Exciting work is coming!

Finally ideas are beginning to gain momentum.  I came away from the All Volunteer Conference earlier this month with lots of ideas and now some of them are starting to happen.  We’ve all but finished the latrine project—all that’s left is the final evaluation for the NGO.  With the help of World Vision (and the District Assembly when they finally release the money), we helped 25 families in Damanko afford latrines for their households.  Now they don’t have to go to the bush to take a dump.  Now it’s time to move on to other things.

Camp GGLOW will be in a couple weeks, and I’m real excited for that.  Some years ago some volunteers in some other country started a camp program for instilling leadership skills and inspiration in young girls (in our case young guys too).  Now, many of them are held in Ghana, and those of us who are in the Nkwanta area are making our own.  I could only take five junior high students, so I went to the two junior high schools in town and asked the teachers to choose a boy and a girl from each.  I also asked the teachers from the smaller English-Arabic (Muslim) school to choose a girl for me.  I am very happy with their choices and look forward to taking these kids to Nkwanta for a week.  I expect it to be as crazy and silly fun as American camp is, which is something these kids will never have even heard of before.  There should be 60 to 70 kids all held in the conference area of Nkwanta’s hospital and we’ll talk to them about life after school, finishing school, boy-girl stuff, health, decision-making, goal setting, etc.  I can’t wait to see how they do.

One of the more popular events the previous volunteers in Damanko planned was a large soccer tournament which Kwesi is eager to replicate.  Football is a big draw around here, so it offers a rich opportunity to educate people about any number of subjects.  Since we have this lucrative pot of gold program called PEPFAR, it will be an HIV/AIDS Football Tournament.  We invite football teams from the surrounding bush villages and provide focused education to the team players, and then to the crowd in between matches.  We’ll even set up free testing at the clinic.  The whole thing should last three days and be a whole lot of fun.  The thing I’m excited about is that we were able to coincide this event with Peace Corps’ training program, so for this event, PC will send us several of the new volunteers who will be arriving in country in about a week.  They won’t come to us until the end of July.

I’ve also organized ten or so kids to participate in a nationwide art contest focused on HIV/AIDS prevention messages.  Plenty of kids like to draw, but don’t often get the chance, so now I’ve got several of them in my house the past few afternoons drawing all kinds of things.

Next week we’ll start my vegetable garden experiment.  I bought seeds for carrots, green peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, and green beans in Tamale so we’ll see if they can grow here.  If they do, it will be a great opportunity for some to farm some extra vegetables for the market.  We’ll transform half of my “yard” into the garden and add tomato and basil plants.  We’ll also start nursing moringa trees.  Any seeds I don’t use, I’ll give to Joseph so he can start his own little garden too, and maybe it will help ease some of the income stress he feels.

Balls are rolling and it's exciting.  Wish you all could see it!

Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Again): Behind Western Eyes

“Women do all the work while men sit under the mango tree.”

I hate this statement.  It took me a while to determine why exactly I felt so uncomfortable whenever I heard it.  This is a well-worn idiom and opinion among volunteers, particularly female ones.  I hear it, its variations, and references to it all the time.  I thought just the fact that it was a broad, generalized, painting-all-with-the-same-brush kind of statement that bothered me, but it wasn’t.  I kept looking for observational evidence to back up this statement in my own community, but I couldn’t—at least enough to participate in its repetition.  I did see evidence to warrant this statement, but I also saw plenty of contradictions, and it’s the second bit that’s absent from this trope and the basis of my insecurity with it.  So here is what I see:

If we do compare “women’s work” to “men’s work,” then the scale is definitely unbalanced.  Women, as everywhere else in the world, have responsibility over the things that keep a household running—cooking, cleaning, childcare, keeping the house stocked, etc.  Things we are all familiar with.  Women also do many things to make their own money.  They have small informal businesses (selling prepared food, pure water, products, etc); formal businesses (sewing, hairdressing, baking, store ownerships); they do trading in the market place on a very large scale, or, if they continue in school, nursing, teaching, and whatever else they dream.  All this they do with childcare seamlessly woven into it.  If women can do any of these things, she has considerable financial autonomy from the men in her life.  They also have farms—groundnuts, okro, peppe, tomatoes, etc.  Men have occupations, trades, or, if they farm, it’s often yams (as they take A LOT more physical labor) or rice.  Men will sell these as cash crops, because it is his responsibility to provide hard cash for his family.  Women’s money, if their husband is able to fill his role, retains her own, but if all is not peach-keen, it could very well fall to her to provide financially as well.  But, just because women are responsible for all this work doesn’t mean she does it everyday or all the time or even alone.  Households consist of many women and daughters to do the housework and childcare.  Women may start and stop their businesses based on time, desire, or income.  Households consist of many men who can bring an income or help on the farm.  Depending on seasons, people may not go to farm everyday.  Their schedules are incredibly flexible.

