Since shortly after the second world war, when major development efforts began in what was called the third world, hundreds of projects have set out to bring a quantifiable good to some quantity of people. Though methods have changed and theories have developed, the planning of development projects is today at its core quite similar to what has gone on for the last sixty plus years. The project planners set targets, and the targets are always numbers. There is a problem with this method, however. Numbers provide planners with better information to make decisions, but concurrently reinforce a way of viewing issues that is radically disconnected from the nature of development. Development is about empowerment, and in a system of top down planning, it is the planners who are empowered.
Numbers help set goals. Most simply, numbers are countable, so they make projects accountable. They make something achieved or not achieved. They are attainable. Numbers can impress donors, governments, and voters. Because they provide something concrete, numbers have come to hold a central position in the world of development. Without a doubt, numbers are necessary to monitor and evaluate projects, yet the way that numbers are set up and used can detract from the very goals they are intended to quantify.
If, as a planner, I look only at numbers, then I have the power to solve the problems of development by balancing the other half of the equation. This makes me quite an important guy. I can direct resources where I think they will be best used. I can get even better numerical information, balance an even better equation, and pretty soon I can lay out a plan to solve just about anything. That can be quite gratifying. Hitting a target becomes less about the overarching goal as it is about me. This sort of ivory tower planning has occurred in innumerable situations in the short history of the development industry, from the halls of academia, to the UN, to the management levels of any international and national NGO. It has produced the kind of surveys in which poor families have their every possession catalogued, from livestock to land to eating utensils. All in the name of informing the planners, so better decisions can be made for them.
My intention is not to demonize the development industry or those who study the challenges facing people in the developing world. Rather, the point is to remind us that there is a person who is represented by that number, and if our goal is empowerment, we should be aware of whom it is that is being empowered by our actions. Not many country directors, World Bank economists, or members of the board would like the field staff to show up and take account of every possession in their homes.
Development has some very large numbers involved. Billions of people live on some few dollars a day, don’t have access to clean water, and don’t get basic healthcare services. These numbers need to be fixed. But this is not an equation that can be balanced. To balance it is to treat people as numbers, which does not allow them to be free acting, independent variables.
In any project there has to be a plan, and that plan must involve some numbers to monitor and evaluate its effectiveness. But that plan should also have at its heart the notion that each number, each targeted individual, is actually an independent variable, and the true goal should be to make them even more independent, not to pigeonhole them into some preconceived scheme of economic behavior.
In the end, numbers are a tool like any other, and can be used wisely or poorly. Tools are empowering to those who use them, but if we become too enamored with our tools, we lose sight of our goals. In the orthodoxy of development speak, it is kosher to say that the planners and workers serve those people who are the targets of their projects. But if the targets are numbers, and the numbers are a tool, then who is serving whom? In our desire to fix these broken numbers, we must not lose sight of a basic equality, stemming from our shared humanity, with those whom we are there to serve.
Showing posts with label developing world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label developing world. Show all posts
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Friday, August 20, 2010
Tackling Taboo Territory: A Cultural Commentary
On Culture
The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.
There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.
Cultural Imperialism
It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.
Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.
I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.
Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.
The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.
There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.
Cultural Imperialism
It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.
Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.
I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.
Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Magically Expanding School Bus
Hoping to get to Ganze by 8 o’clock, we got to the stage at 7 a.m. and asked which matatu would be going in that direction. There were two sitting side by side, the sliding doors open, the attendants motioning for us to get in as they would be leaving soon. There was only one problem, and that was that both matatus were empty.
Public transportation does not operate on a schedule. It runs on a balance of incentives and disincentives. When there are enough people in the matatu, it starts to move. It also wants to pick up people on the side of the road as it goes. This poses a challenge if another matatu is going in the same direction. Both want to leave first to get the first shot at the people on the side of the road, but neither will leave without a respectable compliment of passengers to guarantee at least some coverage of the base cost of the trip. It is a risk game. Or perhaps the drivers simply leave when they finish their third cup of coffee, or when the card game ends, or whenever they damn well please.
