Embracing Reality

I appreciate a lot of customs. Hugging I'm still working on.

Anyone who knows me, really knows me, knows I’m not a hugger. Yes, that’s right. At the risk of sounding like a crotchety curmudgeonly hermit, yes, I cringe at the prospect of embracing my fellow human beings. I’m not saying that hugs don’t have their time and place. Family gatherings, a best friend’s wedding, bar mitzvahs, winning the lottery—there are appropriate moments for soliciting and distributing an occasional affectionate squeeze. This aversion was absolutely no problem for me when I lived in Asia. I relished in the arms-length distance of respectfully wai-ing (bowing in greeting) in Thailand and secretly applauded prudish caution among non-handholding couples in public in India. Coming back to Latin America was another story. I had forgotten the cheek-to-cheek kisses and full body embraces. I was not quite sure how to react to the effusive welcomes and invasions of my personal bubble on a daily basis. Caught between worlds, it took a bit of time (okay, quite a bit of time) to adjust to all the…touching that goes on here. 

Imagine my shock and quickly swallowed horror as I stood next to a video camera and its accompanying filmographer, urging, nudging me to wrap my arms around a young Colombian woman. A complete stranger no less! I was shaken to say the least, not merely for the suggestion that I intertwine my arms and torso in a strange contortionist manner with those of this young woman, but also for the inevitable crack, thunder, and crumble of the carefully erected professional barrier we maintain with all our refugee clients. But she was crying and I’m a softie without a heartless bone in my body. So I took a deep breath, steeled my nerves, and ventured slowly forward for the Herculean task (literally) in front of me.  

Are you surprised I love theater?

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me take a step back. I like to be in front of people. Rephrased, I like to take the stage in front of people. It’s why I dedicated 2 years of middle school, 4 years of high school, and my entire collegiate and even post-collegiate (hullo, Arena Stage!) experience to crafting the art of being in the limelight however possible. That is also a great part of why I loved being a teacher (not to mention the incredible cadres of students and comrade teachers I was so very lucky to work with at Payap University- hullo, Ajarn Oyporn!). There is something simply electric about commanding the attention of an entire room, connecting with the faces in front of you one by one. I thrive on that type of energy. In a way, it makes me feel strong. It’s when I feel most alive. It should come as no surprise then that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I seized the chance to work with a visiting UN filmographer documenting the lives and livelihoods pursuits of Colombian refugees in Ecuador. I was captivated by the prospect of learning more about the process of story-telling with a purpose and of constructing compelling narratives from behind the camera lens.

Financial education telenovela (soap opera) style with theater!

Visiting homes and work places, we strove to create a snapshot of the daily lives of individuals who had been ‘given a leg up’ in one way or another—through seed funding to start a new business or training on nutrition and financial education—to try to set their new lives in this country on a different and more prosperous path. Each interview entailed a bit of background on the push factors that drove the refugee to flee to Ecuador, the conditions they experienced, and the transition they were able to make with the support of UN (and partners). Simple and straightforward enough, but in the hour plus for each session, it became very clear that not everyone gained such thrill out of the camera’s spotlight as I did. This form of story-telling was nothing like campfire tales or on-stage recitations. It was real. It was raw. And it was hard to take.

Behind the camera

Luisa (name changed and not pictured on this blog) was a young mother who escaped abuse in Colombia to start a new life for her and her two children in Ecuador. She lived in a one and a half room cement row house adjoined to her neighbors with whom she shared a yard full of chickens, ducks, and one very scary strutting male turkey the size of her toddler son. As she stood before the camera, fidgeting and absent-mindedly fumbling with the microphone at her hip, (Por favor, no lo toque, señora. Allí está el micrófono para grabarle. Please, do not touch it, mam. That’s the microphone to record you.) we started the usual round of questioning. When did you come to Ecuador? How did you come to Ecuador? Why did you come to Ecuador? She paused and glanced around nervously. Her two-year-old son squeezed between her thighs, tugging at her shirt. Her eyes on the camera she batted him away gently, still staring. I repeated the question. Porque usted decidió en llegar a Ecuador?

She maintained the same blank stare, but began to speak. Huimos. We fled. Yes, I prodded, but can you please explain the story of why, in your own words? We were used to the typical responses: threats, guerilla forces, assassinations. But as she slowly told the tale of years of abuse beginning with the disappearance of her father (who allegedly killed his second wife), the constant maltreatment from her mother and her mother’s changing suitors, and the several attempts she made to escape from her abusers, each time ending in discovery, beating, and being dragged home again, it was clear that a different type of dark story was unfolding.