So because of all this flexible time, I see men sitting around playing games under a mango tree, yes, but is it always the same men?  I don’t know.  If a man doesn’t have any work (and if you don’t you could at least farm something—everyone does to supplement income) then you are considered lazy.  Women I see doing the housework, yes, but I also see them napping on benches in the afternoon, sitting in a group yakking and cracking groundnuts, getting their hair braided (which can take two hours or more) at a hairdressing shop, laughing with sisters and girlfriends as they go to fetch water.  I see men hauling water in barrels all day for selling, carpenters working, tailors sewing, men repairing motorcycles and cars, drivers ferrying passengers out of town.  Everyone works hard and everyone sits around.  I don’t know how equal it is unless I actually sit and count up the minutes.

My frustration with this statement comes because I feel like its speaker is dismissing the contradictions in any given place.  Especially if they come from a Western background, this statement shows that they come from a place with very specific feminist sensibilities; in many cases with the expectation of finding “oppressed” women.  They are framing their observations in a purely Western feminist context (with all its unique histories and indicators) which doesn’t belong here.  I have been fortunate that during the development of my feminist theoretical sensibilities (mostly in grad school), I was aware that the paradigms, ideas, and histories, I was encountering were wholly Western and as such, only one of the myriad of ways women struggle for equity.  This awareness, I think, is the main reason for my hindrance at any assumption of women’s inherent disadvantage, my inability to participate in discussions about what a bum rap they get.  Of course there are disadvantages and imbalances of power and so on, just as there are in our own societies, but I think they are missing the power women do have in this structure and I don’t know how to challenge their assumptions.  I guess I feel unable to do that because I haven’t yet found evidence of it, but my feminist anthropologist spidey sense tells me it’s there somewhere.

When the Women’s Movement of the 1970s turned its head to international women’s issues, a woman named Chandra Mohanty wrote a very (academically) famous essay (titled "Under Western Eyes--pun in my subject intended) in which she stood on her soapbox and said: “feminism in the West happened the way it did because of a particular history and culture.  It won’t work the same in the rest of the world, so stop patronizing us “Third World women” by telling us we’re powerless and we need to be rescued by you.”  Of course I am only grossly paraphrasing; she said it much more wisely and professionally than that and in far more dense academic language.  This is why she is right:

Women in the West (let’s say America for example) fought for their equality by not changing the patriarchal system, but by clamoring to be a part of it—by entering male-dominated careers and demanding equal pay, by passing laws in a male dominated government system, by saying no to child bearing and running households and by seeking a sexual freedom—from men, from religion, from convention.  Much of the struggle didn’t seek to change the locus of power, just for women to have more access to it and men to have less.  Many feminist movements outside of the West have been different; they’ve centered on issues such as financial autonomy and more participation in decision-making, and reproductive choice.  Not that these fights haven’t taken place in the West, but the character of the movement that is created is such that the struggle looks more like women clamoring to keep their roles as mother and wives, they just want more power given to those roles.  Whereas, women in West fought for the choice to abandon those roles (example:  look at the value judgments we have about "working moms" and "stay-at-home moms").  In the West, the ultimate feminist fighter was someone who had a powerful career, no children and no husband to chain her to the house.  Third World women’s movements were more about power to wifing and mothering roles, and the freedom to work or earn money outside the home—financial autonomy.  Western feminism has often tried to “liberate” women it feels are “oppressed” and many non-Western women have felt that patronizing because someone outside has told them their lives are unfulfilling, made a judgment about the quality of their lives and situations without asking them.  Western feminism has told women they need to stop having babies, that they need to enter men’s jobs, that their traditional knowledge is ignorance, their commitment to households and domesticity is non-progressive, and that they are sexually constrained.  This is in sharp contrast to the Western woman (read: white) as educated, modern, having control over bodies and sexualities, and decision making freedom.  In essence, all women are oppressed and oppressed in the same way.  (Taken almost straight from Mohanty.)

