Musing over mango

Setting the scene: Sunday, a very wet early morning in my flat in Abidjan eating a huge fleshy mango cold from the fridge, before putting a shirt on (because of the mango)!

Watching on web the extraordinarily generous Hilary Clinton speech ceding victory and endorsing Obama.

I am back in Abidjan after a week in Liberia (first time I had been there – only Angola now among major conflict countries in Africa that I haven’t visited).

Then a week in our field office in western Cote d’Ivoire trying to save or put a decent end to a hugely expensive youth training project which has got out of hand. The project takes 300 supposedly displaced and illiterate youths in three ex-conflict towns and trains them on a skill half the day and gives them functional literacy and life skills the rest of the time.

Fine, quite classical and we use local workshops/salons for the apprentice part. However, someone went wild on the idea of how much help the local workshop/salon should receive for hosting and training our little dears. We are causing massive distortions in the market. ‘Our’ hairdresser has everything; the one we don’t help next door has nothing … the room for corruption even at the level of choosing which salon to work with was huge.

We are going to pour 50 or so partly trained tailors into a small town market, already saturated, in a few months, same with hairdressers, yet neither the number of bodies to be clothed, heads to be coiffed, nor the disposable income has changed.

It is, I am sad to say, still possible for this to happen these, despite all the agonising and soul-searching and the old accountability to donors and the new accountability to beneficiaries.

If we had divided all that money among the kids they would have been rich by now.

Liberia last week

In Liberia last week I thought it was lucky for some that we are all sinners, otherwise why are there so many churches? In Monrovia there are thousands of American offshoot churches with gleaming buildings and ‘God wants you to be rich’ slogans in the direst poverty. Sorry, that is the Nigerian churches. The American churches work on ‘God wants ME (your pastor) to be rich’.

The visit (which put Liberia into my list, category D) was great, very interesting and made even better by having a good friend working there already so I got a lot of the background. I also got a lot from the work point of view, especially since I had been able to take most of my assistant management team with me.

I have to remark on Liberian Engli, though. It is so difficu to foll. They swall the en of ever wor.

Three women in Gulu

I went to Gulu in early May to help with a little training for one of the Echo Bravo projects. Despite the fact it was unplanned, I had quite a good two days, proving once again that for everyone a quick visit is often better than a long one. I managed to visit the school Echo Bravo runs at Tiiti.

I also met three interesting women, two of whom I had met before and one I hadn't.

First was Apollonia, still running Christ the King Girls' Teachers' College and we reminisced over the very first (pre JRS) trainings for refugee teachers which EPSR held around 1991. Apollonia was the one who made all the hung-over teachers run miles at 6 am to wake them up! She'd been dreadfully sick with breast cancer but appears to have survived the cancer and the surgery, no mean feat in Uganda.

She told us stories similar to many that are now coming out about the relationship between the LRA and the civilian population. The young LRA fighters showed themselves far more often than anyone let on, it seems, and kept in touch with 'normal' society. There were stories that would be funny if they were not so tragic, about mistaken identity and youth telling each other off for trying to assassinate her, in a case of mistaken identity. 'That's not C, that's Apollonia'. Just a remark away from being shot.

Of course it was always obvious that there were some back and forth movements, but to reveal them would have exposed people to government wrath. WFP food distributions in camps were spirited away to the bush the following morning with the LRA men who had come in into the camp in the night. As a result pregnancy rates also remained fairly normal.

Then there was Sister Rosemary who represents me in my absence as local signatory and head of Echo Bravo. She runs a whole variety of activities for displaced people and orphaned girls and her compound/convent/school is one of those delightfully chaotic-seeming places where huge number of things are going on. A safe haven for many in the troubles over the last twenty years.

Met also a strange New Age therapist who said she was a midwife, who was going to change all Uganda's birthing practices overnight. She was staying with the sisters, all of whom who she had given New Age massages the evening before. I was bemused at first, this tattooed young midwife with a jewel in her forehead going on about vibrations and eating chromium to lose weight and having a sauna in a pyramid made of gold leaf (I think that's what she said). In the restaurant she helpfully told us about an ancient oriental method of cleaning your ears out, while we had our lunch.

I was happy to hear that after years of a typical Northern Ugandan’s hard life and difficulty, Apollonia had been able travel a little, for example to Norway for NRC Scouts and Guides. Sister Rosemary had just been taken to New York by CNN (first class all the way) to receive a 'hero's award’ from Christianne Amanpour, for her work with abducted children, and LRA-raped girls who are now mothers, a group of great concern to Echo Bravo also.

Ian Smith, a great friend and fellow consultant, with long connections with Sudan, Uganda and the rest of Africa, had died a couple of weeks before about a year after he had his heart attack and stroke. Strangely in this connected world, there were very many people he had worked with who didn't know he had died (even though it was a pretty big announcement in the New Vision). But then, I reflected, if I died in Cote d'Ivoire, it could be quite a long time before the message filtered to people in other countries.