We have managed to upload a slideshow to Flickr - here is the link below, or you can click on the slideshow pic to the right.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83855790@N00/sets/72157606387691305/
A bit frustratingly, the slideshow starts at a random point - if you're interested in reading it the way we intended, click through to the picture of the white health hut which is the start of the story. Also frustratingly, you can only see the captions we've written if you are viewing the pics in the "White Water Set" on their biggest setting - this link should take you there, but please have patience!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Tobago Take Two
In the High Cost of Giving, we wrote about the village of Tobago and what a tough time they are having there. Things are still hard there, and its going to take a while and a lot of political will to get those people what they need, but I thought I’d counterpoint the picture of gloom we painted with a description of a day we spent there recently.
Sam had done a couple of clinics in Tobago before I managed to get over there with him – transport was difficult and scarce, and so taking me along for the ride just didn’t seem appropriate. Then one Sunday, we hitch hiked over there together – Sam had woken in the night worried about a little girl’s lung infection and wanted to check her before we went away for a week to Georgetown (what a hero). So we had a rainy day out there giving out worms tablets. Moved by the clear need for more effective healthcare, for health education, for nutritional education – we promised we’d go back, this time to give some health talks as well as run a clinic.
Than, in the gentle way of things here, the friends around us steadily began to get interested in our next trip. Bernice, a local retired teacher who lives nearby – wanted to come and do a storytelling session with the children (who get no education at all there). Jud, the pilot of the yellow plane, was interested in coming to see the situation there. His wife Karen is a dental hygienist – she’d like to come and give out some toothbrushes to the kids along with a dental chat.
Next came Godfrey Chan-a-Sue – he’s the local shopkeeper whose task it is to attempt to administer the gifts of Food for the Poor. He had sacks of Soya protein and also of back beans he could give us. There were two problems with this – getting it there and also getting people to eat it. Getting it there was solved after I paid a friendly visit to the local Regional Chairman (I wore make up for the first time in months – my equivalent of power dressing?). He agreed to provide transportation on the Sunday that we wanted to go. Next we had to get thinking about the food itself. Protein is exactly what is needed – protein malnutrition underlies the majority of the severely sick children’s cases that get admitted hospital, as testified by the swollen bellies and skinny arms of many of the children Sam sees there. The problem is that the soya protein flakes were completely unknown to the Tobagans, and we heard that there was something of a taboo around black foods. So the gifts of Food for the Poor were looking like a hard sell.
At this point we had out flash of inspiration. Somehow this trip was bringing together all aspects of our lives – we should give a cookery demonstration – cooking being an ever-growing obsession with us… We decided that the best person in the Mabaruma to give the demonstration (and it would be much more likely to be successful if it was a local – thinking of language and cultural barriers) was our friend Shaira. Shaira is by far the best cook in Mabaruma. She originally taught us all the Guyanese basics – pepperpot, cook-up rice, and just last night, local crab curry with blue crabs – more on that later. Shaira readily agreed, if she could bring along her lovely daughter Nureifa and her husband, David. At this point we were thinking – hell, yeah, the more the merrier….
As we drove out of town towards the village, we made an interesting gang. We had Jud and his family, the 7th Day Adventists, we had Nureifa and Shaira, who are the only Muslims in the village, we had David, Shaira’s husband and a devoted member of the rastatfarian brotherhood. We had Bernice, a fairly straight down the line Christian. And Sam and I, Atheists with a capital A. (We’ve taken to declaring this quite aggressively here. Otherwise you get into long tiresome conversations with various church groups attempting to convert you.) Quite a bizarre multicultural band of brothers.
We had a pretty special day in Tobago. We got there just as they were gathering for church (which turned out to have a pretty low turn out). Bernice and I attended the service – she’s a Christian and I’m nosey – whilst everyone else got set up for the day’s activities.
After the service we gathered as many people into the church as we could. Sam kicked things off by opening up a discussion about nutrition and self-sufficiency. The villagers are all too aware that’s its their removal from the river and their source of crabs and fish that is the cause of lots of the health problems, and there is a sense of grievance that the government has not done more to address this. A community boat is seen as a solution. What about the agriculture side of things though, Sam asked – the move was actually instigated by World Harvest who had started an agriculture project with the people when they lived on Simoto creek (now defunct – World Harvest have no presence here), and had got frustrated that their project kept getting flooded. Oh, then move all the people, perfect solution. The villagers said they still don’t feel confident as agriculturists – they’ve been taught a few things, but then when things go wrong, there’s no help and they lack the knowledge or resources to fix things. For example – on the new land, their first crops were wiped out by Acoushi ant. Any local farmer would have told them this but World Harvest didn’t know or predict it – so they lost their first crop, and haven’t the heart to plant more until they can afford expensive insecticides to protect their crops.
It’s a tough situation and not one with a single, simple answer. An encouraging thing on the day was that David, a local subsistence farmer, offered to drop in and help when he could, and to loan them the use of his insecticide sprayer if they could get the spray.
Next, we moved on to health and nutrition – trying to encourage people to grow crops to better nourish their families – and talking about ways they can cheaply replace the lost crab and fish protein from their diet. This included introducing the idea of the beans and the soya flakes. I found myself chipping in here instinctively, as what had occurred in the room was a complete division of sexes, with Sam speaking to the men and being ignored by the women, and vice versa. As a final addendum, we talked a bit about family size, prosperity and nutrition, and got the women thinking about family planning – showing them a packet of pills and explaining that they can choose when to have their children without affecting their fertility. Maybe this helped them make sense of me – everywhere I go here, people think its strange that I don’t have children yet.
Karen did her thing next, getting out her plastercast flip top mouth and displaying how to brush your teeth properly. She had toothbrushes to hand out but also explained how you can make a brush from a twig by fraying the ends – useful to know for camping trips. Then we dished out toothbrushes, toothpaste and condoms – interesting selection – before separating for our various tasks.
For Sam this was running a clinic at the front of the church. People line up in the pews and come up one by one to see him, with no sense of patient confidentiality, but in a village that size, I suspect there are no secrets. At the back of the church, Bernice ran a storytelling group, theoretically for the children but in the end she had quite a few of the men there too, enjoying her stories.
At the same time, Karen and I headed over to the nearest communal kitchen (this is a feature of Tobago life, the kitchens are shared between five or so families – wooden covered platforms on stilts with a wood fire on a raised wooden platform – the smell of woodsmoke is everywhere), to join Shaira in her cookery demonstration for the women of the village. Our hope with getting Shaira to do this was that she is such a great cook, she would inspire them by making delicious and nutritious foods. And she didn’t fail. With not much more than a couple of coconuts, some onions and garlic, dried thyme (which grows like a weed here) and salt, she cooked a big bean cook-up with soya flakes in, and a stew of greens and beans and soya. She also had the ladies make up some cassava bread.
