Korogocho - Part Three - Jajaroka

Radio DJ Dennis Kamau leans over his desktop computer, with his headphones around his neck, setting up for the next song. Dennis looks to be in his late teens, and for three hours a day, four days a week, he controls the airwaves of Korogocho at Koch-FM, the community radio station.


Dennis Kamau, DJ at Koch-FM

Dennis's music appeals to young people - a mix of hip hop and African beats, but Dennis's real goal is to educate the community about issues that are important to them, and to give call-in listeners the opportunity to discuss their problems. Calling the goal of the station "edutainment," as posters throughout the community advertise, Koch-FM is a primary source of education and entertainment for the residents here, since many cannot read, and televisions are rare.



The radio station was started nearly three years ago, when members of the community turned to the then-chief of the district for help in setting up a radio station. After initially being opposed to the idea, the chief agreed to help build the station - the studio consists of a desk, a computer, and a microphone in a 5'x7' room. That's all they need, though, to reach a large number of listeners. "My program is a very wide program," Dennis says. "It deals with entreprenurship, youth issues, the strength of a woman, so many things."

Dennis's program is called "Jajaroka" - which is Swahili for "getting wise."

"That's the purpose of my program," says Dennis. "You have to jajaroka. You have to become clear. You have to become wise."

Hello Keflavik, my old friend

My goodness, it seems like just yesterday I was approaching Keflavik from the west and here it is again, starring on the United Airlines Kickback Payola Map Network. That was thirteen long days ago, when I was stressing about having a kidney stolen in the Nairobi airport and waxing nostalgic about the Abe Beame administration. I am now, of course, an expert on Africa, having visited all of four of its countries for two whole weeks. I’ve taken eleven separate plane flights in thirteen days. I’ve covered probably twenty five thousand miles, visited six African cities (and environs).

I also have to say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed intra-African air travel, against all expectations. For starters, African airlines serve hot food, even on the shortest trips. On a flight from Kampala to Kigali I was so hungry that I agreed, in obvious contravention to all FDA recommendations, to eat a meat pie (!) that was offered by the cheerful flight attendant. A meat pie! Visions of Sweeney Todd danced in my head, but it was wonderfully hot, the pastry was flaky and tender, and the meat was gloriously well spiced and delicious. I’d have paid ten bucks in a restaurant. And I didn’t end up in the hospital. In fact, I may just have to start a franchise – Rwandair’s Famous Meat Pies – I could sell them at Costco and retire. They’re that good.

While I’m on the topic, what with United Airlines? Here are the things all airlines should have: 1. PLUGS! Is it so hard to put in plugs? Virgin does it, but they don’t fly anywhere useful. Four hours into a flight my laptop dies, and I’m stuck having to read the fiction in the New Yorker, which I only do in emergencies. 2. Movies on demand. What’s with this 1960s ridiculousness of everyone having to watch the same soul-suckingly rotten movie? British Airways has a nice little movie on demand option, as does Virgin. I’d pay for a decent movie instead of having to watch Bride Wars or Marley and Me, and so would you. 3. An internet connection (but please god no Skype). I know it’s expensive to install, yadda, yadda, but it would be so useful. 4. If you’re lucky enough to get an upgrade, a flat bed seat on international flights would be worth a day’s productivity, and would make you want to live again. Again, British Airways does this, and it looks like heaven from the cheap seats. The best business class seat in United reclines just far enough to still ruin your back forever.

I’ve said it before – this kind of travel is really grueling and it takes years off your life, if you’re lucky, and decades if you’re not. And many of my colleagues, bless their due-diligence-loving hearts, spend upwards of forty percent of their lives traipsing around the world to malaria-infested backwaters (pun intended, I guess) because it’s the only way they’ll know if they’re actually making a difference with the organization’s money. And not only that, they do it with astonishingly good humor. After just two weeks of this craziness, I need to spend about a month in a darkened room listening to soft shakuhachi music and sipping herb tea.

Okay, back to Africa. If I learned one thing on this trip it’s simply this - there is no reason that the people should be so poor. The countries I visited are blessed with extraordinary natural resources, amazing tourist attractions, fertile land, and brilliant, hard-working people. And yet wherever we went in these wonderful places, we saw gripping, endemic poverty, shockingly high rates of TB, malaria, diarrhea, and of course HIV and AIDS. Walk down the street in Durban and if you see a hundred people, the statistics suggest that more than thirty of them are HIV-positive. We met women whose families live on less than $1 a day who have five or six or seven children with no possible means to properly care for them. People who spent the entire day in a health clinic to receive desperately substandard care because that was all that the staff were able to muster. Kids who went to school without having eaten. Dispenseries at health clinics with nothing to dispense. It is a tragedy, and the world’s shame, and I don’t have the slightest idea how this problem is going to get solved, or who’s going to do it. I have a not-so-sneaking suspicion that it will have to happen from within. As much as we are trying to make a real difference in people’s lives, and as valuable as it can be in very specific instances, development aid will probably only help at the margins.

