Between one man and one woman

The Tanzanian villagers that Karimu works with often downplay the indispensable contributions of our full Board and our scores of volunteers.  The people of Dareda Kati tend, a little embarrassingly, to see Karimu as like a traditional marriage: as, fundamentally, between one man and one woman.

I suspect the villagers’ knowledge that Marianne and I have been married for many years, and that three of our children have visited Dareda Kati, has a lot to do with their over-identification of Karimu with us.  Rural Tanzania is a place where life without a family is undreamed of, unless that dream is the nightmare of being orphaned.  With four children, Marianne and I fall one or two below the average for Dareda Kati, but at least we make the charts.

Along with the villagers’ satisfaction with this traditional marriage come certain traditional expectations.  One of these was underscored by a recent e-mail from our Tanzanian Board member, the extraordinarily efficient Joas Kahembe.

Joas was reporting on a misunderstanding among the Tanzanians about who would benefit from Karimu’s next clean-water project.  The Chairman of the Dareda Kati Council, a man named Barnabas, emphasized the significance of his hike, two years ago, through the mountains immediately above the village.  Its goal had been for Barnabas, and some Karimu people who hiked with him, to identify possible sources of water for Ufani Primary School and for other parts of the village.

Karimu succeeded in bringing clean water to Ufani School last year.  In the view of Barnabas, therefore, those other parts of Dareda Kati must be the intended beneficiaries of the next Karimu water project.

It upset Barnabas that people from a neighboring village, Aiyesam, were claiming this next water project for one of their schools, Bacho Primary.  Since Karimu had never done any work in Aiyesam, how could this be?

Although Joas believed Barnabas was wrong, he wasn’t sure.  He told Barnabas what he thought could explain Karimu’s sudden interest in Aiyesam, but he also e-mailed Marianne and me for confirmation:

“Marianne became compassionate with the Bacho Primary School pupils when you saw them drinking dirty water from the nearby stream and decided to provide them with clean water.”   

This is part of the truth.  Marianne and I visited Bacho Primary School two years ago and again last year, both times with other Karimu volunteers, including, in 2011, our Board member, Dr. Susan Hughmanick.  Peggy Seltz, Ed Glysson, and Linda Presser may have been with us in 2011, and our older daughter, Greta, last year.

I’m sure I’ve left some people out from both years, and I apologize to them.  I don’t remember all of the faces, but I remember vividly that none of us enjoyed the spectacle of the filthy water that pooled just below Bacho Primary.  This would have been the only water available to any schoolchild too tired for the strenuous climb into the mountains above the school, where cleaner water can be found.

Joas told Barnabas that Marianne became compassionate because, in the village, she is Mother Marianne.  I am Father Don, so my responsibility is not to become compassionate. My job is to listen reasonably to Marianne’s impassioned pleas for the projects requested by the villagers.  Then I must choose this project or dismiss that one or say maybe to these others, based on a rational assessment of Karimu’s capabilities.

Oh, well.  It’s probably less important to try to explain to the villagers where Karimu’s head and heart lie than to make sure that Karimu has both a head and a heart, and that these work in tandem.

Karimu’s method

The first four paragraphs below are drawn from this blog’s About the author page.  The thoughts in these paragraphs are poor orphans, abandoned on that page almost as soon as I started the blog, three years ago.  But I hope that in three years I have matured enough as their father to go back to them in order to help them grow:

My wife, Marianne, and I lead volunteers to the Tanzanian village of Dareda Kati every year, with the intention of bringing its people improved education and healthcare and whatever else will be needed to lift them permanently out of poverty.

Unfortunately, we are hindered by ignorance and lack of resources—our own ignorance and lack of resources.  Marianne and I can lay no claim to certain knowledge of how to end poverty, which seems to have eluded the entire development community.  I received my academic training in Western philosophers like Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche, while Marianne studied poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, and William Carlos Williams.  Our training, as well as our inclinations, led to careers first in higher and then in secondary education.

Only when we were in our fifties did we blunder, by way of unexpected friendship with a few African villagers, onto the minefield of international development.  Even the name we gave to the nonprofit that we established in 2008, the Karimu International Help Foundation, points to our ignorance: having had little or no prior involvement with the nonprofit world, we did not know that a foundation is supposed to have an endowment.  But Karimu lives hand-to-mouth on the generosity of its donors, endowed only with respect and friendship for the people of Dareda Kati.

