Tuesday, March 08, 2005
LARA CROFT IN CONGO
Humanitarian NGOs: Could do better !
By Louis Boël & Françoise Falaise
Is it civil war? Not anymore. Is it peace? Not yet.
We are in Maniema, in the heart of the equatorial forest. In the morning light, the scarves of mist raise slowly from the bushy darkness of the riverbanks. On the mighty Congo river, the long pirogues look surprisingly peaceful by the grace of the slow gestures and the natural elegance of their tall rowers, standing at both ends. Thanks God, we don't hear anymore the devilish staccatos of the automatic weapons. But there isn’t one day without passing by the slightly surrealist run of young soldiers jogging in the muddy potholes of Kindu streets. In the deep silence of their mourning, you can hear them panting at the rhythm of their trot. Every moment, four of them speed up a little, come in front and replace their friends carrying the stretcher. They bring a comrade, barely wrapped in a piece of cloth, to the cemetery. He probably felt under the hoe of a farmer, infuriated by the daily plundering, or hit by a stray bullet, or even, but it is doubtful today, in an accidental skirmish between a pack of mahi-mahi and some demobilized Rwandans, roaming astray.
It is not yet peace, but we can circulate in the borough without fear of insecurity : the 4x4, the trucks and the white armored vehicles are everywhere, sporting the blue flag of the MONUC (1). The Uruguayan, Swedish, Nepalese, South African, Chinese and other officers and soldiers are at every corner, either in deterrence patrols or involved in more colorful pacification activities: soccer matches or improvised carnivals. And yet, it only takes one group of mahi-mahi to cross the river and enter the town, in rags, breasts covered with talismans and munitions belts, to see everyone shutting away and double-locking doors and windows. Do they really come here for reintegrating the national army ? or to help themselves with food ? drinks ? …girls, maybe? And, if they do want to integrate the army, how will they react when they’ll know that, instead of the premium promised by the Government in Kinshasa, they will only get, at best, one blanket and some biscuits from the international relief agencies or the Red Cross?
They will keep their weapons, and the plundering will go on, mainly at night.
During the same time, the United Nations ensure to all, with their OCHA (2) office, freshly updated information about security. We learn of newly opened tracks and unsafe villages that we’d better avoid. And they provide the much needed coordination between their own humanitarian agencies and the NGOs taking part in the emergency operations and the progressive rebuilding of peace. Once a week, at least, they all meet at OCHA and inform each other. It does avoid duplicate work or, worse even, missed complementarities.
In these meetings you’ll meet a selection of the so called ‘local’ NGOs. Born from Congolese initiatives, regional or national, they all started as empty shells or, rather, as Christmas' socks, waiting for an evasive Santa Claus. Many are still waiting. Others received finances from various origins, variously disinterested. Some, among these, thanks to their knowledge of the region, became the preferred partners of the international NGOs (iNGOs). You will also come across the representatives of the big international agencies : MONUC, FAO, WFP, UNICEF, RED-CROSS. And also the ones from the iNGOs who are, by now, the recognized pillars of the humanitarian aid : Médecins Sans Frontières, CARE, OXFAM, MERLIN, and others, whose professionalism, experience and tried methods are generally guarantees of seriousness.
Finally, you’ll meet there the representatives of some less known iNGOs, some of which you would rapidly notice the weakness: their expat staff do need training.
Because, if it’s not yet peace, don’t make mistake, it’s already time for deals. And what will be the first market to take off after seven years of blockade and insecurity? The beer business? No, beer has never been out of stock, if you could pay. The tin ore of Kalima? No: for such activity, professional decision-makers must first compare risks and profits. And then, their teams will need time to reconstruct a network of reliable logistics.
No, the first markets are here, right now: the contracts for humanitarian aid.
In that race, the best iNGOs are those who arrived early, during the troubles. They know the region well and they have, on the spot, the equipment to repair the broken bridges, to be the first to arrive in the villages abandoned by the rebels, and to present to the signature of local authorities (village chiefs, priests, doctors,…) association agreements juicy for all.
And all contracts in American dollars, of course. The first result of the ‘Ugandan’ geopolitical move by the Americans was not exactly a loss for the USA, even if, under growing international pressure, Washington was forced to forego their conquest westwards. Already, all over Congo, the greenback is the trading currency. The entire Congolese basin, from the great lakes to Kinshasa, from Gbadolite to Mbuji-Mayi, drinks, travels, and gets paid for work and trade, in American dollars!
