EastAfrica | #africamp

Reflections on #africamp

Posted on June 5, 2016 by andrewrfretwell

This is our final blog post for our four month trip to Africa. Instead of my usual pontifications, this blog is broken down into a number of “top ten lists” in order to succinctly share the highlights; enjoy!

The 10 Best Things We Did

Attend ASYV Debate Tournament

After being in the village for like two weeks, we joined the coaches and participants and spent a day in rapid-fire debates on the motion: The Rwandan government should significantly cut its current dependence on foreign aid. I learned a lot about the effects of foreign aid on Rwanda and the global south in general. But more importantly had an incredible day watching and coaching my team of three awesome girls who went on to win the city championship!

Akilah One-on-One meetings

The work we did at Akilah has meaningful in so many ways, and one of those ways in how it allowed us to jump on motos and meet with individuals around Kigali, whether it was worth current students, alumnae, or private sector employers who regularly hired interns and graduates from Akilah. The meetings gave Jamie and I an up-close look into the developing private sector of Rwanda and those who are building it from the ground-up.

Gorilla Trekking

Being close enough to see a fully grown silverback gorilla change its facial expression as it finishes eating one thing and considers if he wants to eat the next thing is…rad. Seriously, it was like close encounter of the best kind.

Driving the Garden Route (including Winelands)

South Africa is immersed in natural beauty and winding our way through the hills along the South and East Coast became like a 4 day drive through a series of impressionist paintings.

SAFARI!

Big Cats, Elephants, Hippos, Giraffes, Craters, Zebras, there is no better way to get lost in nature than safari in Masai Mara, Serengeti and Ngorogoro Crater.

Stonehenge

After safari, it was fitting to go from basking in the natural world to trying to pry into the minds of Neolithic men and women who used this site to…bury the dead? Observe the seasons? Pray? All of the above? Few places leave you with more questions that Stonehenge so obviously, we loved it.

Driving Tour of Capetown with Noel

Our driving tour with Noel was amazing because he showed us the sights and shared with us the stories of South Africa. Not just the ones that feel good to hear, about what a saint Mandela is or how great it was for Apartheid to be overthrown without a war. But he also told us the stories about government abuse and corruption that is severely souring the sweetness of what post-Apartheid South Africa could have looked like. For the comprehensiveness and the nuance that we learned, we will forever be grateful.

White Water Rafting down the Nile

Jamie and I are not extreme sporters but we like to have fun. Rafting the Nile was about as far as we could go. We paddled our way through a couple of Category 5 rapids, got stuck under a 14 foot waterfall (that we rafted over) and we capsized twice…each time there was like a half second when one part of me went “huh, is this how Jamie tells everyone that I died?” But anyway, it was super-super fun and wouldn’t trade it back for anything.

Attended Rwanda’s National Genocide Memorial at Amahoro National Stadium

While we didn’t see the Agahozo Shalom students perform, joining with Rwandans from around the country to come together to remember such a recent, painful, confusing and real trauma in ther collective psyche and individual lives was an honor. And because Rwandans are such hospitable people, we were welcomed into such a private, vulnerable moment with open arms and teary eyes. It was a moment through which I will feel connected to Rwanda for a very long time.

Spice Tour and Beach out in Zanzibar

With our volunteering and safari behind us, we took our last few days in Africa to check out Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. While there we both went on a spice tour, where we used all five senses to learn more about how spices and herbs are planted, grow and are used culinarily, medicinally and cosmetically. We’ve done a lot of walking tours, but from this one we said, “Wait, but really?” way more than any other. Then we spent a few days to just sit on the beach at a resort and drink and eat like we were rehearsing for a Corona commercial. We stayed at the Beach Breeze Resort and I recommend it to all. We were also lucky because it was peak rainy season so prices were low, but it was still sunny and in the high eighties on most days. #winning.

