Kuku Karanga

Betty and I are just starting our second week of data collection for our new Orphans and Vulnerable Children project. We’re surveying vulnerable households in 20 communities where we’re hoping to work in the next year, to assess their needs and also gain a better understanding of household situations. The hope is that the results will determine how best to implement our program. Fieldwork, for me, has always been inspiring and humbling. It gives us the opportunity to go deep into the interior of a country- to a small village or town and truly see how people live, how they struggle, how they survive. It brings me back to my Peace Corps days when I was living day in, day out, in a community with similar circumstances-no access to services to meet basic needs, chronic illness, physically demanding work…and witnessing how beautiful and overwhelmingly hard their lives are.

Leading up to the survey and training, I was pulling tightly on my compulsive reigns and becoming utterly consumed with planning. After a bit of self-reflection, I decided this was not the way to operate. My goal for the next two weeks was to let go and accept that many things are just not in my control. And more importantly, that this was not my project, and I was just along to be helpful, supportive, hard-working, and not question everything that was happening. Not to sound callous, but I compare development work to event planning in many ways. Much of what we do takes unbelievable attention to detail-anticipating problems, developing contingency plans, and being a linear enough thinker to connect the dots and see how all of the components impact one another over the life of a project. We are just event planning for incredibly vulnerable people as opposed to people who work for corporations or are about to embark on a fancy getaway vacation.

So, yes. Would I be doing things a bit differently? Sure I would. But much of what we plan in the end doesn’t really make a difference anyway, as we are in Africa, and so much of what happens in a day’s time is simply out of our of control. I mean, we’re talking the bush here. It takes up to two hours to go 18km. We can’t do much about the road conditions, or about when the electricity in town is working to make photocopies, or the rain, or even whether the village governments are around to help us identify households to interview. So, they are long days. Really long days. But they are days that make our work feel worthwhile. They are days that transfer all of our frustrations from the office and impress upon us the needs of these communities and how our projects will inevitably impact lives for the better. It’s a reminder of the importance of what we do.

And of course, it’s also muzungu fishbowl time. Many of the villages we’ve visited in the past week have never seen a foreigner. I spent roughly five hours the other day sitting under a tree with 50 children at any given time starting at me with wonder. We played hide and seek. I taught them duck, duck, goose, or in this case, kuku, kuku, karanga (chicken, chicken, peanut. To date, all Swahili words I know are related to food. Obviously.) I fell in love with a two month old baby named Monica. I ate mangos. I let students practice their English. I giggled with shy toddlers and allowed the kids to poke and prod at my painted toe nails and freckles and tattoos. It was a day of inspiration. All the hard work seemed completely and utterly worth every moment of aggravation. It was peace and beauty and without question exactly what I needed.