There we were, faced with two empty matatus, both hoping to leave for Ganze. Rickety sliding door number one, or rusty sliding door number two? We picked the one closer to the exit from the stage onto the road. My two companions, taking full advantage of their feminine guile and foreignness, were allowed the front seats next to the empty driver’s seat. I sat two rows back. There is a silent awareness shared amongst all matatu passengers that if you don’t get the privilege of sitting in front, the second of the four rows in back is the best spot. You are less likely to be sat upon by someone than in the first row, and in the rows further back you are more likely to be hitting your head on the ceiling. I also believe that there might, just might, be a tiny bit more legroom in the second row. Not that my legs fit in any of the rows, but that extra millimeter, imagined or not, is a psychological salve. The first row is the worst for legroom, as the engine is directly in front of you, which also makes it the warmest place on the matatu into which you stuff your feet. Window seats are nice for the breeze, but bad for the dust and banging your head on the side beams above the glass as the matatu rolls back and forth on the arched roadway.
Shortly after we climbed in, a woman sat in the front row behind the engine, and a man in an Aloha shirt came and sat next to me. He spoke English well, but was impressed by my dozen words of Kiswahili. I practiced with him for a while. He verified the vocabulary list in my notebook, and occasionally made comments to the woman in front of us that made her laugh. After the initial conversation died out, we sat and waited. No one else boarded the matatu, least of all a driver. Looking at the van next to ours it appeared one person had gone with door number two, sat down in it and was also waiting.
The amount of activity at a matatu stage is proportional to the size of the town or city in which it is located. In Ganze, the stage is a single bench on each side of the road, and occasionally someone sits there with a basket of oranges to sell. I live in a mid-sized town, and there are never fewer than thirty matatus revving their engines, looking for passengers, rearranging their parking situations, and almost running over people. Around the matatus gather their smaller cousins, the tuk-tuks (rickshaws) and the piki-pikis (motorcycles), serving as taxis. There are peanut vendors, watch vendors, soda vendors, and people selling all manner of useless colorful plastic items pegged to a board that they carry with them. Want a hair band? No? How about a battery case? Child’s scissors? Giant paper clip? Three inches of flexible tubing? It is possible that I am exaggerating the scope of these vendors’ wares. I cannot report the items with total accuracy because to inspect the assortment is to make it impossible to convince the vendor that you really don’t want any of it.
It was close to an hour after we boarded and our matatu had not moved. The man in the Aloha shirt next to me disappeared. I tried to see if he had gotten on another matatu, thinking there may be better odds of leaving if we all stuck together in a sort of passengers’ union. He was gone. Then he was in the driver’s seat, revving the engine. We inched forward, then rolled back, trying several different gears as if to figure out which would get us out of the parking lot best. After a few moments it became apparent that he was not our driver who had decided to be social with the back seat passengers. He was just as anxious to get going as the rest of us. Another man came to the driver’s window, shoed him out and climbed in. This guy, it appeared, must be our driver. He revved the engine, rolled us a few feet forward and back, and then got out after a few minutes. Neither of them got back in our matatu.
Another forty-five minutes later my companions looked to me for an opinion on whether we should give up on Ganze and try again another day. Phone calls were made, and we were on the verge of bailing out, when the attendant from our matatu apparently poached customers from the neighboring matatu, causing their attendant to storm to our sliding door and slam it shut before the mutineers could board. Strong words were spoken, placating intermediaries showed up, vendors watched in anticipation, and after our attendant fixed the door which the other attendant had broken, the pirated passengers piled in, along with the real driver, who we had never seen before.
In the U.S, with its notions of cargo space and safety, no more than 8 or 10 people would be allowed in a vehicle of this size. Actually, in the U.S, a vehicle of this size usually holds five, and many vehicles considerably larger hold fewer, but whoever makes the little vans that are turned into matatus managed to fit 15 seats into the boxy frame.
At its most cozy, there were 26 people in our matatu. Children are hauled by a free arm and passed to mothers or crammed into slivers of space like bags of grain. Old women are told that there is plenty of room inside, and once they are in, they can’t turn around because someone else has gotten in behind them. The attendants hang out the side door, arms spread wide to keep anyone from falling out. Somehow the attendants always manage to collect fares as they do this. There can be 25 people packed like sardines between you and the attendant, and somehow their hand, grasping an assortment of bills, will find you. Then they will give you the incorrect change, and smile when you correct them, as if their mistake was not intentional. It’s not so much a dishonest grab at money, because he never told you the price to begin with. It’s more a test to see how much you, the ignorant outsider, will pay. These are individuals of particular talents.
