Something About Mulongo

Kitchen conversations in Mulongo

Alright, so I promised to tell you about what I was doing in Congo last month (beyond getting ordained), and since the U.S. government in an ‘abundance of caution’ has said I should avoid leaving the house this week, now seems like a good time to write.

To start off, let’s clear up a common cause of confusion about where exactly I went and who is in charge of the programs I’m (via FPM) assisting. Imagine, if you will, going to a big church event and meeting a Rev. Joe Monroe. Rev. Monroe inspires you with stories of the struggles and initiatives in the town (coincidentally named Monroe) and district (also called Monroe) that he oversees. You’d love to visit Monroe someday, but you doubt you ever will since it is in such a remote place. Soon after you get a call from Denver, an acquaintance who met a Dr. Ivan Monroe and was inspired by Dr. Monroe’s sharing of the unmet health needs in the community where he was serving as head medical doctor and of how he had recently started a nursing and midwife training program there. Your acquaintance is seriously considering making a large financial contribution to Dr. Monroe’s ambitious project and wants to know if you could do a site-visit and give him your professional opinion first. Where is this school? Monroe, of course.

Now replace “Monroe” with “Mulongo” and you’ve got the start of the story of how FPM ended up having Mulongo as its DR Congo headquarters with Rev. Joseph Mulongo as its Country Director and a nursing school headed by Dr. Ivan Mulongo as its first major bricks&mortar partnership project. The story has a lot of twists and turns—some of which you can read about in Dad’s old posts --and a lot more will be told in Dad’s book.  

Last month, I traveled to Mulongo not only with my family but with Denver’s wife (Robin) and their pastor Deanne. We wanted Robin to witness how her contribution had been transformed into cement and roofing sheets for a fully accredited nursing school--the only one in the region. The faculty and students—especially those receiving scholarships from her family—wanted to testify to the many lives being saved because of the education received at this school. Robin was overwhelmed by what she saw and has decided to take the lead in the state-side efforts to raise support for scholarships, construction materials, and equipment for the nursing school. (Dr. Ivan, now a congressman, continues to be the main contributor and fundraiser for it in DR Congo.) She’d be happy to speak with your group about the school and ways you can get involved.

While in Mulongo, we stayed in Joseph and his wife Mary’s beautiful home. (Have I mentioned that Mary was one of the first graduates of Ivan’s nursing school and that she now teaches there?) As you can imagine, there is a very good story behind how a United Methodist pastor built such a nice house when most of his colleagues’ parsonages threaten to collapse with every rainfall. It starts with a laptop he received when visiting the Indiana UMC’s conference office and a desktop printer he bought with his personal savings. Mulongo used them to open the region’s only printing station. With those profits he made thousands of bricks—half of which he sold, and half were for his house. We figured that a pastor who is entrepreneurial enough to turn a budget laptop into a 4 bedroom house (with indoor plumbing!) all while leading several community development initiatives is exactly the sort of person who should be vetting and coordinating FPM-funded projects. 

Thus far FPM's decision to put Rev. Mulongo in charge of the programatic-side of operations has been successful beyond our wildest dreams. Now he's proposing some ideas of income-generating projects that could fund FPM programs and salaries (If the Catholic Church has its own gas stations and hotels in Congo, why couldn't we start a business?). We believe strongly that FPM should walk its talk by leveraging local assets to fund its work, so we plan to give at least one these ideas a try in 2014. We're not ready to broadcast all our plans just yet, but if you are interested in investing, please let us know! 

     

There are plenty of rooms at Joseph and Mary's house

Joseph and Robin by the Nursing School's sign

Meeting with some of the nursing students

The Nursing School

The school's maternity wing under construction

Nursing students at the celebration for the completion of the first building

Words of appreciation to Robin for financial support

Want to see more photos of Mulongo?  Check out the public album's on Bob's Facebook page.

Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts (or Fashionista Do-Gooder)

This dress from Patagonia is something I could truly love.

