Knowing that I was soon to visit a Millennium Village in person, I’ve been reading everything I came across in the media about this controversial project. A few weeks ago, the Huffington Post published a column by Magatte Wade that opened with outrage at the Millennium Villages Project. Wade quoted the brochure of the official tour company which asked visitors not to hand out pens, candy, gum, water bottles or other “treats” to the villagers. She argued that the Millennium Village tour amounted to treating the villagers as zoo animals that outsiders paid to gawk at. I was appalled and righteously angry but then my trip co-leader, J’Lein Liese of the Foundation for Global Leadership, pointed out a counter-argument written by the head of the Millennium Village project in Mayange, the very one that was criticized and the one that we were scheduled to visit.
According to Donald Ndahiro and our tour guide Cecille, the tour company was far from exploiting the villagers—it was actually set up by and for the villagers themselves as part of a tourism cooperative among the villagers. In short, the various cooperatives—the women’s basket weaving group, the farmers, the beekeepers, the school—banded together to make sure that their community received something in return for all their efforts to show visitors the work they are doing. They formed a tour company that charges a fee and then spreads the wealth evenly between the various cooperatives, rotating “hosting” responsibilities among different “cells.”
J’Lein explained that she also strongly discouraged our trip participants from handing things out to children because it taught them to follow tourists with their hands out, asking for, well, handouts. J’Lein explained her rationale to the group this way:
“ I have witnessed children attacked by their peers for what a well-intentioned tourist gave them – often leaving them with torn clothes, bloody and in tears…
“I think it is our ‘human nature’ to want to give and while in other people’s country we often feel so touched by what we are seeing and experiencing that we feel we need to give something in return. Sometimes is it so that we will feel the experience is reciprocal, or so we will be remembered or sometimes simply so we can feel ‘liked.’ Or, often it is just seeing the poverty that makes us want to give a little something to a child who appears to have nothing….
“Among many unintended consequences for wanting to give a small gift to a child, is that it prevents authentic relationship building from taking place and pretty soon the kids see foreigners and start begging or asking for stuff and we feel badgered and harassed – leaving a bad impression on both sides.
“Whereas, when we stop and actually engage the child in a conversation, both sides get to take away something from the human connection and interaction. Stereotypes are often broken and memories are made… Trust me in Rwanda, the children will LOVE to try and talk with you as English has only been introduced post-genocide and they like to practice!”
In both Uganda and Rwanda, there were always plenty of children running alongside our vehicle or stopping to watch as we passed, shouting “Mzungu!!” which technically means “wanderer” but actually refers to any foreigner. They’d wave at us, and we’d wave back, everyone inside and outside the vehicle smiling and laughing as we acknowledged each other.
Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, has a philosophy that says “we’ll do it ourselves. We don’t need government aid dollars. What we need is investment.” Kagame plans to wean the country off of aid by 2020 or 2025. Foreigners are encouraged to come to the country as investors and business partners, not as charity workers. In this spirit, I like the idea of the children seeing me as a visitor enjoying their country and potential source of sales and revenue, rather than a source of charity.
When educated about the reasons behind the Millennium Village tour group policy, I found it to be the stronger position. Our group had such fantastic interactions with both children and adults in every place we visited—the orphanages in Kampala, the AIDChild compound near the Equator, the Empowering Hands project in Gulu and, yes, the Millennium Village in Mayange. Only twice in our travels–once in Uganda and once in Rwanda, did children approach us with their hands held out.
After the conversations we’ve had and the ideas we’ve shared with people we met in these countries, it now seems to me that handing out pens and candy is actually the behavior that treats people like zoo animals.
Tags: begging, international aid, Magatte Wade, Millennium Villages, Rwanda
August 1, 2009 at 11:36 am |
[...] about Huffington Post as of August 1, 2009 Millennium Villages Project, Part I – thephilanthropicfamily.com 08/01/2009 Knowing that I was soon to visit a Millennium Village in [...]