After a long day visiting farms in Ganze, I was not particularly looking forward to the ride back to the coast. I had walked several miles up and down hills, had run out of water, and had not had enough to eat, starting with my skipping breakfast in order to be at the matatu stage by 7 a.m. for a ride that did not leave until 8:45. When the matatu pulled in front of the bench that is the stage in Ganze, I recognized the driver and attendant as the same who had brought my companions and me that morning. My coworkers and I had split up after the morning’s ride, and they had headed back an hour or so earlier. I smiled to the attendant as if we both knew something, and climbed in, hoping that we could at least keep the passenger level below the teens.
To my surprise, the van was almost empty. In addition to the driver and the attendant there was only one other man on board, and I stretched out in luxurious fashion, until it became apparent that that is incredibly uncomfortable in a matatu. We cruised slowly, stopping at junctions for a few moments longer than normal to see if any more passengers would appear. None did. The attendant seemed disappointed. Perhaps he remembered that I knew the actual price of the trip back. More likely he was thinking that someone else, probably the matatu that had taken my coworkers home, had caught all the fares along the roadside. We passed a school, and a crowd of children in threadbare uniforms chased us yelling, ”Taxi! Taxi!” The attendant and the driver mumbled some words between themselves, and we pulled over. Twenty-some school children got on board, giggled, marveled at the white man, and were given a free ride. The attendant, who did not make eye contact with any of the children as he gave them gruff instructions to pile into the back, gazed out the window of the sliding door and smiled. It was a good ride.
Public transportation does not operate on a schedule. It runs on a balance of incentives and disincentives. When there are enough people in the matatu, it starts to move. It also wants to pick up people on the side of the road as it goes. This poses a challenge if another matatu is going in the same direction. Both want to leave first to get the first shot at the people on the side of the road, but neither will leave without a respectable compliment of passengers to guarantee at least some coverage of the base cost of the trip. It is a risk game. Or perhaps the drivers simply leave when they finish their third cup of coffee, or when the card game ends, or whenever they damn well please.
There we were, faced with two empty matatus, both hoping to leave for Ganze. Rickety sliding door number one, or rusty sliding door number two? We picked the one closer to the exit from the stage onto the road. My two companions, taking full advantage of their feminine guile and foreignness, were allowed the front seats next to the empty driver’s seat. I sat two rows back. There is a silent awareness shared amongst all matatu passengers that if you don’t get the privilege of sitting in front, the second of the four rows in back is the best spot. You are less likely to be sat upon by someone than in the first row, and in the rows further back you are more likely to be hitting your head on the ceiling. I also believe that there might, just might, be a tiny bit more legroom in the second row. Not that my legs fit in any of the rows, but that extra millimeter, imagined or not, is a psychological salve. The first row is the worst for legroom, as the engine is directly in front of you, which also makes it the warmest place on the matatu into which you stuff your feet. Window seats are nice for the breeze, but bad for the dust and banging your head on the side beams above the glass as the matatu rolls back and forth on the arched roadway.
Shortly after we climbed in, a woman sat in the front row behind the engine, and a man in an Aloha shirt came and sat next to me. He spoke English well, but was impressed by my dozen words of Kiswahili. I practiced with him for a while. He verified the vocabulary list in my notebook, and occasionally made comments to the woman in front of us that made her laugh. After the initial conversation died out, we sat and waited. No one else boarded the matatu, least of all a driver. Looking at the van next to ours it appeared one person had gone with door number two, sat down in it and was also waiting.
The amount of activity at a matatu stage is proportional to the size of the town or city in which it is located. In Ganze, the stage is a single bench on each side of the road, and occasionally someone sits there with a basket of oranges to sell. I live in a mid-sized town, and there are never fewer than thirty matatus revving their engines, looking for passengers, rearranging their parking situations, and almost running over people. Around the matatus gather their smaller cousins, the tuk-tuks (rickshaws) and the piki-pikis (motorcycles), serving as taxis. There are peanut vendors, watch vendors, soda vendors, and people selling all manner of useless colorful plastic items pegged to a board that they carry with them. Want a hair band? No? How about a battery case? Child’s scissors? Giant paper clip? Three inches of flexible tubing? It is possible that I am exaggerating the scope of these vendors’ wares. I cannot report the items with total accuracy because to inspect the assortment is to make it impossible to convince the vendor that you really don’t want any of it.