10 Teachers and What They Taught Us

JC, Executive Director of Agahozo Shalom Youth Village – showed us how to hit that balance of bringing the the right people to the table with the right jobs and supporting them, but in a way that lets them do what you hired them to do, and therefore thrive.
Vincent, Village Director of Agahozo Shalom Youth Village – taught us how to look at a start-up and begin building, in order to go from good to great
Ritah, Alumnae Affiars Manager at Akilah Institute for Women – taught us how to love a job through building the relationships through those you serve
Aline, Country Director for Akilah Institute for Women – taught me about part of the psychology of Rwndans as refugees and what that means to their values and sense of self-value
Noel, Tour Guide in Cape Town – taught us to look under the surface to see the stories less told in South Africa, post-Aparthied
Nida, graduate of Akilah Institute for Women – taught us that where there’s a will there’s a way
Francis, Tour Guide for Glory Safaris – taught us about the Maasai and how to consider the balance of thousands of years of traditions with modernity
Jessica, Director of Registration and Career Development at Akilah Institute for Women – gave us a crash course in “Re-organizing the systems of your Start-up” through our work together at Akilah
Maxime, graduate at Agahozo Shalom Youth Village – who inspired us with his ambition, belief in hard work, and gratitude and eagerness towards opportunities and uphill battles
Phyllis, fellow volunteer at Agahozo Shalom Youth Village – taught us how to give without imposing, to support without commandeering, to give in the truest sense of the word

10 Assumptions Going to East Africa Tears Down

Africa is too backwards for there to be significant progress any time soon.
Africa is a great place to send charity to, not business contracts.
African women are comfortable accepting a life similar to that of their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers
The best way for African problems to be solved is to find the equivalent problem in the US or Europe and just apply the model.
Travelling in Africa is not safe.
Unless they are rich, Africans do not speak English.
Africans do not deal with issues around ‘colorism’ since almost everyone is black.
Africa just needs “time” to get better.
Africans think life is cheap.
Africans are a “simple” people.

The 10 Things We Will Do When We Return to Africa

Climb Kilimanjaro and do some Safari Hikes and Balloon Rides
Do some work with African Innovation Prize
Check out the Apartheid Museum in Soweto
Attend Passover or Shabbat with the Abuyadaya in Uganda
Stay over for a few nights in Addis Ababa
See Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe
Hike up a volcano in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Spend more time in Capetown and the Winelands in South Africa
Visit the Nyamatta Church Genocide Memorial in the Southern Province of Rwanda
Hike around Namibia

#africampers out…for now.

Lama Lo Uganda?

Posted on March 16, 2016 by andrewrfretwell

Jamie and I sojourned for a long weekend in Uganda. While Kampala didn’t impress us except for insane traffic, it was a wonderful break from work. We went whitewater rafting down the Nile River and lounged, ate, and happily languished in the sun with drinks in hand. As always, if you want to see photos, including of when we capsized (twice), check our Google Photo Album or follow me (@thewanderingview) or Jamie (@jewsforcheesus) on Instagram.

Not so long ago there was a popular Israeli song titled “Lama Lo Uganda?” Hebrew for, “Why not Uganda?” Here’s a little historical context: In the early 20th century, Great Britain was trying to figure out how to make allies of both Jews and Arabs leading up to World War I. The only way to do that was to find a solution to the conflicting Jewish and Arab aspirations for that blessed and cursed tract of land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. And Great Britain figured it out: let the Arabs have Palestine and give the Jews Uganda! It’s a national Jewish homeland, just in a place where Jews had no historical, spiritual, or physical connection; the Zionist Congress roundly rejected it. The song is lighthearted, ironically lamenting that maybe Uganda was the way to go.

The Uganda Plan was a bad idea; it shifted a problem instead of solving it and it attempted to hollow out the ideals of Zionism while leaving the packaging intact and call it whole. But cutting corners for convenience is ubiquitous: it’s in every organization, hierarchy, and culture in the form of jargon. I define jargon as when a term becomes a symbol and that symbol ends up replacing independent thinking and the goal it was actually established to meet. In business, managers constantly invoke the virtue of efficiency to drive decisions. But efficiency is never the business’s goal, just one indicator among many others. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox capture this “tail wagging the dog” phenomenon in their book, “The Goal.”