It’s a muddle. Why are some countries making it work, sort of, and others simply failing? Any family in Lagos, Nigeria that can afford one has their own generator to run electricity during the daily blackouts, which does wonders for the air quality. Nigeria – awash with oil and all kinds of other stuff – can’t keep the lights on. Downtown Kampala is no less chaotic and primitive – probably more so – than Nairobi or Johannesburg, yet I was able to walk the streets safely. There’s no question that politics plays an important role. In Rwanda, President Kagame has by all accounts built a team of managers, not kleptocrats. The greatest test for that country will be the same that many other sub-Saharan African countries have failed spectacularly at – a peaceful democratic transfer of power within the agreed-upon time period (ahem, Mayor Bloomberg).

Zimbabwe was once hailed as the model for modern Africa – much like Rwanda today – and has now descended into chaos, thanks in part, many say, to Robert Mugabe’s failure to yield power. Kenya and Uganda have great promise, but grapple with corruption and mismanagement. Just one year ago, Kenya descended into ethnic violence eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide. And the list of failed or failing states is depressingly long – Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Angola…I could go on.

But I also met some of the kindest, smartest, most optimistic people I will ever have the pleasure of knowing. On the way to Joburg airport, driving past homes surrounded by gates, barbed wire, AND electrified fences, the driver (named Lucky, although he told me he isn’t) told me that he remains optimistic about the future. South Africa is improving, he told me. The World Cup is coming, and there’s construction everywhere. He worried that when the event is over people will be out of work again, but he is nevertheless hopeful. He wasn’t being a Pollyanna – he lives in Soweto, and would have every reason to be cynical – but he told me that he was seeing change. I was blown away by the university students working on their Master’s and PhDs who are committed to using what they’re learning to go back to their countries – Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and others – and try to solve their many problems. Or the women (all women) who ran the many health clinics we visited – understaffed, overworked, but possessed of supernaturally good humor and optimism.

Or the Minister of Health of Rwanda, who, shortly after we met with him, announced that the country was going to provide three ambulances to each administrative district. During our trip, we heard from community leaders in a rural health clinic who told us that their biggest need is an ambulance. Are these leaders clairvoyant, or just tuned into what their people need and somehow finding a way to take on the big as well as the little problems? I have no idea. And this is Rwanda – which fifteen years ago went through genocide and civil war. They have no oil, but no blackouts. If there’s an African success story in the making, it’s unquestionably Rwanda. If Rwanda fails, it will be the most heartbreaking of failures.

The seatback map tells me we’re nearing Godthab, Greenland (sister city to Keflavik, Iceland, no doubt), so I’m nearly home, sort of. But I’m not done with the blog. I took tons of notes on my journey, and I’m committed to telling some more stories before I close out this travelogue, and I have piles of photos still to post. So bear with me for a few more days, and thanks for reading.

Durban

About to leave Durban for Johannesburg. This is a lot more like the South Africa I've heard about than Cape Town. We went for a stroll yesterday and on our way out the door, the doorman asked where we were going. We're going for a walk along the waterfront, we told him. He looked us over and decided that since we weren't carrying handbags or other snatchable items that we'd be okay. Comforting. The walk went fine, by the way. Had dinner at a place called Moyo, which could best be described as high-concept African. They had roving a capella singers, pulsating African music, and someone came by the table to paint my face with Zulu white dashes.


Your extremely dorky correspondent.

Goofy, but really fun. Oh, and I had a crazily hoppy South African microbrew! A little Oregon colonialism, no doubt, but good. And the food was great - I had a spicy chicken curry with coconut, bananas, and other stuff.


Later, I'll report on the health clinic and hospital we visited yesterday. The short story is that South Africa has the highest HIV AIDS rate in the world, and Kwa Zulu Natal, the province in which Durban is located, has the highest HIV rate in South Africa. It's truly a public health crisis, and I don't think anybody thinks they'll get a handle on it any time soon.

Cape Town - Day 2 (I think)

It's Tuesday afternoon in Cape Town, and trip is winding down. We head out to another health clinic in an hour, then off to Durban for a day, then to Johannesburg for a day, then home on Thursday.

