Gratitude

Because not all posts can be about plants. Here is a poem by a Polish poet, Anna Kamienska, I’ve been reading a lot of lately

 

GRATITUDE

 

A tempest threw a rainbow in my face

so that I wanted to fall under the rain

to kiss the hands of an old woman to whom I gave my seat

to thank everyone for the fact that they exist

and at times even feel like smiling

I was grateful to young leaves that they were willing

to open up to the sun

to babies that they still

felt like coming into this world

to the old that they heroically

endure until the end

I was full of thanks

like a Sunday alms-box

I would have embraced death

if she’d stopped nearby

 

Gratitude is a scattered

homeless love

And here are some pretty sandalwood tree seeds I’m trying to germinate.

 

Dryland ag in south Florida!

One month down!  First month: lots of training, following other people around and helping them with their farmwork, like planting rice:

going to trainings, getting acquainted with stuff etc. Now in the second month, I get introduced to the area of the farm I’ll be taking care of.  This is the semi-arid, where we demonstrate techniques that people use in places that get an average of less than 20 inches of rain per year.  What makes it interesting is that we’re in south Florida on a soil that floods, so planting in sunken beds is not really what you want to be doing.  But, we do our best.  I got introduced to the area today.  The basic principles of semi-arid farming are, catch as much water as you can, reduce water loss/waste as much as you can, plant crops that can deal with drought and use the water as efficiently as you can.  Here are some techniques!

The Kitchen Garden~

So, with kitchen gardens, you can grow vegetables that might take a little more water or nutrients, and just use your leftover dishwater or bathwater on them and ash or kitchen scraps or things like that to fertilize them.

Zai Holes:

Zai holes, a technique from Burkina Faso, are basically pits that you dig during the dry season. You put some composted manure into the pit, and plant your tomatoes or whatever when the rains start. You leave a depression and mulch it a lot.  Water penetrates the soil really well, is collected in the depressions and is available to the plants. You’re concentrating the water and nutrients where the plants can use them and weeds can’t, so you’re also reducing weed competition for water. They’re really popular all over West Africa apparently.

Demi-lunes are a similar concept:

The depressions catch water, and the rocks prevent runoff and promote infiltration. These are great to have on slopes. They’re pretty labor intensive. For flat places, sunken beds are another good technique

Also, crops that you plant make a big difference.  At ECHO we like to plant a lot of perennials. They have more developed root systems so they’re better at withstanding unreliable rains, they tend to be good for the soil and some of them are a source of human or animal food year-round. Here is a drought-tolerant, perennial veggie called chaya that we get really excited about here:

You use it like spinach and it’s really nutritious. But it’s also drought-tolerant, and you can plant one and if all goes well harvest off it for the next 30 years.  Also you propagate it by cuttings, so to get new ones you can just use a couple sticks taken from your neighbor’s plant.

Another plant we like a lot is the apple-ring acacia tree

It is a great tree! It’s leguminous, so it adds nitrogen to the soil. The fun thing about it is that it drops its leaves in the summer, which means you can leave it in your fields and plant your crop right up to it. Their roots are really deep so they don’t compete with the crop, but it draws up nutrients from the deep soil that the crop can’t reach, and deposits them on the soil surface when the leaves fall.  Then when your crop is over, the leaves grow back. You can let livestock in to graze on the crop residues, and the shade protects them from the sun, and they give manure that fertilizes the next crop. It’s a neat system.

And the crown jewel of stuff we like at ECHO, the MORINGA TREE!! (seen in the foreground as part of a living fence).  Moringa is another tree with leaves that are extremely nutritious and available year-round. It’s a really fast-growing tree, too, so you can get quite a lot off of one.  People eat it cooked or raw, or dried and ground as a nutritional supplement. The roots are edible too, and if you put the ground seeds in dirty water they actually flocculate out the dirt, after which you can pour off the clear water into a water bottle in the sun for awhile and it’s pretty much sterile and ready to drink. At Lusekele where I was living last year, people said the seeds could be used to help cure stomach aches, but I haven’t heard anyone else talk about that.  Anyhow, they’re a really useful tree against malnutrition and water-borne diseases and they’re our sort of flagship plant, I guess.

Lots more later.

A little tour of ECHO

So, you should all come visit me. But just in case you can’t, here’s where I am and what I”m doing!

The goal of ECHO is to use our resources to help develop sustainable solutions to world hunger.  We’re a resource center to development workers with poor, small-scale farmers around the world.  We use a couple means to do this—searching for interesting plants and varieties, looking for creative ways to address bottlenecks like access to water, transportation, seasonal labor shortages etc.

Here are some of ECHO’s resources

                *Global farm

Here, we demonstrate types of farming that are done around the world.  We use plants and farming techniques that model how someone might farm, say, on a steep slope in South America, in Ethiopia where there’s very little rain, Bangladesh where there’s a whole lot of rain, or in a slum in Bangkok where you have limited access to space or soil. This has a couple functions… in this way we can test out techniques or plants that sound great and see, in practice (in our situation at least) how well they work and what things to watch out for, which helps us give good advice to development workers. We also give tours to visitors—we get almost all our support from donors, and most people are more excited about plants and farm equipment when they see convincingly demonstrated how it can work. And for the interns who take care of the farm, it’s a good opportunity to get hands-on experience with making zai holes, planting terraces, making a tire garden or what have you. (Also we get lots of  our food from here!)  I’ll be working with the semi-arid area, demonstrating plants and techniques useful in areas with little water. Also I will take care of goats… there are four of them and we’re expecting some babies in May! We already have some super cute baby bunnies.

 

 

      *Appropriate Technology

This part of ECHO’s work focusses on “using what you have to make what you need”—ie, figuring out how needs like water, post-harvest processing or transportation can be met by simple technology that uses cheap, locally available materials. Right now, it seems to specialize in interesting pumps.  Last week we used a simple press and cauldron to make our sugar cane into 32 L of molasses.

      *Seedbank

I think maybe this is the coolest thing we have.  We stock a lot of interesting and hard-to-find seeds.  We provide packets free to development workers around the world.  This is a big part of ECHO’s direct ministry.  I think we sent out over a thousand last month alone! I’ll be working in the seedbank, which means I get to do germination tests (and figure out how to germinate really unusual seeds!), help manage inventory and other interesting things like that.

