Joining the Dots

Since arriving in Tanzania many months ago, I have gained more than I could ever have hoped to give.  From the people here, from the experience of daily life, from the beauty of nature, from the development of my thoughts, living in East Africa has changed me. It has changed my perception on education, on aid, on development and influenced the way I think about myself and my own future in this world.  My eyes have been well and truly opened during my experience this year; not just here in Tanzania but also in Nepal. In fact, they have been opening wider and wider ever since I took my first self-planned trip overseas aged seventeen. The more I see of the world, the more I meet its eclectic and diverse people, its rich landscapes and its rapidly developing environment; the more my eyes widen in surprise, in excitement, in despair, in wonder, in recognition. But it is here, in Tanzania, where I have finally learned to join the dots.

What has been blatantly obvious to many of us to see for years has only just made sense to me; but the sense does not make sense (if that makes sense!) What I mean by that is, what I have learned and understood from connecting the dots of this global picture does not leave me with a conclusion or an understanding of how things can make sense or ever change; it just leaves me even more confused. So, to explain (if I can!) here are the dots and I’ll talk you through how they all join together.

There are four main areas of development here in Tanzania that have vexed me ever since I arrived: NGOs, Vol-tourism, Aid and Education. The number of foreign-run NGOs here just in Arusha town is immense. They pop up every week; fixing “women’s issues” here, starting “children’s centres” there, teaching farming, cooking, business, sewing, teaching, writing, happiness even. You name it, there is an NGO doing it, and, although some are making a positive impact on the local community, sadly many of them are somewhat condescending, Mzungu-run organisations wanting to “help the poor people of Africa”. 

For many, there is exhibited a lack of cultural awareness and sensitivity to the local people and environment: a patronising concept of aid that is often causing more damage than good.  Non-educators are coming here with money to start schools, with no knowledge of the Tanzanian National Curriculum or government education goals; but with lots of cash and lots of enthusiasm. Helpful? Very hard to say. Well-meaning charities are shipping over, for example, vast numbers of mosquito nets made in America to hand out to all those in need of a layer of protection from malaria. On the surface, something positive and certainly, as I said, well-meaning. But look closely now at the man in the local area that makes mosquito nets, who is no longer making money from sales and will have to close his business down because someone else is providing his customers with free nets, and this NGO suddenly stops seeming so good. Wouldn’t a better idea be for the well-meaning charity to buy the mosquito nets from a local supplier in country, thus providing capital for the country, increased employment for the local businessman and that all important malarial protection?

I think one of the problems with NGOs comes from a clash between good intentions inspired back home and badly thought-out models of aid that, in many cases, are actually doing more damage than good to the people they are trying to support.

Next gripe? Vol-tourism. This is a relatively new level of tourism that allows travellers to volunteer their services for a very short amount of time: a week, a month sometimes, in an environment that is totally alien to them and vice versa. For a large amount of money, well meaning folk can travel to exotic locations across the world and “make a difference”. Yet let’s pause for a second and take a closer look at some of this tourism-led aid. How on earth is allowing an eighteen year old student to stand in front of a class of forty Nepalese children and be their “teacher for a week”, speaking no Nepalese, having no knowledge of pedagogy, not understanding anything about the country’s educational model and (in many cases) putting a teacher out of work for a week or however long, so that the school can benefit from having a “western teacher”, a good thing? How can this be a good thing for anyone? Maybe for the traveller, who can go home with lots of pictures of them playing “teacher” for a while, surrounded by lots of smiling energetic students; but for the aid of the bigger picture of many countries’ educational problems, it is like putting a plaster with no sticky bit onto the wet walls of a cascading waterfall. Or some other suitably futile simile…

