Fitting in or dropping out? Caught between two worlds...
Fitting in or dropping out?
One month in Rwanda already, 5 weeks since I left Europe. I was swinging between feeling like i was fitting and at home, and feeling terrible lonely. The pining for home came in fits and starts, something as simple as entering a friends name in my mobile and seeing there name attached to a text took on great significance : it was the same name, the same phone, I could have been back at home but i wasn't and what's worse I might never again be. This wasn't true homesickness, I think if I could have been assured that I could go back to my life in Switzerland after my year here then I might not have had such pangs but the mere hint that THAT life could be lost forever or was going on without me was really painful. And more sadness hit, aggravated by the very limited contact I'd had from people back home. I fact in the first two weeks a high percentage of emails I received were total strangers, fan mail from an article I had published on a travel website. Was is the case that I'd moved so much I had nothing to go back to anywhere?
And yet it was only a few days since I'd been swanning around at the First Rwandan Conference on Information Technology like I owned the place. No one I met at the apres conference drinks really believed that I had only been working here for two weeks. Certainly not when i won a printer and definitely not when I was asked to chair the conferences closing session. The enormity and high likelihood of failure of the project I was working on hit during the conference. So many "IT for the masses" initiates like it had been a failure in a whole host of African countries, not to mention back home in Ireland. It was going to take something special to make it work and I was determined to make it work. No failures here, no siree, not on my watch.
Yet i was aware there were forces all around me that were not much indifferent to the project failing, it was very much wanted to succeed but shall we say, possibly indifferent to its impact.
In Ireland I had a part time job through out my five years at university. I worked with Travellers as an assistant teacher doing remedial style work. What I took away from that experience is that often governments/local authorities/donors want simply to be able to say, "We have spent X amount on travellers welfare". Cleansing their conscious by throwing money around without having the motivation to spend $5 on ensuring that $5,000 is spent effectively, working to the letter of the law rather than its spirit so to speak. However as I was in an advisory type role here, all I can do is point out the potential pitfalls of IT projects, if the powers that be chose to walk right into them, what could I do? Still the thought of being part of a failed project was a galling one. I hoped I was being too negative, I have that tendency.
Its always darkest before the dawn, so they say and I was certainly hoping so. Things were looking pretty dark for me in Rwanda. Work was a mess, so much to do and I hadn't an idea where to start and my boss kept putting off meeting with me. I know that its Africa and the speed of change here is (to paraphrase a compiler guru) "slower than continental drift", but upper management here recently spent two days in a meeting to discuss why targets aren't being met. I'd have suggested that maybe they weren't being met because management were spending days in meetings to discuss why progress was too slow.
Hmm...maybe its not so different to Europe here after all.
Life here was also getting me down. I have taken to not wearing my glasses when walking on the street in daylight. I'm not very short sighted and the slight blurriness means I can't make out facial expressions and the overall effect is to make the constant burn of 100's of pairs of eyes more bearable. It also helps that I have a theatrical nature that likes the spotlight, mais il y a quand meme des limites!.
Plus I was starting to have homicidal thoughts about the "Cent francs manger" brigade. This roughly translates as "Oh rich fat foreigner I wish to prey upon your post colonial guilt so that you will give me money which I am claiming I will use for the purchase of food". I don't mind beggars but I'm starting to really take exception to racist ones. Without exception they will only beg from Mzungos (white people). If they ever asked a Rwandan I might be inclined to give them something. The fact that I am paid at a similar level to Rwandans gives me scope for this moral outrage, but perhaps it would piss me off however much I was earning, I just might feel more guilty about it.
One evening I had a kid so young he could barely walk and probably couldn't yet speak Kinyarwanda, I think he didn't even reach as far as my knee. He followed us for about 10 mins repeating his "cent francs manger" mantra. When I got sick of it and made stabbing motions at the urchin with my umbrella, Gary nearly collapsed laughing. I told him I had visions of collecting a row of little creatures on my umbrella in a similar fashion, like on a brochette.
