Author Archives: admin

Acequia Part 2: Historia

Posted on by
Reply

 

Ditch Witch

The ojito is not haunted to my knowledge.  I’ve never heard any La Llarona stories, about this place, but that’s not to say she’s never been spotted here.  Don’t get me wrong, you feel a presence in the mountains where the acequia tumbles down, but it is more like a whiff of prehistoric history.

The summer I videotaped these scenes, I bushwacked alone up sugarloaf, the first big hill behind the stream. I took a break in the arroyo carved out over the years from the water flowing into the ojito.  As I sat on a giant boulder I could easily imagine my resting place to be a prehistoric campsite.  The hills felt eerily familiar to me.  It was as if I had encountered them in a past life.

A human skeleton found in the church parking lot.                        Photo EMHS and UNM.

Before I was here the Spanish had come and given San Antonio its name. Before they arrived there was an Indian pueblo.  Prior to that settlement, hunters and gathers came to the stream to drink.  And they have been doing that for a long time.  Ever since human beings found a way to migrate into North America they have been coming to San Antonio. Continue reading →

Acequia Part 1: Introducción

Posted on by
Reply

The first time this movie was screened it was on the back wall of Tijeras church for the East Mountains of New Mexico’s Centennial Celebration. It was ten minutes before the start of the show and the entire building was packed. Just under a hundred people crammed inside the church; others peered through the doorway like it was Las Posadas.

Five minutes before my screening, the local historical society, who had organized the Centennial Celebration, made a hasty announcement. Continue reading →

In the Shadow of the Hot Sun: Aid Effectiveness & Informal Economies in the Digital Era

Posted on by
Reply

The shortcomings of foreign assistance, the potential of new technologies, and what the First World could learn from the Third.


The Price of Assistance

Even with the stopover in Switzerland, the ride from Dulles Intl. to Jomo Kenyatta was a long one. Somewhere over the Sahara I began to reflect on the project I was embarking upon.  As a health worker, I was sent by an international NGO to teach better hygiene practices to those living in Kibera, an informal settlement located in Nairobi, Kenya.  Last summer fuel prices were on the rise.  The $2,300 price of the plane ticket was shocking.  When I was told that the population I would be assisting lived off of a dollar a day I calculated that the same money the NGO spent on my travel could have sustained a Kibera resident for six years.  Yes, I  possess a few specialized skills.  Yes, my experiences and education have given me some understanding about the field of international development.  But how much of an impact would I truly make on the people I was so eager to help?  I started to evaluate my effectiveness.

Window shopper.

Kibera certainly has its share of problems, ranging from weak governance to crippling poverty, but it’s not completely destitute. One prominent feature of the slum is its bustling marketplace.  Even though the government does not recognize the settlement, residents are able to live and work in Kibera  by exchanging goods and services amongst each other and out of these transactions unofficial institutions are created. How does the informal economy drive indigenous innovation to keep its participants afloat?  How effective is it compared to foreign assistance?  The answers to these questions could help to define the murky underbelly of globalization.  In addition, emerging new technologies have the potential to flattened traditional hierarchies and provide new opportunities that accelerate economic development in impoverished regions around the world.
Continue reading →

Blending In: VS Naipaul’s Masks and Those Who Wear Them

Posted on by
Reply

One should never judge a book by its cover, but I chose to read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River because I liked the photograph on the front of the man wearing a mask.  I’ve always been interested in masks.  Over the years I’ve collected quite a few and my favorites are the ones that I’ve bargained for on the street.  The best one I have is an ancient looking piece carved out of the side of a tree trunk and painted with thick red and black stripes.  I bought it from a man in Gisenyi, Rwanda.  After a crude exchange of French I got the mask (and three hand rolled cigars thrown in) for $5.  He pointed across the lake towards Bukavu, DRC and told me that it came from a spot of bush on the horizon.  In A Bend in the River, masks symbolize the post-colonial tension between foreigners and Africans.  Who controls the path of the continent?  Is it determined by Africans acting under the mask of Europeanism?  Or is it the Europeans who continue to lead under a mask of Africanism?  What is the true face of African development?  Characters like Father Huismans, Raymond, Ferdinand, and Salim add insight to these questions. Continue reading →

