Tag Archives: AIDS

Developing Dictators: The Problem with Foreign Aid in Uganda

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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).

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They’ve Eaten the Money

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I told Robinah I’d help her out. She was in a desperate situation. Robinah is a single parent of four children who also supports her HIV infected mother and a crippled orphan. For the past ten years Robinah had been a teacher at the school where I worked. Then she got fired without notice on the first day of the new semester.

At that point the school owed her three months of back wages and it was easier for them just to let her go. The headmaster replaced her with the very students she had been teaching. The new high school graduates were hired not for their experience, but because they could work for practically free. In Uganda there are no enforceable labor laws. Robinah will probably have to start digging full time in the fields to provide food for her family. Without money for school fees her children, ages 4 to 12, will have to join her. Her mother will have to find a way to purchase her antiretroviral medication.

You’re probably gearing up for me to start pleading with you for a donation for Robinah. “GIVE! GIVE! GIVE!” I should be saying. “For the price of a gourmet cup of coffee this family can have a new lease on life!” At the time I gave Robinah $50. That was enough to get her family through the month. Future assistance remains uncertain. She has no bank account to wire money. I can’t even contact her because she doesn’t even own a phone, let alone e-mail. What do I do, put my faith in a charity to get the money to the right place?

As individuals we give millions of dollars to help those suffering in the developing world survive.  Does all of it reach people below the poverty line, the people like Robinah, who truly need it?

I knew that the school fired Robinah because they didn’t want to pay her, not because they didn’t have the means. I worked in rural Uganda as a community development consultant for two years and followed the money trail from start to finish. I was brought on to a local organization to help with its visibility and give it some publicity. We targeted European trust fund kids on their gap year and others with cash to burn and little afterthought of accountability. We recruited teen voluntourists to come out and workation with us for a few weeks. It was a summer camp that you could put on your résumé. The cash was flowing. In fact, the headmaster couldn’t fire Robinah in person because he was flying to Europe for his annual “fundraising trip”.

You seal up your donation in an envelope and send it to your favorite philanthropic fund. A large portion of that gift goes towards the organization’s administrative costs. That includes stuff like the office rental, phone lines, land rover purchases, and employee salaries. Then what’s left over is distributed over a large population of the organization’s target demographic. Just how much depends on the efficiency and honesty of the organization.

Briefcase organizations focus entirely on fundraising. They run non-profits with a for-profit business strategy. The headmaster I worked for had a pretty good scheme going. He was building a lecture hall, but it had taken him over seven years and it never seemed to get done. Charity groups would come work on it for a week and then give the headmaster completion funds which he pocketed. A new charity would show up in the village oblivious of the last group and the cycle would repeat itself. “The money was eaten” is a popular saying in Uganda.

The founders of my organization were upper-middle class, highly educated, and charismatic. They’d go after overseas money like sharks. I should know: they targeted my friends and family. They’d hustle me on a daily basis. First they’d appeal to my sympathy for the poor, then to my guilt, and if that didn’t work they’d threaten me.

I was asked to sponsor children, buy food and animals, bribe government school officials and traffic cops. My girlfriend was robbed of $400 and her passport at my supervisor’s house while she was taking a shower. My supervisor refused to call the police. Another time, I was on a bus full of senior citizens coming back from  The UN’s International Older Persons’ Day festivities when the supervisor demanded a large sum of money for gasoline. When I refused he told the driver to pull over to the nearest ATM and waited until I made a withdrawal. The next year the same bus of older persons followed me down the street to my house and parked there until I yelled at them to go away.

One day my supervisor got a hold of my home address and decided to visit my parents on his “fundraising” trip to the U.S. He and his wife blew most of their money in Vegas and by the time they got to my home in New Mexico they were broke. They wouldn’t leave until my parents bought them airline tickets to Chicago.