But nothing new in this: everybody is aware of the fact that humanitarian aid is, also, a business. And a hard currency one. Besides, how could we escape? Human beings… “neither angels, nor beasts…”
What hurts, isn’t the competition. The more adventurous will find the black diamond, fair enough! And the most efficient will earn more, bravo ! After all it’s only the big game of life, so let us play fair.
What makes the professionals cry, and our pen screech, is, for some of these teams, their amateurish incompetence and their apparent contempt for the most basic ethics.
And that is also contempt for the population they are supposed to help, and for the very ideal they profess and that keeps them alive and touring the world.
As for any good idea, when time is there to put it at work, the worst might happen.
Is it the eternal lure of profit? At the top of the ladder, probably yes, for a part at least. But it seems to be just as much the unfortunate consequence of a lack of clear awareness of their own thirst for an ideal and, even more, the clumsy haste to bring the entire dream onto the loom of reality. Why do these managers give away the jobs to field teams with shallow cultural roots, no historical references and poor basic grounding in their profession?
In the competition for maximum waste and mismanagement these iNGOs come hard on the heels of the BIG charity swindles of the world. And as they do represent us all, they cover us in shame.
In the middle of the 20th century, Italian movie makers staged the caricature of a furtive street vendor who flaunted, in a quick opening of his ample coat, a display of branded watches. The passer-by with the slightest sign of interest was surreptitiously jeweled on the wrist with a valueless copy. And, sure enough, he then had to pay for it, with good money, seriously risking, during the entire act, to further get his pockets picked !
Today, his grandsons present lots of highflying CVs to charities and financing organizations. Once they get the contracts, they replace the professionals by young incompetents, barely paid ‘au pair’. And, why not, after a few weeks they can terminate these at the end of their trial period and replace them by even less expensive pawns, encountered by chance on some African tracks or on the Web pages.
Contempt for the suffering people? Yes. Because to organize an emergency project, for example against the severely malnourished, and to replace nutritionists by nurses, or even by first-aid helpers, and to raise unemployed catechists into the position of ‘local nutritionists’, it really is, however harsh the words, to play with the life of children.
The methods to cure these kids, bring them back to life and give them a good chance to grow healthy, have been selected along the years by specialists and donors. They are fully tested and reliable. They do work, in a few weeks, but only if they are understood, supervised and checked by competent professionals.
Contempt also for all humanitarian ideals: these cooperants, badly recruited and poorly prepared, are left on their own, without instructions, without methods, often replacing on very short notice someone who couldn’t even take the time to pass the words and the files.
In these conditions, what else could they do than just create their own style, often doing a straight impression of the lead role in their favorite movies or video games?
And sadly, although they haven’t read neither Hemingway nor Romain Gary, they couldn’t find a better model than the hackneyed role of ‘the great white hunter’. Along too many years, this cliché kept distorting our dialogue with Africa. Will it ever stop?
To put it in today’s words, we should coin their role model ‘The Terminator of the humanitarian interference’ or better, as girls are often taking a large part in that game, ‘LARA CROFT IN CONGO’.
Sputtering on their trail bikes, VHF radio handsets at the mouth, striking a trooper’s pose with their war correspondent multi-pocket waistcoats, they twirl through the muddy tracks of the burg, splashing the kids who burst with laughs. Who, better than the African child, has the talent of making fun of everything, so ingenuously that the one hold up to ridicule doesn’t even realize?
All the day, they patrol in a futile attempt to ‘check everything’, as they say. Of course there are abuses, smuggled foods, cheated accounts or warped statistics. Neglect or incompetence. As they haven’t heard of the accounting and managing methods which allow such controls, they resort to coarse policing: riding fast they try to check all what’s going on and, pathetic, they preach to everyone basic honesty and genuine teamwork ‘for the sake of the children’. Bull!
Are they supervised, at least? Regional staffs do visit. They even visit often: MONUC flights are free for iNGOs, so one keeps busy traveling. But visits just happen, without preparation, without planning, without precise program, without assessment tools.