Cape Town has been a bit of a respite in that we're in a touristy part of a modern European-style city. On the other hand, it hardly feels like Africa, the twelve jillion African tschochke shops nothwithstanding.


Cape Town waterfront - all it's missing is a tic tac toe-playing chicken.

We got away from the hurdy gurdys and juggling unicyclists and to visit a women's health clinic yesterday. The clinic was created to serve women who are affected by abuse in the home, and provides a wide variety of services, including HIV testing, counseling, and basic health care, and family planning, among them. The director was yet another one of the highly competent, deeply dedicated people we've met on our visit. The problems that people face in each of the countries we've visited are profound, but I do take some comfort in the fact that there are such impressive people working to solve them.

Today, we visited with graduate students who are studying demography in a special program at the University of Cape Town. This is said to be one of the most rigorous programs in the world, and the students are exhausted and stressed as finals approach this week. We met with six students - three from Zimbabwe and one each from Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The goal is for these young people to be able to achieve the kind of expertise in demographic research necessary to make good policy across the continent. It's a tall order, but boy oh boy is there a need to understand demographic trends here.


Grad student Innocent Karangwa (center), says he would like to return to his native Rwanda to help advance health research there.

Needless to say, funding demographic scholarship sends reporters reaching for the nearest pillow to take a life-affirming nap, but there is still so much we don't know about how to alleviate poverty that these intelligent, ambitious scholars might be able to figure out. As we learned in our meetings with Rwandan ministry officials, collecting data is hard enough, interpreting it is even harder, and the need for such experts is profound. So it won't make any headlines, but that's fine with us.

My friend E

E

My new friend E does communications for an organization that is helping Rwanda improve its health system. They educate members of the community about the various services available, and help train health professionals, among many other tasks.

When I first met him, he was in action – training a group of local mayors, police and city council members on how to help their constituents learn about the services available to them. Engage the local electeds, they reason, and you have a much better chance of actually getting your messages to the community. E led a role play exercise, getting his audience up on their feet, and acting out various scenarios that his audience might encounter back in their villages. He was a wonderful emcee – engaging the room with humor and switching effortlessly between the native Rwandan language Kinyarwanda, French, and for the benefit of his monolingual guests (well, me, since all of my colleagues understand French very well), English. He had the group standing up and sitting down, laughing and engaging, working the room with the panache of a man very much at ease with the world. Later, as we sat in the lobby of our hotel, there was a steady stream of friends or colleagues that came up to him, greeting him warmly. Apparently, there was some kind of event in the building, but he got the same treatment in the parliament building and at the various ministries we visited. “You know everybody!” I observed. “Well, they know ME,” he said, almost surprised.

E is 59. His hairline has almost completed its march to the back of his head, he wear glasses, has a forward-set jaw, a prominent lower lip, and an easy smile that uses the whole face and reveals an expanse of gums. But without a doubt it’s the eyes that I paid most attention to. They are the eyes of a man at peace. I’m not sure how to explain it any better than that. He’ll take in the room, or look you in the eye, pause a moment, and let fly with his disarming smile. He seems happy, and I liked him immediately. And he’s a communications guy, and we tend to stick together.
Someone had told me that in addition to his duties at the NGO, E was a reconciliation court judge. The reconciliation courts are traditional village gatherings, called gacaca (pronounced “ga-cha-cha”) in which a perpetrator of genocide explains his crimes and asks for forgiveness from his victims, if they are still alive, or the survivors of the people he has killed. Once the verdict is given and the sentence, if any, is served, the “genocidier” may return to his village and attempt to resume a semblance of a normal life. This process is said to be painful and highly imperfect, but preferable to every alternative. We were sitting together in a meeting of just the two of us to discuss some other business, and when it appeared we had concluded our work, I mentioned that someone said that he was a reconciliation judge. “Who told you that?” he replied, looking a little surprised, and he changed the subject. I let it go. It was all I could do to bring it up in the first place – I didn’t want to press. We then returned our conversation to some un-decided upon matter, and made a bit of easy small talk. As I said, E is a fellow who’s very easy to like, and I felt very comfortable just chatting. Maybe I passed the test. After a pause, he said, “Let me tell you my story.”