Meanwhile, I gathered some ladies round me and started asking them to help me to learn their language. I am writing a play about Tobago, which examines the events that brought the people here, asking questions about what does it mean to try and develop a place? How do you effect the people and culture you are in contact with? In the play, there are characters speaking Warau, so I asked the women to translate my dialogue into their language, making recordings and writing out phonetically what I heard. They were initially surprised by my request, but soon we were happily beavering away, with different people debating hotly amongst themselves how best to translate “have you got ice” “he’s your sweet man” etc. Then one of the women, Victoria Hosea, began to sing to me. Her voice was rough and strong, and very beautiful as she sang versions of English hymns, first in Warau then in English. Then one of those magical rare moments of synchronicity occurred. The play begins with a true event – one which happened to these people. In 2005, floodwaters threatened their lives in their old homes, and the radical (and controversial) solution to this came in the form of the religious NGO, World Harvest – who uprooted them all from their homes of many generations. The song Victoria chose to sing me next was called “Brother Noah where are you?” And so I found myself sitting in a kitchen in Tobago, being sung this haunting, prophetic song by this wonderfully wise woman, being handed the perfect gift to complete my play:
“Brother Noah, where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
Brother Noah where are you? The rains are falling down”.
By the time we had finished, Shaira had cooked her stew to perfection. There was happily enough for everyone to try the nutritious cook-up and stew, and the improvised meal back in the church had a celebratory feel. There was something good about sharing a meal with the people we had come to help. After that, the rest of the beans and the soya were shared out to each family, everyone excited about cooking with the new food.
By mid-afternoon, it was time for us to get our lift home. We said our farewells – I will be going back to the village next month with my theatre group, and I have a feeling everyone else will be going back for one reason or another. We drove home through Hosororo, a leafy village nearby, where Shaira’s friend, brother Louis, gave us each a freshly picked young coconut. We drank the water from inside and then split them open to eat the nutty white jelly from the middle. Then we all headed down to Hosororo falls – a local set of rapids with (unusually for Guyana – most water here is brown) clear water to swim in. We all cooled off with a swim – even Shaira and Nureifa came in – before all nine of us piled on to Jud’s small 4X4 vehicle – which is about the size of a golf buggy – for our drive home.
I can’t remember a better day I’ve had recently, and its one that really brings into focus a truism about volunteering. Sam recently asked a project manager, Tim, at VSO – who do you think gets most out of volunteering – the governments you work for, or the people you help? Tim shrugged and smiled – it’s the volunteers who get the most, of course.
Sam had done a couple of clinics in Tobago before I managed to get over there with him – transport was difficult and scarce, and so taking me along for the ride just didn’t seem appropriate. Then one Sunday, we hitch hiked over there together – Sam had woken in the night worried about a little girl’s lung infection and wanted to check her before we went away for a week to Georgetown (what a hero). So we had a rainy day out there giving out worms tablets. Moved by the clear need for more effective healthcare, for health education, for nutritional education – we promised we’d go back, this time to give some health talks as well as run a clinic.
Than, in the gentle way of things here, the friends around us steadily began to get interested in our next trip. Bernice, a local retired teacher who lives nearby – wanted to come and do a storytelling session with the children (who get no education at all there). Jud, the pilot of the yellow plane, was interested in coming to see the situation there. His wife Karen is a dental hygienist – she’d like to come and give out some toothbrushes to the kids along with a dental chat.
Next came Godfrey Chan-a-Sue – he’s the local shopkeeper whose task it is to attempt to administer the gifts of Food for the Poor. He had sacks of Soya protein and also of back beans he could give us. There were two problems with this – getting it there and also getting people to eat it. Getting it there was solved after I paid a friendly visit to the local Regional Chairman (I wore make up for the first time in months – my equivalent of power dressing?). He agreed to provide transportation on the Sunday that we wanted to go. Next we had to get thinking about the food itself. Protein is exactly what is needed – protein malnutrition underlies the majority of the severely sick children’s cases that get admitted hospital, as testified by the swollen bellies and skinny arms of many of the children Sam sees there. The problem is that the soya protein flakes were completely unknown to the Tobagans, and we heard that there was something of a taboo around black foods. So the gifts of Food for the Poor were looking like a hard sell.
At this point we had out flash of inspiration. Somehow this trip was bringing together all aspects of our lives – we should give a cookery demonstration – cooking being an ever-growing obsession with us… We decided that the best person in the Mabaruma to give the demonstration (and it would be much more likely to be successful if it was a local – thinking of language and cultural barriers) was our friend Shaira. Shaira is by far the best cook in Mabaruma. She originally taught us all the Guyanese basics – pepperpot, cook-up rice, and just last night, local crab curry with blue crabs – more on that later. Shaira readily agreed, if she could bring along her lovely daughter Nureifa and her husband, David. At this point we were thinking – hell, yeah, the more the merrier….
As we drove out of town towards the village, we made an interesting gang. We had Jud and his family, the 7th Day Adventists, we had Nureifa and Shaira, who are the only Muslims in the village, we had David, Shaira’s husband and a devoted member of the rastatfarian brotherhood. We had Bernice, a fairly straight down the line Christian. And Sam and I, Atheists with a capital A. (We’ve taken to declaring this quite aggressively here. Otherwise you get into long tiresome conversations with various church groups attempting to convert you.) Quite a bizarre multicultural band of brothers.
We had a pretty special day in Tobago. We got there just as they were gathering for church (which turned out to have a pretty low turn out). Bernice and I attended the service – she’s a Christian and I’m nosey – whilst everyone else got set up for the day’s activities.
After the service we gathered as many people into the church as we could. Sam kicked things off by opening up a discussion about nutrition and self-sufficiency. The villagers are all too aware that’s its their removal from the river and their source of crabs and fish that is the cause of lots of the health problems, and there is a sense of grievance that the government has not done more to address this. A community boat is seen as a solution. What about the agriculture side of things though, Sam asked – the move was actually instigated by World Harvest who had started an agriculture project with the people when they lived on Simoto creek (now defunct – World Harvest have no presence here), and had got frustrated that their project kept getting flooded. Oh, then move all the people, perfect solution. The villagers said they still don’t feel confident as agriculturists – they’ve been taught a few things, but then when things go wrong, there’s no help and they lack the knowledge or resources to fix things. For example – on the new land, their first crops were wiped out by Acoushi ant. Any local farmer would have told them this but World Harvest didn’t know or predict it – so they lost their first crop, and haven’t the heart to plant more until they can afford expensive insecticides to protect their crops.