Once more, they will only roam, too fast, from one activity center to the next… and soon enough it will be time to drop by the local beer garden, meet their colleagues from other NGO’s and enjoy a few drinks before going home to sleep. Or stay more, for the ones who, shocked by the culture gap, the insecurity, or the lack of basic comfort in their life-base, won’t go to bed before getting knocked out by too much booze and bar talk.
Tomorrow will be another day. They’ll start it afresh: improvisation and motorbikes...
Unless they stay in bed with fever. Can anyone guess why on earth they don’t take any prophylaxis again paludism? Maybe another caricature of the colonial time veterans. Listen to them: they measure their honor and their ego to the number of malaria attacks they suffered…
So, have these NGOs failed the test? Are they showing too much amateurism to be taken seriously ? Yes. Back to the rifle drill, Lara! More karate practice! Return to the tatami, to the climbing wall, to the shooting range! And first of all go immediately back to the school bench: learn the language, damn it!
We do know the almost scholastic complexity of the Congolese dialectic, specially when it combines with the tricks and traps of the French language. We have enjoyed the fine art of the Congolese for dodging the difficult questions by talking our head off in the magical wealth of colorful details, polite diplomacy and hiatus in logic. Then, it’s hard to believe someone could even consider undertaking any emergency help without a serious command of the French language, or, better, of Kiswahili. Indeed, the dialogue is warped from the starting point: not only these populations are emotionally shaken by the civil war but they are among the poorest in the world. They are motivated, for their children and their family in the broad African sense, by vital emergencies that we simply can’t imagine because we have never encountered them. So, if on top of that we have to collaborate in a poor pidgin with imprecise vocabulary, all the misunderstandings, all the frustrations, all the failures are likely, not to say inevitable.
On an other hand, managing a project needs basic tools and methods. Without calling for all the techniques of Operational Research ( let’s admit it, we are not in the NASA!), the method, in its principles, remains a sure path to success: Definition of the Objectives, Assessment of the Means, Scenarios of predictable problems, Program planning, Critical Paths, Monitoring, and Evaluation of the results on the basis of measurable performances. You want it, you have it! The method is requested by all donors for the proposal papers of humanitarian projects. Why isn’t it applied to management of day by day operations? The corresponding training is well known and easy to arrange. It could, at low cost and without delay, form a part of a preparatory session, organized by the NGO itself or subcontracted, either in their Head Office or at their national coordination. What are they waiting for?
Methods, also, to avoid, at all cost, falling into the picturesque of African misery. We are no more in Lambaréné with Dr Schweitzer ! Although we could doubt it when visiting some health centers. Everywhere you look, all is covered in unspeakable filth. Few or no latrines. No facilities for showering, nor for washing up dishes, nor even for washing the babies ! Only a few plastic basins lying in the tall grass, without stands, without drainage. The foam mattresses stained with diarrhea and vomit, are just reused, after a short dry up in the sun.
Children suffering of extreme malnutrition are very weak and fragile, specially the youngest. Sometimes, at the crack of dawn, they are gone. Most often, they died from septicemia. It – is – a - scandal. Basic hygiene is not expensive and is not out of place in Africa. A few garden pipes, a handful of PVC valves, some whitewash, a little soap, small bed linen, that the mothers can wash every morning, will do it. And especially, tidiness, discipline and relentless reminders.
But grime, and the death it brings to these tiny babies, is no fate.
For our ‘shrimp cocktail’, in the baby shrimp nurseries of the aqua farms in Asia (and in Africa !), it is forbidden to go from one room to the other without sterilizing hands with a methanol spray. It doesn’t cost anything but it calls for method, care and discipline.
Could it be that Congolese kids do not deserve the same care and attention as baby shrimp? Is it asking too much effort?
The target is that these kids stop dying. Full stop.
The revolt against the injustice and the horror of the malnutrition of children, the emotion in front of the distress of these kids and their mothers, we all feel the burn of it. But Emergency is a question of methods, not feelings.
And methods again, for answering emergency without hesitation, without pondering, without stammering, without improvising every morning as if every day was starting from scratch. In short, emergency without loosing time! Why didn’t the managers of these iNGOs prepare a strategy of ‘blitz setting-up’ similar to what does exist for natural disasters? A lot of time could be saved by a preliminary visit and a few kits of well conceived equipment (life-base bathroom and kitchenette; office container; laminated instructions for all tasks and technical jobs; ready to use computerized forms for purchases and reports; communication and computer equipment pre-installed by professionals,…). Six months to one year projects can’t afford improvising their setting-up over five months before the team gets in cruising speed!
