Hey overseas volunteers- it's not you, it's us

Two years ago, fresh from my first development internship experience, newly conscious of how unqualified and generally useless I was in the world, a friend mentioned she wanted to volunteer in Africa. An English graduate, I could barely contain my scorn as I asked her what would she volunteer as. A teacher she replied or in an orphanage or something, just for like two weeks or whatever. What you want is a holiday, I pointed out. No, she insisted, I want to help. I, in reply, went on an unmitigated rant about people with no skills insisting on travelling to developing countries to work with orphans, why doesn't she volunteer at home, etc. etc. The term poverty porn was used numerous times and the friendship strained.

I don't think I was angry at my friend, more ashamed of my own naievety which had once matched hers. Only the year previous to that conversation, I had spent the summer combing websites looking for volunteer opportunities at home or abroad with NGOs or charities, genuinely shocked that no one wanted my free labour. Of course, it didn't occur to me that my years of waitressing experience and a whole two years of college education qualified me to do nothing useful. In my mind, I was a body willing to work for free. Surely, the poor charities should be begging me for my help?!

Oh, how we've all learned. People working in development (of which I only barely class myself, having the minimum of experience. However, I continue.) are scornful of voluntourism and with real, concrete reason. Too often, volunteering is aimed at enriching the volunteer's experience and not contributing anything meaningful to the community. I once got talking to a guy in Camden's Barfly who proudly told me he had volunteered in Africa. It transpired he spent one week planting trees and one week teaching maths in Ghana (I wish I was making this up by the way). I laughed too much to get angry at him and he flounced away, presumably to try and woo a more amenable girl with his tales of aid worker hardship.

This post from the always excellent WhyDev clearly sets out the serious issues with voluntourism.  Aside from English grads trying to pack some meaning into their holidays however, there is the issue of aspiring development professionals, probably still at university, who volunteer - often paying to do so- because they can't get any internships. Internships as an undergraduate are literally like gold dust. I will forever thank my university for establishing an internship programme within my degree. Nervous about graduating with literally zero experience, many students spend a summer or two on these programmes working with street kids in India or the like and for their efforts, develop a hefty slice of debt and nothing but scorn from development professionals. They're not bad people, these young volunteers! They're just thinking about the career prospects.

The thing is, a two week volunteer placement in Zanzibar for example, won't impress any NGO. Experience is obviously a plus but why not volunteer at home, in a women's shelter or a soup kitchen or a homework club for children of asylum seekers? If you can't afford to volunteer abroad and have spent your time at university working part time, shout that proudly. Everyone describes themselves as hardworking on a CV but you can actually demonstrate it. Trust me, that's more impressive than a few weeks volunteer work.

Again, this is not meant to be a dig at those who do volunteer abroad. I understand why and that the motivation is usually good. A lot of the problem actually stems from the NGO sector and it's stubbornly middle class expectation that parents will fund young people to work for free (look out for an upcoming post on how development needs more working class!). So, young volunteers, ignore the scorn you receive from development workers. It's all their bloody fault in the first place. 

Kids Club Kampala in Kentishtowner

My latest piece for The Kentishtowner, North London's only daily online magazine (and now once a month in print!), is an article on Kids Club Kampala.

Kids Club Kampala is a great charity I first came across on Twitter, which works with slum communities in Uganda. It was established by Olivia and Corey when they were just 18, fresh out of some gap year volunteering in Kampala. The organisation impressed me with their community led projects, the fact that all their staff are local (apart from the girls running the fundraising/operational side of things in London) and that it's a very young, ambitious NGO.

Read the piece here to find out more.

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Oh, you don't feed starving babies for a living then?

You may think those who work in development, or those who plan to, would be a rather selfless group, dedicated to helping others, uncaring of material gains and all round good guys.

You would be wrong.

People who work in development are still people (actually, many of them are assholes but that's another blog post). They get involved in development for a variety of reasons, usually very few of which are noble. They may want to travel. They may want to drink a lot without judgement (you're not going to call someone recently returned from the war zone/refugee crisis du jour out on drinking too much now, are you?). Perhaps they want to appear to be noble. Oh, and they want to help people. But that comes a bit further down the list.

There's nothing wrong with this. Development work (I use the term 'development work' as a kind of catch all phrase for aid workers, NGO or charity employees, etc) is a vocation for some people and just a job for others. Like any job, some do it well, some don't. The thing to remember about development folk however is this: they're insanely snobby.

Yup. And not just to people in other professions- we've all pulled out the martyr-ish, "oh what you do is just as important as feeding starving babies," line (even those of us who don't actually feed starving babies). Development peeps are at their snobbiest with each other.

And they don't even wait until they're fully blown development folk. Development students are the worst. I say this as a human rights student recently returned from two semesters of internships which led to a job before I was brutally wrenched from the real world and landed back at university for my final year(bitter? Me? Abso-fucking-lutely).

The snobbiness begins with what you're studying.