          *Nursery

We sell plants, too! We have a retail nursery with lots (and lots and lots) of different kinds of tropical fruits and veggies.

          *Conferences/ consulting networking

Consulting, sharing knowledge and facilitating networking is another big part of ECHO’s work.  Every December ECHO has a big conference in Florida, and we periodically have regional conferences around the world.. Thailand, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, and I think we’re starting one in the Dominican Republic.  Every day, the staff also answer a lot of specific technical agricultural questions. In my last couple months, I’ll get to help with this. We also periodically publish a newsletter of sorts, the ECHO Development Notes, with fairly in-depth articles on topics of interest.  Also, we just started a new networking site, ECHO Community, where we hope members can interact with and support each other.

*Intern program

There are 9 interns, taking care of the global farm, working in the nursery and seed bank, with appropriate technology, organizing volunteers, giving tours, etc etc etc. They are silly people.  But really fun.  If you went to the American School at Kaele… it’s a lot like that.

We come from pretty different backgrounds.. some sociology types, an engineer, a potato guy from Idaho, a biblical studies and theology major, me from soils, etc… Most of us are interested in serving somewhere abroad I think, and they’re a great group to live with and learn from.  As of this month, ECHO has had 200 interns! (The guy who came in with me and I were numbers 199 and 200).  I think they say about 25% of the interns that have come through ECHO have ended as missionaries or development workers, and also ECHO seems to keep close touch with a lot of its former interns. It’s a very good place for being trained and getting to know people.

I really like it so far. ECHO’s in southwest Florida and we are very close to the very large Caloosahatchee River and about half an hour from the Gulf. There are so many interesting plants here, and it is really warm and humid. We’re about two hours’ drive from the Everglades.  Last weekend we went there for a little hike to see the bromeliads in bloom.

I live in a house with three other girls.Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday all the interns eat together.  We have a little prayer meeting every morning too.

We get to eat lots of the farm produce… also, we benefit from living in what’s a essentially a city full of grandmas and grandpas… people seem to really like the interns and want to feed them and invite them over all the time.  I’ve been spending most of my time so far in orientations  and trying to follow people around at their chores, feeding their animals, etc. I’ll really start to get to work next week.

You should come to visit!! I will give you lots of fruit!

Sojourning

By popular request, I am restarting my blog!  It’s been an interesting four months.  As you may have heard, the election in Congo went off fairly peaceably (if not exactly fairly). So after hosting a large goodbye party

I took off on a tiny cute MAF plane,

 

waved a sad goodbye to Marjeanne, Musualu, Ed and Miriam

and after a pleasant and uneventful few days in Kinshasa was back on the airplane to California, via Ethiopia and New York.  A fun incident happened in the Addis Ababa airport.  I had a few hours to kill in the waiting room, and after an hour or so of examining my fellow passengers I realized I knew one of them!  He was a soil science professor; I’d gone to a seminar he’d hosted at a conference last year, and I recognized him by his interesting hat.

So I introduced myself, and it turned out he’d been doing something very similar in Rwanda to what I’d been doing in DRC … developing a set of field soil test methods that would be useful to small-scale farmers, that would be fairly reliable, not too expensive and could be easily done on a farmer’s back porch.  What with a few hours in the airport and a 15 hour flight (we were sitting a couple rows down from each other, both on the aisle), I got the really complete version of his methods and a lot of really good advice.  It felt like getting to see the answer key right after you’d finished taking the test (…”oh man! Dilute calcium chloride as an extracting solution; why didn’t I think of that!) and I came away with lots of good ideas. I don’t know anyone whose life consists of so many deus ex machinas (you get yourself into an impossible situation and then God comes down and saves you) as me.

 

I realize now there’s so much stuff from Congo I didn’t yet talk about… the extension and soil sampling trip to our partner oil palm farmers/associations,

, the trip to Musualu’s family’s delightful house in Vanga, where I met his wife and five kids

and got to eat my first mangosteen.

.  It was such a good time and I’m so grateful to have had it.  It seems very long ago now, and God is still teaching me through it.

Coming back has been a bit hard, though it’s been really one of the laziest and most stress-free times of my life.  After celebrating Christmas and New Year’s with my family in beautiful Pasaden,

I moved back to Illinois to work on turning my master’s thesis into publications and do labwork for three months until my job would start in April.  Transitions are never easy, and I’ve spent a whole lot of time in the past three months strongly being plagued by doubts and fears—what good did I do when I was in Congo? Was it worth it? I had such a hard time—is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life? Should I be in academia instead? But do I look like I have any skills that would make going for a PhD a good idea? Or being in development, for that matter? (No! No! and No!) As I’m getting older, can I keep solid and good relationships that I have and form new ones if I keep moving around and not putting down roots?  My new job’s in Florida and I couldn’t take much with me, so I spent the past few months divesting myself of everything I could think of… lots of things I didn’t use much but some things that I genuinely loved. On the one hand it feels good stripping down your life, but on the other it’s a bit terrifying.  We know that this world isn’t our home and we are sojourners in it, and so in a way, holding onto things lightly and being in the habit of leaving places and people you love feels like a good way to live.  But holding onto people lightly is a different matter,

and in Congo, I started to wonder if I’m think I’m getting too old for this… travelling to a place, starting life over again, getting really attached to people and places and things and then leaving and starting completely over again.  It was hard getting to know and love people in Congo, and in Illinois, and it was hard leaving them knowing I will probably not see them again, and each time I’m with a new set of people it’s hard to fulfill relational responsibilities towards the former ones… But then sometime in mid-March the sun came out and central Illinois had its warmest week on record and I felt way way better. And now I’m in Florida! With sunshine, mangroves, fantastic plants, beloved aunts, baby bunnies, beautiful people, goats, fun housemates, fresh farm produce, turquoise beaches, alligators,  infinite resources on tropical legumes and the strangest soil ever (I’m living on a spodosol, for all you soil people… Californians, I bet you’re all jealous :) )

More on my new job later.  I’m doing an internship at ECHO, a Christian development organization that works as a resource center for organizations working with small-scale tropical farmers, testing and demonstrating techniques to reduce food insecurity for the poor around the world.  I’ll be taking care of the semi-arid demonstration plots (no mean feat in South Florida I gather, which is not exactly semi-arid), working in ECHO’s amazing seed bank and taking care of ECHO’s goats.

