A Day in My Life

Woke up early yesterday because I had a meeting across town.

Put on dressy clothes.

Waited for 20 minutes at the main street for an empty seat in the small sedans that serve as public transport in Santo Domingo (7 people in a 1987 Toyota Corolla is a typical "carro publico")

After finally finding an available car, began the journey with a not-small women nearly on my lap.

Traffic made the 10 minute trip take over 30 minutes.

Switched to another carro publico which would take me close to the meeting location.

Rode said car for 10 minutes (no large ladies on my lap this time).

Got off bus and began to walk to meeting location.

Walked for 20 minutes.

Arrived, just on time, drenched in sweat.

Waited for 45 minutes for the person to see me.

"How can I help you?" She asks.

I tell her.

"Well, I don't really know about that, but this person at a different place across the city can maybe help you" she responds.

I press for more info...surely she knows something that would be helpful.

Nope, nothing.

I'm out in under 10 minutes.

Begin the 1 hour crammed bus/walking trek back home so I can email this other guy to try to talk to him.


You win some, you lose some!

A carro publico in Santo Domingo

Some Lessons Learned

A master networker/researcher I am not, but I have learned a thing or two during my short time in Santo Domingo...


•Don’t be afraid to ask for a favor. I showed up in Santo Domingo with very few contacts, however, I know people who know people who know people. Through these long chains of connections I’ve been able to speak with some of the most important players in the sector I am investigating. The key is simply to ask for some help by those original contacts and run with it from there.

•Make friends however you can. For example: I recently made a really important contact while meeting with a group of “couchsurfers” in a bar.

•Learn to navigate the Public Transport System. When conducting research for a yet-to-be-established initiative with an almost non-existent budget, working cheaply is essential. It’s taken some time and a concentrated effort, but I have learned to navigate the public transport system of Santo Domingo, saving me plenty of money that would have otherwise gone towards taxis.

•Dress to impress. My current reality is that I am very obviously a foreigner, I am young, and I speak Spanish more like a street vendor than an academic or business professional. In light of this, I have to do everything I can to make myself look credible. Dressing like a competent professional is part of this effort. How much does wearing slacks and a nice shirt actually help build credibility? I can’t be sure, but I am certain that it doesn’t hurt.

•Be confident, but honest. In the midst of meeting a contact, shyness and insecurity are not what people want to see. It is important that I am confident that my project will work, and capable of making it happen. However, being honest about the status of the project, the difficulties faced, the areas of uncertainty, is necessary and helpful—if you’re talking to powerful people, they’ve gotten to that position because they are smart and motivated…let them understand your difficulties and help to come up with potential solutions.

The Networking Game

I’m here in the Dominican Republic to figure out how to best provide IT education services to the population. The demand is there, the technology exists, but access to services is lacking. Why? How do we fix the problem? Can we provide quality services cheaply enough for poorer people to afford, but still be sustainable? My mission is to find answers to these questions and to formulate an action plan accordingly.

At the moment, finding these answers is about talking to the right people in the right places and thus I’m earnestly involving myself in the networking game. In week 1 of the game I’ve found myself in the office of the executive director of a prominent university, speaking with staff of a government commission, in conversation with field directors of several NGOs, and having coffee with several university professors. These meetings have led to further contacts and future meetings, which will in turn lead to even more contacts and meetings. All will form part of the equation which leads to the final plan.

While the answers are still not quite clear, there is, already, a light forming at the end of the tunnel. My mind is spinning with ideas and possibilities. How will the puzzle pieces swirling around my brain form into a clear picture and what will that picture be? We shall see…

Misisi

Greetings loyal readers (I think we're up to 15 professed readers of this blog, although the "followers" list to the right only says 5),

Below is a report about a new program we've been working on in Misisi, a slum in Lusaka. This place really is as bad as described (trust me, I wrote it)


