fifty-something (I’m not a tour guide), and a amazingly colourful and decorative Sikh (or Hindu maybe) temple, though I thought it looked a little like Legoland. After staying in what was essentially a squatters house and spending yet more time on a beach (which we shared with some Kenyan convicts doing community service, couldn’t see the guards, which was worrying) we decided it was high time we left Mombasa and got the train inland to the capital Nairobi.

The Mombasa-Nairobi train journey was described by Lonely planet Guide to Kenya as ‘an ultimate colonial experience’, I’m not sure whether this is a politically correct piece of travel journalism as colonialism went out of fashion a while ago, and isn’t showing any signs of a resurgence despite Prince Phillip’s commendable efforts. Regardless of this we decided to check it out and hopped on the (supposedly) 12-odd hour trek across the country, we decided to hit up second class, (too colonial for third class apparently, though Burley and me are from the north so not colonial enough for first class), and sure enough as soon as we got to the station there was a man offering to take our bags to the station for a small fee, all we needed was a copy of the times and a handle-bar moustache and we could have been something out of a Carry On film. Like everything else in on this continent, the train was running on Afrikan time, so despite being advertised as leaving at 7pm (we were told to get there no later than 6:30, or else they’d run out of Gin or cigars or something), we rolled at a pedestrian pace out of Mombasa at well past 9:30pm, (pretty sure the driver didn’t turn up until past 8, the Fat Controller ran a tighter ship than this down on Sodor Island).
Despite the bad rep Afrikan trains have acquired, it was a enjoyable (if long) trip, (preferable to the Knutsford-Piccadilly train marathon), we had our little cabin and there was a restaurant carriage (Northern Line trains take note), I got to sleep on top bunk which was more like a child’s cot after the porter put up a barrier to stop me falling out. We even got to see a ‘zebra’ (though was more likely a donkey, or a cow) as the train cut through a national park on its way north, no one else seemed to be as excited about this though, so it was probably a donkey. Or a cow. More exciting than this however was that nearly 16 hours after leaving Mombasa, the train struggled into Nairobi and the first proper city we had been in since leaving London almost three months previously. (We don’t count Dar es Salaam, because it remains, as ever, shit.)

I get excited by cities, they have big buildings, museums and smell like McDonalds. London is bloody exciting cuz they’ve got Big Ben and loads of other crap, imagine my excitement then, after being stuck out in rural Njiapanda (no buildings over two storeys and smells of petrol) when we rolled up in Nairobi, biggest city in East Afrika, and, if our taxi driver is to be believed, bigger than London as well, (he was chatting all sorts though, so you might have to check that one for yourselves). Nairobi had skyscrapers, government offices, parks, and, most shockingly unlike Njiapanda and many other Tanz towns we’ve stumbled through, the people of Nairobi (Nairobians?) looked like they had stuff to do, important stuff, city stuff. We only had one afternoon in the city so went firstly to the park, where loads of people appeared to be having a nap, even people in suits, wouldn’t happen in Knutsford and certainly not in Sheffield, and then decided to go to the National Museum and Botanical Gardens. After trying and failing to get in using our expired student cards (if they didn’t work in Didsbury Cinema I don’t know why we thought they’d work here), we tried another tactic and just walked in. Saw a crocodile getting fed, then saw a hole in its cage, we left soon after.

Nairobi had more in common with western cities than it did to anywhere in the Njiapanda region, the attitude of the general populace towards us was one of ambivalence, unlike in Tanzania, the fact that we are white (so very white) made no difference, and it was the fact that I was wearing sand-stained shorts and hadn’t shaved in about a month which seemed to cause most offense. It was an afternoon of almost western-culture in four months of rural Afrikan culture. Instead of sticking about to see if the crocodile escaped or if the city could live up to its nickname of ‘Nairobbery’ due to its legendary crime rate (the only robbery we saw was of the daylight variety with the amount they wanted to charge us for the museum. I don’t pay to visit Gardens on a point of principle, I got one at home), we got the 12 hour bus back to Njiapanda and back to work (exactly what we do at ‘work’ will be explained in the next post). Upon re-arrival at Casa del Panda, we were greeted by a power cut and an unfortunate lack of water, Nairobi it is not.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

An Idiot's Guide to an Afrikan Christmas

I never liked Bono’s patronising lyric ‘Do they know its Christmas time?’ not just because he’s a self-serving egotist, but because I wasn’t sure whether they actually celebrated Christmas in Afrika, (I was a lot younger when harbouring such thoughts, a similar age to when I assumed there was no food out here and when I thought The Edge was a cool name for a guitarist). But fortunately for us and Bono, they do know it’s Christmas time, and as this is only my second Christmas on foreign soil and the first riding solo without the rest of the Ford-Stroop clan, I figured I’d lay down some exotic festive truths to chew on whilst nursing an inevitable festive hangover.