As confessed nonexperts, we have hazarded a guess that ending poverty might have something to do with spending money wisely.  If one can justly accuse the global development community of spending foolishly, as many observers do, then at least Marianne and I and Karimu possess very little that we could misspend.

The previous four paragraphs differ only a little from what I’ve had on my About the author page ever since I created it.  Although the modesty is genuine, I see now that it can come across as passive/aggressive: poor us, the down-at-the-heels amateurs, explaining to the trained, well-funded, slick professionals how they should do their jobs.  Any international-development professionals who happened to read what I wrote three years ago could be forgiven for thinking that they detect a note of cheap anti-intellectualism.

But anti-intellectual is pretty close to the last thing I want to be.  Study and reasoned discussion of what does and doesn’t succeed in development work are necessary, and they often inform Karimu’s choices.  In 2010, we based our decision to give away mosquito nets, rather than to charge a small fee, on research inspired by Esther Duflo, of MIT. And our gradual movement into other kinds of development work in addition to building schools, which is what Karimu began with, was originally provoked by Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia, who has argued that improvements in education, healthcare, physical infrastructure, agriculture, and access to clean water are mutually supporting, and stand or fall together.

The truth, however, is that Duflo and Sachs and their respective supporters and critics live in the world of international development in a way that Marianne and I, and the rest of us at Karimu, do not.  For Duflo and Sachs and others like them, inhabiting the world of international development means examining countless models of poverty eradication, designing and applying models of their own, sifting through volumes of evidence, and arguing—sometimes not impersonally enough—with one another.  Except for the arguing (also sometimes not impersonally enough), this does not look very much like what happens at Karimu.

Development professionals need to maintain a certain intellectual distance from the poor whom they study.  They need to do this because there are, at least, many hundreds of millions of people who live in the kind of poverty that Karimu finds in Dareda Kati.  Duflo and Sachs and the others want to end that kind of poverty for all of the millions.  If they succeed, this will obviously be a good thing, so their goal justifies the intellectual distance that their studies require.

These studies might make it possible to help millions of people, or even billions.  But it is not possible to be a friend to millions of people.

On the other hand—as Marianne and I, together, wrote in this space not long ago (http://dstoll49.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/exit-strategy/)—Karimu has friends in Dareda Kati.  Dr. Susan Hughmanick, a Karimu Board member who will travel to the village for the third time in June and July, has friends there.  So do Anne D’Zmura and Peggy Seltz, who will also make their third visits to Dareda Kati this summer, and Cassandra Babcock, who may need to pay down her student loans before she can go back for a fifth time.  And so do dozens of other two-time and even one-time Karimu volunteers, who have found that enduring friendship, like a flower refreshed by the spring rain, only needs a few days to bloom.

Because Karimu’s work rests on a foundation of friendship, the “method” that guides our development projects is simple and intuitive: we trust our friends.

Many of our thank you letters to donors include some version of the following sentence: “Karimu’s volunteers are committed to making certain that all donations go toward completion of projects requested, and worked on, by the villagers themselves; we believe the people of Dareda Kati understand their own needs far better than any outsiders could.”

I’m not sure this is true in the strictest sense, because people frequently misunderstand their own needs.  But we owe our friends a depth of trust that we would not extend to just any people, and which does not depend on the assumption that our friends are perfectly wise.

This doesn’t only mean that Karimu projects originate with the villagers.  Trusting them also means not worrying when a given project isn’t finished when we are there, since we believe the villagers will finish it after we depart.  Trust means wiring thousands of dollars to Joas Kahembe, the Tanzanian supervisor of most of our projects, or to Daniel Amma, the Ufani School teacher and also the treasurer of the village’s farming collective, months before we can visit their country.  We do this because we believe they will spend the money just as intelligently as we would, or no more foolishly than we would.

What Karimu does should never be confused with the scientific development work that professionals like Esther Duflo are working so hard to refine, and which I greatly respect. But then, most of life is not science.

If you ever pass through Idyllwild. . .

Last August 21, a couple of days after Karimu’s annual three-week trip to Tanzania had ended, I posted the following:

“After the good news we received last week about Ufani School’s new clean-water system, today’s visit to Bacho Primary School was an eye-opener.  Bacho School lies perhaps two miles from Ufani, and its water situation is grim.  A muddy creek that flows past the school on its downhill side furnishes water for a dusty garden.  The garden (if calling it that is not too grand) seems to be a source of pride: several dozen students had assembled during their vacation to carry buckets of water uphill to the garden from the creek.