A little over 15 years ago I was a college freshman--another  AU WONK determined to change the world--to battle economic and environmental injustice wherever I may find it. I had just watched in class a documentary on the evils of sweatshops, so I decided to do a term paper on the subject.  My goal was simple: I would make a naughty and nice list of apparel stores in the USA so that I could make socially responsible choices the next time I needed to shop for new clothes.  The more I read the more my naughty list grew and grew, and, by the end of the semester, I hadn't found any realistic options for my nice list. This was a traumatic realization.

The recent collapse of the factory in Bangladesh has stirred up old emotions for me. As I write this, the death toll is at 761 and rising. Stores I've shopped in subcontracted to this factory. When I start to get dressed each morning I pause for a moment. Did the person who made this dress die in that collapse? 

Has there been any progress since I last seriously studied the issue of how our clothing is made?

I've spent several hours regoogling the subject, and most of what I find makes me feel like vomiting from upset-- so many stories about the human rights violations that continue to be committed in the factories that source so much of what is sold in the USA. The naughty list goes on and on. The nice list?  Well, it depends on who you ask, but at least there are now some mainstream companies making a real effort to respect all the humans in their supply chain.

I don't want to fill this post with rehashing of what you can learn from anti-sweatshop advocacy pages, so visit these pages if you want to read more about the enormity and politics of the sweatshop issue:

•  LaborRights.org
•  DoSomething.org
• The Sweatshop Game    (see also this Guardian piece on it)
• StopSweatshopsNow.wordpress.com

I wanted to give you the reader (well, honestly, myself), some easy actions to take to move us in the direction of justice. I wanted to say something other than "Write your representatives and the CEOs of companies!" or "Stop buying clothes!"

I was determined to find a way to do-good with my debit card, so here's what I've found so far for clothing companies making a praiseworthy effort. Granted, there aren't many office-appropriate options (unless you wear t-shirts and yoga pants to work), but consider purchasing something from one of these places as your way of participating in the solution. One of the painful parts of doing this research was how many dead links (as in, ethical stores that didn't make it) I found, so Please, please, please tell me about stores that deserve to be added to this list. 

Clothing Shopping options:

• tsdesigns.com/   (ideal for someone buying custom t-shirts in bulk. Read more about them.) 
• www.maggiesorganics.com/
• www.patagonia.com/
• www.autonomieproject.com/
• www.noenemy.org/
• www.naturewearorganics.com
• http://store.americanapparel.net/
• www.eileenfisher.com/
• green.ebay.com/#wog
• www.sweatfree.org/shoppingguide

Company Report Cards:
http://www.free2work.org/

Clothing Store Ethical Report Card created by BetterWorldShopper.org

I was not aware until reading my alumni mailing that I am a WONK. Silly me just thought I was a bleeding-heart nerd.

Luxury Do-Gooding (Or, how my hubby got me to agree to travel by Rovos Rail)

 

Kirstenbosch Gardens, Cape Town

In my second trimester of pregnancy, my husband was serving as Vice-Consul at the U.S. embassy in Lusaka. Since Zambia did not have hospitals that met the U.S. government’s standards, the embassy flew me down to Pretoria for a high-tech check-up.  And, since ‘visit Cape Town’ and ‘ride on Rovos Rail” was on my husband’s bucket list, he somehow turned my medevac into a vacation with a half-day stop at a doctor’s office.

Cape Town, I was surprised to realize, is a remarkably beautiful city.  As in—Wouldn’t it be nice to retire here—city.  City parks and trails along the coastline.  Crashing waves and sandy beaches. Boardwalk cafes, great architecture, museums—even an aquarium! We stayed at a charming B&B and toured the town on a double-decker open-top bus. Rode the tram to the top of Table Mountain for a stunning panoramic view.  Yes, there are shantytowns on the periphery and unresolved social tensions, but compared to all the other places in Africa where I’ve been, Cape Town was like another world.