Gary is a lifeline, he is another volunteer and lives quite near me. He is a Canadian teacher and has spent over 20 years volunteering in various places in Africa, mostly during the 70's. He works as an Education Advisor, has been here about 18 months and shares the same evil and most certainly un-PC sense of humour as I do. Its a breath of fresh air in a world of pukily well intentioned, oh-so-sensitive development workers who are under the collective delusion that they are on the whole doing some good rather than serving whatever regime happens to be in power. Or even worse serving whatever is in the interest of the donor countries with the chequebooks. He who pays the piper calls the tune...as the saying goes.
I bumped into an ex-VSO while with Gary one day. The guy has in Rwanda for about three years I would guess and has probably used his end of service grant to finance to create a centre for street children in a rural town. As he stood there telling me with an earnest look and tone of voice about his centre, I couldn't help thinking " Ok, what you're doing is good, pouring your own money into it is very commendable, three years in Rwanda is tough by anyones standard and you are prepared to stay longer but COME ON, do you have to take yourself so seriously?"
I do wonder whether I'm just being cynical, being cynical is a path of least resistance it is en quelque sort the easy way out. For sure I have elements of the cynic but I don't think that's the whole picture, theres something in the earnestness that screams "Look how good I am, look how concerned I am, it's just oozing out of every pore". It's only a few steps away from "Look at all I'm doing for these people". And probably even less far from the kind of superior attitude I saw from returned volunteers on some of my training courses.
Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck between well intentioned development workers and well paid, usually cynical ex patriot types and both seem equally clique-ish and closed to me. My efforts to get a social life have been hampered by the cliquey nature of people here and by my salary. I can't afford regular outings to Mzungo hang outs and weekends away. Someone told me recently VSO were development workers of the fourth tier. The first tier being UN people with their western salaries and UN provided accommodation, jeeps and drivers. The German development agency here apparently also belongs to this tier. Between the 2nd and 3rd tier I didn't quite get the difference but they would be other aid agencies where people had only a much better lifestyle then they would have at home, as opposed to a drastically better one. And then there's us, who live like the well-off locals but still suffer the same electricity, water and public transport shortages as everyone else.
Other VSO volunteers have remarked that they can't understand how western development workers cope with their lifestyles as we already feel guilty enough about our 4th tier level of privilege when compared to what we see around us. Traditionally it was assumed that western workers would not come to developing countries without a lifestyle far above what most could hope for in Europe. But VSO and the likes have proved that wrong for decades. Nevertheless considering the problems I already face I can well see how people wouldn't stay in country for years on end without the means to insulate themselves in an ex-pat cocoon. Another argument is that with their enormous wealth they are not thrown up against this great disparity in lifestyles, not as much as those of us who have to walk though the streets of Kigali rather than be driven.
People who know me may wonder why I am putting so much emphasis on ex-pat/development worker circles in the hunt for a social life. Part of it is the "stranger in a strange land" phenomenon which happens all over the world. After two and a half years at a university in Switzerland, I knew half the faculty but among these I had only a handful of Swiss friends. And they were almost always the ones who had spent significant time abroad. However the larger part is due to race attitudes around here. On the whole, people do not want to know you for who you are so much as what you are (a white person). I guess this is what it is like to be super-rich and/or famous. And how do the super-rich and famous cope with this? Well, by hanging out almost exclusively with other rich and famous, at least among peers if people spend time with you its because they like you, as a person rather than as a status symbol or social accessory.
So far I have found the ex-pat scene less than friendly. As I arrived in Rwanda with only two other VSO volunteers, I haven't met many other of the 50 or so VSO people in the country. Consequently I am not in the loop for their group outings and holiday plans. Most are teachers which means they get longer holidays and plan around the school holidays rather than the meager office holidays. For instance in the upcoming Easter hols: the teachers have two weeks, I have two days. I don't appear to have a horrendous amount in common with many of the other volunteers I have met either. I can't put my finger on it but there seems to be a lot of self-satisfaction and political-correctness around not to mention what looks like the existence of well established groups of which I am not part. Of course, I may be wrong - I certainly hope so.
Notes
Travellers are a minority gypsy-like community.
Many do not travel very much these days but are housed in Traveller Settlements on the outskirts of towns or even, as in the case of Galway, poor areas which become prime real estate as the city grows. The houses are built and furnished by the local councils causing much bad feeling with the surrounding populations which are often not better off then the Travellers. During my time working in the community I heard several stories of Traveller families selling all the furniture in their house only to move on to another (furnished) settlement house in another area.