Elections

Please pray for peace in Congo during these next few weeks.  We recently had presidential and parliamentary elections.  There were some problems but they were pretty peaceful and uneventful overall, considering the huge size of the country, the poor infrastructure in many parts of it, the fact that this is only the second time Congo’s held elections and the very large number of candidates.

But it’s far from certain that things will continue calm.  The results of the presidential race will be announced on December 6th, and on the 17th they’ll be declared valid or invalid by the Supreme Court I believe.  There are two candidates who are considered likely to have a chance; the current president Joseph Kabila and main challenger Etienne Tchisekedi, the numbers are looking close, there are many allegations of fraud on the one side and of trying to derail the electoral process on the other.. in short, observers are saying it’s hard to imagine either candidate going down without a fight.

Please join us in praying for a peaceful and just outcome.

Also, I am planning to fly in to Kinshasa on the 13th and leave for the US on the 17th, so you could pray that things go smoothly with that, as well.

(By the way, the area I’m in is really calm and far from the capital, and no-one I’ve talked to seems all that worried.  It’s just reading news and commentaries that gets one alarmed…if by any chance you want to follow things  this is a good analysis site and this  is a good news site.)

 

Charles Dickens

In the course of my soil science career I’ve probably done thousands of hours’ worth of mindless hand work, and I got into the habit of listening to books on tape.  I found a website (www.librivox.com, it’s wonderful!) where you can listen for free to books that are in the public domain being read by volunteers.  Thousands of hours of work and a free source of 19^th century literature translate into lots of Charles Dickens absorbed over the past couple years.  I like Charles Dickens a lot, but I’m wondering if he’s damaging me.  I know he did when I was writing my thesis (“Howsoever it may have come about, the organic matter content of the heretofore relatively infertile field 3-8B was inexplicably elevated in relation to….”) and he’s putting me into some confusion now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “helping the poor” these days, because you can’t help it when you are materially extremely wealthy, and almost every day people ask you for things and you have to decide whether or not to do it, and if you don’t, how you should use those resources instead.  There are two streams of thought, and they’re very difficult for me to reconcile in practice.  One is the development theory side, which was taught to me in my classes and is also taken by almost every person I’ve talked to whose life is spent in helping the poor.  I’m reading a good book on it right now called “When Helping Hurts.”  The basic tenet is that while “helping the poor” is certainly a strong Christian mandate, it does more harm than good when it is done paternalistically—that is, doing for the poor what they could and should be doing for themselves.  It calls for a clear distinction between relief (ie, during times of war or famine or right after an unforeseen disaster when people really do lack the resources to help themselves) and development, which necessitates the growth of locally generated, self-sustaining structures so that the person or community doesn’t stay in dependency on the resource provider.  Thus, for example, if someone comes to your church office and asks for money to pay her electrical bill, you might be doing her more harm than good by handing her the cash: you might be essentially feeding a harmful addiction (of expecting things for free rather than getting her life in shape).  On the other hand, making friends with her, trying to walk with her, figure out why she’s having trouble paying, offering to watch her kids while she’s at job skills training classes etc—that would be a lot more work but it would be helping to treat, say, her cancer rather than the stomachache it was causing.  If she gets enough meds for the ‘stomachaches’ of unpaid bills, it might actually help her to put off treating her real problem for longer.

Another main point of development theory is that for a lot of people, poverty isn’t just about not having enough money or food or things.  Poverty has a big social dimension, too.  Poor people often feel ashamed of themselves; they feel like they don’t have value or a place in society or anything to give.  This “poverty of self” can be as painful as the lack of material wealth, and is a big contributing factor to it.  By giving things to people unconditionally even if they ask for them, without engaging with them or requiring anything from them, you can be reinforcing their poverty of self and be making them actually poorer.  Also, say the authors of “When Helping Hurts”, if you do this you are giving yourself another type of poverty of self—the god-complex, feeling like you have the power to provide for someone’s needs and that they depend on you.

That’s a legacy that missionaries now can have a hard time fighting.  I am told that this part of the world has seen a lot of foreigners come in with very good intentions, and in trying to do God’s work accidentally set up as little gods themselves.  People have needs, we have resources, they ask us, we supply.  We Americans have access to such (relatively) infinite resources, we have a cultural tendency to dictate policy and want to do higher-level things ourselves, as foreigners we often don’t have quite as deep an understanding of the social structures and culture here as we should, and along with a strong sense of “things are not right as they are” it’s resulted worldwide in a lot of free resources getting dumped on problems without the necessary understanding , quick fixes that don’t take, and taking out of the hands of local people the responsibility of solving their own problems.  So by acting like God (though he actually doesn’t act like that towards us!) you have paternalism leading to underdevelopment, like (horrible metaphor but it’s all I can think of right now) the kid in your dorm who never learned to wash his own clothes because his mom wanted to do it for him.  It makes for a hard dynamic to come into because, as a wealthy outsider, you are sort of automatically put in charge and automatically expected to give of your infinite resources.  An example… when I did a year of study abroad in Ghana, I did a research project that involved going into villages and surveying farmers.  At the end, an old man with great presence, probably the head farmer of his village, gave me the traditional “thank you” speech.  He said, “Thank you for coming to teach us about farming.  When you go back to the US, learn many things so you can come back and teach us more.”  On the one hand, this felt a little bit like a sacred charge.  On the other hand… WHAT???  I was a stupid 21-year old, I didn’t know a yam from a cassava, I knew nothing at all, but because I was a foreign researcher this man with a lifetime’s accumulated wealth of experience was asking me to teach him about farming.  I hope he was just being polite, but what if he wasn’t, and I took him at his word and actually TRIED to teach him about farming?  The results would not be anything good.  Another example…a while ago, if I have the story right, Lusekele ordered some much-needed agricultural books to sell the nearby college.  Nobody bought, because with an enterprise where a white person was involved, it was thought that the books should be given away.  Reasonably, since so many white people have given away so many things here for decades.

