Training | 2009.11.08
Two years on, Katine offers much to celebrate – and much to feel frustrated about | Madeleine Bunting
The scale of poverty in rural Africa remains hard to grasp, yet the human connection, so elusive at home, is palpable
Every time I visit Katine , in north-east Uganda, an image remains in the mind for months afterwards. In May, it was a long queue of girls laughing and chatting as they waited at a dirty water pump for hours to fill their jerrycans. In September, it was the eager face of an 18-year-old boy who proudly showed me his school report and told me how it took him three and a half hours to walk to school – and three and a half hours back. I looked with incredulity at the teachers\' praise for his schoolwork. When could he find time to do his homework?
Amid all the statistics that development projects produce – immunisation rates, numbers of malaria nets distributed – it is these encounters that bring you up short and leave you profoundly shaken. How can one look into the eyes of a woman trying to care for a disabled child with no medicines and feed all her children with little food? Global injustice seen this close is terrifying, because you share so much – your humanity, your gender, your mothering – and yet the disparity between your lives is grotesque. You cannot conceive of her suffering and struggle, she cannot conceive of the comfort and convenience of the life to which you will return.
The contrast between the mud huts of Katine under the vast skies of Uganda and, a few hours later, the crowded duty-free shops of Kampala and Nairobi airports never gets easier to explain or justify to oneself.
It\'s been two years since the Guardian launched its rural development project with Amref (the African Medical Research Education Foundation) and the 25,000 residents of Katine, and for the anniversary there is plenty to celebrate: better access to clean water, lower levels of infant diarrhoea and malaria, better enrolment figures and exam results – as Patrick Barkham will report later this week in G2. There is also plenty to still feel frustrated about: not enough access to clean water; the schools struggle with an enormous task to educate hundreds of children with few textbooks, desks, little chalk or paper; and the health clinic\'s supplies of medicines are erratic.
There are also the events that are chilling. This year Farm Africa worked with farmers, providing new seed varieties to help boost yields and increase disease resistance. A few months ago there was a lot of enthusiasm, with new plans for better storage facilities (40% of Africa\'s harvest is lost – it rots or is eaten by rodents – because of inadequate storage). But the rains never came, and the small plants withered in the fields. The Ugandan government is distributing mugs of porridge to children in schools to ensure malnutrition rates don\'t soar. Everyone in Katine is hungry. Now, there are predictions of heavy flooding. No one can remember weather like this. As Camilla Toulmin\'s new book, Climate Change in Africa ,warns, the hardest hit will be the world\'s most vulnerable.
So the record is mixed. Development is a difficult business, with frequent setbacks, but of course that is not the message charities such as Comic Relief want to convey – with its relentless repetition of words such as "just", as in "just give us money", "just get out the credit card". We haven\'t ended poverty in the UK, despite some effort and considerable resources over many decades, so why do we imagine it will be any easier in a continent thousands of miles away of which we have so little understanding?
It\'s that lack of understanding that confronts me every time I step out of the 4x4 in Katine. How can I possibly imagine how the people greeting me see their lives? I know all too well – as do they – that they are the ones expected to make the gigantic jumps of cultural empathy to understand me. The local officials know how to talk to aid agencies, they\'ve picked up the acronyms and American-style managerial jargon, and you know that they are navigating several different cultural understandings far more effectively than you are.
My hunch is that it would take several months of living down one of those long, meandering dirt paths in the bush to begin to understand how a Ugandan woman sees her life. The first thing a westerner doesn\'t grasp is the scale of Africa; they always have a 4x4 to jump into, which will speed them to Kampala with its hospitals, shops and embassies. For millions of African women, every journey involves hours of walking. Three hours to a council meeting, two hours to visit an antenatal clinic, an hour to visit a friend to borrow a pen, an hour to get a malaria tablet. At least.
The second aspect of rural African poverty which is so hard to grasp is that most village women have very few manufactured belongings. A couple of dresses, a pair of flip-flops, a few mugs and bowls, a sliver of soap. You need to have nothing to know how precious an exercise book is. It\'s strange how difficult this scarcity is for us to imagine; on the Guardian\'s Katine website, bloggers urged Katine residents to build their own desks. "It\'s not difficult, I could teach them in a couple of days," asserted one of these armchair development advisers. But who buys the nails – possibly an eight-hour round shopping trip – and with whose money? Where do you get the planed wood in a country where wood is an extremely valuable resource? Furniture in Uganda costs far more than in Ikea. Who transports it to the remote school? Our lives are so conditioned on the availability of what we need that we have no inkling of what it might be like to live with constant unmet need.
Third, poverty is a vicious cycle. Around Katine, the farms are tiny and there is a lot of unused land. But to work more land requires more strength and energy, and many of the women are exhausted already by the harshness of their lives – childbearing, undernourishment, and the continuous labour of food preparation and gardening. Recurrent malaria and dysentery are further obstacles. Unable to work more land, they have little to sell and therefore little income for medicines they might need: it\'s a trap that is very difficult to escape.
Women\'s lives are unbelievably hard; we have been distracted by trivial issues of clothing and too many have been preoccupied with the mistreatment of women in Islamic countries, and it\'s been overlooked that in sub-Saharan Africa, many women are routinely subjected to domestic violence and rape. The causes of the violence are complex – men are going through their own crisis of identity and purpose – but the consequences for women of every age are evident: girls who cannot go to school for fear of "defilement" on their journey there, women beaten by their husbands for speaking up at a village meeting.
I\'ve learned a little of something I have seen a lot of: patience. Many of the women I have met have a capacity for endurance that is extraordinary. No doubt they know that frustration can send people mad – remember the last time you were exasperated by some incompetent service, and then multiply that a thousand times. In lives this constrained, survival requires a strict emotional economy. And yet, along with that so often comes a wonderful warmth and an irrepressible humour – so many smiles, so much laughter. It is why every time you leave, you immediately want to come back – because the immediacy and strength of human connection, often so elusive at home, is tangible there.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]katine-aid-africa-west-society
