Week 6 - Bagamoyo, Tanzania

UKUN

With the schools closed for holidays, we both spent our last week of volunteering doing administrative office work at UKUN. UKUN is a HIV/Aids support centre. Their most visible activity is providing home-based care for HIV patients, but they also provide a number of other services including promoting women’s empowerment, HIV awareness and education.

A number of people came to UKUN to be tested whilst we were in the office. It’s a small place – the waiting area for clients is the same room as the office. When people are being tested, everybody knows about it. There is a lot of tension in the office while people wait.

During our week at UKUN only one person tested positive – it was a good week, relatively speaking. The guy who tested positive was someone that another volunteer had persuaded to come in. Volunteers usually get to know a number of locals, mostly men in their twenties, and the volunteers who worked at UKUN encouraged their local friends to get tested. Since there is a stigma around HIV, and therefore being tested, it’s good that volunteers can influence the locals in a positive way.

The local guy came in with a friend and they both asked to get tested together as they were pretty nervous. One of the volunteers does the testing, and they then take the result to Charles (the guy who runs UKUN) who counsels the patient regardless of test result. One of the guys tested negative but unfortunately the other result was positive.

It was terrible. For the rest of the week we couldn’t stop thinking about it. We saw the guy who tested negative at the local bar, and his friend wasn’t with him. We would wonder how he was doing, and how impossible it would be to process and register that you had HIV. Charles deals with the consequences of HIV every day, and this was just a small taste of his life.

Charles is a pretty amazing man. He has a very generous nature and it was a real pleasure to work with him. There are a number of street kids with HIV that hang around outside UKUN, and Charles lets them come into the office and encourages the volunteers to play with them during quiet times. The kids call Charles “Uncle” and obviously adore him. He prefers them to spend their days around the office with volunteers instead of roaming the streets.

The day before we left was African Children’s Day, and Charles organised for all the volunteers in the office and the street kids to join the local parade. We wore t-shirts and caps to promote the local condom brand, Salama, as Charles likes to use every opportunity to promote condom use.

We didn’t realize what a big deal the whole day was until we started the march. The parade was made up of school kids, organized into groups by their schools. The kids who hang outside the UKUN office are orphans and don’t go to school, so it wasn’t something they would have been able to participate but for Charles. They were really happy to be marching in the parade with us. They held the banner that we’d made as high as possible, and had a great time at the party at the end.

Disorganisation and Bagamoyo

In our experience, organisations in Bagamoyo are not run efficiently. Here are a few examples.

Geoffrey, was placed at the local sculpture college, and was asked to teach English to the students. On the day that Geoffrey arrived, the last student at the sculpture college graduated, which meant that he had nobody to teach. Not only that, but the college had begun to panic because without students or funding, they would need to close.

For the past five years the college had been sponsored by a Swedish trust. The understanding was that the college would use this time to establish an alternative source of funding. Although they had managed to recruit a handful of fee-paying students during that time, the five years had elapsed, and the college had done little to secure any future income.

Geoffrey agreed to help them – he got in touch with the same Swedish trust (something that hadn’t occurred to the college administrator), and was able to secure another grant, with the same proviso that they needed to be self-sufficient in five years time. We’re hopeful that in five years time they won’t be in the same position, but we’re not optimistic.

Anne and I spent our last week of volunteering doing office work at UKUN, as we mentioned earlier. UKUN takes more CCS volunteers in Bagamoyo than anywhere else. Securing funding is also a problem for UKUN. Just a few months ago, the six directors for the organization providing the majority of UKUN’s funding were sent to prison for corruption. UKUN now have next to no income and had to let go of all of their paid staff except Charles, the one guy who runs the place.

Charles and the other volunteers put a tremendous amount of effort and heart into UKUN. But from our week spent in the office we couldn’t help but feel that it would benefit from being organized and run more like a business. We realize that behind the scenes there might be order in the chaos, but we didn’t get a sense of order while we were there.

Since it now has only one paid member of staff, UKUN relies heavily on CCS and local volunteers. The CCS volunteers arrive for work at 8AM, however Charles only arrives at around 10.30AM. Home visits and testing can’t start without Charles because these activities require a Kiswahili speaker. So the first 2 ½ hours of the six or seven CCS volunteers’ day seem largely wasted.

Anne and I were entering data (for central government statistical collection) on computers that were riddled with viruses and are never backed up. The data entry is mandatory, but UKUN are over 18 months behind, with stacks of boxes of forms still to be entered.