I guess a big part of the dependency argument is that there needs to be exchange, it can’t just be a one-sided deal where you give and the other person receives, whether money or resources or knowledge or whatnot.  Money should be worked for.  Goods should be paid for. New knowledge should be generated through collaboration, not through transfer. Things need to be done not for, or to the person, but at most with.  People should not be helped by outsiders if their family or community is able to do it.  If not, legitimate personal or local structures are not given the chance to develop normally and dependency is maintained.

This is very reasonable.  But this is theory, and how does it work in practice?  Say, when an old woman with holes in her sandals comes to your office, says she is a widow, and asks you for money so she can eat?  Or an old man who you know works very hard, who is kind and friendly to you every day, one day asks you for money so he can buy glasses, as he can’t read anymore?  Or the guy who you’ve employed to make you a garden, who you know spends all his time working or taking care of his family, doesn’t ask you for anything but talks about how one of his kids is sick a lot and he wishes he had enough money to take him to the hospital to get blood work done?  Ie, when you are a wealthy outsider with little understanding confronted with opportunities to use your money to make a substantial difference in the lives of good people who are trying hard but who have limited resources?

This is where 19^th century literature is screwing me up.  Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo and Dostoyevsky and the like are full of kind acts done by strangers that change peoples’ lives forever.  In the case of the two latter authors these acts are specifically portrayed as instances of God working through people to redeem the broken lives of others.  Jean Valjean steals a silver candlestick from the archbishop, who, when he’s arrested, says, I gave it to him but he forgot to take the other one.  His life is changed. A kindly doctor gives Mitya Karamazov a bag of nuts when he is little and poor and that kindness stays with Mitya his whole life; when he’s an adult someone sticks a pillow under his head while he’s sleeping and with this freely given kindness is triggered his redemption from the trap of spiritual and physical debts that have been destroying him and he’s reborn into a world where love is freely given and received. (His brother Ivan, meanwhile, can’t accept free and unmerited kindness, has to stick to the system of just exchange, and is driven into madness and possibly damnation). When the sanctimonious director of Jane Eyre’s charity school comes to visit (with his fat children) and reprimands a teacher for spoiling the starving orphans by giving them a snack, he says, “Think how you feed their vile bodies, but starve their immortal souls!”   In Dickens, the rich are Good when they are kind and giving to the poor, and Bad when either they refuse to or they do so in a way that puts conditions on the poor which the rich people don’t understand are degrading or impossible.  In Dickens, if a poor widow asks wealthy Mr. Chucklebury or someone for bread and Mr. Chucklebury says, My good woman, if I gave it to you, then you wouldn’t have to work for it, would you?  Then where would your self-respect be? and then he sits down and eats his second breakfast in the house he inherited and never worked for, the reader knows that Mr. Chucklebury is Bad and a Hypocrite. In practice, it always feels like a short step from dependency theory thinking to this kind of thing, particularly since I am very wealthy.

My problem is that Dickens and Dostoyevsky resonate a lot more with my heart and experience than development theory does, even if my head thinks it should trust the professionals, and right now it’s hard for me to reconcile them.  It’s complicated by a couple things. I’ve known some Dickens characters; for example, my friend Ricardo.  He came to the US to live with his uncle, not knowing any English and hoping for a better life.  Two weeks in he had a fight with his uncle, who kicked him out on the street.  Homeless and not speaking any English in the middle of LA, Ricardo was undaunted.  He bought a broom, and went to owners of taco trucks, asking if they could give him food or a little money in exchange for keeping their areas clean.  Being a very outgoing person, while he was cleaning he tried to learn English by talking with the customers.  Eventually he made friends with an old woman who was a repeat customer.  When she found out he had no-where to stay, she invited him to stay with her.  She gave him food and clothing and helped him to learn English.  Eventually he made enough money to move to the Sacramento area, where he had more family.  Working three jobs at once, he got married and eventually earned enough money to buy his own house.  When I knew him (he was my lab assistant briefly, and the best lab assistant I ever had) he was planning to try to open an organic produce market. It’s possible his personality might have led him to rise above his circumstances anyhow, but wow! so many good things came out of that old woman’s incredibly stupid and irresponsible act of kindness.  Every shelter I’ve worked at would have strongly urged her not to do it.  But to be honest (and not in any way saying that they are wrong in giving warnings) most of the substantial good I’ve felt I’ve done at shelters has been in doing stupid things I’ve been advised against.

In addition I am conscious that myself, I’ve been given more than I’ve earned. All my life I’ve been the recipient of white privilege and of being born a citizen of a country where there is a lot of opportunity, a good exchange rate, where there’s free, compulsory primary education and a lot of scholarships to colleges. I was able to go to college because the state of California mostly paid for it, and grad school thanks to the state of Illinois.  Most of the things I own are gifts from family or friends.  I was only able to come here to Congo because of a large, generous gift from people who don’t even know me, I’m supported by my home church that I’ve been more or less away from since I was 18, most of the lab equipment I came with was given, and I’m living rent-free in a house generously furnished by solicitous neighbors, who also frequently shower me with more gifts of food, visits, flower arrangements and advice than I can even absorb.  And these are just a few and not even the most important examples of things I’ve been given.  Have I been harmed by them or blessed?

Also, when I talk to people here, they sound like they are kind of on the Dickens side as well.  Parasites and criminals should, of course, not be encouraged.  But wealth is for sharing.  A missionary friend put it this way; when inflation and climate make money and food unsaveable, the safest mode of savings is in your community—that is, in kind acts done for those around you.  Then when you are having hard times, they will remember how you helped them and then they will help you.  In this way, money isn’t capital.  Money just gives you the opportunity to earn capital where it counts, with your neighbors.  Not that anyone I’ve talked to makes it that complicated… the essential is, God gives people money so they can help other people, and then when they are in need God will use other people to bless them.  Everyone I’ve talked to in depth (though it hasn’t been many people yet) has had a story about a time in their lives when they went through a tight spot and God helped them through the kindness of strangers or of their community.  And that’s how kindness makes the world go round.