Let us summarize the objectives of the special training we suggest to our humanitarian Laras: efficiency of the communication, professionalism of the methods, perseverance of the discipline, realism of the objectives. All this in lieu of vibrating emotions and endless amateurish improvisation.
Let us go further… Transcultural communication is quick to teach us that words are little matter compared with non verbal messages, always referring to the cultural history of each of us. Messages that we won’t comprehend if we can’t set them back in their context. It is disappointing to realize that most of the personnel working for these NGOs, arrive there with no idea about the social, tribal or historical context of the very people they are supposed to help. Only one training day could be enough to hand down some basic elements. Could it help opening some dialogue between local people and expatriates? Something slightly deeper than the present deal which falls short from exceeding the blunt exchange: ‘money for picturesque’.
Let us dream straight out, now... A further training (maybe a second day…?) will usefully explain the philosophy and religion grounding of the traditions which are the humus and the blood of Central Africa.
Can we really help that society to take charge, and to adapt to the world around, if we haven’t tried to understand what is the N’tu, the essence of Being for the ‘Ba-ntu’ (n’tu-people)?
And in turn, among these young expatriates who are attracted by Africa, how many, disillusioned by the materialist deadlocks of the consumers society, are in fact looking for a new map of their own world, another paradigm of the human, a new style of social contract acceptable between the accomplished individualisms of the West?
By showing them that they could find in Africa some hints for this quest, they would get another chance to find it, one day.
And that would balance the terms of the deal: each one having something to offer and something to grasp, a true dialogue is then possible between humans who, in a fair exchange, will keep their whole dignity. Then, finally, a collaboration can start, a team can be born.
Then (but only then), Good Luck Lara Croft!
________________________________________________________________________
(1) MONUC: Mission of the Organization of the United-Nations in the Republic Democratic of Congo.
(2) OCHA: Coordination Office for Humanitarian Activities.
(3) ECHO: European Commission Humanitarian Aide Office.
(4) PAM: Programme Alimentaire Mondial, World Food Program
By Louis Boël & Françoise Falaise
Is it civil war? Not anymore. Is it peace? Not yet.
We are in Maniema, in the heart of the equatorial forest. In the morning light, the scarves of mist raise slowly from the bushy darkness of the riverbanks. On the mighty Congo river, the long pirogues look surprisingly peaceful by the grace of the slow gestures and the natural elegance of their tall rowers, standing at both ends. Thanks God, we don't hear anymore the devilish staccatos of the automatic weapons. But there isn’t one day without passing by the slightly surrealist run of young soldiers jogging in the muddy potholes of Kindu streets. In the deep silence of their mourning, you can hear them panting at the rhythm of their trot. Every moment, four of them speed up a little, come in front and replace their friends carrying the stretcher. They bring a comrade, barely wrapped in a piece of cloth, to the cemetery. He probably felt under the hoe of a farmer, infuriated by the daily plundering, or hit by a stray bullet, or even, but it is doubtful today, in an accidental skirmish between a pack of mahi-mahi and some demobilized Rwandans, roaming astray.
It is not yet peace, but we can circulate in the borough without fear of insecurity : the 4x4, the trucks and the white armored vehicles are everywhere, sporting the blue flag of the MONUC (1). The Uruguayan, Swedish, Nepalese, South African, Chinese and other officers and soldiers are at every corner, either in deterrence patrols or involved in more colorful pacification activities: soccer matches or improvised carnivals. And yet, it only takes one group of mahi-mahi to cross the river and enter the town, in rags, breasts covered with talismans and munitions belts, to see everyone shutting away and double-locking doors and windows. Do they really come here for reintegrating the national army ? or to help themselves with food ? drinks ? …girls, maybe? And, if they do want to integrate the army, how will they react when they’ll know that, instead of the premium promised by the Government in Kinshasa, they will only get, at best, one blanket and some biscuits from the international relief agencies or the Red Cross?
They will keep their weapons, and the plundering will go on, mainly at night.