I got suckered in too. A team of social workers and I conducted a needs assessment of the child-headed households in the area. In my village there were many. We found that the biggest problem was not just that these children’s parents had died from AIDS, but that they suffered from malnutrition. I raised money from my friends and relatives back home in the States to build a one-acre school farm. Corn, beans, cassava, and pumpkins were planted in anticipation of 850 vocational students working the land and eating what they grew. The students harvested the crops. However, instead of turning the 200 kilos of corn into school lunches, the school threw the sacks on trucks and sold them at the market. I demanded to know how the money was spent. I was told it was paying teacher salaries. I knew that Robinah never got that cash and that her young replacements were working in a simple exchange for room and board. The only one left was the European-bound headmaster. That’s when I got the feeling that I had inadvertently invested in child labor.

When all the money falls into the hands of the middlemen strange power relationships start to occur. The headmaster used to call the neighboring villagers peasants. He wasn’t too far from the truth. As he received more donations he acquired more assets and bought more land. The poor, many of them orphaned, students worked that land in a sharecropping deal for substandard education. The community had progressed little past feudalism. Foreign aid seemed to reinforce this way of life.

What’s the solution? I’ve heard many critics say that we should just stop aid all together. Although my brush with corruption was especially malevolent, I disagree. The community I lived in has been suffering from the HIV/AIDS epidemic for almost thirty years. It is under no fault of their own that they live with affliction. Empathy is a uniquely human trait. To turn our backs on them is the same as turning our backs on ourselves. You’ll notice that I haven’t directly named names in my whistle blowing. Corrupt as they are, to incriminate the guilty parties would cut off the marginalized populations they serve entirely from outside relief efforts. We must continue to help, but seriously deliberate on how we give assistance.

There are often better contributions of aid than money. One of the best gifts I gave was seed. Seed and Light International donated 18 lbs of seed to the village and we distributed it amongst 25 families. The seedlings grown ended up in the home gardens of seven villages. Seed isn’t a handout, but an opportunity for farmers to invest their own time and energy to create food. Most community members survived at a subsistence level. Our small gardens provided nourishment to the people who needed it most. Surplus produce was even sold at market to generated income. Most valuable of all, the farmers grew more self-reliant.

Assistance works best when it is given in direct response to a community generated need. Unfortunately, most of us in the West don’t have the luxury to travel to Africa and follow the relief efforts through on the ground level. Thousands of miles away, those starving for aid don’t have the means to communicate with their donors. I’ve done my best in my blog posts to bring awareness to the plight of the Ugandan people I worked with and lived alongside. Now it’s time to help them build up enough capacity to remedy their situation. Technology has made the globe a more intimate place and given us the advantage to work together to improve the state of aid. I welcome any comments or suggestions on how we can make a lasting positive impact on people like Robinah and their livelihoods.

As long as the Third World is reliant on foreign aid, we as donors are reliant on third party charities and NGOs. We must demand accountability and transparency in their operations.  Here’s a few things you can do:

  • If you give to a group, invest yourself in a long-term relationship.
  • Research the organizations beforehand and talk to other donors. A lot of the big name charities don’t use their earnings as efficiently as you might think.
  • Follow up on how your money is spent and become outraged if it isn’t used correctly.
  • The best way to know where your donation goes is to make contact with the individuals already working in the field.

Peace Corps volunteers, missionaries, doctors, and students are fixtures in the development world. As individuals they make a long-term commitment to live with the local people, learn their language, and their way of life. They are often more helpful than dealing with larger NGOs who take a substantial cut of the contribution or partner with corrupt local leaders to gain access into a community.

The current economic development paradigm in the Third World is flawed. Although it has originated from post-colonial reparations, the method still forces those in developing nations to be subservient to richer, Western powers. For development to work foreign aid must be finite. Assistance alleviates immediate suffering, but over the long-term it creates a culture of dependency. This weakens the human condition just as much as AIDS weakens the human immune system. If development goals are to be achieved, the people they target must meet them on their own terms and in their own capacity. As an American I can go no further to solve Uganda’s socio-economic problems. To fix them the solution must be distinctly Ugandan. Only a native Ugandan can provide that.