This is, I think, how I operate too.  That is, I’ve always felt conscious of being given a lot, and that the direct consequence of that was that I should give a lot and that I didn’t need to be afraid to do so.  This being able to give freely and without worrying about the consequences, enjoying the consciousness of God’s provision to me and through me, is one of the main good things and solid joys in my life, and one of the concrete ways I experience God and learn more about Him.  So it’s thrown me off balance, this new dynamic in which free giving in love is no longer the currency of the kingdom of heaven, but can be an instrument of paternalism and actual harm.  How do I know… in helping this old man buy a pair of glasses, am I being an instrument of God’s love or am I perpetuating one of colonialism’s evil grandchildren, which has been helping to depress Congo for decades?    If it’s not appropriate to give to him, who do I give to?  With every refusal to give, I feel my heart becoming harder, and it doesn’t feel good.

How do you avoid paternalism while participating in a generosity-driven social economy when you are an outsider and for various reasons much richer than everyone else?  If the system is that you give to me when you have enough and I’ll give when I have enough, it requires that both partners have their ups and downs. If one’s always relatively up… paternalism!  If it’s seen in more a karma sense—ie, I give to you because sometime down the line I know I’ll want someone to give to me—how does the rich person avoid becoming the universal provider and setting up as a little god?  That’s where the fine distinction comes; how do we represent God’s love to people and let him work through us, without subconsciously wanting to usurp his role in peoples’ lives?

I don’t know the answer (AT ALL, especially when it comes to real cases) but I know some directions I think I should look in.  One answer, which I don’t want to be true, is that your presence as a wealthy outsider in the gift economy will just by the nature of things mess it up, like a fat adult in a moonbounce full of kindergartners.  In this case, it’s just not a good thing to try to participate or to be a part of the local social economy.  You should use your money and knowledge and free time maybe to discover and fight against unjust systems which oppress the poor or to give relief in truly desperate situations, but by trying to live with them you’re upsetting a delicate ecology and you should just not do it.  Or if you do live there in order to learn more about their situation, it should only be for a short time in order to make sure that dependency doesn’t happen, and you shouldn’t try to become part of the community.

I think another big element of the answer (which I like the sound of but is easier said than done) is to realize the ways in which the supposedly poor people are richer than you and the things you need from them, and making the mechanism of exchange work that way. I think a really big part of paternalism, like I talked about last time with the deficiency post, comes from wealthy, self-sufficient feeling foreigners feeling like the local community has nothing worthwhile to give in exchange, because our culture has taught us to place an inflated value on money and things. This is obviously a big theological error but really easy to fall into. Anyhow, if someone is giving me his social and intellectual wealth by visiting me and thereby including me in the community, relieving my isolation, telling me about his country and helping me to learn his language, is it paternalism if I in exchange give him my material wealth and help him repair his shoes that are falling apart?  The reason this is hard is that it’s hard to know if to him, the exchange is an equal one.  If he values the material wealth he doesn’t have a lot more than the social wealth he’s giving, it seems like this relationship could pretty easily become a provider-dependent one. I think acknowledging mutual dependency and need is a huge part of working together with poor people for change, but I don’t think it can be the only answer.

A third answer, which I tend to do now because it’s the easiest, is only to give luxuries.  We do this unconsciously in America and I always wondered why, but I think I know now.  I mean, if you give your friend deodorant and underwear for Christmas she might take it as a nasty hint rather than as a gesture of friendship, because that’s something she should be able to provide for herself and by giving it to her you’re suggesting she can’t.  It’s insulting.  Unless people really have no resources, as a friend it’s only acceptable to give them things they don’t absolutely need.  So I’ve spent a couple thousand francs buying a round or two of palm wine for half the population of Bilili-Etat in response to a friend’s request, while refusing to give cloth to a woman I don’t know who says she needs it for clothes for her baby.  This sounds horribly wrong, but the one action just feels more like saying, I like you, thank you for liking me, here is a gift to cement this friendship, while the other feels sort of embarrassing and insulting and like it’s fostering historical dependency.  What this mostly translates to in practice is giving out lots of vegetables from my overabundant garden. That feels like a nice halfway point between a necessity and a luxury for some reason.  But again, I don’t think this can be the only answer.  When Jesus said to help the poor, he probably meant more than just buying them drinks so they would like you.  And some people genuinely need the help they are asking for.

Of course the fourth part of the answer, which is the hardest, seems to be the necessary prerequisite for doing anything well.  That is, to get to really know people and the milieu you’re in.  Right now, anyone could come up to me and say she’s a widow and I would have no idea. And, for all I know, widows have a lot of power and society provides for them well.  I don’t know who the community helps and who they don’t, or how they help.  I don’t know who’s really in need and who’s a famous sponger.  I don’t know who’s related to whom.  I have no idea the structures that are extant, so I don’t know what a particular action would support or undermine.    Maybe there are community structures I could be strengthening by participating in as an enthusiastic member, rather than undermining by working outside of.  If it’s possible, I’d like to overcome the “outsider” part of “wealthy outsider”.  But, despite the fact that people are very, very welcoming, it might not be possible.  Unfortunately, I feel like this path will take years, and language skills, and a lot of emotional investment.  But I think this is the main key to reconciling Charles Dickens with development theory… after all, the main fault of the Bad Dickens character (in the event that they are not just 100% evil) is usually that they are too proud to consider anyone poor worth being friends with or getting to know on equal terms, which leads them into dealing with them harshly, callously and ignorantly.

To go back to the doctor metaphor I used at the beginning, that I stole from “When Helping Hurts”—it’s not good if the doctor treats the symptom but not the disease, or if he treats the wrong disease (for example relieving material poverty if the main problem is actually that for some reason they are a social outcast).  But the thing I don’t like is the idea that I have to be a “doctor”, because I have control of a lot more wealth and resources.  I am not qualified!  I don’t know anything!  Who made me doctor?  But like it or not, it seems like if I have resources, I am automatically responsible for deciding the best way to use them.  I hope I can remember this when I get back to US.