During the same time, the United Nations ensure to all, with their OCHA (2) office, freshly updated information about security. We learn of newly opened tracks and unsafe villages that we’d better avoid. And they provide the much needed coordination between their own humanitarian agencies and the NGOs taking part in the emergency operations and the progressive rebuilding of peace. Once a week, at least, they all meet at OCHA and inform each other. It does avoid duplicate work or, worse even, missed complementarities.
In these meetings you’ll meet a selection of the so called ‘local’ NGOs. Born from Congolese initiatives, regional or national, they all started as empty shells or, rather, as Christmas' socks, waiting for an evasive Santa Claus. Many are still waiting. Others received finances from various origins, variously disinterested. Some, among these, thanks to their knowledge of the region, became the preferred partners of the international NGOs (iNGOs). You will also come across the representatives of the big international agencies : MONUC, FAO, WFP, UNICEF, RED-CROSS. And also the ones from the iNGOs who are, by now, the recognized pillars of the humanitarian aid : Médecins Sans Frontières, CARE, OXFAM, MERLIN, and others, whose professionalism, experience and tried methods are generally guarantees of seriousness.
Finally, you’ll meet there the representatives of some less known iNGOs, some of which you would rapidly notice the weakness: their expat staff do need training.
Because, if it’s not yet peace, don’t make mistake, it’s already time for deals. And what will be the first market to take off after seven years of blockade and insecurity? The beer business? No, beer has never been out of stock, if you could pay. The tin ore of Kalima? No: for such activity, professional decision-makers must first compare risks and profits. And then, their teams will need time to reconstruct a network of reliable logistics.
No, the first markets are here, right now: the contracts for humanitarian aid.
In that race, the best iNGOs are those who arrived early, during the troubles. They know the region well and they have, on the spot, the equipment to repair the broken bridges, to be the first to arrive in the villages abandoned by the rebels, and to present to the signature of local authorities (village chiefs, priests, doctors,…) association agreements juicy for all.
And all contracts in American dollars, of course. The first result of the ‘Ugandan’ geopolitical move by the Americans was not exactly a loss for the USA, even if, under growing international pressure, Washington was forced to forego their conquest westwards. Already, all over Congo, the greenback is the trading currency. The entire Congolese basin, from the great lakes to Kinshasa, from Gbadolite to Mbuji-Mayi, drinks, travels, and gets paid for work and trade, in American dollars!
But nothing new in this: everybody is aware of the fact that humanitarian aid is, also, a business. And a hard currency one. Besides, how could we escape? Human beings… “neither angels, nor beasts…”
What hurts, isn’t the competition. The more adventurous will find the black diamond, fair enough! And the most efficient will earn more, bravo ! After all it’s only the big game of life, so let us play fair.
What makes the professionals cry, and our pen screech, is, for some of these teams, their amateurish incompetence and their apparent contempt for the most basic ethics.
And that is also contempt for the population they are supposed to help, and for the very ideal they profess and that keeps them alive and touring the world.
As for any good idea, when time is there to put it at work, the worst might happen.
Is it the eternal lure of profit? At the top of the ladder, probably yes, for a part at least. But it seems to be just as much the unfortunate consequence of a lack of clear awareness of their own thirst for an ideal and, even more, the clumsy haste to bring the entire dream onto the loom of reality. Why do these managers give away the jobs to field teams with shallow cultural roots, no historical references and poor basic grounding in their profession?
In the competition for maximum waste and mismanagement these iNGOs come hard on the heels of the BIG charity swindles of the world. And as they do represent us all, they cover us in shame.
In the middle of the 20th century, Italian movie makers staged the caricature of a furtive street vendor who flaunted, in a quick opening of his ample coat, a display of branded watches. The passer-by with the slightest sign of interest was surreptitiously jeweled on the wrist with a valueless copy. And, sure enough, he then had to pay for it, with good money, seriously risking, during the entire act, to further get his pockets picked !
Today, his grandsons present lots of highflying CVs to charities and financing organizations. Once they get the contracts, they replace the professionals by young incompetents, barely paid ‘au pair’. And, why not, after a few weeks they can terminate these at the end of their trial period and replace them by even less expensive pawns, encountered by chance on some African tracks or on the Web pages.
Contempt for the suffering people? Yes. Because to organize an emergency project, for example against the severely malnourished, and to replace nutritionists by nurses, or even by first-aid helpers, and to raise unemployed catechists into the position of ‘local nutritionists’, it really is, however harsh the words, to play with the life of children.