It’s a tough situation and not one with a single, simple answer. An encouraging thing on the day was that David, a local subsistence farmer, offered to drop in and help when he could, and to loan them the use of his insecticide sprayer if they could get the spray.
Next, we moved on to health and nutrition – trying to encourage people to grow crops to better nourish their families – and talking about ways they can cheaply replace the lost crab and fish protein from their diet. This included introducing the idea of the beans and the soya flakes. I found myself chipping in here instinctively, as what had occurred in the room was a complete division of sexes, with Sam speaking to the men and being ignored by the women, and vice versa. As a final addendum, we talked a bit about family size, prosperity and nutrition, and got the women thinking about family planning – showing them a packet of pills and explaining that they can choose when to have their children without affecting their fertility. Maybe this helped them make sense of me – everywhere I go here, people think its strange that I don’t have children yet.
Karen did her thing next, getting out her plastercast flip top mouth and displaying how to brush your teeth properly. She had toothbrushes to hand out but also explained how you can make a brush from a twig by fraying the ends – useful to know for camping trips. Then we dished out toothbrushes, toothpaste and condoms – interesting selection – before separating for our various tasks.
For Sam this was running a clinic at the front of the church. People line up in the pews and come up one by one to see him, with no sense of patient confidentiality, but in a village that size, I suspect there are no secrets. At the back of the church, Bernice ran a storytelling group, theoretically for the children but in the end she had quite a few of the men there too, enjoying her stories.
At the same time, Karen and I headed over to the nearest communal kitchen (this is a feature of Tobago life, the kitchens are shared between five or so families – wooden covered platforms on stilts with a wood fire on a raised wooden platform – the smell of woodsmoke is everywhere), to join Shaira in her cookery demonstration for the women of the village. Our hope with getting Shaira to do this was that she is such a great cook, she would inspire them by making delicious and nutritious foods. And she didn’t fail. With not much more than a couple of coconuts, some onions and garlic, dried thyme (which grows like a weed here) and salt, she cooked a big bean cook-up with soya flakes in, and a stew of greens and beans and soya. She also had the ladies make up some cassava bread.
Meanwhile, I gathered some ladies round me and started asking them to help me to learn their language. I am writing a play about Tobago, which examines the events that brought the people here, asking questions about what does it mean to try and develop a place? How do you effect the people and culture you are in contact with? In the play, there are characters speaking Warau, so I asked the women to translate my dialogue into their language, making recordings and writing out phonetically what I heard. They were initially surprised by my request, but soon we were happily beavering away, with different people debating hotly amongst themselves how best to translate “have you got ice” “he’s your sweet man” etc. Then one of the women, Victoria Hosea, began to sing to me. Her voice was rough and strong, and very beautiful as she sang versions of English hymns, first in Warau then in English. Then one of those magical rare moments of synchronicity occurred. The play begins with a true event – one which happened to these people. In 2005, floodwaters threatened their lives in their old homes, and the radical (and controversial) solution to this came in the form of the religious NGO, World Harvest – who uprooted them all from their homes of many generations. The song Victoria chose to sing me next was called “Brother Noah where are you?” And so I found myself sitting in a kitchen in Tobago, being sung this haunting, prophetic song by this wonderfully wise woman, being handed the perfect gift to complete my play:
“Brother Noah, where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
Brother Noah where are you? The rains are falling down”.
By the time we had finished, Shaira had cooked her stew to perfection. There was happily enough for everyone to try the nutritious cook-up and stew, and the improvised meal back in the church had a celebratory feel. There was something good about sharing a meal with the people we had come to help. After that, the rest of the beans and the soya were shared out to each family, everyone excited about cooking with the new food.
By mid-afternoon, it was time for us to get our lift home. We said our farewells – I will be going back to the village next month with my theatre group, and I have a feeling everyone else will be going back for one reason or another. We drove home through Hosororo, a leafy village nearby, where Shaira’s friend, brother Louis, gave us each a freshly picked young coconut. We drank the water from inside and then split them open to eat the nutty white jelly from the middle. Then we all headed down to Hosororo falls – a local set of rapids with (unusually for Guyana – most water here is brown) clear water to swim in. We all cooled off with a swim – even Shaira and Nureifa came in – before all nine of us piled on to Jud’s small 4X4 vehicle – which is about the size of a golf buggy – for our drive home.
I can’t remember a better day I’ve had recently, and its one that really brings into focus a truism about volunteering. Sam recently asked a project manager, Tim, at VSO – who do you think gets most out of volunteering – the governments you work for, or the people you help? Tim shrugged and smiled – it’s the volunteers who get the most, of course.
Its Opening Night….
“Well – maybe its time you put them in front of an audience” Sam suggested. This was his solution to my bemoaning my group’s mid-project doldrums – attendance rates were right down, we had generated lots of material but not yet polished it to a performable state, and the idea of ever performing to anyone seemed very remote.
The group are a team of local teachers who (alongside apparently endless extracurricular training to bring up their professional standards) had been giving up their precious evenings to become Mabaruma’s first and only Community Theatre Group. Our remit was public health education, and alongside training them as performers, I was also training them as drama workshop leaders in their own right. At some point in August, this should blossom into spin-off summer schools at Nursery, Primary and Secondary level. On top of that will come my own cherished outreach trips – taking shows to remote Amerindian villages around the region – the first time this has ever been done here.
But half way through the project, this end seemed impossibly out of reach, so I took Sam’s advice and scheduled a preview performance – there’s nothing like the prospect of an imminent audience to energise an acting company and focus everyone’s minds.
Last night was the preview performance of our first (yet to be named) show. We played to an audience of friends and family, plus some local relevant experts – the Regional Health Officer came along to give her input, as did the local director of Red Cross. It was hardly a West End opening – no champagne and nibbles, darling – and until 10 minutes before we started it looked as though we would have to cancel, as the power was down (a transformer in the town generator had burst into flames the night before). But at ten to seven, just as we were deciding whether we had to pull up our stumps or else perform in the dark (far more forgiving) the fluorescent striplight flickered into life.
The performance was rough and ready – some of the material had only been rehearsed once – but the evening was incredibly helpful, both for shaping the health message and getting extra feedback. Here’s a rundown of the content, so you can get a sense of what we are up to. We tried to work with a broad selection of material and forms, local and international, and also aimed at as wide an age range as we could.