The Revealed Truth Part 5: The Last Supper

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All of the actors in the Lazarus scene come from families that have been directly affected by the AIDS virus. In fact, no family has been able to escape the disease in Kiwangala.  Funerals are held in the village on a weekly basis.  It sounds grim, but Ugandans have told me time and again that they are making progress in fighting the disease and thing are getting better.  In the past someone infected would be dead in a month.  Nowadays, antiretroviral drugs, or ARVs, can keep someone alive for years.  The phenomenon is called the Lazarus effect.  I met one woman who had been HIV positive for 15 years and still led a healthy and productive life.

The problem of the epidemic now is the false sense of security individuals get from believing that the disease has become benign.  Young people think that if they get infected they can just take ARVs.  This has led to an increase in risky sexual behaviors and infection rates are now back on the rise.  On top of that, HIV/AIDS therapy is heavily subsidized by foreign aid.  One of the biggest players in Uganda has been the American government’s P.E.P.F.A.R.  The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief is a $63 billion worldwide initiative started by President Bush.  However, while the epidemic is still growing in Uganda, a cap has been put on P.E.P.F.A.R. funds and doctor’s are now forced to send away patients.  This is compounded by the hesitancy of private donors to give more in the economic recession and local corruption.  If things continue this way the battle against AIDS in Uganda could become one step forward and two steps back.

On a lighter note, we come to the most exotic element in The Revealed Truth: the donkeys.  The entire time I was in Uganda I saw just one horse.  I’ve never figured out why there are so few there.  It could be that there were never any wild horses in Africa, but they weren’t in North America either and here they’ve flourished.   I thought for sure that the British would bring some equines along with them to build their colonies.    Maybe it has something to do with the equatorial tropical environment or that Uganda’s such a small country that there’s no need to travel long distances.  Who knows.  They’re just not here.

The play’s were striving for authenticity and imported these donkeys from Kampala.  They became a spectacle in the village and drew a crowd even before the play started.  People would gather around and shriek in awe at the sight of the beasts.  It’s was like when we go to the zoo in America and see the elephants for the first time.  One woman asked if I feared the animals.  I told her no.  Then she asked me if I eat them in my country.  I played the part of a good ambassador and replied in the negative.  I didn’t want to go into what goes on at the Jello factory.  I do know that they eat donkey in other parts of Africa.  I discovered that at an all you can eat Ethiopian restaurant in Kampala when I asked the waiter about the mystery meat at the buffet.  Fish and grasshoppers aside, I don’t care to eat meat so I can’t give a review on the taste of donkey, but I can tell you that it looked a lot like ground beef.

Speaking of strange dinners, we’ve finally come upon one of the strangest Last Suppers I’ve seen.  It’s also one of my favorites because of it’s unintended humbleness.  Like Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi mentioned in the introductory post of this series, this Last Supper has a carnival atmosphere.  Jesus can hardly be heard over the whirr of the generator, squaking of the intercom, and snickering of the crowd.  The disciples dig into a bag of bread.  Bland Ugandan bread probably has the same consistency of the unleavened bread that was broken at the original Last Supper.

Instead of a chalice of wine, Jesus passes around an old plastic bottle of Rwenzori brand drinking water.  This could be a message of temperance.  The Born Again churches that I worked with didn’t drink alcohol.  Maybe the director of the play was trying to downplay an mention of wine whatsoever.  The reason for this prohibition also might have something to do with Uganda being the number one consumer of alcohol per capita in the world.  Bars are open twenty four hours and local brew is potent and plentiful.  Vodka is served doubleshot size in a plastic baggie and costs about a 30 cents each.   I’ve seen old men drunk in the street at 8AM and a two year old throwing a tantrum until his mother soothed him with a bottle of waragie.   There’s reason to be afraid of liquor.  I once asked a girl from the church out to a neighborhood housewarming party.  She declined telling me that she doesn’t go to discos.  There would be drinking and even dancing there.  It was the equivalent of “Sorry, I’m washing my hair tonight”.