Developing Dictators: The Problem with Foreign Aid in Uganda

Posted on by
Reply

Searching for Sustainability

Uganda, an East African country about the size of Oregon, has often been referred to as the poster child of Sub-Saharan development, but lately this title has been questioned. In the 1980s, its charismatic president, Yoweri Museveni, led the country out of civil war and created reforms that reduced poverty and disease. However, the leader has been in power for over 25 years and his rule has become increasingly authoritarian. Over the last decade, Uganda’s government has run off of a patronage scheme funded by foreign aid, but rising corruption has made donors withdraw. Museveni now looks for revenue in the early stages of a local oil industry and in partnering with the United States military in the war against terror. This may bring economic prosperity and security to the country, but how the Ugandan people will benefit must be critically examined. For quality of life in Uganda to improve, the current aid flows must be frankly assessed and a grassroots approach must be implemented.

A Success Story

At face value, Uganda is a success story of how, with the help of foreign assistance, a country can rise from the shambles of conflict and disease to develop into a modern state. Thirty years of brutal dictatorship and civil war followed after Uganda’s independence from Great Britain in 1961. On its heels came an HIV/AIDS epidemic and twenty more years of guerilla attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army. However, Uganda’s charismatic president Yoweri Museveni has done much to achieve stability in the tiny East African country. After leading his National Resistance Army and Movement to victory against Milton Obote in 1986, Museveni called for an end to tribalism and for the promotion of democracy (Mwenda, 2007). He embraced the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the IMF and quickly became the darling of the international community who guided him towards holding regular multi-party elections (IMF & IDA, 2010; Joseph, 1999). Museveni’s aggressive campaign against HIV/AIDS led to a 10% drop in the infection rate (AVERT, 2011). In 2009, his soldiers chased Joseph Kony’s LRA out of Uganda and refugees have begun to return to their homes in the North. An estimated 2.5 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in western Uganda that could further infuse revenue into the economy (Moro, 2011). The numbers certainly indicate that there has been progress. Uganda’s poverty rate dropped from 56% in 1993 to 25% in 2010, surpassing the Mlllenium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015. It has also moved forward in reducing food insecurity, providing universal primary education, and gender parity (World Bank, 2011).

Continue reading →

Of Crime and Camels

Posted on by
1

 

A few days ago, in the late afternoon, two men stopped a taxi driver at a junction in Soweto East, Kibera. They were thieves running from a crime and needed a getaway ride to Kirangari. The driver refused so the men asked him to just take them to Ndugu stage, a much closer destination, instead. He agreed, but by then the thieves had changed their mind. The taxi driver was shot in the head.

Need a ride?

As you can see from the video, I often pass through Soweto East on my way to work. I haven’t seen the story covered in any of the local papers, but I know the junction where the murder took place very well. It’s just a short distance from the school where we’ve been fixing water tanks and the church where we’ve been giving hygiene trainings. From word of mouth, I’ve learned that the crime scene happened at the point where the tarmac on the road turns to dirt. Cars often get stuck there trying to get over an exposed drainage pipe. The incident is typical of the stories of violence I’ve heard about Kibera. Journalist and residents alike weave this element into their narratives of drugs, rape, and filth that make up this slum tragedy.
Continue reading →

There’s a Hole in the Bucket

Posted on by
Reply

A safe water storage container as interpreted by Bonface, a local artist in Kibera.

I’m sitting in a ramshackle compound in Silanga village, one of the deepest and most neglected areas of Kibera slum, with an impossible task. As one of the Water and Sanitation health workers on this project I’m supposed to be training the locals on how to make safe storage containers for drinking water. Back in the United States our WATSAN team often spoke of employing this simple technology. In the field it would be a core strategy in getting our target population to drink clean water. I’ve got a bucket and a little metal valve, but no way to attach the two. In a place like Kibera resources are hard to come by and tools are no exception.

