New Year's Day

January 1, 2009
I am in the west of Uganda about to start teaching beekeeping classes to a group of fifty women from surrounding villages. Most of them are widows, whose husbands have died from HIV/AIDS, one of the local wars/conflicts, or from malaria. We came here with the intend of teaching more people than this group, and we may, but things have changed day by day, sometimes hour by hour, and we no longer take much stock in the plans we make. The adage of preparing for the worst and hoping for the best applies very well to travel in East Africa, particularly when trying to accomplish projects with a timeline, and in many instances at the mercy of locals with an iota of power who wield that power like a blunt tool, their only interest being not the people or groups whom they represent, or the long term goals of the organizations, but their own selfish, petty, short-sighted agendas, often thinly hidden, and often not at all.

Headline in local English paper here in Uganda (not on front page, but well back in the paper):

Chief Irked By Child Sacrifice

He is only irked?

Question: do you think that there is more child sacrifice done in the villages or in the city, in proportion with the populace?

Surprise answer: there is much more of it in the city. Why? Because child sacrifice is performed mostly by, or at the behest of, businessmen, in order to improve their fledgling businesses. When business goes awry, one of the best ways to improve it, according to those who participate in the kidnap and ritualistic murder of an innocent child, is to find a young person (in good health, uncircumcised, and without ear piercings) and kill her/him. The local witch doctors strongly advocate the sacrifice of a healthy child to bring prosperity to the business, so, a very young one is kidnapped (usually from the sprawling, seemingly endless slums from around the capital, Kampala) and s/he is killed. For the businessman, he hopes that business will thereafter boom.

Welcome to Uganda.

Getting here, from the start: Norm and I stopped in London to eat fish and chips on the way here (and to change planes with a ten hour layover) then finally arrived in Kampala, the capital, the next day. Ben arrived, we spent a few days in Kampala, (for those who do not know who Norm and Ben are: Norm is my father, and Ben is a friend who I met at www.CitySeed.org). We visited an orphanage run by a Dane and funded by Swiss bankers. They have about a dozen beehives but only two are populated, and they have been so neglected that nothing can be done with them at this point. The kids crawled all over Norm (Norm has always been loved by babies) and he said that if he did not have his wife and grandkids (no mention of his two sons) that he would love to come and spend the minimum six months volunteering at the orphanage. Norm watched the New Year’s fireworks from the balcony and Ben and I drank Nile beers and watched them fly off of the roofs of all of the upscale hotels (upscale being used somewhat liberally here). We drank, dodged the numerous attractive but probably lethal prostitutes, and listened smirking to two scantily clad girls from the Philippines belt out cover versions of songs by Shakira and off-key butchered renditions of “Stand By Me”. The next morning at 6:00AM, we were picked up by our new friend, Lesster, who took us in his vehicle to Kasese, from where I now write.

The journey here was long, hot, sweaty, dusty, and bumpy, but made all the better by Lesster’s company, and insight to Uganda that he has gleaned over the last eight or so years that he has lived here. He works mainly with honeybees and also has a small shop along a busy road where he sells locally made crafts to tourists. In his case, however, he sells only goods that are actually locally made, and not the usual masks and so on that in fact come in from Kenya or Indonesia, thus his shop benefits the communities surrounding Kampala. But like our own, Lesster’s heart is with the honeybees, and amongst other bee-related endeavors, he assists a group called www.KidsOfAfrica.com which sells honey in Switzerland to benefit the orphanage mentioned above (we have plans to visit an American run orphanage up north later in the month, with hopes of helping them develop their beekeeping industry to generate jobs/income for the residents). Lesster also runs many hives in a few spots in Uganda, harvests, labels, and exports it to Asia and sells some here. He is a very interesting fellow with a diverse and interesting background. Singaporean Chinese by birth, he has been an aeronautical engineer with the air force in the Philippines, has lived in Manhattan, and elsewhere. Now based in Kampala, he lives with five or six long haired German shepherds, one goat (there were three goats, but the six dogs ate two of the goats) and his partner. Like most homes in Kampala not in the shantytowns, Lesster’s house is surrounded by high walls, which themselves are covered in broken glass, wire, and other deterrents from thieves, who are not easily discouraged. Lesster’s canines roam the property freely, and have been trained to tear apart intruders (and indeed, have done so). Lesster said that often robbers will throw poison meat over a fence and wait for the dogs to succumb to the poison. However, most of the thieves are so poor that they cannot afford enough poison to kill as many as half a dozen dogs, and to purchase that much meat as well, so he is in good stead with a force of half a dozen deadly doggies. On the drive, I already have written:

Ben, Norm, and I are all fine, in good health, and pleased to have
made it here in one piece, after 11 hours of driving down roads that
were often unpaved, always full of holes (often large enough to fit a
vehicle into) and all in all hot and uncomfortable to say the least.
Still, we did get to see some interesting things along the way,
including baboons, kobs, antelope, massive wart hogs, and huge garbage
eating storks. Along the way we ate deep fried tilapia from Lake
George, enjoyed the road that drove through a national park for some
time, and took typical tourist pictures of ourselves standing at the
equator (one foot in either hemisphere). We crossed the equator twice
in fact as the aforementioned horrific road snaked back and forth.