It was close to an hour after we boarded and our matatu had not moved. The man in the Aloha shirt next to me disappeared. I tried to see if he had gotten on another matatu, thinking there may be better odds of leaving if we all stuck together in a sort of passengers’ union. He was gone. Then he was in the driver’s seat, revving the engine. We inched forward, then rolled back, trying several different gears as if to figure out which would get us out of the parking lot best. After a few moments it became apparent that he was not our driver who had decided to be social with the back seat passengers. He was just as anxious to get going as the rest of us. Another man came to the driver’s window, shoed him out and climbed in. This guy, it appeared, must be our driver. He revved the engine, rolled us a few feet forward and back, and then got out after a few minutes. Neither of them got back in our matatu.
Another forty-five minutes later my companions looked to me for an opinion on whether we should give up on Ganze and try again another day. Phone calls were made, and we were on the verge of bailing out, when the attendant from our matatu apparently poached customers from the neighboring matatu, causing their attendant to storm to our sliding door and slam it shut before the mutineers could board. Strong words were spoken, placating intermediaries showed up, vendors watched in anticipation, and after our attendant fixed the door which the other attendant had broken, the pirated passengers piled in, along with the real driver, who we had never seen before.
In the U.S, with its notions of cargo space and safety, no more than 8 or 10 people would be allowed in a vehicle of this size. Actually, in the U.S, a vehicle of this size usually holds five, and many vehicles considerably larger hold fewer, but whoever makes the little vans that are turned into matatus managed to fit 15 seats into the boxy frame.
At its most cozy, there were 26 people in our matatu. Children are hauled by a free arm and passed to mothers or crammed into slivers of space like bags of grain. Old women are told that there is plenty of room inside, and once they are in, they can’t turn around because someone else has gotten in behind them. The attendants hang out the side door, arms spread wide to keep anyone from falling out. Somehow the attendants always manage to collect fares as they do this. There can be 25 people packed like sardines between you and the attendant, and somehow their hand, grasping an assortment of bills, will find you. Then they will give you the incorrect change, and smile when you correct them, as if their mistake was not intentional. It’s not so much a dishonest grab at money, because he never told you the price to begin with. It’s more a test to see how much you, the ignorant outsider, will pay. These are individuals of particular talents.
After a long day visiting farms in Ganze, I was not particularly looking forward to the ride back to the coast. I had walked several miles up and down hills, had run out of water, and had not had enough to eat, starting with my skipping breakfast in order to be at the matatu stage by 7 a.m. for a ride that did not leave until 8:45. When the matatu pulled in front of the bench that is the stage in Ganze, I recognized the driver and attendant as the same who had brought my companions and me that morning. My coworkers and I had split up after the morning’s ride, and they had headed back an hour or so earlier. I smiled to the attendant as if we both knew something, and climbed in, hoping that we could at least keep the passenger level below the teens.
To my surprise, the van was almost empty. In addition to the driver and the attendant there was only one other man on board, and I stretched out in luxurious fashion, until it became apparent that that is incredibly uncomfortable in a matatu. We cruised slowly, stopping at junctions for a few moments longer than normal to see if any more passengers would appear. None did. The attendant seemed disappointed. Perhaps he remembered that I knew the actual price of the trip back. More likely he was thinking that someone else, probably the matatu that had taken my coworkers home, had caught all the fares along the roadside. We passed a school, and a crowd of children in threadbare uniforms chased us yelling, ”Taxi! Taxi!” The attendant and the driver mumbled some words between themselves, and we pulled over. Twenty-some school children got on board, giggled, marveled at the white man, and were given a free ride. The attendant, who did not make eye contact with any of the children as he gave them gruff instructions to pile into the back, gazed out the window of the sliding door and smiled. It was a good ride.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Qualified Labor
The sub-machinegun in the fat woman’s hands pointed in every direction but up. As she chuckled, the barrel would loll lazily up and down like a rowboat at sea. When she shifted her weight from one side of the seat to the other the target would switch from my kneecap to my lower abdomen and back. My limited knowledge of anatomy, gleaned from a pair of wilderness medical courses, half forgotten biology classes, and emergency room dramas, filled in the details. Bang! A bullet shatters my femur, the inferior vena cava ruptures, and I bleed to death on the way to a malaria clinic- the nearest place with clean bandages. Pop! The bullet passes through my lower intestine then hipbone, and I die a week later of a lingering infection brought on by gall spillage into the rest of my body. Crack! The bullet only cuts through my shinbone under the knee, and aside from never being able to walk straight again, I recover. This seems the best option that presents itself as the gun completes its pendulum swing.
