HIV/AIDS Outreach

CBW has instituted an HIV/AIDS outreach program, which many of you, having read about the astronomical HIV rates in Africa, may think is totally fitting endeavor. And it is a needed program. However, you may be surprised to learn that West Africa, for whatever reason, has been able to contain the rates of HIV infection. While areas of Botswana (in East Africa) have infection rates of over 40%, Ghana has a rate hovering around 3%. And even this rate has dropped slightly in recent years. In fact, my home city, Washington D.C., has even higher rates than Ghana!

That said, I am living in “little Liberia”, not Ghana, so the infection rates could be higher here in this insulated community where sex is an easy cure for the pervasive boredom. The thing is, nobody knows. There are simply no good statistics because people are afraid to get tested – understandably since there’s no cure and plenty of stigma. But in the few months since I first arrived, my close circle of acquaintances has suffered at least 2 deaths to AIDS. And a local doctor told me that about 1 or 2 in every 10 people who submit to testing have positive results. That high rate could be the result of a selection bias (only those who already suspect they may have contracted the virus get tested), but we just don’t know. The rates could be high and the stigma is certainly there, so the local and international volunteers feel more than justified going out daily to educate the community about the virus.

So, that’s what they do. The HIV team sets out donned in red smocks that announce “HIV/AIDS team” and approach just about anyone they can find to have an unsolicited discussion about the disease. The community is surprisingly receptive to their overtures and they listen patiently and attentively to the presentation.

Those of us in the West who are inundated with information campaigns easily accessed through omnipresent media sources can tend to forget how little some people know about the disease. But in a community where information is passed largely through word of mouth, rumor and misinformation can spread and amplify to the point where people believe that AIDS is spread by kissing and cured by witchdoctors.

But the upshot is that Liberians are surprisingly frank when it comes to talking about sex. The outreach demonstration is pretty graphic and at some point after a rather clinical discussion about the way in which the virus affects the immune system, the presenters incongruously whip out a large dildo and proceed not only to demonstrate how to correctly dress it with a condom, but also thrust the thing forward simulating rough sex (as it may diminish condom effectiveness). This inevitably elicits embarrassed and juvenile laughter from the international volunteers, whereas the Liberians (even the teenagers) just kind of nod knowingly and maturely. Sex here is … what’s the opposite of taboo? It’s just a part of people’s lives and something everyone accepts with a kind of frankness that that would make some of the more libertine hippies at home blush.

That’s not to say that people here are more promiscuous, but just that there is not all the religious and moral baggage that we usually tote around with sex. Maybe this frankness is out of necessity. I mean, people share very close sleeping quarters and are inevitably exposed to other people’s sexual activity. I guess it doesn’t really matter why, but it does make these outreach discussions more lively and honest. By comparison, I can’t begin to image how difficult it would be to have these candid discussions in a Muslim country.

So the outreach has been productive in generating discussion at least. But it’s hard to say how much effect these teams are having. A band of strangers, included among them some young white faces, may not carry the same force of legitimacy as a trusted friend or pastor, and it’s not easy to determine if these discussions are actually changing anyone’s behavior. And the presentations do leave a little to be desired. They spend an inordinate amount of time discussing how to properly store a condom (not in your back pocket or in the ceiling rafters) and how to open it (not with your teeth and always along the perforation) and absolutely no time talking about how to convince your partner to put the thing on in the first place.

International volunteers, especially those with the advantage of a health background, generally want to enhance these presentations, but the language and cultural barrier often hamper these efforts, and the foreign do-gooders are left feeling frustrated or simply superfluous working with the outreach team. At least that was the case until a few weeks ago.

Unbeknownst to us, one of the Liberian volunteers has been doing a lot more than spreading the gospel of HIV prevention. Victoria has been spending several hours a day visiting those people who had already contracted the disease. This was all done clandestinely to prevent any possibility of revealing the identity of AIDS sufferers. Vic would come by their homes to simply check in or provide a shoulder to lean on and even some food and medicine when she could. She had been making a silent but immeasurable impact on people’s lives. We would have known nothing about this if she hadn’t invited Mark (one of the international volunteers) to join her on one of her visits.

Mark went to visit a man called Taller (due to his height) and his 4-year old son we all affectionately came to call “Small Taller.” Taller, already in exile from Liberia, had been thrown out of the community due to his HIV positive status and was living in the bush outside camp completely cut off from his support network (a refugee from a refugee camp). He did at one time have a wife and neighbors and friends, but all of that was gone along with any means to support him and his tiny son.