The methods to cure these kids, bring them back to life and give them a good chance to grow healthy, have been selected along the years by specialists and donors. They are fully tested and reliable. They do work, in a few weeks, but only if they are understood, supervised and checked by competent professionals.
Contempt also for all humanitarian ideals: these cooperants, badly recruited and poorly prepared, are left on their own, without instructions, without methods, often replacing on very short notice someone who couldn’t even take the time to pass the words and the files.
In these conditions, what else could they do than just create their own style, often doing a straight impression of the lead role in their favorite movies or video games?
And sadly, although they haven’t read neither Hemingway nor Romain Gary, they couldn’t find a better model than the hackneyed role of ‘the great white hunter’. Along too many years, this cliché kept distorting our dialogue with Africa. Will it ever stop?
To put it in today’s words, we should coin their role model ‘The Terminator of the humanitarian interference’ or better, as girls are often taking a large part in that game, ‘LARA CROFT IN CONGO’.
Sputtering on their trail bikes, VHF radio handsets at the mouth, striking a trooper’s pose with their war correspondent multi-pocket waistcoats, they twirl through the muddy tracks of the burg, splashing the kids who burst with laughs. Who, better than the African child, has the talent of making fun of everything, so ingenuously that the one hold up to ridicule doesn’t even realize?
All the day, they patrol in a futile attempt to ‘check everything’, as they say. Of course there are abuses, smuggled foods, cheated accounts or warped statistics. Neglect or incompetence. As they haven’t heard of the accounting and managing methods which allow such controls, they resort to coarse policing: riding fast they try to check all what’s going on and, pathetic, they preach to everyone basic honesty and genuine teamwork ‘for the sake of the children’. Bull!
Are they supervised, at least? Regional staffs do visit. They even visit often: MONUC flights are free for iNGOs, so one keeps busy traveling. But visits just happen, without preparation, without planning, without precise program, without assessment tools.
Once more, they will only roam, too fast, from one activity center to the next… and soon enough it will be time to drop by the local beer garden, meet their colleagues from other NGO’s and enjoy a few drinks before going home to sleep. Or stay more, for the ones who, shocked by the culture gap, the insecurity, or the lack of basic comfort in their life-base, won’t go to bed before getting knocked out by too much booze and bar talk.
Tomorrow will be another day. They’ll start it afresh: improvisation and motorbikes...
Unless they stay in bed with fever. Can anyone guess why on earth they don’t take any prophylaxis again paludism? Maybe another caricature of the colonial time veterans. Listen to them: they measure their honor and their ego to the number of malaria attacks they suffered…
So, have these NGOs failed the test? Are they showing too much amateurism to be taken seriously ? Yes. Back to the rifle drill, Lara! More karate practice! Return to the tatami, to the climbing wall, to the shooting range! And first of all go immediately back to the school bench: learn the language, damn it!
We do know the almost scholastic complexity of the Congolese dialectic, specially when it combines with the tricks and traps of the French language. We have enjoyed the fine art of the Congolese for dodging the difficult questions by talking our head off in the magical wealth of colorful details, polite diplomacy and hiatus in logic. Then, it’s hard to believe someone could even consider undertaking any emergency help without a serious command of the French language, or, better, of Kiswahili. Indeed, the dialogue is warped from the starting point: not only these populations are emotionally shaken by the civil war but they are among the poorest in the world. They are motivated, for their children and their family in the broad African sense, by vital emergencies that we simply can’t imagine because we have never encountered them. So, if on top of that we have to collaborate in a poor pidgin with imprecise vocabulary, all the misunderstandings, all the frustrations, all the failures are likely, not to say inevitable.
On an other hand, managing a project needs basic tools and methods. Without calling for all the techniques of Operational Research ( let’s admit it, we are not in the NASA!), the method, in its principles, remains a sure path to success: Definition of the Objectives, Assessment of the Means, Scenarios of predictable problems, Program planning, Critical Paths, Monitoring, and Evaluation of the results on the basis of measurable performances. You want it, you have it! The method is requested by all donors for the proposal papers of humanitarian projects. Why isn’t it applied to management of day by day operations? The corresponding training is well known and easy to arrange. It could, at low cost and without delay, form a part of a preparatory session, organized by the NGO itself or subcontracted, either in their Head Office or at their national coordination. What are they waiting for?