Lusekele has a party :)

Last Sunday, the youth of Lusekele who have been taking catechism classes for the past couple months got baptised.  It was a really big event.  A pastor from a neighboring village and a really great men’s choir from another came for the occasion.  Here is the procession going down to the river (7:30am ish)

There were nine kids; 8 girls and one boy (Marjeanne’s little brother)

Afterwards, the choir sings and Marjeanne’s dad enthusiastically blows the shofar

Afterwards, the whole procession went back to church, which had been beautifully decorated, and was also adorned with new pews (!!)  Many choirs sang (below are the justly famous Mamas of Lusekele)

The choir sang while everyone trooped out (by now it was about noon).  Our church always does a fun thing where when you come out, you join the end of a line that shakes hands with people, so everyone shakes everybody’s hand

Afterwards, everyone formed another procession, complete with the professional men’s choir, the Lusekele women’s choir which is no joke either, and the shofar, and we went around to all the houses of the kids who were baptized.  At each house, there was a lot of palms and flowers and a beautifully laden table for the kids who were baptized, and they were served food, and usually the rest of us were too.  Each house in the village got visited too, and everyone contributed a little something to help with the costs.  We spent a good amount of time at each house, and it was nearing 5 oclock when we finally got to the house of the last kid.  The men’s choir dropped out at about house number 3, but the ladies were made of tougher stuff and lasted all the way through.

It was really fun, and everyone in the village was involved pretty much.  I think it is a nice way to welcome people into the family of God and maybe a little foretaste of the party to come:  to give kids who have been used to serving and eating last all their lives a time when they’re served and eat first, dressed in new clothes and being rejoiced over by everyone else.

6 houses in, and still going strong!  I like this girl, Karen, a lot.  Everyone else does a pouty model face in posed pictures, making me look dumb for being the only one smiling.  But not her!  Also she is my favorite Kikongo helper.

Sufficiency!

Last post was sort of whiny and probably led to the impression that I am suffering.  I am not suffering!  I am living like a queen.  Probably life will never be this luxurious again.

A big highlight of my life here is my garden.  Actually it’s not mine, it’s Musualu Bonard’s.  Musualu is another big highlight.  He is a guy who constantly throws himself into his work, doing things beautifully and well.  I think that of all the people I’ve ever met, he’s the one who most thoroughly seems to do his work as an act of praise to God, and to see his successes as gifts from God.  To be a gardener is, for him, a very high calling.  After all, God called Adam to be a gardener too.  Another calling he has is to take care of me and make sure I am ok, and to make sure that I am properly appreciating Africa.  Every week he brings me a different kind of fruit or something interesting that he thinks I might not have experienced yet.  And every lunch we eat together and he gives me theology lessons, and reminds me that I need to be praising God all the time. He instructed me that I need to show all my friends in America how great Africa is, and also suggested that I show off his beautiful garden.  So, this post is for Musualu.

Here it is at the beginning… nothing growing….

Tiny plants, gently shaded by palm frond tents:

 And a few short weeks later…. (Look at those great structures! Congo is a paradise of good sticks)

And.. the harvest!  Right now we have sweet potato leaves, green beans, green onions, mapukupuku, ngayi-ngayi   (African leaf vegetables), turnip greens and mustard greens coming out our ears.  Here are the first two handsome cucumbers

And some other fun things that make life enjoyable

A motorcycle ride to an extension visit with one of Lusekele’s extension agents, Phillipe Kikobo.  It’s a great privilege to get to learn from him; he’s got a lot of experience

 

Here’s some tubers from one of the resistant cassava (manioc) varieties that Lusekele has introduced to the region.  Pretty impressive!  Cassava is the staple food here… the tubers are soaked, then dried, and pounded into flour which is then mixed with corn flour to make a sort of thick porridge that you eat with sauce … every day, for lunch and dinner.  Lusekele’s work with improved varieties has literally saved villages in the region.

I got to do some soil analysis too, in soil under different cassava varieties.  People are excited about the pH meter

 And here I am with improved cassava variety “Obama” :)

Also, they’ve assigned Papa Kola, one of the Lusekele technicians, to help me in lab so he can learn my techniques.  Actually he spends a lot of time correcting my techniques and making them better.  I am very grateful for him, too

Another thing that’s exciting is that you can wear, say, six yards of bright blue fabric decorated with large orange umbrellas and no-one looks at you funny.  In fact, it’s encouraged.  Here I am attempting to do my model face.

Also, Ed and Miriam’s cat has really cute kittens

 

 

 

Deficiency

My favorite existentialist soil ecology professor once said in the course of a lecture, “As plant pathologists, we are taught to regard all life as basically diseased.”  After the past couple weeks, I know how he feels.  I’ve been reading up a lot on what different oil palm deficiencies look like—potassium deficiency is shown by orange spots on the older leaves, yellowing in the mid-crown and shorter fronds up top, while magnesium deficiency is shown by orange coloring and necrosis on the tips of the older leaves, etc . etc.  Nitrogen and phosphorus and boron are often deficient too, and if the nutrients are out of balance with each other there are different symptoms.  Drought, diseases and insects all show different signs and they can all interact together—for example a potassium-deficient palm has more trouble taking up water, and a water-deficient palm is more susceptible to the dreaded fusarium wilt.  The direct effect of all this reading and diagnosing is that wherever I walk now my mind says, that palm has magnesium problems, that grass is P deficient and whoa! look at those necrotic margins on that shrub, boy it must be K-deficient!  The funny thing is when I notice myself so caught up in looking at deficiencies that I forget I’m basically in a rainforest, surrounded by giant trees and intense green everywhere, where even cut fence posts stuck in the ground start acting like Aaron’s staff and putting out leaves (see picture).