The Revealed Truth Blog Series

This post is the sixth of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.  The  movie is about an hour long  but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.  The next post will feature Jesus’s arrest.

The previous post was The Revealed Truth Part 4: Let The Little Children Come to Me.

The Revealed Truth Part 3: Good Samaritans

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Even though it’s not a speaking role, my friend Godfrey does a great job getting into character as the leper.  Godfrey was one of my students at the local secondary school.  He is also one of the most extraordinary individuals I know.  After both of his parents and two of his siblings died of AIDS when he was 13, Godfrey took over the family farm.  Child-headed households are common in Kiwangala, but Godfrey is different because has always taken on the hardship with an entrepreneurial spirit.  Even though he’s in the field every morning and evening doing the work of four people, he’s still one of the top students of his class.  He also sells the bananas and the sugarcane that he grows at the school canteen.  He’s active in athletics, the church, and drama as you can see here.  Last year he was featured in a movie I made about World AIDS Day.  Godfrey is an inspiration to never give up.  He even convinced me to buy 100 kgs of popcorn kernels that he popped up and passed out at The Reveal Truth premier.

One of the pivotal scenes in Part 3 is when Jesus counsels Nicodemus and convinces him to be born again.  If you want to go to heaven you must first be saved, He says.  Working in community development I partnered with many faith-based organizations and attended their services on Sunday.  Often the lessons of the Bible would be eclipsed by calls from the pastor in his sermon to recruit new members of the church.  When the Ugandans found out that I was not Born Again they aggressively tried to save me.  On one of the numerous occasions, I was in a parked car with a church member waiting for a thunderstorm to die down outside.  We were making conversation to pass the time. One thing led to another and all of a sudden he was trying to save me.  The more I resisted the worse it got.  I felt like I was on a bad date at the drive-in.  The rain couldn’t stop quick enough.

Christianity is relatively new to Uganda.  One young woman, who was working on The Revealed Truth, became Born Again when she was a teenager.  When her animist practicing parents found out, they chased her out of the house and disowned her.  Nowadays, almost all Ugandans identify themselves as being Christian or Muslim and publicly denounce the traditional tribal religions.  However animism is still practiced beneath the surface.  Someone who is sick may go to the health clinic during the day, pray for a miracle in church in the evening, and secretly visit the witchdoctor in the middle of the night.  There are regular reports of child sacrifice.

Obviously missionaries have a lot to do with with Uganda’s religious fervor.  They are responsible for a large portion of the country’s humanitarian development work and nobly live out in the bush with the most impovrished.  However, their gifts come with a trade off.  Their mission is to recruit more Christians.  Many are eager to sign up, but for what?  A new religion or to receive foreign aid?

Despite my criticism of the Born Agains, I think that the religion does help to purify the souls of Uganda.  The Masaka district has been hit hard by spells of bad luck, most recently with AIDS, but also with war.  During the civil war in the 1980s both sides fought with child soldiers.  I’ve met a few that have grown into adults.  It has been suggested to me that by being Born Again they can finally step away from their old lives of violence and the circumstances they were forced into, and start fresh.  Being Born again gives them the psychological release to control their destiny.

Finally, I’d like to have a look at the woman pumping water from the well.  This is a little b-roll that I shot to introduce the Good Samaritan scene.  This is actually where I collected my drinking water during the dry season when the rainwater tank down the street was empty.  I’d carry two 40 liter jerrycans one and a half miles from this borehole to my house. It was easier to carry two rather than one because two gives you balance, plus it’s a good workout.  Eventually I found a man who delivered water to me for 13 cents a jerrycan.  He told me that he makes more money that way than he did as a teacher.  The majority of the population doesn’t have indoor plumbing and so the village waterhole becomes the center of social life.  Water’s fetched mostly by women and children who carry it back home on their heads.  The lady you see here wearing a traditional gomezi dress comes for water at least once day.  Nothing has changed in the 2000 years between her and the Samaritan woman except that the hollowed out gourd has become a plastic jerrycan.