After asking around for a while, Hellen, one of the residents that we’re working with, disappears and comes back with a hammer and one nail. It’s not the ideal situation, but I decide to make do with what we’ve got. At least I can make a hole in the bucket. I start hammering, but am unable to drive the nail through the plastic. I’m about to give up when one of our partners from a local NGO bursts through the door, fresh from his office in town.

Nobody here but us chickens. A bare compound.

“What are you doing?” He exclaims. “You’re not going to get the nail into that thing without stabilizing it first.”

My partner grabs a large rock from the ground and puts it into the bottom of the bucket. He gives the nail a whack and down it goes. His satisfied grin immediately fades when I show him the valve that needs to fit in the pin-sized hole.

“So what you do now, eh, is make that nail hot, hot,” he explains. “Then you move it around in the hole to melt the plastic.”

I ask Hellen for a candle and this makes my partner scowl.

“No! You need to heat it up on a stove. The nail is going to be really hot so you better get some pliers to hold it.”
Continue reading →

Slumming it in Kibera

Posted on by
Reply

A year later and I’m back in East Africa. This time I’m working on Water Sanitation and Hygiene research for my University in Kibera Slum, Nairobi.

Children relieving themselves along the banks of an already polluted river.

Kibera is one of the largest slums in the world. It’s estimated that 270,000 people live in a 1.5 square mile area of Nairobi that the government doesn’t even recognize. This lack of acknowledgement isn’t a libertarian’s wet dream, but a nightmare when it comes to refuge collection and access to water. Kibera is literally a shanty town built out of trash. The buildings are constructed out of scraps of tin and mud with pieces of plastic bags poking out. The narrow roads are layers of rubbish pounded down and cut through by sewage run-off. Flies buzz around children with open sores. Mangy dogs weakly bask on a bridge that crosses a river made of trash.

Junior surveying the neighborhood.

NGOs have poured millions of dollars into Kibera for the provision of essential, but absent social services. The logos of the NGOs are prominently displayed on everything from the sides of buildings to the t-shirts of the shanty dwellers. Residents receive all sorts of support from trainings to allotments of free food. However these interventions have yet to lift Kibera out of poverty.  It is hard to say if or when the slum will be self-sustaining, but it doesn’t look like it will be anytime soon.
Continue reading →

Meme, Myself, and I: The origins of Dr. Arthur Pastor

Posted on by
Reply

Water on the Brain

You can learn to do anything on the Internet.

One night in December 2007, I was hanging out with two of my friends and we were bored. On television two news pundits were debating whether or not the act of waterboarding was torture. They kept mentioning it was easy to do so I searched for directions on the Internet. Half an hour later I was getting waterboarded in the desert. One of my friends poured the water over me while another videotaped the event. Afterwards, I posted I Waterboarded Myself on YouTube and the video went viral (Larroque, 2007). I was shocked that so many people watched it and I’ve been wondering ever since what made the minute and a half film so popular. I suspect that I stumbled on the Waterboarding meme.

Philosoraptor lived during a time before chickens and eggs.

What’s a meme? One might think of them as infectious bits and pieces of culture that spread information from one group to another. So called “viral marketers” often believe that the videos they produce will get a million hits based on a formula. The strategy is designed around how to spread content, regardless of that content’s character (Greenberg, 2007). In their view, memes can be parasites and humans are just passive carriers.
In contrast, scholars believe that memes aren’t the viruses, but ideas appropriated by individuals to promote their own self-expression. Memes don’t self-replicate in a cookie cutter fashion, but are remixed to take on new contexts each time that they are shared (Jenkins, 2009). Who controls whom? Do memes control humans or do humans control memes? What are the conditions that facilitate the spread of memes? Do their carriers adopt them passively or actively?
Continue reading →

What Twitter Looks Like During a Revolution

Posted on by
Reply

This is a fascinating info-graphic depicting Egypt’s social media organization and uprising. Kovas Boguta, the creator of this map, describes the connections between Twitter users on his blog.  He does a great job at explaining the shape and character of the graphic as well as pointing out some of the key tweeters like Wael Gohnim (This is Ghonim’s favorite song).