I was talking to a Nigerian friend once who was a sociologist and knew (like, sadly, so many other people) nothing about soil, and she made a comment something like, the bright red color in our soils shows they are really great, right, and that’s why so much grows here? My initial mental response, as a trained soil scientist, was, your soils are actually terribly poor.  They have no capacity to hold nutrients and they are really acid, etc.  But then again, there’s the evidence of my eyes—they are pretty great at growing giant trees, amazing fruit, hundreds of kinds of flowers, and have supported people for centuries; in fact, how is a soil “poor” when it successfully supports life in a million different forms that couldn’t exist as well anywhere else?  To be a little brutal—did my classes train me to think of it as “poor” because it can’t grow corn like Illinois?  Because things like carrots, which are enjoyed by the foreigners who set up the classification system, don’t grow well here?  Because industrialized monocropping is impossible?  Not entirely, of course, but the point I wonder about is—to what extent do we classify “deficient” things which are more appropriately classified as “inappropriate for the systems with which I’m familiar”?  And how much of “underdevelopment” has been caused by trying to change one place into another which God never intended it to be?

The terms “developing countries” and “developed countries” always struck me as kind of poisonous, because to me they seem to suggest that one day, Congo can and should look like Illinois.  That is, developing countries have yet to pass through all the stages that developed countries have, but they are and should be proceeding in that direction.  But the soils and climates (and probably lots of other things that I don’t know about, knowing nothing, sadly, of sociology) are a lot different, and I just don’t think it will work.  The soils just won’t store nutrients.  Reading soils textbooks talking about tropical soils is really depressing—they make it sound, frankly, like God created Africa to be poor and hungry. And looking at history and statistics is also depressing, and as a foreigner looking around you is very depressing.  The lives of almost everyone are incredibly, incredibly hard and the hopes for an easier future seem so slight.  My first month here was extremely difficult—just adjusting to the difficulties of living in a place where it’s so easy to get sick, to be in pain, to not eat enough(**), where elements of basic living like cooking and drinking and bathing are so much work, and with the additional consciousness (shared by all my neighbors) that I am wealthier, lazier and better equipped than almost everyone around me, and on top of that wanting to share what I have but being very conscious that there is not enough to go around.

The feeling that arises in the newly transplanted and unhappy foreigner is one of intense deficiency.  Two things come out of this.  One is a separation—you feel like everyone wants to take from you, and you don’t have enough, so you start to get protective and closed off and think in “us” and “them” terms.  It’s much easier to be friends with rich people than poor people.  The other thing is that you start to wonder about God’s justice.  Why did he give us so much and them so little?  Why is life in the US so sufficient and here so deficient?

This is the thinking that I know I have to fight against.  I think as Christians, an article of our faith is that God did not make anyone or anything deficient.  He made things for different purposes but he did not make anything wrong.  The church, which is shaped by the different societies and lands it is in, is a body, and an ear is not a very badly-made elbow.  In fundamentals (for example, soil and climate) God made Congo because he loves Congo;  because he is a master artist and designer, and because he loves his world and wanted to bless it, and to help the world to know him and to demonstrate his kingdom, he made Congo.  I think this is true physically, socially and spiritually.  But it’s hard make sense of sometimes, when things seem so hard.

An example I think of a lot—when my friend Regina was doing urban ministry in the Philippines, she met one of the missionaries, a woman who had grown up in the Manila slums and later met and married an American.  She recounted to Regina her reaction the first time she traveled to the US, and saw a full refrigerator; she thought, “How do these people ever learn to trust in God?  It must be so hard for them.”  If God taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” because he loved us, the Church is greatly blessed by having churches full of people who know how to pray this well.  The Church and we as members of the church need to learn to see other parts of the body as Christ sees them, and see how we ourselves need them and can depend on them.

But this gets into dangerous ground, because it becomes easy for us affluent people to say, God created some people to be poor and hungry (but thankfully not me), so I don’t really have any responsibility towards my neighbors, and also ignores fundamental justice issues.  (Congo, says Wikipedia, is actually the richest country in the world… in minerals.  Who are those riches benefitting? Why?).  Congo, like everywhere else, is also suffering from the Fall.  There are genuinely horrible things here, which MUST be against God’s will.  Signs of Babylon and the New Jerusalem are here just like everywhere else.  And the question for me as a Christian involved in “development” needs to always be, I think, “how do I know which is which?”  How do I see this place as He sees it and love it as He loves it, free both from the unhappy transplant’s feeling of fundamental deficiency and of sentimentalism that everything has some good purpose and nothing needs to change and it’s not my business anyhow, or from the different sentimentalism that says all we need to do is return to the Golden Age of the happy village, before white people came and screwed everything up.  Development implies a growing towards a healthy and stable maturity, and if I want to work towards development it’s necessary, I think, to have a vision of what that maturity looks like.  If a “developed” Congo which is fully equal on a fundamental level to the US looks nothing like the US, what does it look like?   Or maybe a better question is, when the Kingdom of Heaven is established and we see the part of it that Congo was a tiny, delicious foretaste of, what does it look like?  I feel like if I can’t see this, I might find myself if the horrible position of actively trying to destroy something unique and good while really trying to be benevolent and useful (a position others have found themselves in!)  And an interesting question for me as a soil and ag person to explore is, what does a ‘developed’ agriculture look like which does not try to imitate systems I know and then make the best of deficiencies, but starts with the premise that God made Congo’s soil and climate the way it is because he loves each child and doesn’t want a single one to be malnourished—ie that looks to strengths and uses them to their full potential?  These are of course questions that probably every single other agricultural development person and farmer here is also pursuing in some form, and a goal for the rest of my time here is to learn more about answers that others have found.