One month in Rwanda already, 5 weeks since I left Europe. I was swinging between feeling like i was fitting and at home, and feeling terrible lonely. The pining for home came in fits and starts, something as simple as entering a friends name in my mobile and seeing there name attached to a text took on great significance : it was the same name, the same phone, I could have been back at home but i wasn't and what's worse I might never again be. This wasn't true homesickness, I think if I could have been assured that I could go back to my life in Switzerland after my year here then I might not have had such pangs but the mere hint that THAT life could be lost forever or was going on without me was really painful. And more sadness hit, aggravated by the very limited contact I'd had from people back home. I fact in the first two weeks a high percentage of emails I received were total strangers, fan mail from an article I had published on a travel website. Was is the case that I'd moved so much I had nothing to go back to anywhere?
And yet it was only a few days since I'd been swanning around at the First Rwandan Conference on Information Technology like I owned the place. No one I met at the apres conference drinks really believed that I had only been working here for two weeks. Certainly not when i won a printer and definitely not when I was asked to chair the conferences closing session. The enormity and high likelihood of failure of the project I was working on hit during the conference. So many "IT for the masses" initiates like it had been a failure in a whole host of African countries, not to mention back home in Ireland. It was going to take something special to make it work and I was determined to make it work. No failures here, no siree, not on my watch.
Yet i was aware there were forces all around me that were not much indifferent to the project failing, it was very much wanted to succeed but shall we say, possibly indifferent to its impact.
In Ireland I had a part time job through out my five years at university. I worked with Travellers as an assistant teacher doing remedial style work. What I took away from that experience is that often governments/local authorities/donors want simply to be able to say, "We have spent X amount on travellers welfare". Cleansing their conscious by throwing money around without having the motivation to spend $5 on ensuring that $5,000 is spent effectively, working to the letter of the law rather than its spirit so to speak. However as I was in an advisory type role here, all I can do is point out the potential pitfalls of IT projects, if the powers that be chose to walk right into them, what could I do? Still the thought of being part of a failed project was a galling one. I hoped I was being too negative, I have that tendency.
Its always darkest before the dawn, so they say and I was certainly hoping so. Things were looking pretty dark for me in Rwanda. Work was a mess, so much to do and I hadn't an idea where to start and my boss kept putting off meeting with me. I know that its Africa and the speed of change here is (to paraphrase a compiler guru) "slower than continental drift", but upper management here recently spent two days in a meeting to discuss why targets aren't being met. I'd have suggested that maybe they weren't being met because management were spending days in meetings to discuss why progress was too slow.
Hmm...maybe its not so different to Europe here after all.
Life here was also getting me down. I have taken to not wearing my glasses when walking on the street in daylight. I'm not very short sighted and the slight blurriness means I can't make out facial expressions and the overall effect is to make the constant burn of 100's of pairs of eyes more bearable. It also helps that I have a theatrical nature that likes the spotlight, mais il y a quand meme des limites!.
Plus I was starting to have homicidal thoughts about the "Cent francs manger" brigade. This roughly translates as "Oh rich fat foreigner I wish to prey upon your post colonial guilt so that you will give me money which I am claiming I will use for the purchase of food". I don't mind beggars but I'm starting to really take exception to racist ones. Without exception they will only beg from Mzungos (white people). If they ever asked a Rwandan I might be inclined to give them something. The fact that I am paid at a similar level to Rwandans gives me scope for this moral outrage, but perhaps it would piss me off however much I was earning, I just might feel more guilty about it.
One evening I had a kid so young he could barely walk and probably couldn't yet speak Kinyarwanda, I think he didn't even reach as far as my knee. He followed us for about 10 mins repeating his "cent francs manger" mantra. When I got sick of it and made stabbing motions at the urchin with my umbrella, Gary nearly collapsed laughing. I told him I had visions of collecting a row of little creatures on my umbrella in a similar fashion, like on a brochette.
Gary is a lifeline, he is another volunteer and lives quite near me. He is a Canadian teacher and has spent over 20 years volunteering in various places in Africa, mostly during the 70's. He works as an Education Advisor, has been here about 18 months and shares the same evil and most certainly un-PC sense of humour as I do. Its a breath of fresh air in a world of pukily well intentioned, oh-so-sensitive development workers who are under the collective delusion that they are on the whole doing some good rather than serving whatever regime happens to be in power. Or even worse serving whatever is in the interest of the donor countries with the chequebooks. He who pays the piper calls the tune...as the saying goes.
