Wading Through Words

Wading Through Words

For seven years I kept a diary of my experiences while I was in Africa, sometimes only a couple of lines but on occasion, several pages. Often I lacked the time to write fully while other times I did catch up. I decided to start typing out the diaries because my left-handed scrawl is pretty much unreadable. It is an exercise for my sons and their children because nine volumes of my writing would be like trying to decipher The Egyptian Book of the Dead! I began a four years ago and I am about two thirds through volume two.

Will anyone be interested enough to read them? Well when I wax lyrical about Tanzania, within thirty seconds 99% of people’s eyes glaze over, but some are interested and a few have even been motivated.

I have recently typed a couple of things that I will share but need a fuller explanation, which I will attend to shortly.

My Africa experience had a less than auspicious start but perhaps this will set the stage to help with the understanding of whatever may follow.

I was assigned the lofty role of Environmental Co-ordinator for an NGO I will call Hifadhi, which comprised of a director, secretary and a seldom seen treasurer. Their funding was provided by our government including special funds for our accommodation and to run the Hifadhi-planned project.

Handing out large sum of money was not wise because the director and secretary set up a bar-cum-restaurant ‘as a fundraising project for the NGO’ but was not mentioned in their request for funds.

These guys were writing funding proposals for various projects using seriously inflated pricing. Not satisfied with pocketing any surplus, they started the projects by spending the very minimum and then using free village resources. In the end I took the projects over and complete them.

The first hiccup we faced was our accommodation which never eventuated, so we were given half of the director’s house – sectioned off for adequate privacy. With meager furniture we lived happily out of our suitcases for two years.

A young, bright American woman requested to work with us and we soon found the flaws in the Hifadhi organisation. My co-worker, Joshia, a local who I was supposed to train showed great promise and the three of us made a good team. The only thing was that we could not wheedle funds from the director to carry out any projects.

So we set up a tree nursery with materials that I scrounged and seed that we collected, but after three months, we needed to be out in the rural villages with trees.

Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying my experience and the director’s family were a delight, Joshia’s young family were too, as were most of our neighbors. 

Finally Hifadhi admitted a total lack of funds - the bar was just ticking over and managed to pay a small irregular stipend to Joshia.  

I took the bull by the horns and applied for funds to run my own project* – without doing so was a wasted opportunity for us, the Agency and our two valuable cohorts.

*Projects should be owned by the target populations, what I mean is that the responsibility for the funds would be mine.

With funds sourced [sounds easy], there were another two lucky breaks. The Agency was able to supply a vehicle. Humble as it was, the little Maruti was a wonder. And the New Zealand government funded an assistance project for village primary schools.

Hifadhi had been carrying out environmental projects by way of village seminars and attracting participants with a food handout and was not effective.

The assistance project for primary schools was to supply desks [kids were sitting on rocks], text books [up to six students were sharing an out of date text book], teachers’ tables and chairs, cupboards [to store the text books], science kits, blackboard paint, chalk and slates. Other Agency volunteers could or would not use their allocation of schools, so I took them over which gave us access to the schools and cemented our relationship. Schools usually had areas suitable for tree planting so we carried out seminars and supplied trees to plant. Once the kids knew how to care for trees, we were able to send some home with the kids to be planted on family plots. We carried out follow-up inspections to make sure the trees were cared for appropriately.

Once the village governments saw the effectiveness of what we were doing in the schools, they wanted to come on board and usually supplied a meal for us!

I was careful not to fall out with Hifadhi, and made sure they received appropriate kudos, but it was by no means plain sailing.

My diary rewrite continues.