Actually the best option is that the foot-long clip protruding out from in front of the trigger guard has no bullets in it. That is sometimes the case in developing nations when security guards must provide their own weapon and ammunition. Or perhaps it is not a real gun at all, but an elaborate replica, sold to the woman at a substantially lower price than the real thing, intended to do no more than discourage would-be thieves. That would be nice.
I had eyed the gun and its gross mishandling as the woman entered the bank. I smiled in a state of surreal bemusement to my coworker sitting next to me. We had been waiting on the bench for a friend who was at the teller. As the woman passed us we glanced at each other, both hoping that she and her spiraling firearm would not sit down. It was not to be. The woman wore a green jacket and a camouflaged skirt. The jacket was the kind you see in a full dress military parade. The skirt was the kind you see at monster truck rally or wet t-shirt contest. She smiled merrily as she chatted with a bank employee who she knew. I could not tell if she was on duty or coming to collect her pay. The only thing I could tell was that she had no concern for gun safety.
The only gun I have ever fired was a .22 caliber hunting rifle. Given the size of the shells and the rate of fire, you could assume that it was intended only to bring down animals under around two hundred pounds that could be killed with a single shot. A person can be killed with a .22, but a moose, bear or wild boar would likely end up very angry at the sudden inconvenience of a bullet in the backside. The gun I fired was adept at punching holes in paper targets at up to 100 yards. Further away than that and the targets were safe, as long as it was I behind the trigger. The process of removing a spent cartridge and getting the next one in the chamber ready to fire took at the least a second, and more if you wanted to aim the second shot.
At the rifle range, firearm safety is paramount. When the voice over the loudspeaker calls for guns to be lain down, they are lain down, chambers open and empty. There is no touching the guns until the voice says the range is clear and gives the go ahead to begin shooting again. A gun in the hand was carried unloaded, preferably in a case, always pointed either at the ground or the sky. It may be the case that in the fifteen-plus years since I have been to the rifle range, safety regulations have changed. Perhaps now it is standard protocol to let the barrel of your gun swing past every person in range. If so, the guard at the bank followed safety standards to the letter.
The possibility of a sweaty palm dropping the weapon that now sat two empty seats away and spraying bullets all over one side of the room was both very real and somehow hilarious. The jolly, rotund, heavily armed and camouflaged woman had all the necessary qualifications to play Aunt Jemima in a syrup commercial. This Aunt Jemima makes pancakes for the Zapatistas and conjures Che Guevara’s ghost. Or she blithely puts the rebels in the square out of their proletarian misery as she smiles in a matronly manner to General Dictatopolous, telling him to wipe the maple syrup away from the corner of his mouth.
Her employment in the position of security guard meant that someone saw this woman as qualified to provide protection for the largest concentration of wealth in a fifty-mile radius. Any person with a preconceived notion of how a security guard should behave would be quite surprised at this hire. She could not move quickly, she was oblivious to her surroundings, and she handled a weapon capable of slaughtering every person in the room as if she were burping a baby. But so it goes.
Qualifications are relative. Relatives often get hired instead of qualified people. Job security is a political issue, not a performance issue. That is unless you screw up so royally that it makes headlines, in which case it is still a political issue, only now performance factors in to the politics. A job can support a person’s family as well as their own self; to not have a job is to live in poverty. Anyone would rather keep a job than lose it. Given these premises, it makes sense to simply not do your job, because in doing it, you run the greater risk of screwing up and getting fired. Show up, exist quietly, and collect your paycheck. And so it takes a half hour to deposit money at the bank, and the security guards may pose a greater threat to life and limb than armed robbers.
Some combination of the serious and the ridiculous, curiosity and the desire to avoid socially awkward escape to the other side of the teller kept us in our seats. Of course it would have been prudent to simply wait outside, putting a thick cement wall between the potential machine-gunning and us. But the woman had not been fired yet, which means she had yet to let any stray bullets hit anyone. Given the circumstances, that made her pretty well qualified to handle the weapon. One can take comfort in that. One can also take comfort in the air conditioning inside the bank, but outside the bank you might die of heat stroke, so why take such a risk?