Vol-tourism has also now started to bring with it new level of problems: in country corruption. Seeing how much money there is to make from these well-meaning tourists flocking overseas to save the world, charities have started to pop up all over the globe; calling out for volunteers to come and work with them. Yet, the construction of the orphanage, the street-kids’ centre, the youth training centre has happened merely as a means of money making by a corrupt individual who has seen the chance to make a buck or two. Take as an example the local orphanage, Good Hope, that I had planned to spend time working with before I leave Usa. When I went up there for my first big meeting to establish the best long term aid I could offer, we decided that I would spend time working on their accounts and teaching some basic accountancy to the director (who was struggling), and also starting up a website for them: something simple to allow financial aid to be given a little more frequently. However, when I went home to start working on the project, I started unearthing some worrying truths about the centre. It seemed that two people in the past had set up a website for them and, for some reason, now shut them down. It seemed that one NGO had linked with the orphanage for several years, sending through money each month for food and school fees, building them the orphanage, a trade centre to teach the students skills and a small primary school. Yet, when asking the director, Mr Elisante, where all of this investment had gone, he seemed suddenly unable to give me any answers. When sitting doing their accounts, it transpired that their monthly incoming total was 220,000 shillings whereas their monthly outgoing was 3.3 million. An insane model of sustainability and a shameful way to consciously run a charity that is set up as a support for children in need. But when questioned about his financial planning, his answer for the future was to build a school, costing 120 million shillings. When asked where the other school was and why this was not being used, I was told that he’d sold it, to make more money to build a bigger school…! More stories, more findings, more corruption: the more I dug, the more I found out things that made me so sad, so angry and so confused as to what to do, I just felt so utterly vexed. Because, at the end of the day, whatever this guy’s doing and however corrupt he is, he is ultimately using the lives of sixty young children to get his gains. And they are the ones who are suffering. 

Aid is creating a dependency syndrome. Many people here look at Mzungus as walking dollar signs; opportunities for the taking. Young children even run up shouting “Give me money!”, holding their hands out in readiness. This model of dependency is creating a generation who have no confidence or faith in their own abilities. They see pictures of Africans transmitted across the globe looking starved, helpless and despondent. They hear stories of how underdeveloped their country is; how in desperate need of aid they are and how they must be helped, must be saved. Huge billboard signs exploit with graphic images of starving people, articles in the press across the world depict Africans through degrading and humiliating images; showing the very worst the continent has to offer. When we present our own country through the media to the rest of the world, do we show pictures of the homeless, the drug addicts, the derelict housing, the endless dole queues?

Transmitted across the globe are images of “whites in shining armour” (take Madonna or Angelina Jolie, or even Bono as a media-splash example), wandering in with smiles, cash and promises of a better life for the needy Africans, whilst cuddling sad looking little children with flies in their eyes. 

The power of the media to dictate a country’s global perception is cruel. Really cruel. I meet incredible people here: people with such strength, such intelligence, such motivation, self-sufficiency, determination. Why are they not being celebrated in the world’s press like our own success stories are splashed across the global media? Why is Africa being seen as a world that is struggling with its everyday living, when there is so much brilliance out here? Why on earth should they be told they need to be saved? And who exactly are being sent to save them? Young pip-squeaks straight out of school with no knowledge of anything about the country they are visiting; many probably not able to point to it on a map!

Governmental aid is rife, with enforced repayment conditions pushing countries even further into debt: interest rates beyond understanding, incompatible levels of corruption within countries with no regulation of where and how the vast chunks of incoming aid should be spent. Countries are being led by leaders teeming in dishonesty, yet it is not to them we present our focus and questions of action, but pm the minority of those struggling to survive. The balance of wealth coming in and going out of these countries is staggering. Poverty levels are even higher than before international aid even began. It is being proven time and again to not be working.

Education is a mess. I saw this first hand in Nepal; where students are learning things through a repetition of sound; not understanding what on earth they are being taught. Teachers are feeling demoralised through having to teach things they do not understand in a language they have little competency in, whilst at the same time quashing their use and appreciation of their own language. I see this too in the schools here; teachers asking students to rote-learn reams and reams of information with no understanding of how it relates to the wider world or, in many cases, what it actually even means.  Look closely at many areas of the curriculum content and it is irrelevant: it has no bearing on life in the country it is taught. There is often abstract information from an old colonial education system teaching children all about a world they will never know. Children in Pokhara, Nepal, are learning about how to take books out of a public library and how to use the computer-coding system. But there is no such thing as a public library in Pokhara and certainly no computers these kids will ever see. Children here in Arusha are learning about public transport systems from Scotland to London and the varying merits of each. Huh? Children in Udaipur, India, are learning about the monarchs of England, in chronological order, with all family trees memorised. What is the relevance of this to their daily life? What are they learning about the Indian government and the people of their own country? What are they learning about their own heritage and cultural identity?

