Too Many Airports

One month ago…

Well, I’m at Heathrow airport. I’ve left Nigeria; I’m out of Africa. It’s been a hard couple of days, with strong overtones of weirdness and hints of relief. I’m pretty overwhelmed right now, actually. Everyone told me about culture shock upon returning — I don’t know if this is culture shock, I probably wouldn’t call it that. When I first came to Nigeria, I was completely baffled and alienated by the culture. Returning home, I’m entering a culture that I’m quite familiar with. I’m not entirely out of practice, having spent many a lonely Nigerian night engaging with Western institutions in my imagination. The images in mind’s eye during these sessions didn’t seem particularly strange. Really, I’ve got two decades in Canada to my six months in Nigeria, so this should be no surprise. I’m not exactly a child raised by hyenas coming to the city for the first time. I may have lived in Africa for half a year, but I did with a laptop, iPod, and a fairly extensive wardrobe.

So yeah, I’m not feeling alienated exactly (at least, none moreso than I did before I left!) But I keep flashing back to scenes in Kagoro or Kafanchan, scenes that are massively incongruous to my current environment. I’m having trouble reconciling these two worlds, trouble believes that they can possibly exist in the same universe. I feel like an inter-dimensional traveler who has seen things so absurd that the people around him think he’s mad. I’ve ridden cloud dragons through a marmalade wormhole, and I’ve bought a venti dolce latte at Starbucks, but never the twain shall meet.

Mind you, I don’t mean to exoticize Nigeria. Canada and Nigeria are equally insane and complete bullocks, each in their own utterly unique way. Canadians take SSRIs and threaten humanity with overconsumption; Nigerians don’t believe in AIDS and drive death-machines at a zillion miles an hour. On the other hand, most of us are basically decent people, trying to be comfortable without screwing things up too significantly for everyone else. But the devil’s in the details, and the differences in this demon are quite… drastic.

More later — the plane is leaving.

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On the Road!

Super special double post! Hot hot hot!

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WhyCT for D

You know, I don’t think you can discuss this kind of work without somebody wondering what the point of it all is. I’m talking about my own work, the whole philosophy behind me being here. Somebody is asking a question, and that question is: What can possibly develop from ICT development in developing countries?

It’s a good question. I didn’t really have a clear answer when I came here. Honestly, part of the reason I came here was to probe the issue. Technology is great, yes — utterly fabulous, let’s get that straight. But does that fabulousness hold within the context of rural Nigeria? Does it translate into Hausa? A lot of these people are dying from diseases borne through their food, water, and each other. Most of them rely on subsistence farming to make it through life. Whither information technology in this sort of climate?

There are some abstract notions that have been bandied about, which purport something or other about education and connection, but what the hell does all that mean? Information and communication are usually good things, yes. Certainly it is nice for Canadian kids to speak to Nigerian kids over MSN. But how does this transmute into actual, you know, development? What is the action plan here?

I think I’ve got a few decent answers. At least for Nigeria — I can’t speak too much as to other parts of the world, but I’d imagine a lot of this is relatively universal. From what I can tell, the old “people who need water and medicine don’t need technology” line of thinking stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of a developing country’s realities and problems.

This is not an exhaustive list of answers. This is merely what’s occurred to me. I have about 20 other half-formed ideas. I’d be interested in hearing what has occurred to my fellow NetCorpers.

• ICTs facilitate economic development. Development work is, I believe, popularly conceived of in terms of house-building, sanitation, inoculation, that sort of thing. These are important and useful activities because they satisfy immediate and undeniable needs of local populations. However, sustainability is a key concept here. The goal of development work is not merely to alleviate woes in the short term, but to build an environment where these woes are eliminated entirely. Band-aids are nice, but they fall off.

  What is the fundamental problem, then? In Nigeria, it’s largely economic. There’s a serious lack of industry in Nigeria — maybe I’ll discuss it more later, because it’s a huge issue, and there’s whole lot of other issues at the root of it. But right now the important thing is the subsequent impact on the availability of gainful employment, which is to say, there is none. Poverty in Nigeria doesn’t arise from a lack of money; there’s scads of money. The problem is that it doesn’t filter down to the majority of the population, because there’s no infrastructure for it. To be fair, a system of proper government spending would help considerably, but handouts cannot be the only solution. Nigeria is a capitalist nations, and will be the foreseeable future, so it’s got to implement proper capitalist trappings if anyone is going to get anywhere.