E was born in exile, in Burundi. His family was forced to flee Rwanda in 1949, after what is known in Rwanda as the “first war” – a period of attempted ethnic cleansing that forced many members of the Tutsi tribe to escape to neighboring countries, including the neighbor to the south, Burundi. His father had a seventh grade education, (“It would be like coming from University,” he said) was considered an elite, and he became chief of their village not long after they arrived. E was born in Burundi in 1951, the 14th of 16 children, of whom ten survived. With the exception of one sister, who was made to stay home to help their mother, all of his surviving siblings were educated and went on to professional careers. E eventually went to work at the Burundi Ministry of Health, specializing in child and maternal health, despite the fact that he was not a citizen of the country. In fact, he wasn’t a citizen of any country – the militant Hutu government of Rwanda wouldn’t allow him to return to his ancestral home, which he longed to do, and Burundi refused to grant him citizenship. “I was, what’s the word?” “Stateless,” I said. “Yes, I was stateless.” He was given a card by the government that classified him as a “native refugee.”

Things in Rwanda were extremely tense in the 1980s and early 90s – there were periodic explosions of violence, primarily targeting the Tutsi minority, and the tensions exploded in April of 1994 in the famous genocide, in which one out of every seven people in the country was murdered. When the genocide ended and the militant Hutu government was deposed, E took it as an opportunity to return to Rwanda to try to find his relatives and to rebuild his country. It was still a very violent and unhealthy place then, with revenge killings commonplace, and services nonexistent. He arrived in July of 1994, finally stepping foot on his country’s soil at the age of 44. He returned to his village to seek out the relatives he had never met, but not a single relative survived. All his aunts, uncles and cousins had all been killed.

E took a job at the Ministry of Health, working in his field of maternal and child health. Rwanda in the summer of 1994 was barely a state, and E struggled in the ministry to provide some help to people with almost no resources. The international aid community was well meaning, but ineffectual. “After the war, they would send things to us that made no sense,” he told me. “These big shipments of blood would arrive, but it was too late for blood.” “There was an outbreak of cholera, and they’d send water. There’s water everywhere in Rwanda – we needed medicine.”
They did the best they could, and as I’ve noted before, the country seems remarkably functional for a place that just fifteen years ago was no less lawless than the Congo is today. There are no shortage of problems – malnutrition, illiteracy, and myriad health problems among them. Yet the government’s goal is for Rwanda to be a middle class country in ten or so years.

E responded to my interest in his life, and to my curiosity about his country’s history. There was a movie on his laptop about the genocide that he wanted me to see, and after repeated failures to transfer the files from his laptop to mine, he called his son and dispatched him to town to buy me a copy. “Are you okay with the bad pictures?” he asked. I told him that I thought I could handle it. “Good,” he said. “It’s the whole story.”

In many ways, E is the face of the reconciliation, and if Rwanda succeeds, it will be thanks to him and many, many others like him. He’s a judge, and a community organizer, and he’s working his way through his own pain. He’s willing to try to put that aside for the good of the country, something which is a theme that emerges wherever you go. “It’s crazy,” E said. “You can’t tell a Hutu from a Tutsi by looking at him. We all speak Kinyarwanda. We eat the same food. We’re the same.” Indeed, bumper stickers and billboards everywhere proclaim “It’s our Rwanda,” imploring its citizens to try to move beyond the past.

“One million people died, and I think that there were three million people who were responsible. But we can’t put three million people in jail.” I asked him how he can be so positive when he’s been through so much. Has he found a way to try to forget the past? He took a moment and said, “The simple decision is not to forget but to take another strategy to live together.”

Cape Town

Finally made it to Cape Town last night after thirteen hours of travel that began with a 1:30 am wake-up call. Three flights, three countries, two airlines, and we arrived early and the luggage made it just fine. Nibble on that, United, Southwest, Jet Blue, and the rest. I know, I know, you're not responsible for the weather or air traffic control, but you still really stink.

Cape Town is a very strange place - driving from the airport past shanty towns that look very much like the Korogocho slum - an agglomeration of tin roofs and rutty dirt pathways, we arrived at a waterfront complex that brings to mind Baltimore's Inner Harbor, complete with shops, hotels, tourists, and buskers.


A billboard advertising a new development to replace the slum.

I went for a run along an ocean front promenade that could have been Santa Monica, with art deco apartment buildings and cafes taking in the view. I am told that South Africa is like that - a very thin layer of modernism and development stretches across a deep core of poverty and deprivation.

Planes, planes, and well, planes

Taking off from Nairobi, having successfully made our 4:30 flight this morning. Four hours to Joburg and then to Cape Town. The pace is grueling - we've been blasting through this trip and we're all pretty whipped. Waking up at 1:30 am to catch a flight is nuts.

I honestly don't know how my colleagues do it, but in just a week I know why. Seeing the organizations at work on the ground and meeting these amazing people - truly amazing people - is a gift. I have such a better sense of what we do and when and how it works (when it works) than I did before.