Charles asked me to look at one of the three computers in the office that wasn’t working at all. I opened it up to find out that it was missing both its CPU and hard drive. This computer had been sitting there for years, taking up one of the three desks in the main office, and nobody had realized that it was useless.

From what we’ve seen, UKUN is fairly typical – it certainly isn’t badly managed compared to its peers. When you bring the problems to the attention of Charles (who is a really nice guy, and extremely generous as well) – he agrees that this is terrible, and says that he’ll definitely change things. But Charles is so busy running UKUN that it seems unlikely that these things will ever get prioritized.

One of the volunteers, Jerry, was a fire fighter in Chicago. He pointed out to us that Bagamoyo has one fire engine. It is about one year old and looks very nice. It was acquired after a spate of serious fires in the Bagamoyo district. However it has never been used, and is unlikely to be used in the future. Not only has nobody has been trained to use it, but even if there were people who could operate it, there are no water hydrants in Bagamoyo. The fire engine would shoot out its small tank of water in a couple of minutes. Then everyone would have to wait around while the tank was refilled with a trickle from the water mains and buckets from the nearest well.

These are just some of the examples that we’ve seen or heard about. It seems that there are a lot of good intentions in Bagamoyo, as well as a lot of compassion and a desire to help the community. However, in many instances the lack of organization really hampers any attempts to bring about long-lasting change.

Fishing

CCS has a policy that volunteers are not allowed to donate money or gifts of any kind. Rather than giving people what they need, we should be working with them, and where we can, teaching them how to meet their own needs. It’s the whole argument around not giving a man fish, but teaching him to fish instead.

The problem arises when as a volunteer you expect that people will want you to teach them to fish, but instead they expect that you’ll give them the fish. Especially when you come from a country with a lot of fish.

Just to stretch the fishing analogy a little further – CCS argue that the giving of fish is actually harmful. If someone can always get fish from CCS volunteers, then why bother learning to fish? This is a pretty tricky area – there is plenty to argue about. Anne and I don’t really feel like we have come away with any answers after six weeks in Bagamoyo.

Our first experience of this sort of problem was when our Kiswahili teacher pulled me aside after a class and asked me to give him ten thousand shillings (around eight dollars) so that he could get to a job interview. I was caught completely off-guard – I couldn’t think of a reason why I couldn’t give him the money, and I didn’t want to be rude to him. I guess that the fact that this was a teacher employed by CCS made it more difficult for me to turn him down. I gave him the money but the whole exchange left me feeling bad.

Tracy, our friend had a really hard time with her teacher at her placement. At first the teacher just made a point of telling Tracy about how little money she had. Tracy put it well when she said that in a way she could understand the teacher’s behaviour - she might be inclined to behave in a similar way if she went to work with Donald Trump. But the hinting became really persistent, and the hints turned into requests for money. When Tracy said that she didn’t have any money with her, the teacher said that Tracy could transfer phone credit to her instead. Tracy ignored her, but the teacher just took her phone and transferred the credit anyway.

One of the volunteers had to leave her placement early because the head teacher at her school first asked her for cash donations to the school. He then asked her to find out the contact details of all of the people who had previously volunteered at the school and then email them with requests for cash donations.

Madam Rachel would talk about all the things that previous volunteers had sent her. She would give me instructions about how, if I wanted to, I could send stuff to her directly without CCS finding out. She told me about a previous volunteer who had sent her cash to help her cousin with an ear operation.

Madam Rachel invited me, Anne and Monica to her house so that we could see where she lived and meet her sick mother. We were apprehensive about the visit because we thought she would lay a guilt trip on us. In the end, we were wrong. The visit to her house was really nice – she was nothing but generous and hospitable. Entertaining us would have cost her a lot of money, relative to her salary, and she asked for nothing in return.

We’ve talked a lot about this and we think that we’re completely on board with the teaching fishing concept. But, not everybody in Bagamoyo is asking to be taught. Sometimes people in the local community will ask for fish, and given the disparity in wealth between volunteers and locals, that’s understandable.

Next stop South Africa

We left Bagamoyo last Friday and have now started the ‘holiday’ part of our trip. We had an amazing time doing our volunteer work, and we made some great friends from around the world.

We’re currently travelling around Tanzania, and next week we’ll meet up with Al and Maha in Cape Town.

We probably won’t be blogging as much. But we’ll definitely be putting up some pictures every now and then.

Much love,

Anne and Max.