  Now you might think: well, everyone’s just providing for themselves through subsistence farming, and everyone’s eating, and isn’t that good enough? Subsistence farming is nice, but it doesn’t work in a vacuum, because you still need to pay for housing, medicine, etc. Even if you expand to cash crops, you’re still trapped in a country of 99 million other farmers that are selling the same thing as you. Basic trades simply don’t generate enough resources to accommodate a “developed” lifestyle (with some exceptions.) You need real industry with real jobs.

  It’s basically undeniable that ICTs facilitate industrial development. Even if you don’t believe that ICTs, when properly used, are powerful enhancers of productivity (and if you don’t, read a book goddammit), you can’t deny that the realities of surviving in a global economy demand participation in the infotechnowebosphere. So part of what I’m doing here is helping industry to grow.

• ICTs provide opportunities to the middle class. People tend to conceptualize African countries as massive wastelands filled with throngs of skinny, screaming, starving children. (Also there are elephants and giraffes.) This is an inaccurate picture. As it turns out, there are plenty of highly literate, intelligent young adults, who are not starving, but aren’t going anywhere either. They live in mudhuts with chickens like everyone else, and they suffer from (more or less) the same diseases. Their futures are bleak, because there are no real opportunities for them (see above.) To coin a phrase, all they need is a chance.

  To call these people the middle-class is perhaps misleading but basically accurate. There are plenty of people in abject poverty, and for these people, ICTs are admittedly not directly applicable. But there are even more people who live in the same sort of basic conditions, but have enough capital for, say, school. The problem is that a diploma is worth even less than it is in Canada.

  Like it or not, the bigwigs are into technology these days, and technical-ability equals employ-ability. So being able to learn about computers is potentially a huge deal for these people.

  Furthermore, the Internet in particular offers a tremendous opportunity for personal development. This is a twofold opportunity: on one hand, there’s the potential for self-education. On the other hand, there’s the potential for exploring avenues in an international context. I have known many people at Fantsuam who have researched scholarships and such for attending school abroad. So part of what I’m doing here is helping these people to explore their own opportunities.

• ICTs are what’s wanted. This one is really simple. People here are interested in ICTs. They want access to them, and they want to know more. They want to be involved in what appears to be a Really Big Thing.

  Now it’s easy to write this one off, but be careful. Us Northerners have a tendency to be rather paternalistic in our dealings with the South. There is definitely a “we know best” attitude — just ask anyone in a volunteer-sending organization, it’s something they have to constantly struggle with. Admittedly, it’s hard to say whether this attitude actually has any merit or not. To be sure, conditions in the North are notably better than they are in the South, so apparently we’re doing something right. On the other hand, most of us really don’t know squat about the reality on the ground here (see above.) So if people in rural Nigeria are saying “we want to use computers,” perhaps we shouldn’t be second-guessing them; perhaps we should be helping them to fulfill on that desire. So part of what I’m doing here is just that.

• ICTs build capacity at NGOs. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but I believe most people sort of miss this in picturing the way development works — it is accomplished largely through the work of NGOs (not by lone volunteers building houses, or by financial aid being funneled into corrupt governments.) So contributing to an NGO is contributing to development. This is one thing that VSO really gets right; their entire model is built on partnerships with local NGOs. VSO Program Offices set high-level goals for development in a country, but the NGOs are the ones that actually implement those goals, and it is the responsibility of people like myself to help them. Very often this means interacting exclusively with a host NGO, as in my case. My work is directed at improving Fantsuam’s capacity, and my interactions with the “locals” are strictly social.

  And it’s clear that ICTs are helpful to an organization like Fantsuam. A simple but indisputable example: Fantsuam runs a microfinance institution with about 2000 clients. At this level, paper record-keeping is unfeasible, so they upgraded to Excel several years ago. Now, as they continue to grow, their spreadsheets are becoming increasingly unwieldy, and they require a more specialized solution. So part of what I’m doing here is giving them the solution that they need.