Cape Town

Then, we took Rovos Rail from Cape Town to Pretoria. This is the same Rovos that offers a Cape Town to Cairo trip for the uber-rich. Just two days on Rovos was a major splurge for us (I actually don’t even know how much we spent—Stuart refuses to tell me, although he swears he negotiated a special price).  Rovos, for those who don’t know, boasts being the most luxurious train in the world.

“Recapture the romance of a bygone era as you step aboard the reconditioned wood-panelled coaches and enjoy fine cuisine in five-star luxury.”

You had me at 'cheese course.'

I admit it was pretty darn luxurious.  There was that voice inside me, though, that nagged isn’t this wasteful narcissistic spending?  Shouldn’t we be pouring every dollar we can spare into Friendly Planet Missiology or, at the very least, a college savings account for our unborn child?  With all the visits of friends and family we received during our two years in Zambia, we had been going on a number of expensive safaris and road trips. I felt like we were hemorrhaging money. Wasn’t it time to throw on the brakes and say enough?!  

Rovos Rail

My husband responded that I was being inconsistent in my logic.  Wasn’t it I who had insisted he read Dead Aid? Hadn’t I agreed that the best way to combat poverty in Africa wasn’t via charity but through purchasing the goods and services of African-owned and operated businesses? By my own arguments, wouldn’t this mean that if one really cares about sustainable development in Africa one should spend serious cash as customers of the tourism industry?  Hadn’t we deliberately been choosing socially responsible companies whose profits went back into the local economy? 

I didn’t have a good reply.  All my economics training suggests that he is correct, so why did it feel wrong?

It has been ingrained in many of us that doing-good requires sacrifice.  We must give things up in order to improve the world. We donate to charities, take ‘alternative spring breaks,’ and join in boycotts of stores and restaurants.  In exchange, we get the satisfaction of making a difference. Sometimes, we are so emotionally moved by our volunteering that we comment that we received more from the experience than we gave  (which I think is often true, and this opens up a whole other conversation about ways we exploit poor communities).

But sometimes, we can participate in win-win exchanges. Sometimes doing what’s good for the health of the community can feel indulgent. We can pamper ourselves by going to an eco-friendly retreat center and spa and have a tasty lunch at a café that purchases from local farmers. We can buy theater tickets to support the arts, and, yes, if we happen to find ourselves needing transportation to Pretoria, we can go in style via a family business that started as a foolish pipe dream and now provides regular paychecks for hundreds of households.  

Waking up to the sight of South African vineyards going by? Yes please. 

Bait and Switching Do-Gooder

In my first year of undergrad I took a class titled Honors English: Subversive Thinking.  Our professor told us to call him ‘Coach.’ I hated that class, and I loathed calling that man Coach.

It wasn’t the classroom time or even the assigned readings I disliked; that part was fun. We’d dissect political speeches and magazine articles looking for logical fallacies and meaningless phrases. We read The New Doublespeak and books that discussed the disconnect between public opinion and government policies. All of this I devoured.

The painful part was the writing. Coach said we’d all gotten into his class because as teens we’d excelled in the art of generating long papers that didn’t say much of anything. This time, we had to say something thoughtful, and filler words would not be tolerated.

Coach was ruthless with my papers, calling some unfit to grade. My sense of identity and self-esteem was that of being a straight-A student. How could he suggest that my work was rubbish?!  I oscillated between anger and grief. 

Last week I blogged about my frustration with the way do-gooder fundraising campaigns are usually pitched in the USA. I talked about how they manipulate emotions by playing to our vanity and (often subliminally racist) savior complexes. I wanted all my readers to be cognizant of the game so they could make wiser decisions in how to use their money and energies.  The target of my attack wasn’t do-gooder organizations; it was the dysfunctional game that they are trapped in. If we could raise awareness of how sick the game is, then do-gooder groups would be freed from the pressures of duplicity.  No more debating whether the ends justify the means! No more treating donors like children who we have to trick into eating their vegetables! (and no, not all do-gooder groups are aware of the conspiracy—just the healthier ones) Without the pressure to bait and switch the public, we could pull back the curtain on the messy realities of do-gooder work and start healthy public explorations of what methods are fruitful.