‘Little Jonny and Victor Vomit’ – a street theatre piece for children, where Victor the Vomit Bug lurks around Little Jonny as he plays cricket, plays with his dog, visits the latrine, eats his cookies. The kids have to shout out what Jonny is doing wrong as he fails to wash his hands, drinks untreated water etc. Then Victor turns on the audience, looking for children who haven’t washed their hands and scaring them (which they love). Finally, the children are invited on stage to whack Victor to death with enormous bars of soap and bottles of bleach, to much vocal approval from the audience.
‘How to Stay Healthy’ – a glove puppet piece about three kittens – Pinkie, Fluffy and Blackie - who decide to eat mangoes straight from the floor without washing them. The kittens get sick, and learn their lesson – always wash your fruit before you eat it.
‘Family Planning Skit’ – skits are the main form of theatre here. In this one, our two performers Seetama and Anthony, have a ball sending themselves up as a mother and son who are both as confused as each other about safe sex. Anthony is accused of impregnating a girl called Samantha – but its impossible, he claims, as they practiced safe sex. This involved Samantha drinking cold water, jumping up and down and putting her head between her knees after sex. Eventually, a local health practitioner offers some advice – these are family planning myths which won’t protect you from pregnancy or from STI’s like HIV either. The best thing is for Anthony to use latex condoms which he can get from the hospital. At this Seetama joyfully runs off to fetch him some – and returns with an enormous box of condoms which will last him a lifetime and more.
‘Nutrition Playlet’ – this short drama tackled some more emotionally difficult subjects, and raised some laughs where we really weren’t expecting them. We’ll be looking at this and seeing if there’s a way we can adapt to this. The play involves a young mother bringing her very sick baby to hospital – the baby is malnourished and has fallen sick, on top of which the mother has given it local constipating medicine as treatment. The nurse tries to educate her about caring for her baby, but it is too late and the baby dies while they are trying to treat it. Next we see the mother ten years later – again with a young child. She speaks about how she has learned all about how to care for her child through nutrition, and that she never wants what happened to her first child to happen again.
‘Chronic Illness Skit’ – another skit – here, two friends meet on the street, Betty and Sati. Betty has been diagnosed with Hypertension, and is trying to think of ways that she can remember to take her tablet every day, even when she feels OK. This is a big health issue here, where people with chronic illnesses don’t keep taking their medicine once they feel well, and so get into cycles of illness. Together they go through some options – what about with my alarm clock? Says Betty – but you switch it off and go back to sleep, says Sati. OK – what about with the chicken feed? Says Betty – but what if you feed the tablets to the chickens, says Sati. Eventually, they find the solution – in Betty’s pants drawer (or panty bag as its called here…) – she never leaves home without her knickers on….
‘Tiffany’s Story’ – Forum theatre piece. This was the biggest experiment of the night – staging our first forum theatre piece – in which the audience are actively encouraged to get up on stage and change the course of events. We had no real idea how the Guyanese audience would respond to this. Tiffany’s story also has challenging content. When selecting our theme, I asked the teachers to identify a group they believed was oppressed locally. This might seem like a strange request, but the central idea of Forum theatre is to identify with social groups who are in oppressed situations socially, to put them on stage, to try to activate positive change for those groups and to raise awareness of their plight – most importantly through awakening their own sense of empowerment and dissent.
Somewhat to my surprise (perhaps I had over-romanticised the appearance of happy families here in Mabaruma), almost all of the teachers wanted to treat the subject of child sexual abuse. They told me that it is very common in this community – one welfare survey came up with a truly staggering 79% of children suffering some form of sexual abuse in the home. Depressingly, the official response to this statistic was a bit of a shrug – well what can be done if its so prevalent? In a way they have a point – resources here are extremely scarce – there is not a single social worker in the region, let alone women and children’s refuges or counselling. Perhaps most depressing of all, most teachers knew of at least one case where a family had tried to act and a father or a step father had been reported to the police, only to have the police bought off and the charges dropped. For teachers who had acted on a child’s behalf, this also raises frightening prospects of reprisals. Their view though, was that the vast majority of cases go completely unchallenged, with poverty playing a major role. For too many of the women here, the economic consequences of challenging a partner’s abuses - possible abandonment and destitution - are just too harsh, and so they too end up complicit in their children’s situation.
So – into this quite complicated picture we have waded, with Forum theatre as our tool. In Forum theatre, you develop a scripted core, in which a central protagonist is depicted in the situations which oppress them. The emphasis is very much on the oppression side of things, with the aim being to provoke the audience into challenging the protagonist’s passivity and offering alternative strategies. And then acting them out themselves.
Our scripted core was in the end a bit long (this is previews remember, so we’ll be cutting). We had a scene over breakfast (Breakfast at Tiffanys, get it?) where Tiffany’s father bullies the mother into leaving for market, before abusing Tiffany. Next we see Tiffany at school, rejecting her friends’ attempts to talk to her. Then we see her in class – a teacher has noticed her strange behaviour and wants to know what’s wrong. The piece continues with a scene with her headmistress and eventually with a highly apathetic Welfare Officer.
When we replayed each scene, we encouraged the audience to stop the action when they wanted Tiffany to behave in a different way. They would then explain what they wanted, and then come on stage and enact it. The actors on stage would stay in their characters and improvise to try to keep the action going the way their character wanted it to. We had some excellent interventions – with various Tiffanies managing to stand up to the Father, call for help from neighbours, talk to their friends or their teachers about what is happening. And eventually, in a brilliant adaptation of the form, we had audience members replacing other characters. The Red Cross director was so disgusted at the apathetic welfare officer, she got up and replaced her, making her a sympathetic and caring figure.
It was quite a hit as a piece, with most people very engaged, and a few people coming up time and again with different possible strategies. Happily there was a lot of fun and laughter, despite the tough subject matter. In the improvisations, the performers really shone, as they hung on to their characters, or adapted them at instructions from the audience, with great sponteneity and playfulness. In terms of hosting the piece, the role of the Joker (who kind of conducts the audience, mediating their desires) was a real learning curve for myself and Candaisy, who were both chipping in. In particular, we should have enlivened the younger audience members early on (it tended to be confident older women who intervened), and also to try to find ways to get male members of the audience feeling able to identify with and play Tiffany. I’m not sure if this will be possible – gender roles are very defined here – but I will try. I still can’t help feeling it was a real success though, with a sense of thrill as each new intervention began, and with the older women getting to model positive behaviour for the younger ones, also putting over the message that there are people in the community who will listen and help you if you need them.
