A few days ago I wrote about my agreement with the tour company discouraging handouts of trinkets and treats to people living at the Millennium Village community in Mayange, Rwanda (or any community, really). As controversial as that policy has been, the very existence of the tour company has been of equal concern to many.
In short, it’s downright unheard of for an NGO (Non-governmental organization, the equivalent of “charity” here in the United States) to “charge people to visit its projects.” Criticism of the tour company, and the Millennium Villages Project, comes from Magatte Wade at the Huffington Post (among others). She describes the Millennium Villages, in part, as
“American professors [a reference to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University] spending tens of millions of dollars telling villagers how they should live their lives, so that American tourists can go and watch the new feature at the zoo in which the African natives are doing just as they are told by the American experts.”
Before visiting one village participating in the Millennium Villages Project in Mayange, Rwanda for myself, I shared the author’s outrage and cheered her on for taking shots at the media and celebrity darling Jeffrey Sachs. But looking back, my outrage feels academic, condescending, and not rooted in the reality of the place.
“We Never Get Anything Out of These Visits”
A few days before visiting Mayange, our group of international donors seeking an education went up to Gulu in northern Uganda to visit a woman named Milly Amau, founder of an organization called “Empowering Hands.” Milly is now an Ashoka fellow, and was named one of Glamour Magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 2007 (see their moving piece about Milly and child soldiers).
But before the attention she now receives, Milly was a young girl who was abducted by soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army, the murderous rebel group in northern Uganda that only seems to be rebelling against the very people they purport to free. Like many thousands of other children, she was forced into combat, and was also given to a man as his “wife” and forced to bear his children in captivity. Like many others, she also managed to escape the rebels and tried to return to her village. There she found distrust and discrimination for her and her children.
While still in captivity, Milly had risen to a place of some respect among the rebels and was looked to as a resource by the other women. I know this because 5 of the formerly abducted “child mothers” who now work as peer counselors with Empowering Hands told us their stories.
In truth, they told us only fragments of their stories because neither we nor they could bear for them to tell more. While one women gave the outlines of her abduction, escape and life after trying to return home, others in their group would sit stony-faced, or worse–would bury their head in their elbows as demons from that part of their lives came rushing back. Trauma experts tell me that retelling is re-living, and the pain of what they had been forced to do and to witness was tangible and overwhelming.
These women are peer counselors who reach out to other former abductees in the camps where all the Internally Displaced Persons were gathered (“IDP” is international aid talk for refugees in their own country, forced to leave their villages and seek safety somewhere else). We went from the Empowering Hands office to an IDP camp to visit with a gathering of formerly abducted child soldiers that is brought together regularly to discuss their unique problems and support each other in re-integrating into their communities and developing businesses to support themselves.
Members of the group shared some of their challenges: a rash of robberies leads neighbors to accuse the formerly abducted because they are believed to be criminals; a woman is accepted as a man’s wife but he tells her she must kill the child she bore while in captivity; many in the group have no claim to land they can farm because their families were killed, or their families do not accept them back and will not recognize their claim to the family land; the list goes on.
Hardest for our group to hear, though, were the words of the Chairman of the group. He said many visitors had come through this camp in the last few years. The former abductees would share their stories and talk about what they needed to make their lives better. They needed some way to generate income, perhaps with oxen and a plow so that they could provide services to the entire community, who might then be more accepting to them. But no matter how many people visited, he said, they never got anything in return. No visitors sent them one of the many pictures they had taken, much less anything they could use to improve their lives. So why didn’t people help them, he asked?
The Chairman’s words suddenly placed our group as one car in a long caravan of visitors–we weren’t the first and we certainly wouldn’t be the last. We had been focused on our own education but not thinking of the burden–physical and psychological–placed on those hosting us and teaching us.
In most cases, these local “teachers” are powerless to ask for anything to meet their own needs. They can’t say no to having us visit because we just might be the ones to contribute. And they can’t be cynical, angry or frustrated to our face because they might turn us off. And they can’t follow up with us very well because their IDP camp doesn’t have electricity, much less Internet access to reach the United States. We have all the power–to say we’ll come, to say we’ll leave, to say whether we’ll compensate them for their time and effort and for the emotional toll of sharing their stories again and again.
It took a lot of bravery for the Chairman to share his frustration, as his group must have worried that he might offend or scare us away. In light of his comments and the pervasive pattern of gawkery and poverty-tourism that they revealed, it seems only fair that a community like Mayange ask visitors to make sure they leave something of value in return for all the value they take away. I don’t condemn the villagers or the tour company in Mayange for charging visitors a fee and making sure they receive some thing for sharing their work and their hard-earned results. I applaud them for taking control of their time and taking care of themselves.
The next time I visit an NGO, I’ll be sure to ask them what I might bring that is of value to them, as a way of compensating them for the expenses associated with hosting me.