Speaking of ‘bait & switch,’ an old friend e-mailed me after my last post and suggested that this was too harsh of a term. Couldn’t I find a softer way of saying it? She shared her personal experience of how ‘incredibly unpleasant’ it had been when I had shared with her my critiques of child sponsorship programs, since she has made considerable contributions to one. While the logical pragmatic part of her brain could clearly recognize that what I wrote made sense, it was still painful to process—even coming from a friend.  Perhaps if I used gentler words more people would be receptive to what I have to say, she suggested.  I responded that I saw the process like ripping off a bandaid, and after over a decade (arguably two decades) of me trying to coax people to reflect on their mission models, I just want to RIP THE DARN THING OFF.

This, in case you’ve been wondering, is how I got to thinking about Coach. He took the rip-the-bandaid approach, and at the time I hated him for it. It hurt to realize that my writing wasn’t wonderful (looking back, it really was rubbish). It was agony to see all those red marks on the page. And yet, now I’m grateful that I went through the experience--that he saw my potential and pushed me to go further. While I’ll probably never be an award-winning writer, barely a day goes by that I don’t apply what I learned in that class.

So, if you want to say I’m full of it and don’t have the right to presume to be your coach in the world of do-gooding, I get it. You’ve probably been do-gooding since childhood.  Who am I to question your methods or motives?

Nevertheless, I do request that you stick with my team at Friendly Planet Missiology and join the conversation as we wrestle with these issues.  Who knows?  Perhaps someday you will be begrudgingly glad that you did. 

 

Taylor

Mary, Martha and Malaria

Some years back my ballroom dance coaches invited me to work at their studio. I helped them mostly in office admin and hospitality tasks, but then started teaching some beginner private lessons. I wasn't a popular teacher at first. I thought the underlying problem was that I was still just a student myself, but my coaches recognized it was that I lacked awareness of what the clients really wanted when they handed over their credit cards. They thought they were purchasing fantasy, praise and a sense of accomplishment. What they got from me was 50 minutes of pointing out all the mistakes they were making. The tragedy of it was that even though I too yearned for what they wanted, I was driving people away from the very activity I loved.

So what’s this have to do with malaria? I care a lot about malaria. I have many loved ones who have suffered from malaria and good friends who have lost children to it. I know what the forehead of a toddler with malaria feels like. I live in a malaria zone and fret over every mosquito bite my own daughter gets. I know first hand that even treated bed nets and bug spray are no match for some of those stubborn devils. I care, and I want the whole world to care.

Therefore, I’m hesitant to say anything that would discourage any efforts that address malaria. Goodness forbid that I whisper a word of critique about Nothing But Nets, Imagine No Malaria, or other campaigns. It would be better to put a millstone around my neck and throw me into the sea! And yet… I do have critiques. The folks running those initiatives haven't asked for my feedback, so should I still offer it? (Ballroom etiquette is to not give coaching unless it is requested; otherwise you just look like a jerk)

I suppose I could blog about what I might say if they did ask me, but that’s not actually what has been eating at me today. This week I saw advertisements for a new HBO movie called Mary and Martha. United Methodists were encouraged to host parties to watch the film, which was publicized as something that would raise awareness of malaria. I clicked on the website and watched the trailers. Ugh. My stomach felt sick. Please don't be another Great White Savior film. I clicked to read the reviews, since I don’t have access to the movie here. Sigh. “The malaria story, it seems to say, is filmable only if the central figures are white and it is larded up with the kind of button-pushing that television dramas thrive on. The Africans in this film are largely props for Ms. Swank to hold; we learn little about them beyond the happy choruses of welcome songs they shower on white visitors.” (New York Times)

