Beggars

There are few things more striking that you’ll find when spending any time in Ethiopia than the sheer amount of people living rough on the streets. Back home we have more than any so-called ‘developed’ society should have, but in Ethiopia beggars are notable not only by their numbers but also by their variety. I have almost certainly seen female or elderly homeless people back in the UK, but I can’t remember where or when – at home they are nearly always men. I think and hope that the reason I don’t see elderly homeless people in the UK is because at a certain stage, social care takes over, and, for the time being, there are refuges for women.

People living on the streets here are male and female, from the cradle to the grave – often literally - there are homeless at every stage of life. Many, mostly boys, live their entire lives on the street. By adolescence many show signs of developing mental illness. I have seen no grown men living on the street here who aren’t severely mentally ill or drug dependent. Most are both.

Skeletally thin, these men seem all but lost. They refuse offers of food. When not chewing chat many wander the streets, their clothes hanging off in raged strips of assorted fabric, not faintly aware of being fully exposed.

A man with grotesquely swollen lips indiscriminately eating rubbish from the gutter, laughing. Another sitting stark naked for hours on end in a skip being picked through by dogs and goats. A skeleton wrapped in dark brown skin and rags lying in the gutter at the bus station as commuters jostle past one another, drifting through their morning routine. These things don’t shock me anymore but they’ll never leave me.

People

The label ‘beggars’ reflects in some measure how they are perceived and treated here in Ethiopia and in the UK. I was once admonished by a friend with words to the effect of “he’s just going to spend it on drink” for giving 50p to a man sitting wrapped in a sleeping bag next to an ATM in Belfast. We were just about to go into a club to spend the money on drink ourselves. The man was right there, well within earshot. I doubt my friend knew - in saying this, I doubt he cared.

We use words in this way when we, consciously or not, want to replace or qualify someone’s personhood – their humanity – into a special or different category. Something deviant, other, or entirely alien, and it’s always pejorative.  Loosely, you can do this by turning the adjective describing the person into the noun representing the human – encompassing the whole of their identity. Think:

A gay man           -              A gay.

Of course, like anything in language, like most things really, no rule holds for all cases. Think:

A Pakistani          -              A Paki*.

To call someone ‘a Pakistani’ is to frame them primarily in terms of their nationality, but it isn’t necessarily pejorative. My friend’s attitude wasn’t an aberration. It’s entirely normal and almost everybody does it. It’s an attitude that reflects this ‘othering’ of a marginalised population of people. You’ll never hear this construction of the identity of someone powerful or successful other than in a light-hearted way,  not even when they are being criticised. I can’t even think of a nickname with the slightest chance of sticking to rich people. There probably are some for powerful women.

My point is that in language and in action they are treated like something other or less than human. The logic would seem to be that ‘they are suffering, therefore they deserve to be marginalised’.

Beggars and choosers

Everybody chooses. It just happens that often the choice is between difficult to distinguish bad options. A homeless person might ‘choose’ this life, in that their choice might be between homelessness and, for example; physical or mental abuse, crime, or any of a long list of awful things 

that they find less preferable to homelessness.

Many of East Africa’s homeless people find themselves in this position because their lives have been ruined by clumsy forms of ‘development’. Enclosing common land and creating enormous arable farms benefits those who come to own the land, which is almost always a very small number of people who become incredibly wealthy. When those people who once lived there try to bring their animals onto land that was once free for them to use, cowherds are beaten, imprisoned, given ludicrous fines they couldn’t possibly pay. In desperation, people come to towns where they might find a job. They rarely can. Landing a job as a security guard in an expat compound is about the best many can hope to achieve. In Ethiopia this usually pays about £30 a month, but very few can land regular work. Most hang around car park areas to blag 20 birr (60p) for an hour’s work watching cars.

Maybe some people end up on the streets because their families rejected them for being drunk, addicted, violent. Maybe a lot of them do. Are you going to assess a human being on the basis of a set of media-filtered assumptions?

*I’ve had people say to me, with a completely straight face, that it’s ok to say ‘Paki’ because you can say an ‘Afghan’ or a ‘Tajik’.

Community action day.

One of my underlings is blogging the team's experiences, and it's well worth a look. No point in me re-writing this stuff after all.

Here it is.

Andy.

Growth, development and containment

Containment

In my last post, I described the disconnect between development and growth, and how that is reflected in the world's economic order between the developed, or 'growing' world, and the 'developing' world. 

Though I take a critical view, 'sustainable development' per se is not a bad thing, but the picture that emerges from this disconnect is that, often, development becomes a strategy of containment or mitigation. In practice, what we call 'development' in a charity context is often to mitigate the negative effects of economic development.

When tribes have been dispossessed of their truly sustainable lives, and pulled into developed urban chaos where poverty and wealth exist in ways that never did before, they need this form of ‘sustainable’ development. There is little reason why, having lived the same kind of life for countless centuries, they might need anything else.

Let me be clear that I am not trying to romanticise tribal life. These are hard people, living hard lives. I do not at all begrudge them access to facilities and institutions if they want them. My issue is with the practised belief that they must want these things, whether they realise it or not. 

Post tribal

I’ve seen streets of typical post-tribal African towns. Empty sachets of sugar cane spirits flake and crumble in the red dust. Old men, still in their traditional shuka cloaks sit beneath a tree drinking all day, receiving handouts from the local NGO. Meanwhile a group of well-intentioned young people build a water pipeline for them – a great way to fix a formerly itinerant community. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it(1).