Its going to be interesting putting this piece in front of a more mixed audience. I hope and pray it will have a positive reception, and if it raises a hornets nest (its pretty critical of the current welfare system in place) I hope it will be with a positive outcome. I suspect I can’t really mediate for that, but in the immediate term, I think the piece should at least raise awareness and model more assertive behaviour for young people. And it’s a joy to be making theatre which the audience can change, adapt and get real pleasure out of moulding.
The Grand Finale!
Anyone who knows me will recognize the irony of this one. I was really keen to use song in the show. One of the exercises we did was to take popular songs which everyone knows, and to subvert the lyrics to deliver a health message. The most successful of these was based on “Rum Until I Die” a massive Soca hit around the Caribbean in the past couple of years. My group adapted the lyrics into “Rum will make you die, Rum will make you die, so you’d better stop now, and live a better life!” Going on to describe in 4 verses the tragic consequences of alcoholism and the positive outcome of choosing to abstain. “Pass out this message to all your buddies – give up the rum and save your monies”. Oh yeah. Just now.
The group are a team of local teachers who (alongside apparently endless extracurricular training to bring up their professional standards) had been giving up their precious evenings to become Mabaruma’s first and only Community Theatre Group. Our remit was public health education, and alongside training them as performers, I was also training them as drama workshop leaders in their own right. At some point in August, this should blossom into spin-off summer schools at Nursery, Primary and Secondary level. On top of that will come my own cherished outreach trips – taking shows to remote Amerindian villages around the region – the first time this has ever been done here.
But half way through the project, this end seemed impossibly out of reach, so I took Sam’s advice and scheduled a preview performance – there’s nothing like the prospect of an imminent audience to energise an acting company and focus everyone’s minds.
Last night was the preview performance of our first (yet to be named) show. We played to an audience of friends and family, plus some local relevant experts – the Regional Health Officer came along to give her input, as did the local director of Red Cross. It was hardly a West End opening – no champagne and nibbles, darling – and until 10 minutes before we started it looked as though we would have to cancel, as the power was down (a transformer in the town generator had burst into flames the night before). But at ten to seven, just as we were deciding whether we had to pull up our stumps or else perform in the dark (far more forgiving) the fluorescent striplight flickered into life.
The performance was rough and ready – some of the material had only been rehearsed once – but the evening was incredibly helpful, both for shaping the health message and getting extra feedback. Here’s a rundown of the content, so you can get a sense of what we are up to. We tried to work with a broad selection of material and forms, local and international, and also aimed at as wide an age range as we could.
‘Little Jonny and Victor Vomit’ – a street theatre piece for children, where Victor the Vomit Bug lurks around Little Jonny as he plays cricket, plays with his dog, visits the latrine, eats his cookies. The kids have to shout out what Jonny is doing wrong as he fails to wash his hands, drinks untreated water etc. Then Victor turns on the audience, looking for children who haven’t washed their hands and scaring them (which they love). Finally, the children are invited on stage to whack Victor to death with enormous bars of soap and bottles of bleach, to much vocal approval from the audience.
‘How to Stay Healthy’ – a glove puppet piece about three kittens – Pinkie, Fluffy and Blackie - who decide to eat mangoes straight from the floor without washing them. The kittens get sick, and learn their lesson – always wash your fruit before you eat it.
‘Family Planning Skit’ – skits are the main form of theatre here. In this one, our two performers Seetama and Anthony, have a ball sending themselves up as a mother and son who are both as confused as each other about safe sex. Anthony is accused of impregnating a girl called Samantha – but its impossible, he claims, as they practiced safe sex. This involved Samantha drinking cold water, jumping up and down and putting her head between her knees after sex. Eventually, a local health practitioner offers some advice – these are family planning myths which won’t protect you from pregnancy or from STI’s like HIV either. The best thing is for Anthony to use latex condoms which he can get from the hospital. At this Seetama joyfully runs off to fetch him some – and returns with an enormous box of condoms which will last him a lifetime and more.
‘Nutrition Playlet’ – this short drama tackled some more emotionally difficult subjects, and raised some laughs where we really weren’t expecting them. We’ll be looking at this and seeing if there’s a way we can adapt to this. The play involves a young mother bringing her very sick baby to hospital – the baby is malnourished and has fallen sick, on top of which the mother has given it local constipating medicine as treatment. The nurse tries to educate her about caring for her baby, but it is too late and the baby dies while they are trying to treat it. Next we see the mother ten years later – again with a young child. She speaks about how she has learned all about how to care for her child through nutrition, and that she never wants what happened to her first child to happen again.
‘Chronic Illness Skit’ – another skit – here, two friends meet on the street, Betty and Sati. Betty has been diagnosed with Hypertension, and is trying to think of ways that she can remember to take her tablet every day, even when she feels OK. This is a big health issue here, where people with chronic illnesses don’t keep taking their medicine once they feel well, and so get into cycles of illness. Together they go through some options – what about with my alarm clock? Says Betty – but you switch it off and go back to sleep, says Sati. OK – what about with the chicken feed? Says Betty – but what if you feed the tablets to the chickens, says Sati. Eventually, they find the solution – in Betty’s pants drawer (or panty bag as its called here…) – she never leaves home without her knickers on….
‘Tiffany’s Story’ – Forum theatre piece. This was the biggest experiment of the night – staging our first forum theatre piece – in which the audience are actively encouraged to get up on stage and change the course of events. We had no real idea how the Guyanese audience would respond to this. Tiffany’s story also has challenging content. When selecting our theme, I asked the teachers to identify a group they believed was oppressed locally. This might seem like a strange request, but the central idea of Forum theatre is to identify with social groups who are in oppressed situations socially, to put them on stage, to try to activate positive change for those groups and to raise awareness of their plight – most importantly through awakening their own sense of empowerment and dissent.
Somewhat to my surprise (perhaps I had over-romanticised the appearance of happy families here in Mabaruma), almost all of the teachers wanted to treat the subject of child sexual abuse. They told me that it is very common in this community – one welfare survey came up with a truly staggering 79% of children suffering some form of sexual abuse in the home. Depressingly, the official response to this statistic was a bit of a shrug – well what can be done if its so prevalent? In a way they have a point – resources here are extremely scarce – there is not a single social worker in the region, let alone women and children’s refuges or counselling. Perhaps most depressing of all, most teachers knew of at least one case where a family had tried to act and a father or a step father had been reported to the police, only to have the police bought off and the charges dropped. For teachers who had acted on a child’s behalf, this also raises frightening prospects of reprisals. Their view though, was that the vast majority of cases go completely unchallenged, with poverty playing a major role. For too many of the women here, the economic consequences of challenging a partner’s abuses - possible abandonment and destitution - are just too harsh, and so they too end up complicit in their children’s situation.