Learning the art and process of story-telling

Most people are probably familiar with the choose-your-own-ending novels of our youth—does the gang of wily teenagers run into a gopher hiding out in the backyard shed or something more sinister? Does Molly uncover a hidden trove of family heirlooms or just an age-old empty chest? This was something like that. When you can feel the dread-mixed anticipation welling up from within because you know something is coming and you almost know just what. But I didn’t choose this ending and if I could have I wouldn’t have known what to pick. Watching your father murdered in front of you for refusing to pay guerilla vacunas (coerced contributions) or suffering years of abuse at the hands of your mother and her string of never-ending lovers? And then she said it: rape. Raped. I was raped. I was raped so much. I was raped. I left and I ran, but they found me. They always found me. And I was raped. So much rape. And the words didn’t stop. Nor did the tears, which fell freely, choking her words on the way down. I was stunned into silence while the seasoned filmographer at my side snapped into action, encouraging her to stop, telling her she did not have to recount any more of the story. But she wanted to. In some way, I think she had to. 

And then the moment happened and I could hear the words telling me to step forward and embrace her, but they were mixed up with the other words, or rather with that one word and for a moment, I couldn’t move. But then I was there and my arms were around her and I was breaking every rule I knew in my head and on paper and she held on and I held on and I just felt absolutely powerless to do anything but hug.

Those are the moments they don’t prepare you for in grad school or on the job for that matter. Those are the moments that they can’t. How do you teach someone to express genuine compassion and sympathy? How do you explain how to absorb a moment, assess the situation, and act from somewhere deep within? People might laugh at me when I say I am not a hugger or when I used to joke about fleeing from those “Free Hugs” campaigns on my college campus. But a hug to me is an act of love and a symbol of a shared bond between two people. It’s so much more than the mere mechanics of opening and closing one’s arms around another. It is a statement that says more than “Hi how’s it going?” It says, “How are you? I’m here for you.” It says, “What do you need from me? What more can I give?” It says, “I love you.” 

And then there are the small signs of beauty (cocoa beans).

Working in this field it’s easy to become inured to moments like those when you hear these stories on a daily basis. It’s easy to become numb to the horrors to shield oneself from sinking into the pit of no return, the pit of questioning humanity. Doctors and nurses experience it on a daily basis. Lawyers I am sure go through it all the time. But for me, it is still something new. Something I am learning to grow into because you see, what they don’t teach you in your school books or on that first day on the job is not so much how to pose gently probing questions or how to position the tissue box for easy access on the interview desk. What they don’t teach you is what to do with that feeling of crushing, weighing, guilt-laden powerlessness that engulfs you in moments like these.

Hugs are okay. Frightening turkeys not so much.

I am a doer. A consummate doer. When I see a problem, I am not only compelled, but impelled to do something to resolve it. I have a hard time just sitting on my hands. But there was nothing I could do for her in this moment, but let her have her moment and be there all the way through. So as I always say, I am learning. Learning to be patient with myself and with others. Learning to love the cheek-to-cheeks and embrace the mechanics of a hug. Learning to tell better stories that are not my own and to appreciate the true owners of the same. But the lesson I learned or ­re-learned that day was that powerlessness is an unfortunate part of the reality of this work and is something my doer self cannot always change. And those are the moments when you have to accept the fact that sometimes hugs are all you can give and, really, that is okay. 

Lunchboxes and Knapsacks

Thoughts of field trips typically conjure images of small children in matching colored T-shirts bouncing along a path with brown paper sacks or tin boxes glinting in the sun with pictures of Superman, Batman, Barbie, Spongebob Squarepants, or Shrek. Maybe they have those oversized dangling nametags, squinted eyes as they shield them from the sun, and a seemingly permanent painted frown giving them wrinkles in their young age as they complain about their feet hurting, having to go to the restroom, and wanting snack time (all not unlike their wizened counterparts at the opposite end of the age spectrum.) This field trip was a bit different. It was a work trip. Very official. Very…aherm, business-like and all that jazz. Having worked out of the American culture context before, I knew to expect (or perhaps not to expect) quite a number of norms from the American office place. No water coolers, no Starbucks coffee breaks, no automated projection system that lowers from the heavens and clicks magically in place with a blinking blue screen waiting patiently for your Powerpoint or Prezi, no little thingies that remove staples from papers once you’ve stapled them. But with relatively few field trips under my belt, I was admittedly a bit unprepared for exactly what such an outing would entail.

 We were supposed to leave at 8am. Around 9am I started to wonder. At the moment, we were still sipping chai and nibbling on breakfast sambusas (samosas) and hot fluffy rice cake puffs. I wasn’t tooo unhappy at this fact, but still. At about 9:15 the car arrived and we ventured to a shop to make print-outs of the handouts for the day. Finally, ready to go! A welcome ominous sign, the moment we pulled out of the makeshift parking space, boom! Accident. Hmmm. After some back and forth and admission of guilt on both sides (his car looked much worse for wear than our 4X4), we all piled back in and hit the road. The drive was incredible. Up and down winding roads hugging close to the mountains, we made our way down a road cut through the gorgeous Rift Valley, so named after having been created by the tectonic shifts that had given rise to the mountains around us. The view from above was breath-taking and refreshingly crisp to breathe. One of the women accompanying us had grown up in the valley and pointed to squat stone and cement structures that she identified as the valley hospital and one of very few schools. As she demonstrated, children were required to walk up, down, and through the valley for several miles often to reach a school at the far end of the valley away from their homes. Many girls, she informed us, never attended secondary school given the even greater distance from home and the amount of chores needed to be completed in a given day.