“However, the closest source of more-or-less drinkable water is on the school’s uphill side, a steep mile and a half toward the plateau above.  On a typical day, Head Teacher Stephen Nakei sends fifteen or twenty of the school’s two hundred and fifty students on a trek up to the water source, carrying buckets.  Needless to say, the water is not disinfected.

“Karimu spent roughly $4,000 on Ufani School’s water system.  A comparable system for Bacho School might cost several thousand more, since the water will need to be piped a much greater distance.  But I don’t think Karimu can walk away from this need.”

Lori Ferro helps run Café Aroma, in Idyllwild, California, an hour’s drive and a mile in elevation above the austere beauty of the Palm Springs desert.  Lori also refused to walk away from Bacho School.  With no hesitation, she greeted the proposal for a Karimu fundraiser to bring water to Bacho School with an offer of twenty percent of all proceeds earlier this week, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  Lori promised that the owner, Hubert Halkin, and the operating manager, her husband, Frank Ferro, would go along.  She was right.

Karimu had previously held a number of fundraisers in restaurants.  In none of those cases did the owners even come close to the generosity shown at Café Aroma.  It often filled up during the past three days, so twenty percent of the proceeds will be substantial.

Café Aroma’s outstanding food was complemented on the first night, May 7, by the explosive jazz fusion of Paul Carman’s saxophone, Marshall Hawkins’ upright bass, and Najite Agindotan’s Nigerian drums.  Paul, Marshall, and Najite donated all of their tip money—amounting to several hundred dollars—to Karimu.

The villagers and the Karimu volunteers will have their hands full this June and July.  They will build another teachers’ duplex for Ufani School, as well as a bridge across the river that floods dangerously every rainy season, several hundred yards below Ufani.

But we will certainly make enough time to hike up the Rift Valley escarpment that towers above Bacho School in order to work out, along with a Tanzanian hydraulic engineer, the best way to pipe water down to its students.  Within several months after our trip, the school will get its water, thanks mainly to the big hearts that we found at Café Aroma.

So, in case you ever pass through Idyllwild, I have a restaurant recommendation for you.

Bumps

For the last three rainy seasons, storms straight out of the Book of Genesis have repeatedly pounded East Africa.  The rains have wiped out bridges, roads, homes, and crops.  Sometimes they have taken the lives of animals and humans.  The problem of above-average rainfall has often been exacerbated by heavy winds.

The extreme weather has not spared Tanzania.  This past January 29, during a span of only eight hours, five inches of rain slammed the Singida Region, immediately southwest of the Manyara Region, in which the village of Dareda Kati lies.  In the Manyara Region itself, on March 30, flooding swept away a handful of houses, though apparently without causing any deaths.

However, during one weekend late in April, the rains eased up long enough to permit two engineers from Bridging the Gap Africa to visit Dareda Kati, whose people desperately need the kind of small bridge that Bridging the Gap has built dozens of times in Kenya, Tanzania’s neighbor to the north.  Unluckily, the soft soil turned out to have much less anchoring capacity than the lead engineer, Nate Bloss, had grown used to seeing from his work in Kenya.

But this came as a surprise, rather than as an insurmountable obstacle.  Nate and a Kenyan colleague, Sylvester Ouko, have since designed a suspended bridge that will stretch about thirty or thirty-five yards from end to end.  Building it may cost Karimu slightly less than the $10,000 that Bridging the Gap had estimated when they possessed only oral descriptions of the site.

The founder of Bridging the Gap Africa, Harmon Parker, plans to build the bridge in late June and early July, when forty Karimu volunteers will be in Dareda Kati.  Bridging the Gap will fabricate the entire bridge in Nairobi and then truck its parts into Tanzania.  These will include steel towers, steel hangers, steel steps, wire rope, and planks.

Harmon worries that transporting the parts across the border will be a bigger challenge than the construction itself because of the corruption of Kenya’s border officials, who gave Nate and his party a hard time during their recent border crossing.  We have similar concerns about the border officials on the Tanzanian side.

Apart from the issue of corruption, legitimate import taxes might be payable on the bridge parts when they enter Tanzania, where Karimu lacks the tax-exempt status that it has earned in the United States.