So – into this quite complicated picture we have waded, with Forum theatre as our tool. In Forum theatre, you develop a scripted core, in which a central protagonist is depicted in the situations which oppress them. The emphasis is very much on the oppression side of things, with the aim being to provoke the audience into challenging the protagonist’s passivity and offering alternative strategies. And then acting them out themselves.
Our scripted core was in the end a bit long (this is previews remember, so we’ll be cutting). We had a scene over breakfast (Breakfast at Tiffanys, get it?) where Tiffany’s father bullies the mother into leaving for market, before abusing Tiffany. Next we see Tiffany at school, rejecting her friends’ attempts to talk to her. Then we see her in class – a teacher has noticed her strange behaviour and wants to know what’s wrong. The piece continues with a scene with her headmistress and eventually with a highly apathetic Welfare Officer.
When we replayed each scene, we encouraged the audience to stop the action when they wanted Tiffany to behave in a different way. They would then explain what they wanted, and then come on stage and enact it. The actors on stage would stay in their characters and improvise to try to keep the action going the way their character wanted it to. We had some excellent interventions – with various Tiffanies managing to stand up to the Father, call for help from neighbours, talk to their friends or their teachers about what is happening. And eventually, in a brilliant adaptation of the form, we had audience members replacing other characters. The Red Cross director was so disgusted at the apathetic welfare officer, she got up and replaced her, making her a sympathetic and caring figure.
It was quite a hit as a piece, with most people very engaged, and a few people coming up time and again with different possible strategies. Happily there was a lot of fun and laughter, despite the tough subject matter. In the improvisations, the performers really shone, as they hung on to their characters, or adapted them at instructions from the audience, with great sponteneity and playfulness. In terms of hosting the piece, the role of the Joker (who kind of conducts the audience, mediating their desires) was a real learning curve for myself and Candaisy, who were both chipping in. In particular, we should have enlivened the younger audience members early on (it tended to be confident older women who intervened), and also to try to find ways to get male members of the audience feeling able to identify with and play Tiffany. I’m not sure if this will be possible – gender roles are very defined here – but I will try. I still can’t help feeling it was a real success though, with a sense of thrill as each new intervention began, and with the older women getting to model positive behaviour for the younger ones, also putting over the message that there are people in the community who will listen and help you if you need them.
Its going to be interesting putting this piece in front of a more mixed audience. I hope and pray it will have a positive reception, and if it raises a hornets nest (its pretty critical of the current welfare system in place) I hope it will be with a positive outcome. I suspect I can’t really mediate for that, but in the immediate term, I think the piece should at least raise awareness and model more assertive behaviour for young people. And it’s a joy to be making theatre which the audience can change, adapt and get real pleasure out of moulding.
The Grand Finale!
Anyone who knows me will recognize the irony of this one. I was really keen to use song in the show. One of the exercises we did was to take popular songs which everyone knows, and to subvert the lyrics to deliver a health message. The most successful of these was based on “Rum Until I Die” a massive Soca hit around the Caribbean in the past couple of years. My group adapted the lyrics into “Rum will make you die, Rum will make you die, so you’d better stop now, and live a better life!” Going on to describe in 4 verses the tragic consequences of alcoholism and the positive outcome of choosing to abstain. “Pass out this message to all your buddies – give up the rum and save your monies”. Oh yeah. Just now.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
The High Cost of Giving
We’ve found NGO presence high here in Guyana. Favoured by international organizations as a more direct route to people in need than sometimes corrupt or cumbersome governments, they tend to wield considerable power in terms of resources, manpower and skills. Unfortunately, the work done is not always unquestionably good, as we’ve discovered. Sometimes the results are tragic, as Tobago’s story shows.
Tobago is a local village that we kept hearing about when we got here. A child with pneumonia from there had died just before we got here, and that wasn’t the first case. We’d been asked by Annette Arjoon, who is the dynamic character involved in regenerating the Amerindian communities in the Northwest, to look in on the village if we got the chance. She told us they were a struggling community, but it took several months to piece together the full story, which goes something like this.
Back in 2005, Guyana was victim to high levels of flooding, which are attributed locally by many people to global warming. Whether or not this it true, what is certain is that the worst hit were the river dwelling Amerindians – known here as Riverain communities. These people mainly belong to the Warau tribe. There are nine Amerindian tribes in Guyana (as distinct from the African Guyanese and East Indian Guyanese who are the majority of the population): the Warau have been characterized as choosing remote lands to settle on, often swampy lands unlikely to cause conflicts over ownership as no-one else would think to live there. Historically, the Warau adapted to this environment, becoming skilled boatmakers and fisherman, cultivating cassava on land behind the river and building simple homes on stilts with palm roofs and often without external walls.
Many rainy seasons bring floods, but 2005 was worse than usual, the water level reaching into houses filling them with mud and crabs. Bouts of sickness followed as a result of the water, mud and poor sanitation.
The plight of the people living around Simoto creek in particular came to the attention of an American Christian NGO. Shocked by the conditions the people were living in, they funded a plan supported by the local government to re-house the whole village. (Apparently it was election time and seen as a vote winner). Land was identified for the new village about five miles from Mabaruma, between Hosororo and Wauna. 40 houses were built on the steep hill that was chosen, along with a community centre and a church. Water was pumped to standpipes in the village, and latrines were built well away from the dwellings.
It seemed like a great act of philanthropy – entire community rescued – yet just three years down the line it’s a very different story, and its sad to say that the NGO is nowhere to be seen.
On the surface, Tobago looks like a successful Amerindian village – the houses, 40 mint-green clap-board huts which stack prettily up the hillside look new and clean. The latrines line up next to (but not too close to) the narrow creek that runs below the hill and the villagers congregate there to wash clothes and socialize. The community centre is beautifully crafted from local wood. But the appearance of the people gives away the real issue. Adults have sores at the corners of their mouths. Children suffer from ‘white mouth’ (oral thrush) and have oversized bellies suggestive of protein malnutrition.
The sorry truth is that these people are poorer and sicker than they were before. Removed from their river environment, they have to make long journeys to catch crabs and fish, meaning less to go around for everyone – hence the protein malnutrition. It also means fewer surplus crabs to sell, so they are economically worse off, and less able to buy extras. So the previous diet, based on cassava and fish, which worked, is now largely a diet of cassava – which is not working. They don’t understand the connection between poor diet, malnutrition and sickness. The result is malnourished children, hospitalizations from simple illnesses such as diarrheoa and vomiting, coughs and colds as well as widespread TB, and several unnecessary deaths.