Hard folks, hard lives.

The tribe in this example, the Hadzabe, are one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa. Since the end of traditional empire-based colonialism, when Africa coalesced (more or less) into nation states, the government of Tanzania has been trying to 'fix' these communities, with fairly minimal success. In 1961, a town was built for one of the communities. They moved in and, following their custom, moved on with the game. The government made several more fruitless attempts and gave up until 2007, when they tried an opposite approach, attempting to lease massive tracts of their traditional hunting grounds as a safari reserve for a company based in the UAE(2). After a huge international outcry, the Tanzanians reneged on the deal(3).

Education is an informative example when we look at the interaction of the modern with the traditional. Within Hadza hunter gatherer communities, many young people elect not to go to school, despite it being in some way available. Many young people in these communities are aware of school and what they can get from it, but do not see the ‘gain’ that we presume. Most development workers, myself included, have harnessed huge gains from education – usually up to post-graduate level. We are not even faintly comparing like with like. Exercises of power like formal education are normally viewed as benign at worst, but can play a part in erasing distinctive identities by forcing people to operate within a larger culture than their own.

                                       

To attempt to join a global modernised society would severely disempower members of this kind of community, according to their cultural views of power. The ability to track game, to survive for days on end in the wilderness, to navigate, to fletch arrows, to make and use a bow. This is their empowerment. The only empowerment that we can hope to provide is a strange, warped kind that operates within our metropolitan, modernised sphere of experience and this form of empowerment can only become relevant when this kind of world begins to encroach upon the social and physical environment of these tribes. That is fine in theory, except that this kind of progress works at a different rate than a human life. In the social spaces in which tribal communities live, the difference between the wealthiest and the poorest members is negligible. In a town, a fat man without the first idea of how to catch a Dikdik*, but who knows how to sell a car, might be immeasurably wealthier than the average Hadza*. It is no wonder that when faced with rapid social and physical alienation, that rates of alcoholism, drug-addiction and suicide in post-tribal communities are staggeringly higher than in metropolitan communities. 

(*a small, incredibly fast antelope. Slightly bigger than a hare.)

(*I mean immeasurably – they don’t use money for day-to-day activities)

Another thing to make clear, these folk aren't afraid of the wider world, they welcome strangers, sharing food and fire. The Hadzabe don't even mind if you break their cultural norms (within reason - I would often run around the countryside tops off. They thought it was strange, but didn't much care). They want to enact their lives in a manner of their choosing. Instead, global society seeks to put them into the prison we have built for ourselves.

As I had a lot of trouble last night starting a fire - with matches and charcoal - I remembered seeing a man starting a fire in less than a minute using two sticks, a handful of grass and a piece of cow dung.

Tbc.

Sources

1. My old blog

2. Briefing note on the threat to the Hadzabe people of the Yaida Valley, Karatu District, United Republic of Tanzania
3. Survival International - Hadza Tribe celebrates first land titles 

Growth or Development? (1)

For a long while, I’ve been cruising charity and development organisations’ websites, looking for jobs, ideas, and general awareness of issues in developing countries. Doing this, you’ll notice that they all talk about ‘sustainable development’. Development is itself a more slippery term than you’d like to think, adding ‘sustainable’ does little to make it much more specific. What I find more interesting, though, is the fact that we only really talk about sustainable development as something other countries do.

In the west, we talk about ‘growth’, our euphemism for development. When you look more closely at these two superficially synonymous terms, you start to see a disconnect in parallel with the disconnect between our two worlds.

We adopt a different term because our political masters don’t want to suggest - by using the term ‘development’ for their own nations - that they are in any way underdeveloped – we are, after all, the developed world. 

We just grow.

I’ve never heard anything about ‘sustainable growth’. Of course not – no one in government will dare suggest that growth is anything other than ‘sustainable’ because growth is the holy grail of capitalist economics. During the financial crisis, growth became one of the biggest metrics by which we judged a politician’s success or failure. To introduce this small qualification is to question the basis of the West’s economic trajectory over the past century. 

But poor countries need ‘sustainable development’. We qualify the nature that their development must adopt. The term has different facets of meaning, encompassing use of natural resources and the preservation of the environment, and the necessary sense that the development is not being imposed, but simply helped along – ‘sense of ownership’ being a stereotypical key phrase.  All of these facets come together into a system that circumscribes certain kinds of development and promotes others at the discretion of powerful NGOs, IGOs and donor governments.

To do ‘sustainable development’ in the first-world capitalist system is a contradiction in terms – our development is not sustainable. In the long term, it only consumes. We create things certainly, wealth, huge buildings, marvellous technologies – but only through consumption of primary resources. To be sure, we can recycle, when we can be bothered, but there’s no recycling oil. The linchpin of nearly all the development the western world has undergone in the last hundred years.

Many of our unsustainable activities are outsourced from the Growing World to the Developing World. The domestic and industrial waste we can’t easily deal with – we export it. Think PCBs, for example. The food we can’t manage to grow ourselves – we just buy up land in Africa, pushing up prices and depriving those whose land this has been for thousands of years, whilst lining the pockets of crony regimes, landowners and the military. In short, we harness powerful people in these countries for our own ends, they enable this outsourcing and become fantastically rich.

With all this in mind, it isn’t surprising that most of those working in the NGO world are fairly left-wing. But is this a natural response of a system, or the cop-opting of idealistic lefties by the dark forces of capitalism?