I'm still an Undergrad. But I'm studying for a BA in Human Rights. Firstly, that makes me (and my classmates) awesome. Secondly, it makes us better than those of you who did a BA in English, realised you wouldn't hack it as a journalist, figured you'd like to travel and so chose to do a MA in Development Studies/Human Rights Law, etc.

I, on the other hand, was reading Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell  when I was 16 and deciding that I would study human rights and work for an INGO. Which makes me- yes, a geek but also- better than you. Fact. By the time you get your shit together at 22, decide to do your MA and figure out where Sudan is on the map, I'll have been studying it for four years already (Am I coming across as snobby???)

Don't be offended. You'll need to get used to the backhanded arrogance which is RIFE in NGOs. Aid workers are always trying to prove how hardcore they are, faux -casually dropping stories which begin "One time, I was hammered in Kabul. . ." or "When I was in a refugee camp in Goma. . ." or hinting at the affairs they've had with freelance war photographers, MSF doctors or members of the IDF (politics goes out the window when there's tequila involved).

The snobbery and arrogance goes all sorts of different directions and is usually accompanied by some envy. My class can be viewed as a microcosm of the wider development world, spread as we were all across the globe, amongst large and small organisations working on various issues. Although we do all genuinely get along, there are some discernible 'tensions' between us that emerge once we discuss placements.

People planning to do human rights law think those working in development can't get anything actually done. People doing development work think those law folk don't know what goes on in "the real world". People back in HQ are envious of those out in the field, convinced all they're doing is drinking a lot, having affairs and actually helping people while they are stuck filing endless donor reports. Meanwhile, the fieldworker (what is this bloody 'field' anyway? Does it just refer to anywhere outside of London?) is cursing what ever power cut ridden shithole he or she may be in, misses regular showers and is convinced that all the big decisions get made back in HQ and they must simply do what they're told.

If I'm making us out to be an unlikable bunch, that really isn't the case. There are few perks to our jobs sometimes what with the endless donor-reporting and postings to locations which have a distinct lack of electricity; being able to brag about how hardcore/exotic/exciting out jobs are, even if they usually aren't, is one of the few perks we have. And at least we're able to poke fun at ourselves!



 

#SudanRevolts: Notes from the fringes of a revolution

I didn't know much about Sudan last summer, when I was offered an internship with SIHA- a regional women's rights network based in Kampala, Uganda. Trying to further women's rights across a region that encompasses Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda is no small undertaking. There's a lot of issues there. After extensive research (ahem, quick glance at their website), I realised SIHA focused much of their work on Sudan and set about learning as much as I could about the status of women there and the issues they faced.

What I learned wasn't very encouraging. Al-Bashir, the President of Sudan and his ruling NCP party have instituted a corrupted form of Shar'ia law. The ridiculously restrictive Public Order Laws have little to do with Islam but instead are used as a tool to exert social and political control on the country's citizens. Women can be arrested, fined or even lashed for "offences" such as wearing make-up or trousers, drinking alcohol or being alone with a man to whom they are not related (even in an office environment). Stoning is rare but unfortunately not unheard of. Outside of the capital Khartoum, the situation for women was even worse. Al-Bashir's regime was waging a genocidal campaign in Darfur where thousands of women had been raped or sexually assaulted by the Sudanese Armed Forces and their associated militias. Conflict had once again broken out in the border state of South Kordofan in June and early reports indicated the same policies of sexualised violence as a weapon to intimidate, terrorise and punish women (and whole communities) were also being instituted there.

A grim but unfortunately accurate summation. Fresh off the plane in Kampala and deposited at SIHA's rather leafy offices, I was fortunate enough to meet many Sudanese women who worked for or with SIHA or who attended the various workshops SIHA ran for women human rights defenders.

At first I was intimidated by these women. In my mind, they were Human Rights Defenders- capitals intended. They risked imprisonment, torture, rape and other horrific consequences for the work they did. But thinking about them in such terms made me forget that they were women first- and in some case girls. They wore nail varnish and eyeliner like I did, some of them had daughters my age, some were my age. The older women laughed at my pink skinny jeans while the younger girls lusted after my H&M sandals and at the coffee breaks we all sat around chatting and gossiping.

Seeing them in such human terms didn’t make the work they did any less impressive. If anything, it made it more. Most of these women would prefer to just get on with their lives, their biggest problem being what to throw together for dinner after work or if that boy they liked would ask them out. Instead, they found themselves thrown into a fight, out of their control.  One doctor, thinking of her own daughter at home, couldn’t turn away a young girl who’d been raped as a punishment for some imagined infringement. A lawyer couldn’t turn away the case of a female street vender who was imprisoned for selling alcohol, thinking what she would have done if her husband had left her and she had no other means of supporting her children in a country that wages war against its citizens but doesn’t provide them with social welfare. One journalist was imprisoned for reporting rapes carried out by members of the police and army. The government said that writing about such “unproven allegations” was akin to spreading lies.

