Week 3
John is with us for the
first three weeks, taking charge and translating English to French, Swahili, Kinande,
and vice versa[1].
He is overwhelmingly nice to
me, making me feel guilty for any sign of impatience or frustration. I met his
wife an oldest daughter 5 years ago in Washington
DC
Mama Raziki is also gracious
and accommodating, having given me one of her kids bedrooms to myself and
making her eldest bring me half-full buckets of boiling water for the first few
mornings, until Denise shows me where in the kitchen its heated[2].
But then, the whole town is
graciously accommodating, making me a guest of honor at a 1,200 person wedding
and presenting the delegation “from America Tanzania ,
Uganda , and China
The first few days at the
office are revealing. I’ve worked on the periodic reports for almost three
years without having closely examined the accounts, ever since I stopped having
time to. I don’t understand the transition the office has made to a financial
cooperative. And I don’t approve of how the credit commission works. But it is
early days.
Week 4
We meet with wholesalers,
retailers, go-buy-chop sellers, industry owners, service providers, and
academics[4]. We
start planning a permaculture training, a handicrafts exporting business, and
visit the beneficiaries of our first institutional funder. I’m told that Nande
are known to be businesspeople. They hate politics and would rather work in
business. Except that some of them have realized that politics affects
business, so they have recently started getting into politics.
Week 5
I realize there is no one in
Butembo with John’s level of English, so we organize a hurried training in
public information with the staff. I continue to try to find and meet, in
total, with 4 potential interpreters. The
one I choose starts with me on the first day of John’s last week. On Thursday,
John’s last day before he leaves, John is pulled to his in-laws for a series of
visits that takes him all day to return from. The PMI office is next door to a
clinic called “Fight Against Mental Illness” with crowds of men in odd choices
of clothing constantly lounging outside, ready to kung-fu fight with the white
girl and other unintelligible requests.
[1]
According to the family I’m staying with, 99.9% of the people residing in and
around Butembo are Kinande. This will be an important distinction for the
research I proposed to do with my PhD, which intended to look at ethnic
tensions as a driver of conflict, both economic and political. It calls for
correction, then, and probably revisiting and redesigning the original research
proposal to either drop the inter-ethnic aspect or increase the geographic scope
of the research.
[2] The
family uses a combination of heating sources in the two rooms of their outside
kitchen, including compressed gas cylinders in one room of the kitchen, and a
variety of charcoal brassieres in the other room. It’s a luxury at all to have
a bath with heated water every morning, but in a mountainous region, with
temperatures ranging from 17-22, easy to get used to.
[3] This is
in line with Gerard Pruniers observations on Rwandans adopting “synthetic
“tribes of exile,”, that is, the countries where they had spent their years
away…there were “Zairians,” “Burundians”, “Tanzanians,” and “Ugandans”…If these
distinctions did not matter too much in daily life, they mattered a lot as soon
as politics, business, or the military was involved”(4:1). I also observe that
it highlights the family’s international ties and influence, as does the
presentation of a member of parliament based in Kinshasa
[4] Some of
PMI’s clients are teachers who use us for income smoothing purposes. We also
work with a couple of schools to do automatic salary payments, which helps
schoolteachers save their earnings.
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