• ICTs help NGOs find funding. Another incredibly straightforward one. E-mail, websites, etc. help NGOs connect with international organizations that can fund their operations. So being able to get connected, and being able to build a respectable web presence is crucial to a place like Fantsuam. So part of what I’m doing is teaching them how to do that.

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Boy, these days!

Lost Kids

Originally uploaded by Fono.

The morning starts with a lot of loud sounds at around 5:30. The area is saturated with roosters, which are very effective alarms, and with mosques that have attached loudspeakers to their roofs. I get up around an hour later and I heat a pot of water using my kerosene stove. Bathing is accomplished by way of a bucket, a bowl, and a hole in the ground. Generally there’s enough time for a couple of slices of bread and coffee before the driver arrives to take me to work. A driver is necessary because work is in the neighbouring village, about 20km away.

So I get in at about 8am, which is when the workday technically starts. In theory. In reality, there’s a lot of socializing as everyone filters in over the next half hour. There’s about 40 staff in a compound which is not terribly large, so things get very friendly around here. Typically, first thing in the morning there’s a meeting – about the wireless ISP project, or schools – which is somewhat hampered by the fact that everyone is late to it.

Figuring out what to do with my day is always an incredibly interesting task. There’s about a million things I could do – I could work on preparing one of several IT trainings, I could work on the school marketing plan, or the microfinance MIS, or the wireless ISP marketing material. It’s difficult to prioritize because everything is sufficiently challenging that I get exhausted working on any one thing at a time. So I sort of grapple with indecision until lunch. In times gone by, a lunch lady would come to the front of the compound, and I’d buy rice, beans or pounded yam (50 naira), plus a mineral (30 naira), and I’d sit around and eat in the shade with my colleagues. These days, there’s no lunch lady, and I generally wander down the street for fried sweet potatoes or boiled eggs or something to that effect.

After work, I’ll usually spend a little bit of time hanging out with my friends at work, and we’ll go to a bar for a while. Beer is amazingly cheap in Nigeria, and the alcohol content is unregulated, and when you combine those you spell “fun.” Also the beer is occasionally somewhat cold. Other times, I hit the market to buy ingredients for dinner. I live almost entirely on various combinations of tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, rice, beans, cabbage, potatoes, bread, and instant noodles. Once in a while I’ll get some overwhelmingly luxurious good like a pineapple. When I get a pineapple it’s like the best day of the week. There are one or two stores where you can buy imported goods like chocolate chip cookies, but for some reasons, all those sorts of things are basically awful here.

Then I go down the road – or I’ll take a (motor)bike, which is a horrifyingly bad idea, but one gets desensitized to the sensation of imminent death after a while – to where the cars wait to take people to the town where my house is. Public transit is certainly of the highlights of rural Nigeria. The cars are heaps of rubble, held together with strings and wires, packed with a number of passengers which I’m relatively sure exceeds the manufacturer’s intended capacity. Sometimes you’ll sit in someone’s lap, or they’ll sit in yours. It is essentially awesome.

When I get out of the car, I walk through a bit of a bush, across train tracks, and onto the dirt road to my house. I trade short greetings with the people I walk by, of which there are plenty, and more elongated greetings with the people I know, of which there are a few. About halfway down the road the neighbourhood children spot me and they descend upon me like a thunderstorm. The children travel in packs here, like wolves. They clasp onto my hands and feet with razor-like talons, threatening to drag me down, down, down. Their smiling, laughing faces hide their murderous intent. Luckily they are very small and they lose interest after a few minutes.

Children aside, all the neighbours are incredibly nice. They offer me palm wine and they attempt to teach me Hausa. I’ve only encountered hostility once, but I’m pretty sure the guy was drunk. And even when people are drunk here, they’re usually even more nice than usual, so I’m pretty sure the guy was also just a jerk. All the niceness can get a bit tiring after a while, though. When you’re in a good mood, it’s great to walk outside and find yourself in what is essentially a never-ending, town-wide party. But when you’re in a bad mood, going around the corner to buy some eggs is like walking a gauntlet.