So the question I have been asking and asking is why. Why is all this going on? How has all this happened? What is the bigger picture when you stand back at look at these pockets of problems bubbling up all over the globe? (Because it is not just Africa experiencing these issues: I saw it daily in Nepal; I saw it in South America, I saw it in India, and I know I would see it in other continents and countries if I were to go and look beneath the surface gloss.)

I’ve talked with friends, I’ve read articles, I’ve watched documentaries (one in particular being one of the most incredibly poignant and thought-provoking things I have ever seen, find it if you can (www.schoolingtheworld.org) and I’ve pondered many ideas. And then finally I too managed to join the dots. And I saw what was happening. Put all of this together as a model of development and we are moving away from diversity into global uniformity. Schools are functioning almost like factories; taking the children as raw products and churning out a mass model of sameness.  In his text, ‘On Liberty’, John Mill writes, “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which is casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government it establishes a despotism over the mind leading, by a natural tendency, to one over the body.”

I came across the most brilliant song from Malvina Reynolds summing up this insanity so lyrically beautifully.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4Xs

As a global model, education is moving from teaching wisdom, through teaching knowledge to teaching mere information, and this information is fruitless. People have no idea what to do with it. Education is educating people away from having any useful talent or applicable skills to their own environment. Parents across the globe are running themselves into huge levels of debt and living on the poverty line in order to send their children to “good schools” because of the pressure to educate their children. The Millennium goals of EDUCATION FOR ALL are screaming out from every country’s government right now, echoes washing down loud and clear for all to hear. Young people across the world are being sent away from the limited education systems in their local areas to attend what are advertised as good schools, in order to “get an education”. Yet, when they return home to the mountains, to the rivers, to the valleys and villages in their shirt and tie, carrying their schoolbooks in their hands and their new-found information in their heads, they realise that they have lost their home. They no longer know how to tend the animals, grow the crops, and work with the local environment, speak to the people they grew up with. They could write an essay about it (no doubt in their finest English) but would have no knowledge of how to actually live there or be a part of, or use to, their own community. They will have read and studied all about the nature of their own environment through books, rather than be taken out of the classroom to learn from what is outside the walls; what they are a looking at through the windows.  And so what happens? They leave. Leave home and head for the big city, in search of these “dream jobs”. Children are graduating from schools across the globe with ideas of being doctors, lawyers, accountants. But how many jobs are there for these children in these fine positions? Not anywhere near enough for the population increase demanding them. So then what happens? Through a need for employment, they are forced to take low-paid, long-hour jobs working in factories, working in harsh conditions, living in slums as they cannot afford to live anywhere else on the wage they have. Educated to a life of poverty and an exclusion from the culture they call home.

Look closely and it seems that by developing countries out of poverty through education, we are actually educating them into deeper levels of poverty. The education system of so many countries is nigh on identical. Modern education across the globe has one goal – to turn us into products of a modern, global consumer culture. We are told that we need to get an education so that we can get a good job with money. We can buy a car. We can buy a house; we can buy opportunities and continued development and success because we will have vast amounts of material wealth. But then what do we do when we have it all? We sit in our house, or in our car, looking at our material gains and feel sad, because we don’t know what to do next. Buy more? We have lost our community, our culture, our identity. We are a robot in a system. As well as educating ourselves into a global mindset of sameness, we are educating ourselves out of traditional cultures and homesteads and into bland cities that look identical across the globe.