Misisi Compound is notoriously known as the worst and most neglected slum in Lusaka. With one hundred thousand inhabitants and no public schools, police stations, or health clinics, this perception appears quite accurate. There are no sewage systems to speak of. Those residents that are not fortunate enough to have a pit latrine close to home instead use the ponds that are scattered throughout the compound. These mini ‘lakes’, often with the foundations of houses lining the edges, have small outhouses built above them so that waste conveniently drops directly into the water below. This lack of proper hygiene, coupled with the overwhelming HIV/AIDS problem in the country, has led to in a high proportion of sicknesses and deaths, resulting in scores of orphans. Some of these orphans have a grandparent or other relative that tries to care for them, even though many of them barely able to care for themselves, but even this is not always an option. Up to one thousand children in Misisi live in “child headed families” - orphaned brothers and sisters who depend only on each other for survival.
Because there are no government schools in the area, a system of sixteen community-run “schools” has been developed for those students who can’t afford private schooling and are unable to travel to those schools further away. These schools are run only with sporadic, small grants from the Ministry of Education, meaning that all teachers are unpaid and facilities and materials are incredibly insufficient. A two hundred and eighty student school can be housed in a three by six meter structure, with the students coming to class in two to three hour increments throughout the day.
The Chairman of the Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) Committee from Misisi summed up the situation facing his compound: “There are many orphans here, but in reality, we are all orphans. The OVC Committee, the schools, the families - we are forgotten. The government and the NGOs have all abandoned us. We are alone.”


Kids Alive’s “Families Together” Program in Misisi
Often in the struggle to care for the thousands of orphans in Zambia, children are placed in an orphanage program despite having a loving family member who wants to care for them. This is because this guardian is simply unable to meet the needs of the child due to a lack of resources. Many aging grandmothers are caring for their orphaned grandchildren with little or no money, so, instead of watching the children suffer, they search for a person or program that can adequately meet the child’s needs.
Kids Alive’s “Families Together” program in Misisi seeks to combat this problem through providing a unique and thoroughly holistic model of care. By merging the Care Center model that has been established successfully in several Kids Alive fields with a more ‘family-based focus’, our program aims to provide optimum benefit to the orphans and vulnerable children within Misisi Compound. Our goal is to enable and empower these children’s guardians so that the children can stay at home, rather than enter the already overcrowded orphanage system in Zambia. The plan is to begin modestly, with 25 children from the most dire of circumstances supported, but with the goal of expanding as funding, staffing, and facilities allow.
This program will have a multi-faceted approach in order to holistically meet the needs of the selected children. The child will receive a daily meal, medical care, clothing and the supplies needed for school attendance, daily tutoring, spiritual and emotional encouragement, and opportunities to interact with other students. There will also be an intensive focus on supporting the family of the child in order to enable them to play an active role in establishing a stable, positive, and healthy environment for the child to grow up in. These needs will be met through providing clothing and foodstuffs for the family, loans or grants that can be used by guardians for training or income-generating activities, or repairing or improving their homes. This program will also target the child-headed families by providing basic needs so that the oldest brothers and sisters can return to school instead of having to work odd jobs in order to feed their younger siblings.
Please pray for this exciting new program as it develops – that it will make an enormous difference in the lives of needy children and their families in this desperately poor part of Zambia!


Scenes from Misisi:

compassion

I’m not a compassionate person. This might seem an odd statement considering my current profession, but it’s often true. Lately at least, my compassionate side has been hiding away in the far reaches of my soul. I’ve been too caught up in the business side of saving the world. Developing project plans, dealing with unruly employees, fighting against the view that due to my white skin I have piles of dollars pouring out of all bodily orifices, etc. Often, though, it only takes a small story, experience, or scene of suffering to jolt me back into reality and get my heart juices flowing. Usually, as I see, touch, hear, and smell poverty on a regular basis, my own experiences suffice to give me that periodic reminder, but today it came from the story a friend relayed to me.

Here is what happened:

The doctors and nurses are striking in Zambia, fighting for higher salaries. Strikes can be painful, I guess that’s the point, as pain often brings forth action. In this case, however, those that end up suffering have nothing to do with the disagreement. When there are no doctors and nurses, it’s the common public who reap the consequences. This brings us to Ruthie, a beautiful 4-year-old with asthma. Ruthie is lucky in that both her parents are alive, but they are poor, very poor. Just one of the thousands of families struggling to survive in the slums of Lusaka, the Zambian capital. Ruthie had an asthma attack last week, so her mother rushed her to the closest clinic. No nurses, no doctors, no one to help. They moved on to the next clinic, same story. She used precious resources to hire a taxi in order to find a clinic with the medical personal to help her little girl. Seven clinics in all they visited, none could offer any help. On their way to number eight, Ruthie died, in the arms of her hysterical mother, in the back of a cab, of an easily treatable condition.

This should not have happened.

Someone is to blame.