We could try to make the argument that the bridge will be built on behalf of Ufani Primary School.  This is only a half-truth, since it will also benefit many villagers who have nothing to do with the school.  Yet, despite the fact that Ufani is a government-registered school, committed to the national curriculum, it may nevertheless have no tax exemption.

There is no doubt that the villagers, Bridging the Gap Africa, and Karimu will build this bridge, even if, on the road to its completion, we get shaken up by a few bumps we still can’t see.

Stay tuned. . .

Exit strategy

(My wife, Marianne, and I wrote this post together.)

We are getting ready for our seventh trip to Tanzania, and the sixth trip on which Karimu (www.karimufoundation.org) volunteers will accompany us.  This June we will travel with thirty-eight volunteers, whose ages range from the mid-teens to the mid-sixties.  They come from all over California, except for the four Chinese students who attend high school in Southern California.

When the two of us first visited Dareda Kati in 2007, the villagers would occasionally see tourists (like ourselves) staying for a few days in the home of a farmer named Marceli.  The house in which he lives with his wife and their eleven children is extremely simple—like nothing that any of our volunteers could imagine living in.  It is built out of bricks, however, while all the other homes in the village are mud huts.  By comparison, Marceli is well off.

But now the villagers expect us to arrive every year, along with many other mzungus (“foreigners” in Swahili).  Even though our time in the village is short, a lot gets done.  As we write this post, two engineers from Bridging the Gap Africa (http://www.bridgingthegapafrica.org/) are in Dareda Kati, having driven there all the way from Nairobi, Kenya, a couple of days ago.  They are surveying the site where our volunteers will help the villagers build a permanent footbridge so that many hundreds of people will no longer be cut off from medical care, education, and supplies by the torrential rains that hit East Africa every March and April.

We also hope to build another modest teachers’ duplex at Ufani Primary School, so that the government will send two more teachers.  Its classes are overcrowded because so many parents want to send their children to the school that the villagers and Karimu volunteers have renovated.  Ufani has become known for its excellent teachers and for high scores on the nationally-administered exit exam that offers Tanzanian children their only chance to qualify for secondary school.

The numbers of people who want to travel with us have grown, and so has the variety of our projects.  Now and then, someone will ask us if we envision a time when we will no longer travel to the village, or if we have an exit strategy.  These questions reflect the belief that development work should aim to create a self-sustaining community.

The success of Ufani School’s students, the appetite of its teachers for ongoing professional development, the gradual extension of pipes carrying clean water to every part of the village, the improved medical facilities, and the health of a handful of small business cooperatives, like the HIV patients’ chicken farm, all point to the villagers’ own determination to become self-sustaining.  This supports our hope that the need for Karimu’s presence will disappear some day.

But when is the right time to exit a friendship?  When is the right time to tell friends that we no longer intend to visit them?  When is the right time to tell friends that we have no more need to enjoy their company or to walk and eat and talk with them?

Last August, Paul Yoronimo, Ufani School’s Head Teacher, reminisced about our first visit to Dareda Kati.  He reminded us of when it came time to say goodbye to the teachers who, in less than a week, had become our friends.

“Don, I know you did not want to raise our hopes that you would return.”

He paused.  Paul wishes he could speak English better than he does, so he speaks slowly and carefully in the attempt to do his best.

“I think you were sad, but you did not want us to see.  You held your body and your face like this.”

Paul stiffened, making his face into a mask.

“You said, ‘We cannot come back.  This trip cost Marianne and me a great deal of money, and we are not rich.  But we promise that we will try our best to raise money for your school.’”

Paul relaxed.

“Do you remember what happened next?”

Neither of us could say a word to him.

“Don, I reached over to you and put my hand on your arm.  I looked you in the eye and said, ’But you belong to our family now.  You have entered into our hearts.  You must come back.’”

We will.

Some good news and some bad news

The engineers from Bridging the Gap Africa (http://www.bridgingthegapafrica.org/) have sent some good news: they might visit Dareda Kati Village in less than a week in order to plan the footbridge that villagers and Karimu (http://www.karimufoundation.org/) volunteers will build this June and July.

Harmon Parker, founder of Bridging the Gap Africa, reports from Kenya that the flooding there has already caused a lot of destruction, misery, and even death.  Although the conditions in Dareda Kati do not seem to be that extreme, its people are nevertheless thrilled to know that the rainy season of 2013 will be the last one in which rising waters swallow their existing, tiny bridge and slice the village in two, keeping some teachers and many children from going to school and making it impossible for many sick people to get treatment.