I bumped into an ex-VSO while with Gary one day. The guy has in Rwanda for about three years I would guess and has probably used his end of service grant to finance to create a centre for street children in a rural town. As he stood there telling me with an earnest look and tone of voice about his centre, I couldn't help thinking " Ok, what you're doing is good, pouring your own money into it is very commendable, three years in Rwanda is tough by anyones standard and you are prepared to stay longer but COME ON, do you have to take yourself so seriously?"
I do wonder whether I'm just being cynical, being cynical is a path of least resistance it is en quelque sort the easy way out. For sure I have elements of the cynic but I don't think that's the whole picture, theres something in the earnestness that screams "Look how good I am, look how concerned I am, it's just oozing out of every pore". It's only a few steps away from "Look at all I'm doing for these people". And probably even less far from the kind of superior attitude I saw from returned volunteers on some of my training courses.
Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck between well intentioned development workers and well paid, usually cynical ex patriot types and both seem equally clique-ish and closed to me. My efforts to get a social life have been hampered by the cliquey nature of people here and by my salary. I can't afford regular outings to Mzungo hang outs and weekends away. Someone told me recently VSO were development workers of the fourth tier. The first tier being UN people with their western salaries and UN provided accommodation, jeeps and drivers. The German development agency here apparently also belongs to this tier. Between the 2nd and 3rd tier I didn't quite get the difference but they would be other aid agencies where people had only a much better lifestyle then they would have at home, as opposed to a drastically better one. And then there's us, who live like the well-off locals but still suffer the same electricity, water and public transport shortages as everyone else.
Other VSO volunteers have remarked that they can't understand how western development workers cope with their lifestyles as we already feel guilty enough about our 4th tier level of privilege when compared to what we see around us. Traditionally it was assumed that western workers would not come to developing countries without a lifestyle far above what most could hope for in Europe. But VSO and the likes have proved that wrong for decades. Nevertheless considering the problems I already face I can well see how people wouldn't stay in country for years on end without the means to insulate themselves in an ex-pat cocoon. Another argument is that with their enormous wealth they are not thrown up against this great disparity in lifestyles, not as much as those of us who have to walk though the streets of Kigali rather than be driven.
People who know me may wonder why I am putting so much emphasis on ex-pat/development worker circles in the hunt for a social life. Part of it is the "stranger in a strange land" phenomenon which happens all over the world. After two and a half years at a university in Switzerland, I knew half the faculty but among these I had only a handful of Swiss friends. And they were almost always the ones who had spent significant time abroad. However the larger part is due to race attitudes around here. On the whole, people do not want to know you for who you are so much as what you are (a white person). I guess this is what it is like to be super-rich and/or famous. And how do the super-rich and famous cope with this? Well, by hanging out almost exclusively with other rich and famous, at least among peers if people spend time with you its because they like you, as a person rather than as a status symbol or social accessory.
So far I have found the ex-pat scene less than friendly. As I arrived in Rwanda with only two other VSO volunteers, I haven't met many other of the 50 or so VSO people in the country. Consequently I am not in the loop for their group outings and holiday plans. Most are teachers which means they get longer holidays and plan around the school holidays rather than the meager office holidays. For instance in the upcoming Easter hols: the teachers have two weeks, I have two days. I don't appear to have a horrendous amount in common with many of the other volunteers I have met either. I can't put my finger on it but there seems to be a lot of self-satisfaction and political-correctness around not to mention what looks like the existence of well established groups of which I am not part. Of course, I may be wrong - I certainly hope so.
Notes
Travellers are a minority gypsy-like community.
Many do not travel very much these days but are housed in Traveller Settlements on the outskirts of towns or even, as in the case of Galway, poor areas which become prime real estate as the city grows. The houses are built and furnished by the local councils causing much bad feeling with the surrounding populations which are often not better off then the Travellers. During my time working in the community I heard several stories of Traveller families selling all the furniture in their house only to move on to another (furnished) settlement house in another area.
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