If the movie critics at the New York Times can instantly see what is fundamentally racist about this movie, why can't the folks leading Imagine No Malaria?  Perhaps they do, but they think such an approach is the only way to open the pocketbooks of middle America (I'd rather believe this than think they are completely blind).  Many years ago I took a class in grad school called NGOs and Development led by a former higher-up at World Vision. He talked about the tension that exists in the big development organizations between the fundraising department and the folks working out in the field. Experience has taught them that there is a huge chasm between what development approaches are effective (supporting local agency, for example) and what generates donations (campaigns that play to the savior fantasy).

I want you to understand that you, the "First World" public, are being played. I'm not hating; I'm just saying.

Thus far, most of what I've seen in terms of anti-malaria campaigns play to our fantasies.  Just like financially successful ballroom dance studios understand what their clients really want, these campaigns understand that the more we can visualize ourselves as praise-worthy saviors of the less fortunate, the more we will contribute.  Some argue that this approach is only truly problematic when the organization isn't consciously pulling a bait and switch.  Even our team at Friendly Planet Missiology has gone round and round on whether using what we know to be "more effective fundraising approaches" would be an ethical compromise.

I am beginning to think, however, that it is time for us all to stop being amateur do-gooders.

Let's jump back to my example of what my days at the ballroom studio taught me; I left out something very important. When I made the switch from being a regular student to being on staff, the nature of the coaching I received switched too.  They went from fluffy feel-good to hard work with expectations that I put in real effort and start mastering the material. This didn't mean that lessons were no longer enjoyable (although some felt miserable at the time); the joy came from an accelerated rate of advancement in my dancing--the thrill of viscerally experiencing a figure done well. The difference between an amateur dancer and a dance teacher, my coach insisted, was not about skill level but a matter of mindset. A teacher does not pay his/her coach for coddling but assistance in refining the craft.  A professional values correction over compliment.  

So I am issuing a challenge to all who are interested.  Consider making the switch from amateur to professional do-gooder.  The world's problems are too big and the opportunities for growth too many for us to continue to be content with false praise and slow progress.  Want to explore what would really make a difference in this world? Are you willing to grow thicker skin and be ready to critique every method you've ever tried?  Then let's get started. 

Because, quite frankly, if you want me to smile and say "Great job! You're my hero!" then you'll have to start paying me.     

Taylor

SIFAT build update

"So, Taylor, what happened with that construction project in Lusaka that you spent so much time telling us about?  You never got around to doing a follow-up blog on it."

I'm so glad you asked.  Those of you who know me well or have read my blog posts from when I was working in Zambia know that through no planning of my own (i.e. the hot potato dropped firmly into my lap not long after arriving to town) I ended up playing a major role in helping the United Methodist Church's Lusaka district obtain a title deed on a large plot of land north of town and acted as the communications link between SIFAT and district leadership. I expressed to you my mixed emotions about the initiative--about how the missiologist in me would suggest to anyone considering such a thing to run away quickly, and yet how I sensed that I was being called to shepherd this project precisely because I was keenly aware of the difficulties it would face.

After the countless trips to bureaucratic government offices I had truly hoped that, if anything, the district leadership would succeed in obtaining a title deed and that I would still be around the hold that dang piece of paper in my hands.  My wish was finally granted one month before I left Zambia.  Rev. John Ilunga beamed with pride when he returned from the Ministry of Land, and I squealed with joy.


 

I got to be around to see the caretaker's house built (which John, Mary and their children live in), the exterior enclosure completed, and the much of the main building's structural elements go up.  Was even given the honor of preaching at the first official worship service in the building.

There's a little Evelyn in that big belly!

The construction stage is still ongoing and volunteers are welcome.  So if you'd like to spend a vacation going on safari, seeing Victoria Falls and meeting some great people--and helping them build a conference/training center while you are there, contact my friends at SIFAT.