We wound on farther and eventually found ourselves in the town of Mbulu in Manyara District. As if on cue, just over a dozen women emerged in colorful bursts from various places around town and followed us to the screening site where we would conduct a series of interviews to select the participants for our pilot project. Eager to get started, I made to pass out the papers we had brought explaining the program—a solar energy initiative targeting rural women who were leaders of a number of local village savings and loans associations (VSLAs)—but was quickly stopped by my colleagues as it was necessary to perform an extended greeting, personal welcome, and introduction first. Strike one against the overzealous American.

I introduced myself briefly in Swahili giving my name and explaining that I was an American working with d.light and was very pleased to meet everyone. As the women approached one by one we went through a series of questions. Excuse me sister/mam, but how old are you? Samahani dada/mama, una miaka mingapi? Do you have a husband? Una mume? Do you have children? Una watoto? We learned that almost all of the women save two had been educated to Standard 7 (Grade 8), were farmers (wakulima) of some sort and entrepreneurs, had no personal means of transport (bikes included), could read and write to at least basic level, and were relatively (professedly) debt-free. One woman explained how she rose at 3am every day to prepare her children for shule (school), take her wares for sale nearly a three hours’ walk away to town, and then return home in time to cook, clean, and set up the house for when her husband returned home. Others, women barely older than me were responsible for families of two and three children and somehow managed to tend farms, prep for market, attends savings group meetings, and still get dinner on the table before dark as few had electricity at home and needed to squeeze the most out of the daylight. When it came to time management, these women were pros.

Consulting my Excel spreadsheet, I tabulated the data, calculating scores for each woman based on traits we thought would embody a strong retailer and community representative for the brand and the project: did she make frequent eye contact? Did she speak confidently? Was she animated? Did she project? Did she understand the role and responsibility? Was she a trusted member of the community? Then we came to the water selling task. As an on the spot demonstration, we asked each women to sell us a bottle of water. She got highest marks for demonstrating the benefits of the water over soda or juice, negotiating a fair price, highlighting the best characteristics of the water, and vouching for it personally as the best drink on the market. Great activity, right? It frequently went like this:

“Okay, now dada/mama, please sell me this bottle of maji (water).”

“You already bought it. It’s on the table.”

“Right. Okay, I know I bought it but now sell it to me.”

“I don’t understand. You have it.”

“No you have it. This is pretend, make-believe so imagine please.”

“Imagine what?”

“That you are selling it. Pretend we are in a duka (shop). I am the mteja (customer). You are the shop keeper.”

“Ah yes. Okay. This maji here is very delicious maji. It costs 600 shillings.”

“That’s expensive and I don’t like water. It’s tasteless. I like soda. Maybe Coca or Tangawizi (a ginger soda).”

“Okay. Wait, can I sell you that instead?”

“Alrighty then let’s go to the next activity.”

Strike two against the foolish American. Silly me, they would be selling solar lights not water. Didn’t I know that? Oof. Imagination is a luxury. When do adults have time for that when they’ve got cows, sheep, children, maize, and wheat flour on the brain? I silently cursed the theater-phile in me for conjuring up the task though my colleagues seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. They were exceedingly patient in managing to explain to each woman just how this activity had anything to do with selling solar products and eventually got through to each one. They were convinced if a woman could sell us this bottle convincingly, she would have no trouble fielding the same questions about the solar lanterns. Activity saved! Task behind us, we moved on and wrapped up the interviews just as the sun sank low behind the clouds and our stomachs told us it was dinner time. The next day we repeated the process first in Hanang and then Babati, two towns also in Manyara district, but not without the foolish American rearing her ugly head inside me again.

Working lunch. \WER-keeng Luh-nch\ Noun. Definition: a meal around midday completed while performing tasks related to one’s job or occupation. Origin: Somewhere due West.