In the non-profit industry, managers pray at the altar of innovation, but to what end? Innovation is important, but it so often causes so much hand-wringing it’s as if organizational missions are reduced to being the vehicle to simply showcase innovation. There are myriad examples to include but let’s move to the next point: Democracy in most of East Africa today is little more than jargon.

Democracy is when a society regulates itself to create constructive tension and harmony between individuals and sub-groups, to the benefit of that society as a whole. No one does this perfectly; democracy is as much a group journey as it as a set of systems and institutions. America is an exciting democracy despite, and in some ways because of, its warts, many of which are on full display when Donald Trump tries to poison our country for his own profit. Borrowing from MLK, America’s moral arc is long and uneven, but it bends towards justice. Our democracy is more inclusive and mature than it was 50 years ago and 50 years from now it will be even more so than today.

But in most of East Africa, while the word democracy is everywhere, only the packaging is left intact. Elections were just held in Uganda; President Yoweri Museveni won handily and few believe the results have any authenticity. Elections are the easiest imitations of democracy to display for foreign governments and investors and, in this region, they rarely reflect popular opinion. Even in South Africa, where election results are honest, anyone who is not a beneficiary of the African National Congress hardly feels like they get a whisper in government decisions. Many protest, but more resign themselves to a corrupt, incompetent government. The regimes in Kenya and (un)Democratic Republic of the Congo are too busy remembering who they took bribes from to even feign democracy.

Is this a uniform condemnation? Hardly. We have a fairly fixed conception of democracy: regular elections with universal suffrage, an independent judiciary, protection of press, free expression, and private property. All of these may be a part of our utopian vision but if those conditions are the whole of the democracy we promote, instead of the core pursuit of creating harmony within a society, then we compel these countries to jargnoize democracy for the sake of foreign cash flow. In “Long Walk to Freedom” Nelson Mandela speaks about his childhood village tribal councils. Tribesmen would come to the hall of the chief, present pressing conflicts, and the chief would build an agreement by consensus. The chief was born into his position, so by our standards this is not a democracy. Yet Mandela praised this system as democratic since it settled conflict and created cooperation among quarreling neighbors. Who am I to disagree with the great Madiba!

In “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families” President Museveni explains his disinterest in a Ugandan multi-party democracy by making the comparison to a man with a heart condition who tries to prove his good health and kills himself in the process. The “democratizing” of Iraq and Arab Spring prove the point quite well. We jammed in the mechanisms of democracy where the societal cohesiveness was not strong enough to hold up and what we got are dictators and the Islamic State.

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, DRC’s President Joseph Kabila, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and Jacob Zuma at a ceremony to celebrate the peaceful transfer of power in Tanzania.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame also leads a single-party government and controls the army, which does not hesitate to instruct people on how they should vote when elections are held; no one expects this to change, but should we wag our finger at Kagame? It was only 22 years ago that Rwanda suffered a genocide rooted in the rivalry between Hutus and Tutsis. For democracy to work, citizens must believe that their destiny is enmeshed with the destiny of all their neighbors. Otherwise the staples of democracy are little more than a coat of polish on tribal vitriol. Perhaps Rwanda will host a vibrant political discourse someday with great discord and dignity, but to push that prematurely is not just dangerous, it’s radioactive. You need look no further than Burundi on Rwanda’s southern border to see that Hutu-Tutsi violence remains a potent threat.

So what am I to think? Democracy is a fig leaf for single party rulers, so that’s bad!

But that may be the only way to set the foundations to uphold a democracy, so that’s good!

But we’ll only know that’s the case if a peaceful transfer of power can take place, so that’s…inconclusive.

There is no stress test for if these governments are ushering their countries towards democracy or away from it. Only when Kagame, Museveni, et al either die or step down will we know down which road they have led their people. How frustrating to the instant gratification seeking millennial who is thirsty to witness history, good or bad.

Maybe I should just be content with a fun get-away and ask “Lama Lo Uganda?”