However, some very bad news seems to be coming out of a different part of Tanzania, more than a hundred miles directly north of Dareda Kati.  The central government of President Jakaya Kikwete may be preparing to evict large numbers of Maasai from their land in the Loliondo District, which links the two crowning jewels among East Africa’s priceless wildlife treasures, the Ngorongoro Crater (visited by Karimu volunteers every year) and the Serengeti Plain.

Apparently, the Kikwete government purports to justify the evictions as a conservation measure that will prevent overgrazing by the Maasai’s cattle.  But the Maasai themselves, along with representatives of NGO’s active in the area, challenge the government’s assertion that their traditional pastoral lifestyle poses an environmental threat.  With the Maasai out of the way, the Ortello Business Corporation, an organizer of luxury safaris based in the United Arab Emirates, would profit from unrestricted access to one of the world’s most abundant hunting grounds.  Both the Maasai and the NGO’s insist that the Kikwete government is merely seeking a share of that profit, at tragic and incalculable costs to both the human and the animal residents of the Loliondo District.

There is strong evidence that the Kikwete government can be forced to back down in the face of international pressure.  An article that appeared last week in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/30/maasai-game-hunting-tanzania) explains the crisis at greater length.  The article will also point you toward the international advocacy group Avaaz (http://avaaz.org/en/save_the_maasai/?slideshow) in case you want to help exert some of that pressure.

We’ve met our match

Earlier this week, an extraordinarily generous donation of $5,000 by The Bright
Horizon Fund at the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County enabled Karimu (www.karimufoundation.org) to match the $20,000 grant promised by the Santa Cruz, California company, Quantaphy.  Quantaphy’s owners, Ken Terry and Debbie Burns-Walton, had originally set a deadline of midnight on December 26, but they gave us a few extra weeks because they believe in the value of Karimu’s work.

In the very near future, the focus of that work will be on construction of a new bridge to connect the two halves of Dareda Kati Village: the half that includes Ufani Primary School and the half that includes Ayalagaya Secondary School.  As I wrote in my last post (http://dstoll49.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/a-bridge-for-the-village/), the present bridge is made unusable by the drenching rains of March and April.  During those two months—and sometimes even for longer, since the wet season can stretch into May—many children and teachers often cannot get to school and many sick people cannot get to the public health clinic.

But now Bridging the Gap Africa (http://www.bridgingthegapafrica.org/), an Ohio-based nonprofit, will supply the expertise to complement Karimu’s funds, as well as the labor of our volunteers and of the villagers.  The little footbridge that now vanishes beneath rain-swollen waters every March will be a memory by March of 2014.  Since 1997, Bridging the
Gap Africa founder Harmon Parker has built almost fifty bridges in rural Kenya, becoming one of the top ten CNN Heroes of 2010.  He will make the long drive from his home in Nairobi during the upcoming rainy season to get a clear picture of the length and strength required by a new bridge.  Barring unforeseen problems, the building will start when Karimu’s volunteers arrive in Dareda Kati at the end of June.

Ken and Debbie, the anonymous donor-advisors of The Bright Horizon Fund, and everyone else whose generosity has made the new bridge possible should know that Karimu has no intention of stopping with the bridge.  This past Sunday, Karimu President Marianne Kent-Stoll and I enjoyed a long Facebook conversation with Martina Hando, the nurse who has run the public health clinic in Dareda Kati ever since Tanzania’s central government moved the clinic’s doctor to a big city.  Martina wants to expand the clinic and also build a modest house for a doctor to live in.  Just as the duplexes that Karimu builds for teachers at Ufani and Ayalagaya Schools help the villagers make their case to the government that teachers will want to stay in the village, such a house would make a strong argument for Dareda Kati’s ability to keep a doctor.

Besides a new bridge, the villagers need water supplied to Bacho Primary School, solar power for Ayalagaya Secondary School, and more textbooks and another teachers’ duplex for Ufani Primary School.  We do not yet have enough money to satisfy these needs, never mind to achieve what Martina dreams of.

It’s an important dream, however, so Marianne and I will spend part of our time in Dareda Kati this June and July looking at what and where Martina hopes to build, and thinking about how we can raise the necessary money.