The atmosphere of the village is quite strange – just five miles from Mabaruma and down the hill from the leafy village Hososroro, it feels extremely isolated, with few visitors, and none of the basic amenities you’d see in a naturally evolved settlement – no-one is running a shop, for example, no-one has the money to buy a generator, so come nightfall there is no light, no noise. The NGO, having built the houses, latrines and a church, didn’t provide anything else – like improved roads, communication, or a shop or supply line – the villagers have to bring all supplies in themselves, and have no means of transportation to do so.
Most surprising is the lack of a school. In a village with 95 children, at a distance from other villages, it seems a pretty appalling oversight on the part of the planners to leave this out. Currently perhaps 10 of the children (the strongest ones) head up the gruelling hill to Hosororo each morning – where they get a lunchtime meal from the nuns there – but everyone else stays in the village.
Being geographically closer to Mabaruma, where the hospital is, hasn’t solved any access problems either. Before, the river trip was long but cheap and not too exhausting – now, for most people, the cost of the bus ride into Mabaruma is far too much except in emergencies. So no mothers attend the ante-natal clinics at Mabaruma - hence poor education about nutrition for small children. It also means that local women are denied their only opportunity to have an HIV test, which is offered as part of routine antenatal care.
Local people are getting involved piecemeal to try to sort things out, but here resources are scarce, and the difficulties in transport and communication mean even the simplest act, like running a clinic there – take on the proportions of an heroic act. What seems saddest of all is that these people’s lives have been uprooted, turned around, dropped again at a whim by an NGO whose aims are unquestionably positive (and certainly whose US funders wouldn’t condone this behaviour). The traditional skills of the Warau culture – boatbuilding, fishing – are in danger of being wiped out in a single generation. The Warau language itself, already in danger through exposure to mainstream Guyanese creole and standard English - still the primary language in the schools - could slip away with the culture, in their new and alien lives. Not to mention the immediate, unnecessary tragedy of malnourished babies dying of treatable sicknesses in hospital, through lack of education and resources. It’s a mess which could really have done without western intervention at all.
We’ve seen a few other strange examples of NGO “do-gooding” gone wrong out here. Another US organization which ships foodstuffs from the US at great cost and effort frequently delivers pointless items – an electronic scrubbing brush in an unpowered village, anyone? In need of an emergency M&M? Its often like those harvest festival collections of oddments, when parents take advantage of donating food to clear out some of those peculiar purchases from the cupboard.
NGO’s aren’t always too well behaved towards their volunteers either. A British NGO, Project Trust recently responded to an 18 year old gap year student teacher’s plight with amazing indifference. Our friend Tom had been robbed at knifepoint by 2 of his students in his own home. He was distressed and a bit traumatized by the robbery. The culprits were arrested, and Guyanese justice being what it is, it was looking unlikely that the case would go to court or his belongings be returned to him, as he was due to leave the country this month (July). We got a barrister we’d met in Georgetown to intervene and give the police here a bit of a shakedown, and things looked more positive. Until Tom appealed to his NGO for direct support, in funding him to stay out here and fight his case. Without even consulting the barrister, they advised him against the case – it wasn’t worth the trouble. Not worth it to whom, we had to ask. It turns out, this had happened to the student placed at Wauna the previous year, when the NGO had also done nothing, and not felt honour-bound to tell Tom (or his parents) of the situation he was walking into. The lack of responsibility towards their young volunteers is pretty appalling, not to mention the lack of foresight. What will it take for this NGO to act?
As we are finding, being an NGO is very far from guaranteeing effective administration, ethical behaviour or even competence. In Georgetown we heard a number of stories, about NGO’s being set up explicitly to meet the funding criteria, then the funds disappearing along with the NGO. Many international bodies prefer funding NGO’s, as Governments in developing countries can be vulnerable to embezzlement, or even just deadly slow bureaucracy. But who are the NGO’s answerable to? Who regulates them? And in the case of Tobago – how can they be held responsible for the consequences of their interventions?
There’s clearly no simple answer. Some of the most fantastic work out here goes on through NGOs. At the same time, the crusading approach, storming in, making judgments based on your own cultural expectations, has to be discouraged, and genuine grass roots collaboration strived for. Respect for local culture, nurturing of local skills, encouraging independence and enterprise, has to be valued. And its very heartening to see that one of the most outstanding groups here is the UK’s own VSO. Collaborating with local and national government, appointing excellent practitioners, developing specific job specs the fulfillment of which will have led to greater national expertise – its an organisation worth working for and supporting.
The other impressive team here is, once again, the yellow plane run by the 7th Day Adventists – Wings for Humanity. The group has committed to a long-term presence here working alongside the government to provide a service that just couldn’t be provided by the government alone, but which saves ordinary people’s lives on a regular basis. Their commitment is humanitarian – there are no religious strings attached to the work that they do, and they are in it for the long haul, committing to the region for the next 10 years, so it’s a service policy makers and local people can rely on for a time to come.
And in case anyone’s wondering where the name “Tobago” came from – the administrator who named the place chose it, as he had fond memories of the idyllic Caribbean island of the same name. The gap between the original and its namesake couldn’t really be any wider.
Tobago is a local village that we kept hearing about when we got here. A child with pneumonia from there had died just before we got here, and that wasn’t the first case. We’d been asked by Annette Arjoon, who is the dynamic character involved in regenerating the Amerindian communities in the Northwest, to look in on the village if we got the chance. She told us they were a struggling community, but it took several months to piece together the full story, which goes something like this.
Back in 2005, Guyana was victim to high levels of flooding, which are attributed locally by many people to global warming. Whether or not this it true, what is certain is that the worst hit were the river dwelling Amerindians – known here as Riverain communities. These people mainly belong to the Warau tribe. There are nine Amerindian tribes in Guyana (as distinct from the African Guyanese and East Indian Guyanese who are the majority of the population): the Warau have been characterized as choosing remote lands to settle on, often swampy lands unlikely to cause conflicts over ownership as no-one else would think to live there. Historically, the Warau adapted to this environment, becoming skilled boatmakers and fisherman, cultivating cassava on land behind the river and building simple homes on stilts with palm roofs and often without external walls.
Many rainy seasons bring floods, but 2005 was worse than usual, the water level reaching into houses filling them with mud and crabs. Bouts of sickness followed as a result of the water, mud and poor sanitation.