Getting into the festive spirit has been a struggle, unlike England there was never any chance of a white Christmas out here, temperatures have not dropped below 20C and it’s been hard to imagine its December at all when we remain by far the whitest thing on the landscape. The purchase of the Pogues Fairytale of New York therefore has been the best purchase since a Massai spear we bought from a local blacksmith (smuggling it through customs however will be a bloody nightmare), and between Kirsty McCall’s sultry tones and licking a spoonful of nutella every morning we successfully got past the disappointment of not being able to find a Cadbury’s advent calendar anyway of the continent. (The only other Christmas song we had was Chris de Burgh’s Spaceman Came Travelling, played a good deal less, cuz the song makes no sense, and de Burghs an oddball).

Despite knowing its Christmas time, the general populace of Tanzania don’t seem to love Christmas half as much as the Brits and the rest of the Santa-worshipping West do. The country is a 50/50 Christian/Muslim split (plus some other funny religions too), which would go some way to explain some of the indifference to the big day (Eid was a while ago, we got the day off for that too, being the good Muslim boys that we are), but the whole Christmas culture is different to England. There doesn’t seem to be a tradition of giving presents, or of tinsel and Christmas trees, (we bought a fake one for our house, much to the amusement of everyone else), it doesn’t matter if you have been naughty or nice, presents seem rare and lumps of coal are only seen the the local home-brew banana beer mbegya, (we don’t know why they are there, but it makes it taste very strange). We discussed our disappointment at the apparent lack of festive cheer with our bosses at the charity, and they just seemed to accept the day as a public holiday (as is Eid, Independence Day and the ex-President/Communist dictators birthday) and a chance to meet up with family, no snow, no stockings or shepards or wise men, no fat bloke at the Trafford Centre dressed up as Santa with a worried looking child on his lap, thank god for the Pogues and Nutella for keeping us festive.         

Our own Christmas was spent with Burley’s family in the nearby city of Moshi (Lord knows how Njiapanda celebrates Christmas, and we sure as hell didn’t want to find out), though due to the muppets Kenya employs on her borders they got here a day late, which meant that Christmas Eve was spent almost exclusively eating the massive meals which the charity’s directors prepared for us. No turkey obviously (I’ve kept my eyes peeled for one, but all I’ve seen is heavy-bollocked goats and mangy looking chickens), but roast potatoes and goat curry went down an absolute treat regardless. We had originally planned to tear up Midnight Mass at the local Catholic Church on Christmas Eve (much to my mother’s delight), but come early evening we had ploughed through a fair few beers and our own limited experience of Afrikan church services (a wedding and a christening) is that services are long and in Swahili (a proper Catholic service should be in Latin, but I’ve kept quiet on that for now), and unlikely to look favourably on snoring foreigners, so decided to give the Catholics a wide berth for the evening.
Christmas day began at half 6 but some joker blaring out Christmas carols over the needlessly loud hostel sound system, (by seven they had ran out of Christmas carols and were playing some sort of Shaggy compilation instead). After exchanging gifts (I got a few books to add to our wide literary collection which includes super-geek Tom Clancy, the idiot Jeffrey Archer and the genius L. Ron Hubbard, as well as some Dutch chocolates relating to the hilariously racist Dutch tradition of Zwarte Piet, type it into Wikipedia and find out for yourselves) we headed to a waterfall just outside Kilimanjaro National Park to spend Christmas morning cutting very pale figures swimming in the splash-pool. The locals were not impressed, but they rarely are when the white folks go splashing about ruining the natural beauty of any place.

Whereas Christmas dinner is usually spent in Cheshire or Shropshire, this year we went to a bizarre little Austrian restaurant back in Moshi. I’d never paid Austria much thought before, they usually put in a decent shift at Eurovision and a pretty poor one at sporting events, I didn’t realise they had cuisine, and definitely didn’t realise they had enough of it to claim an entire restaurant. Turns out nothing on the menu was Austrian (except schnitzel, but I don’t know what that is, possibly something to do with an egg), so we all had a fat steak and chips for Christmas dinner, (blasphemy for Christmas purists, but there are literally no turkeys on this continent, and they wouldn’t take any Brussels Sprouts chat out here either). Beautiful.

After finally managing to organise a Skype call with the family (I replaced the Queen’s speech apparently, the one time a year she gets to go on TV and she gets replaced by some bearded tourist, honoured), they proceeded to show me both the snow in England and the remnants of their own traditional Christmas dinner, which did not go down well. (You know who you are, and you should be ashamed). The result of all this has been Christmas in Afrika has been a rather surreal experience, enjoyable, but surreal none the less. Nobody was anywhere near as excited about it as we were, and even our own excitement was dampened by the climate and the distinct lack of Santa’s hats at the market (Gin and spears easy to find, but not a hat nor an elf costume in sight. Scrooges). It sounds odd, but I’m looking forward to Christmas next year already, last minute Christmas shopping, throwing rocks at kids singing carols and watching Steve McQueen and the gang give the Jerrys a damn good hiding in some sort of war-related flick. Tanzania does know it’s Christmas time, they just don’t seem to care about it as much as we do. Sorry Bono.

Wishing England a merry belated Christmas and a happy new Year