His shelter, though you could hardly call it that as it lacking the very defining characteristic of shelter - a roof, was falling apart and he had virtually no personal possessions. On top of this reversal of fortunate and this indignity, Taller was sick and his son had probably contracted the disease as well – though Taller refused to get him tested because the any negative news would have devastated him to the point of taking his own life and leaving Small Taller an orphan.

So, Victoria thought that maybe a visit from the outside world might help Taller and encouraged Mark, an international volunteer from Ireland, to pay him a visit. Mark was shaken and moved, touched and outraged by what he saw. He quickly moved to raise funds so that Taller could build a roof and provide better care for his son. He has even begun a fund to bring anti-retroviral therapy to some of Victoria’s clients.

Conditions on the camp are hardly stellar, but the strength of the community seems to overpower and at times even help alleviate any material deprivation. Taller was stripped of all of that and forced to live in isolation with no means to support himself. As volunteer coordinator, I worried that visits from a short term international visitor would do more harm than good when that support was once again yanked away from Taller, but I was wrong. At Mark’s leaving ceremony – each group of departing volunteers is thanked in a public ceremony full of speeches and gifts – Victoria read aloud a letter from Taller that went something like this:

“Mark, you and Victoria have saved my life. I had started to lose my faith in God. It seemed he had abandoned me and there was no hope for myself or my son. But then you came to visit me and showed me that people do care about each other and that god acts through you. You have given me hope back and let me live again.”

Of course, it was much more beautifully rendered than that, and many people were moved to tears. These leaving ceremonies can be full of embellished and ceremonial gratitude, but this was the one moment that seemed to crystallize the positive aspect of our presence here. Sometimes it’s just important to let people know that there are people from the outside who care enough based on some shared sense of humanity. Victoria, Mark and Taller all helped to remind me of that.

peace cells

The organization I work for, Global Volunteers Network (GVN), sends volunteers to another NGO on camp called PCO (People Caring Organization) which, despite the fact that it sounds like a group that goes around randomly hugging people, actually focuses primarily on “peace and reconciliation” and “conflict resolution” activities. But what does that all mean? These are really big issues. Like, how do you forgive your enemy enough to co-exist again as neighbors back in Liberia when they may have committed unspeakable acts of violence against you or people you love? Should you? How does the cycle of violence end? What form of justice will work to heal the nation? How can you prepare in exile to return to Liberia?

These seem like pretty impossible questions, but tackling them is precisely what PCO has set out to do. As a part of this, PCO conducts outreach they call "peace cell meetings" around camp. These meetings are held outside in different zones each day and are open to anyone. When I heard about this, I had my doubts that people would actually turn up to talk, vent or discuss what could be potentially deeply rooted traumatic issues. But I was wrong.

The last meeting I went to was held in zone 4 in an area between a cluster of houses, and it drew such a crowd that people spilled out between the houses out of view. I don’t know if it was really the opportunity to talk through issues or if it was the free drinks (that’s usually a big draw) and the chance to break the monotony of daily routine, and I guess it doesn’t much matter. Many people came, and they were not shy about adding their opinions in typically long-winded, metaphor-filled African fashion.

The topic that week was "how to prepare to return to Liberia" now that they have a democratically elected president and relative stability. Quite bizarrely, I thought, the discussion started off with a focus on technicalities - should you fly or take a boat, and how much luggage does each allow you? But while those questions seem to avoid the most important issues, they are also safe areas to approach the subject and everyone can somewhat detachedly discuss the pros and cons of these logistical options. And the discussion inevitably found its way to meatier issues.

Someone summed up what most people seemed to have been thinking saying a bit angrily, "It doesn’t matter how I get there, I cannot go back there. There is nothing left for me. I have no family left, no land and I’ve been here for 15 years. Me, I will not go back to Liberia!" This was reiterated by several refugees, most of whom concluded that their only hope was to be resettled, hopefully in America, or continue to eke out an existence on the refugee camp. But the hope of being granted resettlement diminishes through the years, and it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet on camp as the UN provides less and less handouts. So, people are left feeling truly stateless and hopeless. This rather pessimistic conclusion led to a discussion of the refugees neglect by the international community who seem to have forgotten about them. There was a lot of venting about the lack of concern and support from the outside world, which the facilitators tried in vain to turn around into a discussion of how to become more self-empowered. There were lofty speeches by PCO volunteers about how 1 + 1 = 11 because of the power in unity, and how if stick together and form groups we can have the strength and resources needed to rebuild Liberia. It’s was all very well put and inspiring to an outsider, but I’m not sure how many people were swayed by this rhetoric.

At one point others noted that despite the difficulties of camp living, standards of living are higher here than in Liberia, so there is no real pull to go back to a place whose capital city still does not have electricity and roads are so impassible that goods cannot get to many places in the interior. Not to mention the indeterminate likelihood of a return to violence. Why should they leave a camp that has increasingly reliable electricity, easy physical access to education and medical care (albeit expensive) and even internet access for a place with decrepit infrastructure and the chance of war? It’s a hard sell to say the least. The UN “sweetens” the deal by giving each refugee a whopping $5.00 to help in this transition, something the participants found at least as laughable as it was depressing. If all this were not enough dissuasion, many refugees noted that once they return to Liberia, they forgo their refugee status and forfeit their right to be resettled in a wealthy country. They also lose the ability to appeal to relatives in wealthy countries for help based on their status as refugees.

Most of the group conveyed a message of “our only hope is being resettled in the West, and in America specifically.” This is something I’ve noticed all over camp. It’s the dream of most to win a spot on a resettlement program to America. It’s what people pray for at church, and many of my interactions with Liberians have the subtext of “how can you help me get to your country?” As an outsider it seems like this drain of talent to America can only hinder the rebuilding of Liberia, but I also know that each individual makes the best decisions for themselves and their family. And why should they be different from the millions of other refugees and economic migrants who flock to wealthy countries in the hopes of having a more secure future? My public policy professors would call this brain drain a classic collective action problem. I don’t know how to solve it.

But towards the end of the peace cell meeting, a young woman, probably no older than 18, got up to speak. She said, “Why is it that all of you want to go to America? America wasn’t always so powerful and rich. People made it that way. We can all go back to Liberia, make it strong together and pretty soon people will want to go from America to Liberia.” This was put a lot more powerfully by the young woman, and it kind of stunned the group to silence. I’m not sure what they were thinking. It was easy to admire her aplomb and her eloquence, but the group may have been silently dismissing her message as naïvely idealistic. But maybe that’s what Liberia needs – a little naïve idealism in the face of so many dark realities.

Microloan mamas

Many of you may be familiar with microloans because they are the development strategy of the moment. For the uninitiated - microloans are small business loans generally granted to women (because they are more likely than men to spend profits on the family’s basic needs and also have a more difficult time accessing capital in the first placed - sorry guys, that’s what the research shows) and often disbursed to a group of women who are jointly responsible for repayment and thus apt to police each other. Grameen bank was the first to do this on a large scale for poor rural women in Bangladesh, and they have seen an enviable repayment rate of over 95%.

The logic behind microloans is that one of the biggest impediments to climbing out of poverty is the lack of access to capital due partly to the false assumption that poor or illiterate people will not reliably pay back loans that were too small for any banking institution to award in the first place. It’s not that people don’t have bright entrepreneurial ideas or the ability to work hard and see them to fruition; it’s just that setbacks like illness and large webs of extended family obligations mean that hey cannot get enough money together to ever get started. Also, the lack of collateral and credit history make them poor loan candidates - if there were banking institutions even available.

Unlike traditional aid disbursement, encouraging the upstart of small ultimately self-sustaining businesses reduces long-term dependency and empowers families to take control of their futures. And it only takes a very small amount of money to make a huge difference. Fifty dollars is enough for a woman here to start a business selling cookies or kerosene. For all of these reasons, so many students and practitioners of international development have become really excited about microloans. And that is why Children Better Way set up a microloan program for 14 women on camp.

The loans (ranging from $40 to $80) were disbursed to these women based on business plans, interviews and recommendation from the head of the program, Amelia. The women have 20 months to make repayments. They are visited by the microloan committee twice a month and required to attend meetings once a month to collectively discuss problems they face and share strategies. Because it is a revolving fund, if the women make timely payments and regularly attend meetings, they are eligible to receive additional loans. Sounds good, huh?

The problem is that providing loans on a camp in which people depend heavily on and are accustomed to receiving remittances from relatives abroad or UNHCR handouts (both technically grants, not loans) means that sometimes the women resent having to make payments. It’s a lot easier to ask someone abroad to send money than to work all day, barely see a profit and then have to use some of it to pay back a loan. A few of them view it as such a great burden that they have some regrets about having taken the loan in the first place. Maybe access to capital is difficult here, but when people do get some it is usually a gift with no repayment attached.

But in actuality the microloan program has been more successful than this context would have predicted. The repayment rate is not exactly the stellar, but they women are trying. Most are up to date with their payments and some have actuality paid several months in advance. But considering the culture of surviving on handouts and our inability to send a repo man to confiscate goods or threaten them with a poor credit report, it is amazing that the women make the payments they do.

So, what keeps the women making their payments at all? A lot has to do with social pressure and pride. We visit the women every two weeks to inquire about their business and nag them about late payments. We hold monthly workshops to discuss issues like “how to save for emergencies” and “how to attract more business”. So, they form relationships with their creditors making it more difficult to avoid or cheat them. But a key component is Amelia. Amelia is the local head of the program and she is widely respected by the women. She is a naturally gifted leader and has admirable ability to inspire and encourage the women who seem to seek her approval. They respect her, she has vouched for them and they don’t want to let her down.

This week I attended my very last monthly workshop, and I left feeling such a genuine admiration for these women who are struggling to make something against so many odds, and doing it with such good humor, raw intelligence and grace. The workshops have not always been this inspiring. When I first arrived they were more like little classes where we would lecture them on savings and profit margins. But this was generally done by outsiders and had no real relevance to their lives and it seemed, while not exactly patronizing, not empowering either. So, we changed the format to a group discussion where answers to problems like how to save for emergencies and what to do when their businesses are failing came from the women themselves. These women may not know terms like "profit margin" and "market demand" and some of them cannot even read or write, but in our discussions it was clear that they, perhaps out of necessity, know business. Their advice to one another seemed plucked straight out of an MBA course - logical stuff but ideas that conveyed a keen business savvy. The women suggested anticipating seasonal market trends, increasing advertising, diversifying the product base, increasing exposure by walking around camp instead of staying in one place, and providing a discount if a customer is likely to bring in more business.

This week we talked about how and when to say "no" when your neighbor or family relation comes to ask for money. In this culture it is incredibly hard to refuse these requests (i.e. someone needs money for kerosene or medicine or rice) especially, as the women told us, when everyone sees that you have a business and thus assumes you have the means to help them. This tension between extensive and expensive social obligations and the need to accumulate the wealth required to grow a business is apparently something economists will cite as a real impediment to development around the world. And it is something that is played out as a very real struggle in these women’s lives. There are no easy answers. They cannot refuse to help anyone because they are still poor enough to need to reserve the right to call in a favor of their own in the future and because in a small community the appearance of selfishness can seriously damage one’s standing in the community. But they have to be able to refuse sometimes because otherwise they will never save enough to pay back their loan, provide a cushion for emergencies or better their lives. In our workshop, the women again offered astute suggestions to handle this dilemma, such as setting out guidelines on ‘when to give’ for yourself that you agree not to violate and putting away money that you consider inaccessible to anyone including yourself. This way when a neighbor comes around asking for money for their daughter’s wedding you can say you have none, knowing what you do have is already in a kind of unreachable savings account for your future. They also offered advice for tactful ways to refuse requests without appearing selfish or injuring relations.

None of these are easy issues. And the women struggle with them everyday to scrape by enough money to sustain their families. Amma Cooper has 7 kids and her husband was killed in the war. She has no help from relatives abroad. Sometimes she has to watch her kids go hungry and when they fall sick, medical expenses quickly eat away all her savings. But she is poised and articulate and diligent and proud in the face of all this, and watching her provide well-reasoned and caring business advice to her microloan sisters is simply inspiring. I doubt I’d ever have the strength of any of these women.

Some of my favorite little people...

Here are a few shots of my favorite little people.

I do

One of the things a person most anticipates when spending the better part of a year living in another culture is being included in traditional rights of passage. Well this past weekend, I got just that opportunity with an invitation to a Liberian wedding. But please erase any images of intricate of dowry exchanges overseen by village elders or elaborate bridal attire sewn by a bevy of wizened matrons. Like I’ve mentioned, the unyielding belief in witchdoctors aside, this is a very modern Liberian settlement and people pride themselves on outward displays of modernity and all things American.

The invitation announced that the ceremony would begin at “11:00 AM prompt” which in African time is about 12:30 PM. But being hopelessly western, we arrived at the church around 11:15 and waited around with the groomsmen and bridal party for the service to begin. The church slowly filled up with attendants, who were dressed in the most flamboyantly colorful attire I’ve seen yet. Some of the women were wearing the most outrageous headdresses - think gigantic shinny wrapping paper crumpled into a ball, placed on the head and then let to expand.

I think the best way to describe the service is to say it was like a Southern Baptist revival with an African theme. The Jesus music started as the guests filed in, and when the spirit caught anyone they would simply saunter up to the front of the house and join in the singing or more often dance in an utterly unself-conscious way. It was mainly the women, of all ages and sizes, who boogied up to the front together and you couldn’t help but smile at sense of freedom and sisterhood. If they were particularly impressed with the singer the guests would dance up to the front and stuff some money into her clothes; something I’ve seen done in blues bars on the South side of Chicago but which I know has African roots. The music went on for at least an hour and it was hard to keep still, but we kept ourselves to fanning our sweat to the rhythm. Other than the African dress, we could have easily been in a gospel church in rural Lousiana. At least until the Krahn (a Liberian ethnic group) women’s choir began to sing. They performed a traditional song that sounded almost ethereal in comparison to the gospel, and made me wish my voice recorded hadn’t been stolen a few weeks ago.

All of this chruchy stuff made us wonder if the wedding would ever take place. Then came the processional. And it made us wish that the church service would come back. The 4 bridesmaids literally took 20 minutes to walk 30 feet to the front of the room. It was a lazy kind of step-together-step choreography that took so long we kept exchanging glances of disbelief. Just when you felt their slow promenade was covering any distance, they would do a little shuffle in the opposite direction. I know all of this makes me sound very impatient, but trust me – when you’ve already sat through an hour long church service in 90 degree heat, a person only has so much tolerance for this stuff, no matter how romantic you are. Well, they finally made their way to the front and took their seats, men on one side and women on the other. After this the preacher came in with a sermon for the young couple that reminded me I was in modern Africa.

This guy was totally southern Baptist style, punctuating his points through repetition, loud impassioned growling into the microphone and stomping of the feet. As if all of these flourishes were not enough to drive home the point, after the preacher had made a particularly important insight (like Jesus died for your sins) a drummer would beat out a rhythm to emphasize his words. If the preacher was going for a more somber mood, the organist filled the background with a soft melody to cue us in on the mood change. The crowd played their part, by screaming out “preach on” or “he’s telling the truth” if a particular point rang true. I even heard a “wrap it up preacher” when it was getting a bit long (I love that last one).

So, the meat of the sermon (“ingredients for a successful marriage”) was just about as classic as his style. The first point was - keep Jesus central to your marriage. I won’t say I agree with that one, but it’s a fair enough argument. The second was to marry for true love, not for money, or beauty, or… “resettlement love”. (I.e. don’t marry someone because you think they may be about to be resettled in a wealthy country) I guess it’s a common enough occurrence to have a name attached to it, but it still raised a few eyebrows in our crowd. For the third point he addressed the men. “Talk to them preacher!” He gave a surprisingly feminist diatribe against treating your wife like a slave (don’t ask her to bring you water after she’s been cooking for you all day or wake her at night with “honey, ….”). But this argument was totally undone by his fourth point (“now I’m going to deal with the ladies” “deal with them preacher!”) – advising the women to “not be so lazy, and cook for your husbands like you should. And for god sake don’t make the rice too salty.” The fifth point was advising against dipping in “someone else’s well” no matter how tempting. Even if your wife’s boobs turn to “slipper boobs” (yup. He said that right there in the church) and you long to touch young “iron boobs” (oh, and he emphasized this point by grabbing imaginary breast) you should pray to Jesus to make the slippers feel like iron and should remember that it was you who turned them into slipper titties in the first place. The women erupted at this point with “halleluyah”s, “he right”s and laughter, and at that point I think he officially won them back. We were all too stunned to know what to think.

The last highlight of the ceremony, in keeping with the excruciating slow theme, was when after the exchange of vows Abraham finally lifted the veil from his new bride’s face. He took his time (probably for dramatic effect) rolling up her lace veil neatly in an upward motion with all the attention and care of a tobacco aficionado rolling a cigarette. It was totally comical. It took him about 5 minutes to lift the small veil half way up. Then, the veil slipped from his hands and he had to start the whole process again. But the kiss signaled the end of the ceremony, so we were all relieved.

After the ceremony, we headed to the reception. About 300 people showed up at the camp basketball court for food and speeches and dancing. However, the speakers blew part way into the first speech and so the guests, having eaten and gotten in enough revelry at the ceremony, promptly left. So, we ended up having a 4 hour ceremony and 40 minute reception – in an exact reversal of wedding celebrations at home. While I'm wouldn't have missed this for the world, I think I prefer it our way.

s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g

Today I went to a spelling bee. Or is it “spelling b”? Or “spelling be”? I guess I wouldn’t have qualified for it. Anway, it was about one of the most chaotic events and certainly the most chaotic “bee” I’ve ever attended. We crammed 8 schools and their cheering sections into a hall where the chatter bounced off the concrete walls and was amplified by the tin roof. The noise was such that it was impossible to hear anything happening on stage despite the loud speakers, which crackled and hummed often enough to entirely conceal anything that was said. When the speakers blew midway through the contest, it was actually a relief. We used the scoreboard (a man furiously writing in chalk and erasing as the contestants got answers right or wrong) as our only real cue for what was happening. The noise was almost intolerable, but the heat was literally intolerable. We sat their fanning ourselves in vain and dripping with so much sweat, that at one point we ran out of it. It was so hot in there that my friend Adam actually noticed his palms start wrinkling. That’s hot! But we suffer for the children.

But there was plenty redeeming (at least journal worthy) about the bee. There were 2 teams on stage at a time each with 4 contestants and 2 alternates, all dressed in their brightly colored school uniforms full of nerves and excitement and embarrassed pride. And the teachers took the contest at least as seriously as the students. The moderator showed the children no sympathy, and when the kids answered incorrectly, he would either say “no way” or shake his head with a cocky smirk saying “I can’t accept that”. At one point a kid was part way through butchering the spelling of “Sierra Leone” and he just cut her off, saying “save your breath.” Wow! This is kind of shocking coming from the land where (I’ve been told) that in is now verboten to correct papers in red pen - because red is too stigmatizing. Kids here have to have resilient egos, and many of them really do.

Every contest started with each team introducing themselves. They had clearly memorized these little speeches of introduction, and some of them said things like, “My name is Princess Johnson, but for the convenience of the audience you can call me Academic Queen.” The kids also took this opportunity to taunt the other team saying in practiced unison, “we will destroy, defeat and demobilize you.” Yes. They said “demobilize”. Oh, and half way through each match the competitors stood up from their seats and switched sides of the room. I asked the teacher next to me why they were doing that, and he told me (as if it weren’t totally obvious) “because it is half time” That shut me up.

Our school participated in the last of the 4 contests, and I have to admit it was worth the wait. The first 3 matches were blow-outs with the winning schools taking it by 50 point margins, so I didn’t have high hopes for our match. But ours had all the components of a great contest. We are kind of the rag tag school of kids who can least afford an education, so we had the appeal of the underdog going for us. We opened with a 40 point lead, due mostly to our superstar speller who had all the charisma and confidence of a true champion. He was easily the most fun of all the kids to watch because, whereas most of the kids spoke slowly and apprehensively, he darted out of his seat and pluckily spelled each word so quickly that even the judges raised their eyebrows. But the other school had some contenders too and the lead quickly narrowed to 10 points and remained there for the rest of the contest. At the end the score was 180 to 180 and the last turn was ours, so we all primed ourselves for some serious cheering. But two of our contestants stood to answer at the same time, and before we knew what was happening the judges docked us 5 points and gave the opposing team an opportunity to spell the word. They did so correctly and the audience (the wrong side) erupted in unexpected glee. Our teachers all rushed the stage waving the rule books and crying “unfair.” Our champion was downright despondent and we were all stunned.

It wasn’t exactly the Rumble in the Jungle, but this may very well go down as the Great Bee Upset of ’06. And I can say, I was there.