My house is big and pink, and usually pretty dirty, and usually not full of immediately edible foods, so a lot of the evening gets taken up with cleaning and cooking. It’s generally dark by the time dinner is ready, which means there’s just enough time afterward to read a little, have a tea, and go to bed. Then I’ll have a dream about neutron bombs or rabbits, and it’s time to start again.

A few other things to note for those coming to Kafanchan, in no particular order: Don’t get sick, because the hospital is scary. On the other hand, if you can self-diagnose, then you can buy drugs on the cheap without a prescription. Hand-washing your laundry in the hot, beating sun is kind of fun at first, but eventually you’ll be glad you can pay a lady N300/week to do it for you. Please remember to wash your hands frequently. There is garbage on the ground everywhere, but you get used to it. Digestive biscuits are cheap and plentiful. Most of the barbecued meat you can buy on the roadside is delicious, and probably does not contain horrible diseases.

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Scenes from the Palm Wine Hut

It’s dark, but the darkness is softened by the light of a wavering candle in the corner. When you’re frequently threatened by total blackness, you begin to realize just how much illumination a candle has to offer. We’re sitting — squatting, really — on wooden benches in a small boxy hut constructed from thatched palm leaves. We can see each other, a little, enough. The flickering orange glow casts our features into a ghostly, syrupy relief. It’s a scene with the vividness of a dream, and the palm wine contributes rather successfully to that effect.

Palm wine is to palm trees as maple syrup is to maple trees. Not the palm trees you find in California; it’s a different species. Unlike maple syrup, though, palm wine is alcoholic as soon as it comes out of the tree. Basically it’s a miracle of nature. The substance is a kind of milky juice, a bit sweet, a bit sour, a bit bubbly. Nigerians, as you can probably tell, are quite adept at harnessing the incarnate power of the palm tree. The sap is a popular libation, the leaves a building material, and palm oil is extracted from the fruit.

“We” consists of myself and Hiromi, and John, and Matthew, and Alex. John is an older gentlemen, and his wife is our palm wine dealer (she also deals in stiffer, more dubious beverages.) I’ve talked about him before, but it bears repeating: he used to be a Scout leader, as well as an artist who studied in Glasgow, and he was trained as a soldier in Israel before fighting in the Nigerian Civil War. He is currently a police sergeant and a schoolteacher. Early today he came to our house for dinner, which was spaghetti. Matthew is a new acquaintance. He’s a middle-aged guy, and apparently he knows our employer at Fantsuam Foundation. Through that connection he set up a computer centre in Kagoro a number of years ago, although he is currently a teacher as well. Alex is a younger dude who we’ve met briefly before, although it’s been a while since we ran into one another and I can’t recognize him in the low light. I’m about to have one of those embarrassing moments when someone I don’t remember asks me if I remember them.

“What is wrong with Nigeria?” wonders Matthew. It’s not a challenge; it’s not a denial; it’s a rhetorical question.

“We really appreciate what you’re doing,” continues Matthew, addressing myself and Hiromi. “You’ve sacrificed a lot to come out here and help us. People need to understand this.”

“People need to do their best,” suggests John.

Matthew grows emphatic. “People are lazy! If you want to improve your life then you can do it by taking responsibility and working hard. A boy down the street I know, he just learned to repair GSM handsets. That’s what people can do.”

“But the young men around here just spend their time doing nothing,” says John, completing the thought.

“I brought two computers to this town, with my own hands,” Matthew declares proudly, and angrily. He’s punching his words, intoxicated with passion and palm wine. “Two computers, for free. We brought them to the chief’s palace, and he gave us his blessing, and they gave us the reading room to put them in. Now there’s a media centre.”

There’s a contemplative pause, which often occurs in these sorts of conversations. Matthew continues.

“Developing countries all over, they’re learning. India! Look at India, India can do it. Look at their computers.”

“Malaysia,” adds John.

“Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan…”

“Germany,” contributes Alex.

“Germany?! Germany!” Matthew is incredulous. “Shut up! Germany is a world power! Germany, France, USA… China, maybe Canada. Germany!?? Shut up! Germany is where Hitler came from.”

“Didn’t Hitler come from France?” asks John.

“That was Napolean.”

“Ah right. Napolean Bonaparte.”

Matthew can’t quite get over it. “Germany!” he exclaims.

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