Why is Tanzania one of the poorest countries in the world? It has such vast natural resources and rich landscapes; it should be one of the strongest countries in Africa. Examining simple facts show that post-colonisation left a landscape of poverty; poverty on an unprecedented scale. We left behind an education system to elevate the locals out of their own culture and into the western model of thinking. The education system does not embrace anything about African culture and identity. For a start, secondary schools here are English medium. Primary schools do not teach in English (phew) but suddenly, by the age of eleven, students are expected to be fluent enough to learn all of their subjects in this second language when they start secondary school (school that they have to pay for, by the way). Those who are able to speak enough English (and have teachers who are fluent enough to impart facts) learn information; reams and reams of information with no practical application to their daily lives. They learn the cities of the UK, the history of monarchs, the nuances of English grammar. They read Dickens. They start to lose their Kiswahili because, in many schools, it is banned; a punishable offence to be spoken. I remember being so shocked when I heard this upon arrival at St Jude – how on earth can you punish a child for speaking their native language in their own country? What on earth is that teaching them about themselves, their identity or their place in the world?

And so what happens? Many of these children fail. They fail to leave school with any education of any worth to the life they will inevitably live back in their homeland. Those who do pass struggle to find jobs with their new-found education, as there are not enough of these “dream jobs” to go around. Those who return home find themselves suddenly unable to live in their community. They have not learned wisdom from their elders, as history preached; they have not learned the ways of their own culture, their society, their rich heritage. They have learned how to live in a modern consumer culture; valuing money and material success over any simplicity of happiness. Old values of kindness, compassion, neighbourliness are starting to decline.

Henry Thoreau once wrote, ‘Education makes a straight cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook’. How distressingly true this is. And the madness of it all is that we, in the West, caused the problems in these "developing countries" and we, in the West, feel we should help to fix the problems that we have created by interfering again. But what gives us the right to assume that we are doing things any better, when our way is failing too?! Look at our own education system in the UK for a start: children are learning facts, facts, facts which they retain long enough to pass a few GCSEs and which then fall out of their brains faster than through a large-holed sieve. Hundreds of thousands of students are graduating from university every year to find themselves faced with the prospect of no jobs and vast amounts of debt. No longer do we teach trade, skills, and practical knowledge about how to live a self-sufficient life. We teach how to do big things in a big world; educating ourselves away from communities, families and home. We promote the need to travel and get out of our own worlds. We aim high (much higher than we could ever find at home): we want more: bigger things, brighter things. Home suddenly seems too small. But where on earth are we going? What will we do when we get there? And what are we actually doing with all of this education? We have so much information (all of which could just as easily be found through Mr Google and pals) and so little wisdom. Ask a fifteen year old student in the UK to grow a meal for his family, to build a shelter, to light a fire, to make sustained and entertaining conversation and they would most likely struggle. These practical survival skills are no longer taught. The very basics for human existence: Food, Water, Shelter and Companionship are no longer part of our education system. Are we not, therefore, ironically educating ourselves out of the basis of existence? And (to add insult to injury) telling the rest of the world to pack up and follow suit! Forget your centuries of cultural richness, diversity and (dare I say it) self-sustaining models of happiness; come follow us out to join in the western model of success. Go West! Go West for a life of anti-depressants, alcohol and drug abuse, child-behavioural medication, vast levels of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, social dispersion and emotional dissatisfaction. (A bit harsh, sweeping and ever so slightly melodramatic, I know, but you get the point I’m trying to make!)

So there. With a little help from some friends, I’ve joined the dots. And, as I’m sure you’ll agree, in the way I’ve joined them, it’s not a pretty picture that I’ve drawn. Part of me wishes I didn’t have to see it; that I could go back to seeing blurs on the horizon floating abstractedly around the world. The picture hurts my eyes but I don’t know now how to rub it out. That, I guess, is the harshest part of its development.

Again I have no conclusion to make, and know that there is no easy answer to any of these musings. What I do know, however, is what strength there is to take from the people I’ve met during my travels. It is those individuals on the ground who are questioning the future that will make a change. Individuals working to mould a different direction for the masses; who are struggling to retain the individuality of a culture and a nation. It is those people that I will invest my time in, my thoughts with. We are living in a world of unbelievable paradox, but there are many out there who have connected the dots and made their own unique pictures for the future. It is they that give me hope and a smidgen of a return to sanity for my somewhat over-scrambled brain!