After a long, dusty matatu ride from Dol Dol, I like to head to the Mt. Kenya Cyber to catch up with the world. Yesterday, when I logged on and surfed my way to the Drudge Report, I found a Financial Times article titled “UN warns it cannot afford to feed the world”, which described the World Food Program’s trouble in maintaining the amount of food it distributes. The growth of the Chinese and Indian consumer markets, as well as the world’s new interest in turning corn into electricity rather than tortillas, has meant the price of staple foods has skyrocketed in much of the world. When I got back from the internet café, I opened up the Daily Nation, which ran a large article on its third page titled “Maize farmers count blessings and cash.” It’s a good time to sell food, and a bad time to buy it. As if I needed to be told.
For all the thought I’d put into the AIDS training and mobilization, all the strategies we’d discussed for the daunting tasks of getting stubborn elders to use condoms, teaching illiterate women about antiretroviral drugs, and testing proud and promiscuous morani for HIV, most of my work revolved around the equally daunting task of feeding dozens of Maasai. In Mukogodo, you can come up with the perfect plan, the perfect project, but if you don’t provide the perfect meal, it will fail.
Such is the spirit of volunteerism here. Very, very few are the people who will do something for nothing, even if it’s for their own benefit. People attending workshops, trainings or anything like that usually expect cash payments. This is especially galling when the same people complaining yesterday about having nothing to do are asking to be paid today. The blame lies with the NGOs, including the one for which I work. They throw money around to boost the attendance and thus impress donors, and now everyone has come to see the NGOs as cash cows. It’s gotten so ridiculous that people demanded payment before they’d watch a play about HIV or be tested. Crazy. If you’re in Mukogodo, work for an NGO and see someone on fire, be prepared to pay him an “allowance” before you tell him to stop, drop and roll, or else he won’t budge.
Of course, because of our principles (by which I mean our meager budget) we did not make any cash payments. I know for a fact that we lost attendees and mobilizers because of this decision. In order to keep the rest, we had to at least feed them. And the Maasai like to eat. I’ve seen four of them eat their way through a full-sized goat in half an hour- and I mean all the way through, including the organs, the blood and the bone marrow. One of my friends explained the speed with which the Maasai eat by saying, “We used to have to compete with the hyenas.” Trying to satisfy these appetites is not the sort of thing I wanted to get caught up in, but as many, many people here told me, “No eating, no meeting”. So we bought seven goats, a huge sack of rice, 10 kilos of sugar, the state of Idaho’s quarterly potato yield, enough cooking fat to supply a La Belle Province franchise for a month and an amount of flour suitable for covering the surface of Lake Huron in chapatti. We spent lavishly, because I was told that if we fed the people “cheap rice”, they’d all quit. Even still, it wasn’t enough. Part of the problem was that someone took a fair portion of the food, especially the cookies, out of the locked office where we kept it. The bigger problem was that random people turned up to eat with trainees and mobilizers, so instead of the forty people we budgeted for, we were feeding sixty. In this anti-Hanukah, the food was designed to last eight days but only lasted five. Worst of all, we had to sell two of the goats.
This is not to suggest that the problems were only culinary in nature. The medical officers, who spoke at the training, wanted to be paid for their work, even though they were already getting a government wage to promote the health of the community. The teacher who holds the keys for the community library hall where we were to have the training refused to hand them over unless we paid her a bribe. We found an alternate venue at one of the churches, but the pastor, who was one of the trainees, refused to let us use it unless we paid 500 shillings. The problem was resolved only when we got one of the town’s Big Men to threaten the teacher into giving us the keys. I don’t think we had to pay him a bribe.
Despite all that, the project has been judged a success. The VCT counselors are seeing a lot of clients, the community is buzzing with talk of HIV, and a few leaders have emerged to plan a sustained community HIV program. I just want to be far, far away from the kitchen when that program is launched.