Actually the best option is that the foot-long clip protruding out from in front of the trigger guard has no bullets in it. That is sometimes the case in developing nations when security guards must provide their own weapon and ammunition. Or perhaps it is not a real gun at all, but an elaborate replica, sold to the woman at a substantially lower price than the real thing, intended to do no more than discourage would-be thieves. That would be nice.
I had eyed the gun and its gross mishandling as the woman entered the bank. I smiled in a state of surreal bemusement to my coworker sitting next to me. We had been waiting on the bench for a friend who was at the teller. As the woman passed us we glanced at each other, both hoping that she and her spiraling firearm would not sit down. It was not to be. The woman wore a green jacket and a camouflaged skirt. The jacket was the kind you see in a full dress military parade. The skirt was the kind you see at monster truck rally or wet t-shirt contest. She smiled merrily as she chatted with a bank employee who she knew. I could not tell if she was on duty or coming to collect her pay. The only thing I could tell was that she had no concern for gun safety.
The only gun I have ever fired was a .22 caliber hunting rifle. Given the size of the shells and the rate of fire, you could assume that it was intended only to bring down animals under around two hundred pounds that could be killed with a single shot. A person can be killed with a .22, but a moose, bear or wild boar would likely end up very angry at the sudden inconvenience of a bullet in the backside. The gun I fired was adept at punching holes in paper targets at up to 100 yards. Further away than that and the targets were safe, as long as it was I behind the trigger. The process of removing a spent cartridge and getting the next one in the chamber ready to fire took at the least a second, and more if you wanted to aim the second shot.
At the rifle range, firearm safety is paramount. When the voice over the loudspeaker calls for guns to be lain down, they are lain down, chambers open and empty. There is no touching the guns until the voice says the range is clear and gives the go ahead to begin shooting again. A gun in the hand was carried unloaded, preferably in a case, always pointed either at the ground or the sky. It may be the case that in the fifteen-plus years since I have been to the rifle range, safety regulations have changed. Perhaps now it is standard protocol to let the barrel of your gun swing past every person in range. If so, the guard at the bank followed safety standards to the letter.
The possibility of a sweaty palm dropping the weapon that now sat two empty seats away and spraying bullets all over one side of the room was both very real and somehow hilarious. The jolly, rotund, heavily armed and camouflaged woman had all the necessary qualifications to play Aunt Jemima in a syrup commercial. This Aunt Jemima makes pancakes for the Zapatistas and conjures Che Guevara’s ghost. Or she blithely puts the rebels in the square out of their proletarian misery as she smiles in a matronly manner to General Dictatopolous, telling him to wipe the maple syrup away from the corner of his mouth.
Her employment in the position of security guard meant that someone saw this woman as qualified to provide protection for the largest concentration of wealth in a fifty-mile radius. Any person with a preconceived notion of how a security guard should behave would be quite surprised at this hire. She could not move quickly, she was oblivious to her surroundings, and she handled a weapon capable of slaughtering every person in the room as if she were burping a baby. But so it goes.
Qualifications are relative. Relatives often get hired instead of qualified people. Job security is a political issue, not a performance issue. That is unless you screw up so royally that it makes headlines, in which case it is still a political issue, only now performance factors in to the politics. A job can support a person’s family as well as their own self; to not have a job is to live in poverty. Anyone would rather keep a job than lose it. Given these premises, it makes sense to simply not do your job, because in doing it, you run the greater risk of screwing up and getting fired. Show up, exist quietly, and collect your paycheck. And so it takes a half hour to deposit money at the bank, and the security guards may pose a greater threat to life and limb than armed robbers.
Some combination of the serious and the ridiculous, curiosity and the desire to avoid socially awkward escape to the other side of the teller kept us in our seats. Of course it would have been prudent to simply wait outside, putting a thick cement wall between the potential machine-gunning and us. But the woman had not been fired yet, which means she had yet to let any stray bullets hit anyone. Given the circumstances, that made her pretty well qualified to handle the weapon. One can take comfort in that. One can also take comfort in the air conditioning inside the bank, but outside the bank you might die of heat stroke, so why take such a risk?
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