But given that the kingdom of heaven isn’t here yet, how do you live as a rich person in the meantime in a place which (says Wikipedia) has the 2^nd lowest GDP per capita in the world and where pretty much everyone feels strongly that life has some serious deficiencies?  My first big crisis here was trying to figure out how to deal with people asking me for stuff all the time.  I am sure that usually they needed the thing or money more than me, and I had enough to spare, and doesn’t the Bible say to be generous?  But after a while you just feel bitter and used, and also development theory and common sense and my mom all say, don’t encourage dependency and reinforce Western paternalism by giving stuff.  I asked a lot of people, and most of them pointed me to look at Jesus.  I mean, talk about having infinite resources and being in the middle of a lot of people who ask you for stuff all the time.  And sometimes he did miracles and sometimes he didn’t.  He multiplied loaves and he also refused to.  He healed many people, and then there were places he never went and those people weren’t healed.  He never did miracles on demand to prove anything.  To me, his ministry seems to have been informed by three things—call them, where he was from, where he was going and why he was there in the first place.  He knew (and we as God’s children can know, I think) his infinite wealth and resources.  Which isn’t to say he was wasteful, just that the idea that the supply of bread might run out didn’t enter into his calculations.  More importantly, his actions were informed by the authority that he derived from the knowledge that he was there as a representative of his Father and was acting in obedience to him.  And secondly, he acted as he did because he had a clear view of the Kingdom he was bringing near, and to demonstrate it was always his goal and his vision of ministry.  Because he know what the Kingdom looked like, he knew that healing a leper who said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean” would demonstrate it and serve its purposes, but that “giving a sign” to skeptical Pharisees would not.  And thirdly, he was there because he loved people, and all his actions, even his refusals to perform signs, were done because of that love.  I feel strongly, strongly right now that if I end up in development, all my actions need to be informed by that same knowledge of sufficiency, derived authority, vision of the kingdom and deep love for people.

I don’t feel any of those things right now , really, and it makes me feel useless and immature most of the time, and is also my excuse for not doing much of anything besides take soil samples.  But I think I shouldn’t expect them yet—I don’t know the place well, I can barely communicate with most people, and I spend a big part of my time alone in lab or taking samples or writing up results or whatever.  When you are a shy and workaholic introvert, reading phosphorus papers and taking samples is easy, visiting relative strangers you can’t talk with too well is really hard!  That’s why I’m feeling now that I’ve almost finished the first part of my project, I should spend a lot more time being outward-focused, hanging out with people and learning and praying a lot.  The comforting thing is that it’s not up to me to develop anything; I’m pretty sure and in fact I’ve seen that God is already here and working powerfully through the Congolese church and people (i.e., pretty much through Lusekele’s work of introducing improved cassava and peanut varieties, malnutrition has been almost eradicated throughout the region) and they are nicely letting me join in.

(**NOTE: for the honor of Lusekele and of Marjeanne: I have been treated and fed royally the whole time. Everything that could be done to make me happy and comfortable has been done.  Things are just difficult to get used to at first.)

Je preleve beaucoup des echantillons!

It’s sort of incredible to me, that a mere month and a half ago I was unfamiliar with the magic words “préléver les échantillons” (to take soil samples), and also the great word, “jachère” (fallow land).  For the past couple months those have been the answer to most of the questions I get asked… ie, “what are doing?” Taking soil samples!  “where are you going?” The jachères!  (see last post). Though it’s kind of sad when your whole life can be reduced to a couple phrases…

Actually I take samples in lots of other places besides the jachères.  Here, for example, is one of the Lusekele oil palm plantations.

There are quite a few; Lusekele has done a lot of work in refining their techniques and also in helping local farmers who are interested in learning to do commercial oil palm. The plantations an important income generator for the station, and also give them a place to test out new techniques.  Unfortunately, some of the plantations are producing less than expected, and one of them has been looking pretty sick for a couple of years.

 

One of the projects I’ve been working on is to take samples from a lot of different plantations and see if I can help to figure out what’s going on.

Look at those potassium deficiency symptoms!! Another reason I don’t post many pictures any more is that almost all of them are of deficiency symptoms.

Here’s another interesting experiment they are doing:

A potential solution that agronomists have developed for the problem of how to replenish soil organic matter when you can’t leave your land in fallow for as long as you used to is something called alley cropping.  In alley cropping, the same land is used continuously, but you intersperse strips of leguminous trees in with the crop.  Since they are leguminous they fix nitrogen into the soil, and their branches can be broken off and used as soil cover to prevent erosion and green manure to add nutrients for the crop.  At Lusekele, they’re using Leucaena.  However, for some reason the trees at one end of the field are doing really well, but at the other end have never been able to grow well.  I’m doing some soil tests to see if I can find a difference between the two sides that might explain this.

One of their most successful experiments is an intercrop between corn and a tropical legume called mucuna, or velvet bean.  Congo has two rainy seasons; they plant corn during the first one, so it’s already pretty well grown by the second one.  Then they plant mucuna. The mucuna grows really fast and gives good soil cover, and also suppresses weeds.  When the corn is harvested the mucuna takes over, and then dies on its own during the long dry season.  All during the dry season it forms a thick mulch (see picture), and then decomposes when the rains start again, giving its nutrients back to the soil just in time for the corn to use them.

This is a really good way to keep nutrients in the system in tropical soils, where N is easily leached out and P can get eroded away or adsorbed permanently onto mineral surfaces.  They’ve been getting really good yields but they’ve been slowly declining.  They’ve got three fields of different ages, and I’m trying to figure out if the soil can give hints about what becomes limiting first.  Also I’m taking nitrate measurements all through the growing season, to get an idea of the timing of nitrogen release.  So far my data is making no sense and it’s driving me crazy!!

That’s why I’m glad I get to spend some time NOT doing soil work, and just learning how farming works here and spending time with interesting people.  Here are some of my fellow interns!

There’s an agricultural college nearby that requires its students to do a practical internship, so Lusekele gets a steady stream of “stageuers” coming in.  They are my best friends here and I am so grateful for them!  Last week I got to help plant a manioc (cassava) field.  One of Lusekele’s main focuses is giving farmers access to improved varieties that are more disease resistant or able to get higher yields.  For that, they plant the improved material in ‘multiplication fields’ and then sell the seeds or, in the case of manioc, cuttings.  Planting the field took a long time.  First it was burned, but that doesn’t really kill anything.  After the burning the remaining plants needed to be hacked out/ down, and collected, and burned again.

Then we made lines exactly 90 cm apart (this was probably the most time consuming part… closely supervised by Mma Philo, one of Lusekele’s extension agents),

 

and then dug holes down along the lines with hoes (that was my job…I was very good at it), and then drop in the little 10cm manioc cutting and cover it with soil.

The whole field took about a week I think.

You’ve probably reached your saturation point for crop pictures.  Just wait till next time when you get the lab pictures :)