Is it the doctors and nurses, or the government, both sides too caught up in the fatness of their wallets to bother themselves with the suffering of those they are responsible to help? Or maybe it’s the western countries, whose corporate bailout packages reach the trillions of dollars, a tiny percentage of which could go to increase salaries for medical personal in developing nations, satisfying those workers. In the end, the problem is inside all of us. It’s selfishness. Lack of compassion. It’s thinking too much about our own well-being and not enough about that of others. The question I ask myself now is what can I do to keep a scenario like this from happening again. How many Ruthies have died because of my self-centered attitude, my lack of compassion? I don’t have an excuse, I can’t plead ignorance. I see suffering every day. The same story, with different characters and slight plot variations repeats itself over and over and over, right in front of my eyes. Yet I am so often unbothered, or uncaring. I must do more. I must change my attitude. I must live differently. Someones life may depend on it.

homelessness

I'm learning that there are various states of homelessness. For example, there are your classic homeless folks, the panhandlers in big cities, sleeping under cardboard boxes and filling soup kitchens. I currently interact with homeless street boys, those that sleep wherever they fall, usually high on glue or drunk on cheap liquor sold in plastic bags. There are also refugees, chased out of their land by one threat or another and forced to live at the mercy of their new hosts and the international organizations who attempt to keep them alive. And then there is me, a slightly higher class of homelessness, maybe, but still homeless nonetheless. I'm now completing my 4th month of being a vagabond, rarely staying in one place more than a week or two. I left North Sudan in late December with a weeks worth of shirts and underwear and a few pairs of pants and am still making due with that wardrobe, the resulting wear and tear pulling me closer and closer to looking like the rest of my homeless brothers. I've slept in no fewer than 16 different homes, apartments, hotels, and hostels since leaving Khartoum. To take a further step back, since the beginning of 2008, I've lived (staying at least one month) in 6 countries.

Am I complaining? Certainly not. This sort of priviledged homelessness that I "endure" can only be dreamt of by most people. I can say, however, that it's time to at least gain some control of this nomadic lifestyle. I could use a home base of sorts that I can go back to. Maybe a place that has a closet, so that at least occasionally, I can unpack my suitcase. These might be petty requests--when considering the street children and refugees that I see on a daily basis, they certainly are--but perhaps I'm just not strong enough to be homeless. An interesting thought: to be able to survive a homeless life, you must be either completely crazy, or incredibly strongminded. Apparantly I'm neither, although I feel like I'm moving closer to the crazy side every day. In fact, if within the next year you stumble across a smelly, sunburned white guy with an afro and bushy red beard sleeping on a park bench with the sports page of the local newspaper as a blanket, remember this message and buy the guy (me)some coffee, or fried chicken, and try to understand as he mumbles to you in an odd combination of English, Arabic, and Spanish about his prior life as an African nomad trying to save the world.


what I might look like after a few more months of homelessness...be on the lookout for this guy if I go missing:

Christmas thoughts (a few weeks late)

An important part of surviving the type of life I find myself in is gaining
the ability to have gladness in the daily successes and constant joys, while
being surrounded by seemingly hopeless images and suffocating scenes of
despair. I must learn to celebrate with little boys who have been given
hope, to sing and dance with joy, as they do, all the while knowing that
outside the gate is the dirty 9-year-old refugee girl with yellow hair from
malnutrition, living in a tent because her house was torn down, who can't go
to school because she has to care for her younger siblings while her mother
sells tea in the market. It's a hard line to follow, to laugh and smile in
the presence of certain children, to truly experience their joy, and then
later to cry and curse in frustration of my own limitations to help others.
I don't wish to dampen your Christmas spirit with these thoughts, but rather
to help you understand what the reality of my life is. I also write to say
that despite the unrelenting scenes poverty that fill my every day, joy and
happiness were in abundance for me this Christmas season. I celebrated this
Christmas at a children's home located in a refugee camp. I spent that
night sleeping outside, surrounded by boys who have been given a chance, a
chance to receive food, an education, love, and truth. I managed to put
aside what was happening outside the walls of the compound and be joyful
that at least these 15 boys had a happy Christmas and were sleeping soundly,
with full bellies, dreaming of how to play with the few new toys we were
able to purchase. Happy, smiling kids on Christmas is always beautiful and
joyful and I was blessed to experience it in full this year.


Ps. I almost forgot to mention that I am temporarily (hopefully) leaving
Sudan in a few days. My current visa is expiring, so I must leave the
country while I wait on the new one to come. I will fly to Kenya on the
30th , where I will spend 2 weeks helping out in the Kids Alive programs
there. After this, I will visit our one program in South Sudan (it operates
on a different visa system). The current plan is to stay in South Sudan
until my new visa for the north comes through, which could take a few weeks,
or a few months.