One of the nicer things we saw yesterday, and related to our mission
here, was an apiary of 50 Kenyan Top Bar Hives that were nestled along
the side of a mountain above Queen Elizabeth National Park, which is
home to many native animals, including the ones I already mentioned.
Anyway, these 50 beehives are owned and operated by a very nice young
man of about 19 years, who has been learning about and working with
bees for about 18 months now. He was taught by a great fellow named
Lesster. People like him here, few and far between, give me some glimmer of hope.

It all sounds well and good and not easy but not too difficult to come over to Africa to work with a non-profit group in order to better their lot in life through beekeeping. I mean, it is obviously a challenge, but, workable. Or so it seems. Herein I will try to explain what are some of the difficulties facing a successful project.

First: when would be recipients of funding or training initially request help, they lie. They lie horribly. They will write whatever it is they believe the sponsor wants to hear, even if it is easily disproved upon arrival of the benefactor. For instance, the people with whom I am working here have only about 12 beehives, not hundreds as earlier claimed. This is, to say the least, disappointing.

The aid workers, local organizations, and so on, often (usually?) see mzungu (the local word for white people) as walking ATM machines, and as such we can never offend them, since we are a connection to a world of untold riches. According to the initial unanimous impression of the three locals with whom I had lunch, there is no poverty in America, everyone is rich and everyone is beautiful. Not so, we told them. We know plenty of poor and ugly people. There is a lot of misunderstanding, I am sure on both sides, but we at the table, three Americans and three Ugandans (two men and one woman) agreed on a few things: that most Ugandan men are lazy and will not work and will instead watch their wives/sisters/mothers carry heavy wood, haul water, wash the children, floor, and clothes, tend the animals and the fields, cook the food, and manage every last thing, while the men sit and drink. Indeed, there in the hot sun of the afternoon as we waited more than two hours for our meals (we were the only ones in the restaurant and the kitchen staff had actually stopped preparations for our meals in order for them to take lunch themselves) one of the men polished off two small flasks of 40% alcohol, and the other three large bottles of beer. (In fairness, the woman had a small flask of sherry and we mzungus each had a beer.) In short, like in most of the world and certain from what we have seen, collectively, in Morocco, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and now here, women do the work, men sit back and drink or do nothing. That is precisely why NGO’s and so forth are targeting women and women’s groups to give aid, assistance, and invest in hope for the future.

There is a popular and misguided notion that native peoples, indigenous populations, and the like, have a closer connection to nature, a better understanding and appreciation for Mother Earth, and so on. I find it to be the case that these indigenous people are more ruthless, care much less about animals and other people and the environment, than their so-called developed counterparts. For convincing, see how dogs and donkeys are treated (beaten and worse) in the developing world. Witness so-called mob justice here, where a person is pulled out of a car and beaten to death if the driver should hit someone, or even if there is a perceived injustice. Mob justice is common here (the guidebooks strongly recommend to keep driving in the event of any altercation, and to seek refuge with the police, but then warn that the police may not be much better and could be worse). People treat people worse in these places than in any other place on the planet (the inevitable argument is that modern nations kill with weapons on a larger scale; no time to get into that too deeply, but it is one thing to drop a bomb on people, and another to bind then and set them aflame, or to stone then to death). Here, or in India, or Peru, see how the place is absolutely littered with trash. I understand that there are some explanations for this (such as lack of recycling facilities due to poverty) but these places are so corrupt, from the government squirreling away money into private overseas accounts, to the tribal leaders who demand a portion of the assets of all villagers, a la the mafia, that there is in fact little hope. To connect this to bees, the native beekeepers do not have any compassion for the bees or passion for bees. They burn out the hives, kill all the bees, and take the whole hive. They do not smoke them out, they actually burn them. The few who have had training here with working hives (not feral colonies) will still, for the most part, pull all of the honey out of the hive rather than leave enough for the bees to survive. So, this notion of there being a gentler, connected essence between these people and the land, water, sky, and so on, is rubbish. Also, the idea that there is some knowledge still out there, by the average medicine man (the same profession who has children decapitated in order to boost his own income) is far fetched. He knows nothing of the herbs, plants, flowers, and so on that grow in abundance around him and certainly little to nothing about bees and the products of the hive. Whatever they knew, they lost.

I have no idea if this project will work out and bear fruit or just be another of many exercises of futility in the non-profit, aid sector, but we will certainly continue to give it our best efforts. As you may infer, it can be a bit frustrating.

Signing off,

Andrew

PS If you want to see an interesting film, much of which takes place in Uganda during the 1800’s, watch MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON. For something more contemporary, see THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND.