by Nina Munk
“What can we do?” asked Ahmed, rhetorically. “We cannot enforce. We try to explain. We want to empower. But no one can come and change them if they do not want to change themselves.”
Chapter 15
Insha’Allah
Is poverty the result of cultural values? Religion? Jeffrey Sachs has no patience with that sort of thinking—in his view, it’s nothing more than a form of cultural imperialism. “Virtually every society that was once poor has been castigated for being lazy and unworthy until its citizens became rich, at which point their new wealth was ‘explained’ by their industriousness,” he wrote in The End of Poverty. “What look like immutable social values turn out to be highly malleable to economic circumstances and opportunities.”
According to Sachs, as soon as people are lifted out of poverty, they move beyond superstition and outdated rites. To a large extent, the success of the Millennium Villages Project depended on Sachs’s idea of progress. As Ahmed understood it, mounting the development ladder was like boiling a frog: you proceeded gradually, one step, one rung at a time. “If you put a frog in boiling water, he will jump out,” said Ahmed, “but if you put the frog in cold water and slowly warm it up, you may be able to get the frog to the point where you can eat it.”
Ahmed believed in Sachs’s idea of progress. Sometimes, however, he felt he was losing his bearings. The more he tried to effect change in Dertu, the more often he was assured that the future was in God’s hands. The Arabic phrase Insha’Allah, “God willing,” is used all the time in Dertu, in almost every situation.
Ever since the Millennium Villages Project arrived in Dertu, the village dispensary had been stocked with free contraceptives—birth control pills, condoms, injectables, you name it. And yet no more than five or six women or men in the village used birth control of any kind. Meanwhile, female genital cutting continued to be an almost universal practice.
Few people in Dertu will speak openly about genital cutting; they know it’s illegal in Kenya, just as they know that “Europeans” consider it barbaric. For the record, Sheikh Abdirahman Guliya, Dertu’s imam, discourages complete infibulations—the most extreme form of genital cutting—in favor of a simple ceremonial “nick.” At least, that’s what he told me. In all events, infibulation is a normal and accepted practice in Dertu.
When a girl is six or seven years old, her clitoris and labia are sliced off with a knife or razor blade, and the surrounding area is stitched tight with sewing thread or string from sisal sacks. All this is done without anesthetic. After the operation the girl’s legs are bound together with cords of camel leather, and she is kept in isolation for seven days while the wound heals.
Soon after she arrived in Dertu, Fatuma Shide, the Millennium project’s health coordinator, was present at a ritual circumcision in the village. Yes, as a child her genitals had been cut, but she had retained no memory of the procedure. Seeing it years later, at first hand, made her ill.
“The girl was seven years old,” Fatuma reported. “Four old ladies were holding her down by the legs and arms, like a goat being taken for slaughter. The little girl was screaming and crying and trying to bite the old ladies. I saw her flesh being cut with a razor blade, the clitoris, and inside they were cutting and cutting. The blood was coming out between her legs. The blood was coming out everywhere. I had to look away, I was crying, and the old ladies they saw me crying, and they said, ‘You are a coward.’ I am not able to erase the scene out of my head. I still feel the pain.”
In Dertu, as in North Eastern Province generally, an uncircumcised girl brings shame upon her family. She’ll never find a husband, for one thing, since the purpose of genital mutilation is to guarantee and demonstrate a girl’s virginity. I knew all this, and yet I hadn’t fully considered what it really meant until, one day, I was invited to a wedding in Dertu.
As is customary, the celebration would last all day and all night. When I arrived in the early afternoon, a large crowd was gathered in the homestead, outside the hut where the bride and groom would spend their wedding night. Chanting loudly and stomping their feet, a dozen men danced around in a tight circle, banging their wooden staffs on the dry ground. A woman was beating an overturned plastic bucket with two sticks. I could hear the wailing of conch shell trumpets. Soon the dancers were surrounded by onlookers, clapping and singing. Old women shrieked and ululated.
Allahumma salli ala Muhammadin wa ala aali Muhammadin—Oh Allah, shower blessings upon Muhammad and upon the family of Muhammad. Kamaa sallaita ala Ibraheema wa ala aali Ibraheem innaka hameedun majeed—Just as you showered your blessings on the family of Abraham. You are the Praiseworthy, the Glorious.
The dancing ended at dusk, and the wedding feast began. A camel bull had been slaughtered for the occasion. Someone brought us a tin bowl with shredded pieces of camel meat in ghee, and deep-fried squares of kac kac. To wash down the camel meat, I was offered a ladle of warm, smoked camel’s milk.
Just after nightfall the bride arrived. She was veiled almost completely, her eyes darkened with kohl, and her hands and fingernails were stained orange with henna. Escorted by a dozen ululating women holding up a silk canopy, she was led into the matrimonial hut. Inside was a small wooden bed. A large carpet had been placed over the sand. Soon she was joined by her husband and by the two women who would serve as “witnesses.” Officially, the ancient ritual would go on for three days.
I tracked down the one woman at the wedding who I knew spoke good English, a Kenyan nurse named Irene: “Why do they need witnesses?”
“To see that the girl is pure,” she answered.
“You mean, they’ll examine her to see that she’s a virgin.”
“They will use the penis,” said Irene, pronouncing the word very slowly, pee-niis, in case it wasn’t understood. “Without a stick, how can you know how deep the river is? Without a stick, how do you know the vessel can receive?” The entrance to the bride’s vessel had been sewn up years ago. Now the groom had to prove his worth, and his bride’s worth, by breaking the seal and plumbing the depth of the river.
Until he managed to penetrate the bride fully, the couple would remain in the hut. As soon as it became clear that the bride’s vessel could receive, the two witnesses emerged from the hut holding up their evidence, a bloodstained sheet. At which point the festivities resumed.
Would this rite of passage become a thing of the past, once Dertu was lifted out of poverty? Ahmed wasn’t sure. The people of Dertu, as far as he could tell, were in no hurry to embrace Western ideas of modernity. “Mzungu come and mzungu go,” Madame Sofia once remarked: life went on, and the people of Dertu would do what they had always done, Insha’Allah. Was it Ahmed’s job to convince then to abandon their way of life? To what end? Apart from encouraging a dependence on aid, what had the mzungu ever done for the people of North Eastern Province?
Part Six
I said to him, “Jeff, to be honest, we are not ready for input credits. We need to keep subsidizing. These are peasants, living hand to mouth, and you are telling me to extend to them a one-million-dollar line of credit that must be paid back? That’s a very tall order indeed!”
—David Siriri
Chapter 16
I Am Thinking We Are Not Ready for This
In June 2008 the Millennium Villages Project held its annual five-day conference in Bamako, the capital of Mali. More than 150 people—all the senior staff from New York, four or five staff members from every Millennium village, and a number of the project’s major benefactors—were in attendance. A month or so before the meeting, a memo had been sent to all participants announcing that business development would be the central theme of the meeting. “By the end of the conference,” the memo stated, “it is expected that we will have completed and approved strategic plans for sustainability of private sector enterprises that will include details on priority commercial agriculture initiatives, microfinance initiatives, and market linkages.”
At the Azalai Hotel Salam, on the l
eft bank of the Niger River, Jeffrey Sachs opened the first plenary session of the conference with a hard-nosed talk about money. Despite his best efforts, the “big push” in foreign aid hadn’t come to fruition. And he still hadn’t managed to convince international donors to underwrite agricultural inputs in Africa. According to several participants, he was blunt in his assessment: the time had come—more quickly than expected—for the Millennium Villages Project to make the transition from subsistence agriculture (or sub-subsistence, as the case might be) to commercial agriculture. The project could not afford to continue giving grants.
By nearly every measure, the Millennium Villages Project was losing money on agriculture. It didn’t help that the cost of inputs had soared. In less than eighteen months, the price of diammonium phosphate (DAP) fertilizer on the world market had increased almost fivefold, from $250 to nearly $1,200 per metric ton by that summer of 2008. At these prices, there was no way to justify the expense of fertilizer—not if the objective was self-sufficiency.
To make the point clear for his audience, Sachs displayed on an overhead slide a chart of each village’s “value-cost ratios,” which are commonly used to calculate the economic return of fertilizer. In most of the villages, the ratio was far below the minimum of 3 to 4 needed to justify the cost of fertilizer. In Ruhiira, the ratio on beans was a dismal 1.25; on maize, 1.26; on sorghum, 0.64. “If the value-cost ratio isn’t good, it can’t work—period,” he said.
The villages would not be lifted out of poverty on rain-fed agriculture alone; that was a given. Now, however, it had become clear that even with the help of fertilizer, yields were not high enough to make a difference. To “move up the value chain,” farmers in the villages needed to increase productivity by double or even triple cropping; they needed high-value crops; above all, they needed irrigation. “What we need,” Sachs said, “is to think big.”
One member of the audience raised his hand. “Excuse me, Professor,” he began hesitantly. “I am thinking that we are not ready for this. The biggest problem we are having is subsistence farmers who are trying to get enough food to feed themselves. So I am asking, why are we thinking big now?”
It was then that Sachs began to yell. “We don’t want you to think big or small,” he bellowed. “What we want you to think is RICH! What we want is to maximize opportunities!”
“We need business plans from all of you,” Rustom Masalawala chimed in. “It’s all about execution and the speed of execution. ‘Make it and they will come’ sounds good, but it doesn’t work like that in the real world.”
It’s never easy to disagree with Jeffrey Sachs. You might trigger an argument. You might ruffle his feathers. In all likelihood, he’ll make you feel small. He might call you “misguided” or “ill-informed” or “ignorant.” At Millennium project meetings, where everyone in the room depended on Sachs for his or her paycheck, being a dissenter took courage. And yet in Bamako that summer of 2008, the air was thick with dissension. People in the audience—sincere and earnest employees of a nonprofit organization devoted to ending extreme poverty—were being ordered to transform themselves from social workers into entrepreneurs. Yes, they admired Sachs, and despite occasional doubts, they believed in his mission; however, they disliked and mistrusted Masalawala. Who was he to lecture them about the “real world”?
Another hand in the audience shot up. “In my opinion, we are moving too quickly,” someone said. It was Dr. Rebbie Harawa, head of the Millennium village in Malawi. Smart and outspoken, with a Ph.D. in soil science from Cornell University, she is highly respected in her field. In Bamako, she decided to speak her mind, whatever the consequences. The farmers in her village had managed to double or triple yields in the past two growing seasons, and now she was being told that wasn’t good enough. “I think what’s important is that we are helping people who are hungry,” she said. “That is our job.”
Sachs insisted that he was not abandoning small-hold farmers, according to Harawa. But what options did he have? At current prices, there was no way the project could keep subsidizing farmers. At the same time, farmers could only afford inputs on their own if they earned a generous profit on their crops. That was precisely why Sachs and Masalawala were pushing for irrigation, high-yield crops, “Millennium Farms” branded products, business proposals, and venture capital. If all went well, Sachs told the audience, there would one day in every village be sizable commercial agriculture enterprises—enterprises in which every villager would own shares. “That’s where we are heading,” he said enthusiastically. “We are going to be bold!”
In the villages, most people were still trying to rise above the level of subsistence farming. Here and there a lucky few, underwritten by the Millennium project, were managing to diversify their crops, earning some desperately needed cash by selling onions, tomatoes, chili peppers, and cabbage to their neighbors. A handful of people in the villages could be described as small-scale entrepreneurs. And yet here, in a shabby conference room at the Azalai Hotel Salam, Sachs and Masalawala were talking about a speedy transition to commercial agricultural enterprises as though the only barrier to success was a lack of courage and determination.
“I don’t think there’s anyone who didn’t know we would have to make this transition,” interrupted Pete Ondeng, another senior member of the Millennium project’s staff in Africa. “It’s that the transition is coming faster than we expected. The work of nonprofit organizations is radically different than the work of commercial organizations.”
“Either you step up to the plate, or you don’t,” said Masalawala dispassionately.
Chapter 17
A Very Tall Order
Going into the planting season of late 2008, David Siriri had a sense of foreboding. It weighed heavily on him, the pressure to generate income in Ruhiira. He did his best to find links to markets and to locate buyers for surplus crops. He made a few stabs at writing business plans. He nourished one cottage industry after another and encouraged almost any enterprising idea that was presented to him.
Thanks to the Millennium project, a building boom of sorts was under way in Ruhiira—the granary, a new school, repairs to the health clinic. Thus Siriri designed a training program to teach young people to make sun-dried adobe bricks: making bricks was a practical way to put to work the now-unemployed banana boys. As well, inspired by a Colorado-based nonprofit called BeadforLife (“Eradicating Poverty One Bead at a Time”), he established a bead-making enterprise: diligently, a dozen women spent their days fashioning beads from dried banana leaves and glue.
Invariably, visitors to Ruhiira—mzungu, mainly—were invited to meet the bead makers and to admire their handiwork. Everywhere you looked there were banana beads: baskets of banana beads, strands of banana beads, banana bead bracelets, banana bead anklets, banana bead necklaces, banana bead earrings.… Measured by output, the enterprise was a great success. As a means of eradicating poverty, however, it was less successful. Not even Siriri could ignore the fact that the market for banana-bead jewelry was limited.
Now that Siriri was expected to think like an entrepreneur, he was having second thoughts about his suitability for the job he’d accepted. Honestly, he asked himself, what did he really know about starting a business? He was a soil scientist—a man with a Ph.D. in agroforestry—and it pleased him that, in terms of crop yields and diversity, he was making progress on agriculture in Ruhiira. Augmenting household incomes was another matter altogether. “Frustrating,” Siriri described it to me.
The proposed deal with the World Food Program—a sure thing, Siriri had been led to believe—was falling apart. For months there’d been one delay after another. Outside consultants, trained to judge whether Ruhiira’s beans conformed to the WFP’s rigorous standards and specifications, made round after round of inspections. Not once but three times the food inspectors demanded that Ruhiira’s beans be fumigated against weevils, a process that, all in all, cost the farmers 3 million Ugandan shillings. More quality control w
as required; after all, there were moldy beans, sprouted beans, discolored beans, shriveled beans, and beans damaged by insects, not to mention extraneous matter among the beans (dead weevils, rodent excreta, twigs). All such imperfections had to be identified and the flawed beans discarded. Next, the inspectors insisted that Ruhiira’s beans be transported in special bags marked with the World Food Program logo, a requirement that cost the farmers even more money and effort. And still the farmers had not been paid for the beans.
Someone in the know advised Siriri, sotto voce, that he should simply bribe the inspectors and be done with it. Siriri shrugged off the temptation. In the real world, as every Ugandan knows, bribing officials is the way things get done, but there was no point trying to explain that fact of life to his bosses in New York.
Meanwhile, with each passing month, the market price of beans was climbing higher and higher, to the point that the deal brokered with the World Food Program was no longer advantageous. The farmers started to rebel. Calmly, Siriri tried explaining to the people of Ruhiira that a contract is a contract; it’s nonnegotiable no matter what happens. It wasn’t his fault that the WFP was an incompetent, lumbering, myopic bureaucracy.
Ruhiira’s farmers were not a bit interested in the nuances of contract law and demanded to be released from any obligation to the World Food Program. When Siriri stood his ground—“My hands are tied,” he told them—a mob of farmers descended on the Millennium project’s office, smashed a window, threatened Siriri’s staff, and impounded one of the project’s trucks.
Angry farmers were only one of Siriri’s many problems. Another planting season was about to begin, and he had nowhere near enough money to buy the fertilizer and seeds he’d promised to supply. Worse, he was supposed to be rolling back subsidies on fertilizer and seeds. “We’re asking our farmers to pay fifty percent of the inputs we give them,” he said. “But one bag of DAP is now one hundred dollars, and there is no way a farmer is going to contribute fifty percent of that.”