The plight of the people living around Simoto creek in particular came to the attention of an American Christian NGO. Shocked by the conditions the people were living in, they funded a plan supported by the local government to re-house the whole village. (Apparently it was election time and seen as a vote winner). Land was identified for the new village about five miles from Mabaruma, between Hosororo and Wauna. 40 houses were built on the steep hill that was chosen, along with a community centre and a church. Water was pumped to standpipes in the village, and latrines were built well away from the dwellings.
It seemed like a great act of philanthropy – entire community rescued – yet just three years down the line it’s a very different story, and its sad to say that the NGO is nowhere to be seen.
On the surface, Tobago looks like a successful Amerindian village – the houses, 40 mint-green clap-board huts which stack prettily up the hillside look new and clean. The latrines line up next to (but not too close to) the narrow creek that runs below the hill and the villagers congregate there to wash clothes and socialize. The community centre is beautifully crafted from local wood. But the appearance of the people gives away the real issue. Adults have sores at the corners of their mouths. Children suffer from ‘white mouth’ (oral thrush) and have oversized bellies suggestive of protein malnutrition.
The sorry truth is that these people are poorer and sicker than they were before. Removed from their river environment, they have to make long journeys to catch crabs and fish, meaning less to go around for everyone – hence the protein malnutrition. It also means fewer surplus crabs to sell, so they are economically worse off, and less able to buy extras. So the previous diet, based on cassava and fish, which worked, is now largely a diet of cassava – which is not working. They don’t understand the connection between poor diet, malnutrition and sickness. The result is malnourished children, hospitalizations from simple illnesses such as diarrheoa and vomiting, coughs and colds as well as widespread TB, and several unnecessary deaths.
The atmosphere of the village is quite strange – just five miles from Mabaruma and down the hill from the leafy village Hososroro, it feels extremely isolated, with few visitors, and none of the basic amenities you’d see in a naturally evolved settlement – no-one is running a shop, for example, no-one has the money to buy a generator, so come nightfall there is no light, no noise. The NGO, having built the houses, latrines and a church, didn’t provide anything else – like improved roads, communication, or a shop or supply line – the villagers have to bring all supplies in themselves, and have no means of transportation to do so.
Most surprising is the lack of a school. In a village with 95 children, at a distance from other villages, it seems a pretty appalling oversight on the part of the planners to leave this out. Currently perhaps 10 of the children (the strongest ones) head up the gruelling hill to Hosororo each morning – where they get a lunchtime meal from the nuns there – but everyone else stays in the village.
Being geographically closer to Mabaruma, where the hospital is, hasn’t solved any access problems either. Before, the river trip was long but cheap and not too exhausting – now, for most people, the cost of the bus ride into Mabaruma is far too much except in emergencies. So no mothers attend the ante-natal clinics at Mabaruma - hence poor education about nutrition for small children. It also means that local women are denied their only opportunity to have an HIV test, which is offered as part of routine antenatal care.
Local people are getting involved piecemeal to try to sort things out, but here resources are scarce, and the difficulties in transport and communication mean even the simplest act, like running a clinic there – take on the proportions of an heroic act. What seems saddest of all is that these people’s lives have been uprooted, turned around, dropped again at a whim by an NGO whose aims are unquestionably positive (and certainly whose US funders wouldn’t condone this behaviour). The traditional skills of the Warau culture – boatbuilding, fishing – are in danger of being wiped out in a single generation. The Warau language itself, already in danger through exposure to mainstream Guyanese creole and standard English - still the primary language in the schools - could slip away with the culture, in their new and alien lives. Not to mention the immediate, unnecessary tragedy of malnourished babies dying of treatable sicknesses in hospital, through lack of education and resources. It’s a mess which could really have done without western intervention at all.
We’ve seen a few other strange examples of NGO “do-gooding” gone wrong out here. Another US organization which ships foodstuffs from the US at great cost and effort frequently delivers pointless items – an electronic scrubbing brush in an unpowered village, anyone? In need of an emergency M&M? Its often like those harvest festival collections of oddments, when parents take advantage of donating food to clear out some of those peculiar purchases from the cupboard.
NGO’s aren’t always too well behaved towards their volunteers either. A British NGO, Project Trust recently responded to an 18 year old gap year student teacher’s plight with amazing indifference. Our friend Tom had been robbed at knifepoint by 2 of his students in his own home. He was distressed and a bit traumatized by the robbery. The culprits were arrested, and Guyanese justice being what it is, it was looking unlikely that the case would go to court or his belongings be returned to him, as he was due to leave the country this month (July). We got a barrister we’d met in Georgetown to intervene and give the police here a bit of a shakedown, and things looked more positive. Until Tom appealed to his NGO for direct support, in funding him to stay out here and fight his case. Without even consulting the barrister, they advised him against the case – it wasn’t worth the trouble. Not worth it to whom, we had to ask. It turns out, this had happened to the student placed at Wauna the previous year, when the NGO had also done nothing, and not felt honour-bound to tell Tom (or his parents) of the situation he was walking into. The lack of responsibility towards their young volunteers is pretty appalling, not to mention the lack of foresight. What will it take for this NGO to act?
As we are finding, being an NGO is very far from guaranteeing effective administration, ethical behaviour or even competence. In Georgetown we heard a number of stories, about NGO’s being set up explicitly to meet the funding criteria, then the funds disappearing along with the NGO. Many international bodies prefer funding NGO’s, as Governments in developing countries can be vulnerable to embezzlement, or even just deadly slow bureaucracy. But who are the NGO’s answerable to? Who regulates them? And in the case of Tobago – how can they be held responsible for the consequences of their interventions?
There’s clearly no simple answer. Some of the most fantastic work out here goes on through NGOs. At the same time, the crusading approach, storming in, making judgments based on your own cultural expectations, has to be discouraged, and genuine grass roots collaboration strived for. Respect for local culture, nurturing of local skills, encouraging independence and enterprise, has to be valued. And its very heartening to see that one of the most outstanding groups here is the UK’s own VSO. Collaborating with local and national government, appointing excellent practitioners, developing specific job specs the fulfillment of which will have led to greater national expertise – its an organisation worth working for and supporting.
The other impressive team here is, once again, the yellow plane run by the 7th Day Adventists – Wings for Humanity. The group has committed to a long-term presence here working alongside the government to provide a service that just couldn’t be provided by the government alone, but which saves ordinary people’s lives on a regular basis. Their commitment is humanitarian – there are no religious strings attached to the work that they do, and they are in it for the long haul, committing to the region for the next 10 years, so it’s a service policy makers and local people can rely on for a time to come.
And in case anyone’s wondering where the name “Tobago” came from – the administrator who named the place chose it, as he had fond memories of the idyllic Caribbean island of the same name. The gap between the original and its namesake couldn’t really be any wider.
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