What is wrong with the mango tree statement is that it is said in the spirit of Western feminism; that the fact that women do all the men do nothing is not only true, but that it is unfulfilling for the woman, that she has no other options, no power to change it, and so we have to do it for them.  And that men are somehow complicit in all this.

This isn’t to say that all is hunky-dorey and that everything is equal.  Of course it isn’t.  Women and girls are at a severe disadvantage in many ways, are victimized in many ways, and there are men who are scoundrels and no friend to women or their rights.  They are at a disadvantage based on traditional beliefs about education, opportunity, and gender roles which are only now beginning to change.  Women are forced into powerless situations, girls are preyed upon, but show me a society where that isn’t the case.  It doesn’t mean our Western ideas are better at fixing the problem or all-knowing of it.  My struggle is to decide whether the situations I witness are isolated incidents, the blame resting on the individuals involved or whether the situation is indicative of a larger cultural problem that needs to be addressed.

I guess the key is fulfillment.  To make sure every girl has the opportunity to fulfill her own life whether that’s through school, marriage, motherhood, becoming the president of Ghana, or whatever she chooses.  Really, I think this culture tells girls that they can be and do anything, just not that it will happen for every girl. 

So, that said, it is my intention to organize a Women’s Empowerment workshop in Damanko where we discuss mostly rights and health; where women and their daughters can learn about opportunities and support systems available for their needs.  I think many women think they have less power than they actually do.  I’ll keep you posted.

"Successful Development" follow-up

How much does the lack of natural resources and/or cash crops for export affect this equation?

Wow.  Point to my mom for shooting out the highly loaded question.  So loaded, I couldn’t answer it in the “comment” section.  It needed a whole other blog post.  Not that I’m the reigning expert, but here’s what comes to mind.

So when international development first started receiving focus in the aftermath of WWII, there was a huge meeting in a place called Bretton Woods of all the rich, “developed” nations of the world to answer the question: how do we best eliminate poverty (with all these newly independent nations) so as to ensure greater global security (so nothing like the path from German poverty to fascism ever happened again)?  Their solution was to set up massive international lending bodies to (theoretically) develop the business and industry in these new countries.  Sounds great right?  Give some assistance, advice, hard cash to impoverished (and brand new) country governments to build up economies, markets, private businesses.  Poor people get jobs, global poverty is alleviated and people (poor and rich) make money.  It sounds great until you look at it more closely and see that it is “trickle-down economics” heart and soul.  If the business sector—the sector with cash got better, then so would everything else.  If people just had more money….  It’s a very Western—very American—way of looking at solutions to poverty and, hence, development.  The institutions created—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—existed to lend money to developing countries.  In order to receive their monies, like any lending institution, you had to play by their rules and the reigning belief in these large, international institutions, created and run by the rich, powerful nations of the world, was on expanding international markets and greater inclusion in them.  In order to get IMF money, developing nations had to enter the global market, whether they were ready for it or not.  This meant growing more cash crops for sale in international markets rather than for feeding their own people, selling their natural resources to the rich countries who consumed 25% of the world’s resources rather than selling them to their own people.  That was supposed to give them enough money to then buy the things they needed, including food and resources they had traditionally gotten for themselves.  This is unsustainable development at its finest, and only in the last 20 years have we really seen the problem.  Countries like Jamaica have been in debt to the IMF for so many years, they can’t climb out of it.  They used to be able to grow enough of their own food to feed their population, but now it can’t even compete in the global markets it was supposed to.  Now it’s sold its soul to the tourism industry.  All the money the IMF said it was supposed to make is not there, so what little money they do make has to go back to the IMF to pay for the loan rather than paying for stabilizing an education systems, a health care system, job creation, etc—all those things that contribute to building a structure in a country.  Now they’re one of the many countries clamoring for “debt forgiveness.”  For more, I encourage you to watch the VERY GOOD documentary Life and Debt.  The IMF and the World Bank forced countries to export their goods as the driver of development rather than “keeping it local”.  Which is really totally backwards, I think, from the rich countries.  When I think about the “successfully” developed countries I mentioned in the last post, I realize that these are all countries that import more than they export.  Have you ever heard that statistic—the richest countries in the world have 10% of the people and consume 25% of its resources?  It’s kind of old hat now.  If you (a country) don’t have natural resources to export, you don’t get any of the rich countries’ money, but then you’re not their slave either.  The institutions that were created to help countries help their people climb out of poverty, only succeeded in making them poorer.  These “successful” countries never had substantial help from them.  