These women didn’t want to be Human Rights Defenders. They just were. The term itself is problematic. It’s not a profession as such, something to be put on a CV. These women were from different walks of life. Some of them were professionals, some weren’t.  Some were very religious, some weren’t. Some of them were nicer and friendlier than others. Being a human rights defender doesn’t make you a saint. It’s incredibly stressful and many of the women showed signs of a life of tense, constantly looking over their shoulder, pressure.

Meeting Safia, in particular, made a huge impression upon me. Safia was a young artist and student who had dabbled with Girifna- a political activist group largely made up of students. She handed out some leaflets which denounced the regime and attended a rally. Nothing remarkable. But then she was kidnapped off the street, taken to a ‘ghost house’ and beaten, raped and tortured by three men. They knew who she was and they knew of her so called ‘political activities’. What happened to Safia was meant as a punishment for her and a warning to others.

Safia, demonstrating remarkable strength, spoke out about her ordeal and was forced to flee Sudan for her own safety. When I met her in Kampala, she was quiet but friendly, with a soft smile. She was remarkably pretty, with amazing cheekbones and short hair. As I got to know her better, she was no longer a Human Rights Defender or a Brave Woman. She was Safia, who was much more than one horrible thing that happened to her. She was an amazing artist, an expert at plaiting hair, terrible at time keeping and partial to the odd Pixar movie.  She liked brightly coloured jewellery, coffee and chocolate.

Safia

Safia with Hala Al-Karib at the opening of her first exhibition in Kampala, Novermber 2011

Safia and I at her exhibtion

Preparing Eid-Al Adha

Enjoying Eid Al-Adha!

With Zainaab Blindio, Executive Direcotr of Ru'ya Association from South Kordofan

Enjoying some good Kordofanian cooking!

 

It’s important to see these women as who they really are, not as the terrible things that have happened to them or as remote creatures who are impossibly brave. Often, I discovered, they are terrified, constantly worried and stressed. But they just carry on, like women all over the world do when they have burdens to bear.

When the revolts began in Sudan, I was pleased in a way. Maybe finally this was it, the beginning of the end for Bashir. But I was also scared, in case it wasn’t. What if these girls were going out on a limb and would bear the brunt of the inevitable repression if no one backed them up?

There's not much you can do from a desk in North London, besides obsessively checking the frustratingly scant news reports coming out. I wrote some articles about what was going on. I joined Twitter and obsessively tweeted and retweeted any updates on the situation I came across. It's bizarre, watching a revolution unfold on your computer screen, comprised of a mish mash of tweets, blog posts and the stale language of international news reports, from your 9-5. First thing in the morning, drinking coffee and trying to do my hair, I would check all my networks to see if anything had happened overnight. Overgrounding it to work, there would be more coffee when I got to the office and more digital monitoring. I began to build up some good links with activists on the ground and activists or journalists in Europe and the US who had much wider links than I did so the information I gleaned from Khartoum could reach people in London and New York who might have some clout. Or at least the means to get the issue more publicity.

I would check my twitter, facebook and emails last thing at night before I went to sleep. One weekday night when a few after work drinks had turned into an unplanned session, I returned home sometime after 3 in the morning and discovered my inbox crowded with messages about an activist, whom I had befriended through twitter and emails, had been arrested earlier that day. No one knew where she was. All I could do was send a few well chosen tweets to try and publicise her disappearance, hoping those better known than me would retweet it and help to pressure the Sudanese authorities into releasing her. Tweeting from my nice warm flat in London about this girl languishing in a cell somewhere in Kharotum, having been in a Camden pub when it was actually happening, made me feel incredibly guilty. But there was nothing else to do.

 

The protest movement known as Sudan Revolts fizzled out somewhat but I wasn’t disheartened like some (see this piece which expresses why not much more eloquently than I ever could) . I know there are many people in Sudan working quietly, at great personal risk as always, to end the genocidal regime of Bashir. But I shared in the anger of many at the recent protests in Khartoum against the now nototious anti-Islam viral video. These people will attempt to storm foreign embassies in anger at a slight against Islam yet they will not join their fellow citizens protesting in the streets at their own leader who corrupts Islam every day in their name?  I know many Sudanese activists who were deeply and personally hurt by that and I do not blame them.  

Sudan Revolts didn't explode in some sort of Arab Spring like some pundits predicted it would. But those people were never looking at the Sudanese case as the unique situation it is, but were instead lumping into into the category of "Arab" and assuming it would go down the path of Libya or Syria. That was a mistake and part of the reason why some international commentators have written off Sudan Revolts as a flash in the pan. It should be given credit for what it achieved and seen as a step on the road to revolution. Bashir will eventually fall and Sudan Revolts will be one of the most important catalysts in the series of events it will take to oust him. Most dictators don't fall in a day.

So there you have it; notes from the (extreme) fringes of a revolution. #SudanRevolts.