I will beat you-o

Before coming here I primed myself to be open-minded about the inevitable cultural differences. For instance, I knew from prior travel that in a lot places in the world considered knees to be scandalously sexy; but breasts were simply functional protrusions devoid of ability to arouse the interest in the baser sex. Like a good anthropology student, I was ready to keep my judgments at bay and see the beauty in our differences, knowing that our way of mentally and socially organizing the world is not the only or best way of doing so. All this multiculturalism is fine in theory, but in practice it is another thing.

The hardest thing I’ve had to come to terms with is the level of what in the Western world would call “domestic abuse”. The other night I came back to my house to hear my little 6 year old neighbor, Bakayoko (the tree climber from previous posts) wailing in a kind of agony that I’ve never heard before from such a little person. He was literally writhing on the ground pounding his tiny fists on the dirt outside his house, screaming and shaking, and no one was coming to his aid. When we approached him we saw that he could not open his eyes. Everytime he tried to, he would start convulsing in pain. As we attempted to rinse his eyes out in the dark with a bag of water and flashlight, we’d ask him to hold still; but each time he’d attempt to open his eyes the pain was so much that he would twist his little body uncontrollably and start to wail again. It took some time, but we flushed out the irritant and he just sat there on our stoop hunched over and exhausted from the pain. I asked his brother what had happened, and he told us that their mother had put hot pepper in his eyes. She did this because Bakayoko, in a defiant 6 year old tantrum, had thrown some dirt in the dinner his mother was cooking. Some of the kids were sympathetic telling him that they were sorry and other kids just laughed.

We were outraged, confused and at a loss as to what to do. I asked the other neighborhood kids if this was common, and they each told me story of a time it happened to them. Sandra told me that she stayed out too late once and her step mother waited until she was asleep and then rubbed pepper in her eyes in the middle of the night forcing Sandra to go screaming out into the night alone in search of water. I asked some of the adults if this was considered acceptable, and perhaps they were embarrassed because they said it was wrong and was not what educated or modern Africans do. But almost every child I asked said it happened to them.

But what’s the point? If it’s culturally acceptable does that mean it is beyond criticism? When do we stop caring about cultural sensitivity and start caring about individual lives and human rights?

But who are we to tell someone else how to raise their kids or initiate their youth into their society? Isn’t that just cultural imperialism?

But maybe all of that is bullshit. When someone is writhing in agony or being regularly beaten for minor infractions, maybe there’s no cultural dictate strong enough to morally excuse it. I also know that not everyone beats their kids as severely, and I’m sure there is a point at which even a culture that sanctions regularly hitting children draws a line.

Our school is the only school on camp to officially prohibit corporal punishment. And that is only because the international volunteers would not work beside teachers who cane their students. But this is policy that was imposed from the outside and the local teachers are not really behind it. They still beat the kids, just often not within our sight. When we try and talk to the teachers about alternative strategies like positive reinforcement and taking away privileges, they just smirk and remind us that these are “African children” we are dealing with. One of the volunteers from Denmark, where even spanking your own child is legally prohibited, had reached her wits end working alongside a teacher who had on several occasions taken the child out to beat them. She was torn between being a respectful guest in another culture and coming to a screaming child’s aid. Intervening did not seem appropriate, but neither did doing nothing. She was paralyzed to inaction, but left feeling like she had let the children down. Most of us have the same struggle. I was spanked as a child and I don’t know that I won’t do the same to my own children, judiciously. But for those volunteers who vow never to spank their own children, this kind of punishments is bordering on outrageous. Each person responds to it differently, and no one feels entirely like they’ve done the right thing in the end.

But the tides may be turning. The other day I saw a very small girl being chased by her mother with a switch. The little girl ran behind her neighbor, who yelled to the switch-wielder that he would call the “domestic abuse authorities” if she kept beating her daughter so severely. Another time we had to bail one of the local volunteers out of a Ghanaian-run jail on camp for allegedly beating his wife. This may not seem like an example of something positive, but for years, beating ones wife was a right or even duty, not a jailable offence. It’s still legal in Liberia. We see signs around camp about domestic abuse awareness, and peace and reconciliation groups are teaching ways to non-violently solve problems. But I guess the key is that change has to come from within to be sustainable. An outsider can’t carry the message with the same kind of impact. Being an outsider I guess that lets me off the hook, but just like my decisions on to whom and how much and in what way I should give people help here I still never fully feel like I’m doing the right thing.