Well, I hope that answers at least part of the question.

Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Number...whatever): Successful Development

So here's a question:  What does successful development look like?  During all of my literature research in graduate school, critiques of current development paradigms brushed a number of different themes such as:  a focus on boosting capitalist economic systems only widens the rich/poor gap, changing agricultural techniques are not congruent with the environment, development aid is another form of colonialism, development programs often marginalize women, the flow of information from North to South is unequal, development isn't a linear experience (i.e. barbarism to modernism), most development is not sustainable, etc, etc...  So, what does one nation/society have to do to develop successfully?  There are some national level success stories, but why isn't Ghana one of them?  It was supposed to be--everyone thought so.  During the wave of Independence in the 50s and 60s  when most African nations gained independence from their colonial masters who were ravaged by WWII, Ghana was christened the "gem of Africa."  I'm not exactly sure why; maybe it's because Ghana is one of only a few countries with no history of civil war since independence, or because Kwame Nkrumah--Ghana's first president--was this Obama-like, messianic leader, or maybe it's gold revenue was supposed to make it prosperous?  Whatever the case, Ghana was supposed to be the big brother that showed the rest of Africa how to do it.  So why, after 50 straight years of Peace Corps (Ghana being the first PC country thanks to good ol' Kwame) are we still here?  In a recent conversation with my district's Coordinating Director, he said there is a goal to make Ghana middle-income and out of "development country" status by 2020.  An ambitious goal by any standard.  These timelines are rarely met (think of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty by half by 2000--didn't even come close), but still, it's exciting to think about.  But why could some countries get there and not others?  Places like Japan, China, Bhutan, Singapore, and South Africa "developed" in the span of a single generation.  It seems that many countries providing the aid in the development of other countries--US, Britain, Germany, China, Japan, and the UN, countries from which the finances and expertise flow from and therefore have all or most of the power--have first tried to direct development by basing it on their own histories and models.  And since these countries have mostly developed via various industrial revolutions, they have tried to replicate it in the rest of the world.

I've been thinking on this linkage I've noticed between accelerated development and rights.  In Europe and America, during our Industrial Revolutions, we were "developing" and we were worshiping at the alter of "progress" without being real sure where we were going.  And we committed a lot of human rights violations on the way.  The large factories and businesses responsible for production worked people for long hours and little pay; they privatized everything making it harder for some to afford necessary services like healthcare; they kidnapped thousands of people, sold them, and kept them in forced labor so we could have cotton, sugar, and tobacco.  And we made other sacrifices:  we scarred the Earth in irreparable ways with our pollutants and digging for riches, gave up living in communities for more private and affluent suburbs, and squeezed out productive family farms for unethical industrialized meat farms and chemicalized plants, and the list goes on.

More recently developed countries--Japan, China, Singapore--have a slightly varying version.  The difference is the rights they take away and the fact that they have a nationalized game-plan.  Their development is all top down, not in the establishment of large-scale private enterprise.  It has an amazingly organized structure and requires total obedience.  Culturally, these societies are already fit for these hierarchical development plans; they don't have the same problem with authority that Western nations do.  In one generation Japan  went from being gutted by the world's first atom bomb to the technological powerhouse it is today.  Granted it was already on it's way there before WWII, but still, that's quite a turnaround.  China had its Cultural Revolution which brought Communism, and Singapore had it's own Cultural Minister.  These countries' governments came up with a plan and demanded complete obedience to them.  Right to free speech or dissent was the first thing to go, next the freedom from Big Government and too many Thou Shalt Not rules, then the right to choose many important things in your life: the number of your children, the career or your choosing, your residence, etc.  Then come the other sacrifices:  traditional customs are devalued and eliminated, rituals are lost, languages go extinct, and lifestyles change.  Japan lost the noble samurai, teahouses and geishas; China lost a lot of music and art.  Grandparents grew up in villages, grandchildren in cities.  It's like countries have growing pains (South African apartheid example?).  The pattern seems to be that in order for desired development to occur, a whole generation has to be sacrificed--have their rights taken away and work doubly hard so their children see the benefit, not them--and be on board with it before their children start squawking about growing up in repressive regimes.  Is that what's happening in Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria right now?  Discuss.

Next on this vein:  Bhutan and the idea of Gross National Happiness as a legitimate measure of development. I also have one about gender (finally).