To be fair we were already an hour behind. We were wrapping up the interviews in Hanang which had taken longer than expected as extra people showed up eager to be interviewed and possibly selected. Babati was about 45 minutes to an hour away with bat out of hell race car driving. We were all starving and I suggested calling ahead to the next group to say we were running late and getting food on the other end once we arrived. Negative. My colleagues were bent on getting lunch in our current location. Fine, then, I reasoned, let’s just get it to go and eat en route as we drive. EEEEENNNNNHHHHH. Somewhere a million buzzers went off. Eat as we drive? Eat as we drive? What absurd recommendation was this? What bizarre machinations was I plotting such that we needed to eat in transit? But, but, I stammered. Didn’t we eat en route yesterday? Ah yes, but only to beat the darkness back down the mountain. There was plenty of light now. We would sit. Forty minutes later we were almost two hours late and still an hour from the site. We piled into the car again and took off. Flying down the road. I buckled up and held on for dear life, a silent prayer escaping my lips at some point, and then as quickly as we had begun we stopped. It was time for muwa. I cringed as I looked out the window and saw the man running with the cart of sugar cane sticks. My colleagues pulled over and asked for six. Now mind you, these things are about six feet long and he has to hack them down to manageable two feet size with a machete. That’s six feet and at least two cuts per stick for six sticks. My head was spinning with the math that screamed We’re already going to be three hours late!! I said nothing. Sensing my inner turmoil perhaps, a colleague assured me that a few more minutes would not hurt that much. I breathed. I calmed my Western anxiety, remembered my own role among friends as the erstwhile latecomer, and relaxed…a little. Strike three against the uptight American!

Eventually we made it of course. As in Hanang, the Babati group was a bit more mixed than our first town of Mbulu with men and women, producing an interesting dynamic between the male interviewees and the female interviewing team questioning them. Most men, not surprisingly, had no trouble with eye contact whatsoever and typically barreled through the questions with ease. Like the women, most all were married farmers/entrepreneurs with several children and had completed Grade 8 though a few had gone on to Form 4 (secondary school). As leaders of their VSLAs, like some of the women, they had remarkable reach into the rural community, accessing as many as two and three hundred individuals on a regular basis. Jackpot. This was exactly the rural penetration we desperately needed where our local distributors had no reach. I thought back to the houses dotting Rift Valley and pictured each of these village agents making their way through communities we didn’t even know existed on roads far from any map I’d ever seen. And guaranteed just about each and every one of those houses goes dark when the sun goes down, hauling out smudged and dangerous kerosene lanterns and jerry cans that cost them hundreds of shillings per day to burn. With solar energy, the possibilities were staggering.

We wrapped up the screening, jotting down notes on scribbled pieces of papers and print outs and headed back to Arusha. I was pumped and ready for action. This was why I wanted to be out here in the field doing this sort of work. We had spent several weeks being bogged down in bureaucracy. It’s bound to happen with so many cooks in the kitchen on a single project, too many organizations with conflicting agendas just trying to make sure their best interests are kept in mind. Getting out there reminded me of the people on the other end, miles and miles away from headquarters and conference calls and absurdly long email chains where sometimes very little actually gets done. Instead as the field team, we are the ones getting regular calls from these farmers and entrepreneurs wondering what was taking so long? When were the products arriving? Why had we come and visited them two and three times with no results to show? Would we be like that last organization that came through with so many promises and never followed through? 

I cringed when we had to call them back to notify them that there was yet another delay at HQ and we would be pushing back the training one more week, maybe two. But didn’t we know harvest season would end soon and the money would dry up? Who would they sell to then when everyone was pinching shillings again? Those are the moments that make this work difficult, not just from a logistical angle, organizing meetings and interviews and trainings, but from an emotionally taxing perspective as well. We are here on the ground because we want to help, but how much help can we be when our hands are so tied by donors and board members, country directors and distributors, and the like? The money is not in. The board doesn’t agree. The MOU hasn’t been signed. The team is not assembled. All these are typical development problems, and necessary evils most would say, but it leaves you wondering: is there ever an easier way to just take action? To get things done and provide the services needed without a cadre of squabbling figures like crabs in a barrel, clawing for this interest or that? Perhaps no because we need the funding. We need the support. We need the technical expertise and resources. At the end of the day, frustrating though it may be, perhaps it’s just enough that the work eventually gets done, no matter the creeping road to get there. 

A week later on a flight, I sat down next to a woman in a beautiful colored kanga wrap much like the women we had interviewed. I asked her where she was from. Mama, unatoka ni wapi? She told me Manyara, Hanang specifically. Excitedly I tried to explain that my work was in solar with the sun and did she know of our company? Kazi yangu ni solar, na jua. Unajua d.light? She said that she had not, but was very happy to hear we would be coming to her hometown. She did not have electricity and wanted light at night. She said our work was good, very good, and thanked me for doing it. I paused for a moment. Even though she hadn’t seen the work and had no idea of what our products were like or when she would see them, even so she was grateful the work was being done and that someone wanted to invest in her town. That alone was validating. I smiled and thanked her, adding Mama, nafurahi kukufahamu. (Mama, I am happy to meet you/It was a pleasure meeting you.)

Truthfully, it really was.