Methods, also, to avoid, at all cost, falling into the picturesque of African misery. We are no more in Lambaréné with Dr Schweitzer ! Although we could doubt it when visiting some health centers. Everywhere you look, all is covered in unspeakable filth. Few or no latrines. No facilities for showering, nor for washing up dishes, nor even for washing the babies ! Only a few plastic basins lying in the tall grass, without stands, without drainage. The foam mattresses stained with diarrhea and vomit, are just reused, after a short dry up in the sun.
Children suffering of extreme malnutrition are very weak and fragile, specially the youngest. Sometimes, at the crack of dawn, they are gone. Most often, they died from septicemia. It – is – a - scandal. Basic hygiene is not expensive and is not out of place in Africa. A few garden pipes, a handful of PVC valves, some whitewash, a little soap, small bed linen, that the mothers can wash every morning, will do it. And especially, tidiness, discipline and relentless reminders.
But grime, and the death it brings to these tiny babies, is no fate.
For our ‘shrimp cocktail’, in the baby shrimp nurseries of the aqua farms in Asia (and in Africa !), it is forbidden to go from one room to the other without sterilizing hands with a methanol spray. It doesn’t cost anything but it calls for method, care and discipline.
Could it be that Congolese kids do not deserve the same care and attention as baby shrimp? Is it asking too much effort?
The target is that these kids stop dying. Full stop.
The revolt against the injustice and the horror of the malnutrition of children, the emotion in front of the distress of these kids and their mothers, we all feel the burn of it. But Emergency is a question of methods, not feelings.
And methods again, for answering emergency without hesitation, without pondering, without stammering, without improvising every morning as if every day was starting from scratch. In short, emergency without loosing time! Why didn’t the managers of these iNGOs prepare a strategy of ‘blitz setting-up’ similar to what does exist for natural disasters? A lot of time could be saved by a preliminary visit and a few kits of well conceived equipment (life-base bathroom and kitchenette; office container; laminated instructions for all tasks and technical jobs; ready to use computerized forms for purchases and reports; communication and computer equipment pre-installed by professionals,…). Six months to one year projects can’t afford improvising their setting-up over five months before the team gets in cruising speed!
Let us summarize the objectives of the special training we suggest to our humanitarian Laras: efficiency of the communication, professionalism of the methods, perseverance of the discipline, realism of the objectives. All this in lieu of vibrating emotions and endless amateurish improvisation.
Let us go further… Transcultural communication is quick to teach us that words are little matter compared with non verbal messages, always referring to the cultural history of each of us. Messages that we won’t comprehend if we can’t set them back in their context. It is disappointing to realize that most of the personnel working for these NGOs, arrive there with no idea about the social, tribal or historical context of the very people they are supposed to help. Only one training day could be enough to hand down some basic elements. Could it help opening some dialogue between local people and expatriates? Something slightly deeper than the present deal which falls short from exceeding the blunt exchange: ‘money for picturesque’.
Let us dream straight out, now... A further training (maybe a second day…?) will usefully explain the philosophy and religion grounding of the traditions which are the humus and the blood of Central Africa.
Can we really help that society to take charge, and to adapt to the world around, if we haven’t tried to understand what is the N’tu, the essence of Being for the ‘Ba-ntu’ (n’tu-people)?
And in turn, among these young expatriates who are attracted by Africa, how many, disillusioned by the materialist deadlocks of the consumers society, are in fact looking for a new map of their own world, another paradigm of the human, a new style of social contract acceptable between the accomplished individualisms of the West?
By showing them that they could find in Africa some hints for this quest, they would get another chance to find it, one day.
And that would balance the terms of the deal: each one having something to offer and something to grasp, a true dialogue is then possible between humans who, in a fair exchange, will keep their whole dignity. Then, finally, a collaboration can start, a team can be born.
Then (but only then), Good Luck Lara Croft!
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(1) MONUC: Mission of the Organization of the United-Nations in the Republic Democratic of Congo.
(2) OCHA: Coordination Office for Humanitarian Activities.
(3) ECHO: European Commission Humanitarian Aide Office.
(4) PAM: Programme Alimentaire Mondial, World Food Program