The Revealed Truth Blog Series

This post is the fourth of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.  The  movie is about an hour  long  but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.  The next post will feature Judas.


The previous post was The Revealed Truth Part 2: Cross Culture Shock.

The Revealed Truth Part 1: Shepherds and Fishermen

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The Archangel Gabriel rouses the shepherds awake, but the cows in the background are not part of the scene. A herdsman decided to graze them in the field while he watched the performance.  During filming, the Biblical world of the play often blurred with the rural life of the village where it was performed. More examples can be found in the nativity and fishermen scenes in the video below.


The Nativity

Most of the nativity scenes that I’ve seen usually substitute a doll for Jesus, but in Kiwangala it’s not so hard to strive for authenticity in this department.  Seven of us in the cast and crew got in a saloon car and drove a few kilometers out of the trading center.  The road quickly turned from a potholed monstrosity into a single-lane, dirt path.   This is no problem for Ugandans who drive small sedans.  They tackle terrain that soccer moms with 4×4 SUVs in the U.S. would never dream of attempting.  Twenty minutes later and deep in a banana plantation we parked in front of a small shamba.  A farmer and his wife were drying coffee beans out front.  A newborn baby was napping in the shade.  Around the back were cows, sheep, and a manger.  Naturally, things fell into place quickly.  It was just a matter of putting the baby in the trough.

The Music and Animation

As the shepherds visit Jesus they sing a traditional Christian folk song.  As I was recording the dialogue for this scene, the cast spontaneously burst into this song.  When you’re recording something in a language you don’t fully understand you tend to zone out and focus on the technicalities of the mixing.  When the actors started singing I immediately became alert and got goosebumps.

The reprise plays over a fish animation.  I bought a whole tilapia on market day for $1.50 from a man selling them out of a basket on the back of his bicycle.  After photographing the fish for the movie I wrapped it in banana leaves and cooked it over hot coals.  It was delicious.

The Fishermen

The fishing village where we filmed is one of many landing sites in the Rakai district.  They dot down the coast of Lake Victoria to the border of Tanzania.  While they are little more than shantytowns these villages have an infamous reputation.  As early as 1982, entire communities in the area had become sick with a mysterious illness called silimu, or in English “slim”.  Perfectly healthy people would get really skinny and drop dead.  At first witchdoctor juju was blamed, but eventually scientists arrived from the west, backtracking Patient 0,  and diagnosed the disease as HIV.  Landing sites like Kasensero became the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Over the last twenty eight years there has been a marked improvement and drops in infection rates, but the toll the disease has taken is still visible.  As a result, people live a primitive existence in mud walled homes and depend on the lake for their subsistence.

The video footage is a little shaky.  I was shooting from a fishing boat that kept tipping precariously from side to side.  I had to wade through the lake to board the vessel and as a result contracted schistosomiasis.  Yet, in retrospect it was worth it.  Shooting this scene was a special moment for me as a filmmaker.

The lack of economic development at the landing-site reinforces the literalness of the passion play.  The fishermen know what the apostles went through.  They’ve experienced the same anxieties of not coming home with a full catch.  If they caught as many fish as the apostles do in the movie, it would be the equivalent of winning the lottery.

However much the landing-site is in harmony with the life of Jesus, the real world still creeps into the film.  Jesus performs his miracle from a boat with an outboard motor and modern technology breaks our suspension of disbelief.

Likewise, filming unintentionally captured the sordid moments of the people in the village.  Near the end of the scene, a man and a woman can be seen quarreling in the background.  The woman runs into the field as Jesus comes ashore.  The man, who seems to be holding a knife, chases her down and drags her out of the frame.  The preaching of Christian values juxtaposed against the backdrop of domestic violence is a theme that will repeat itself later in the movie.

The Revealed Truth Blog Series

This post is the second of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.  The  movie is about an hour  long  but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.  The next post will feature the teachings of Jesus.

The previous post was The Revealed Truth: An Introduction.