Beyond the Vapour Trail Read online

  ‘You were the only ones to come out here and help us. Nobody else came.’

  But our work wasn’t sufficiently effective by our standards; it wasn’t the best use of donor money. We needed other funding approaches, as child sponsorship in particular wasn’t working well here. So during my time there I decided to understand why, to deconstruct the reasons.

  And I began to discover them. The challenges were many and varied: in Papua New Guinea, it’s always complex. In child sponsorship our primary approach is to select a sample of the children, and work with communities to change things for these and all the other children – to develop the whole community. It’s very effective. Yet back in those days we still had some individualising of sponsored children through the provision of handout supports, such as school fees. This is inherently flawed, and was a particularly bad fit for Pacific cultures, which are strongly collective. We also encountered significant logistic problems all over the country. Papua New Guinea is a beautifully rugged and wild place. Many communities have no roads. We could only reach them by motorised log canoes or hours and hours of hiking. But the isolation could be even more intense. Some of our local volunteers had to monitor children scattered across several mountains in sparsely populated areas where families lived in remote hamlets; communications often broke down; the children kept disappearing due to population mobility, or even changed names due to passage of life … The list goes on.

  I listened to all kinds of people in communities and documented everything, and it began a process. Pull it apart, find what’s wrong, rethink it. How could we make child sponsorship operate effectively in these difficult contexts? How could it better fit within traditional local cultures and values? How could we eradicate the welfare overtones of handouts and benefactors and make each child in a community feel equally valued?

  My time here was the beginning of a personal journey, a kind of quest. A few agencies had given up on sponsorship, but the reasoning seemed to me like the crocodile syllogism.

  Assumption: Sponsorship is inherently flawed.

  Observation: We saw problems.

  Conclusion: Therefore sponsorship is inherently flawed.

  Well, fix it, dear Henry. Almost anything we do in communities can cause problems if we don’t adapt what we’re doing. Over the next nine years, in addition to my other responsibilities, I analysed the way child sponsorship operated within community contexts across five continents. I documented about twenty-four different things that can go wrong – and began to find ways to rethink it. It led to piloting experimental approaches and became a simple set of ideas to completely transform the way child sponsorship worked. The ideas were first applied in Armenia and Albania. And they worked brilliantly. Beyond expectations.

  But that was nine years away. On a journey wrapped in and around much of the travel in this book.

  Travel Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, Part 1

  There are a few travel mistakes that are better to avoid. I know, because I’ve made some of them. Let’s call it research. I may even have invented some new ones. Yes, I am an occasional practitioner of travel stupidity. Hopefully this will help you to learn from what might be termed ‘experienced and ongoing idiocy’.

  A few years ago when I was doing a consultancy for Baptist World Aid Australia in Sydney, I booked my own travel from Melbourne for a one-day meeting. I finished the day and arrived back at Sydney airport to fly home, but I couldn’t find the flight on the monitor. I went to the counter and was informed that my flight had already left. More than ten hours earlier. In the morning. A.M. P.M. I didn’t recall noticing that small distinction when I booked. It was at this point that I realised the absurdity of our clocks. There are twenty-four hours in a day, but some father of clocks decided to stop at twelve and go around again. So many choices these creators of time measurement could have made with twenty-four hours – eight hours three times; six hours four times could have been fun; four hours six times … Or, sensibly, twenty-four hours. Just once. So people don’t miss flights.

  The man at the desk told me I’d have to buy a new ticket, and this one-way offering was twice the cost of my original return ticket. Surely not. He was insistent that this was my only option. So I asked if I could use his phone to speak to the frequent-flyer service desk – I have platinum status and sometimes pulling rank … Just. Makes. Sense. They immediately put me on the very next flight, which was earlier than my original eight o’clock flight. (Well, except that technically the original flight had already left that morning.)

  Finding myself next to a friendly person on the plane, I told her the story of my stupidity. She was very understanding. She then told me her story. She had booked a return flight from Sydney to Melbourne. Only, she was from Melbourne and probably should have booked a return flight from Melbourne to Sydney. Where mine was an a.m. and p.m. mix-up, she had muddled that minor detail of departure city and destination city.

  We reflected – the two of us being seated together – a coincidence? Or is it possible that airlines have a Tweedledum and Tweedledee seating arrangement policy to promote mutual learning?

  Travel idiot warning #27: Remember the twenty-four-hour clock. Check the time carefully.

  Travel idiot warning #82: Try to book flights that are leaving from your intended airport and heading to your intended destination, rather than flights that begin at your destination.

  On another occasion I was heading back from India to be home just in time for my son’s fifteenth birthday. It was important for him – I couldn’t miss it. As I was checking in at Chennai airport, the check-in attendant observed, ‘It’s six-thirty.’ I looked up at the clock behind her and affirmed that she was correct.

  ‘No, your flight leaves at six-thirty. That means it closed long ago and it’s taking off now.’

  I had muddled in my mind the flight time with the time I needed to arrive for check-in. She called over the woman in charge.

  ‘Are there any other flights to Delhi tonight?’

  ‘Yes, there are three others, but they are very full. Please sit down over there and wait and I will deal with your case later.’

  I realised that if I wasn’t on the first leg of my trip, the system might record me as a no-show. Qantas could give my seat away.

  ‘Can we contact Qantas in Delhi and tell them I will be there? I don’t want them to cancel my booking as a no-show.’

  ‘No, I don’t have their number. Please sit down over there.’

  ‘But you have a computer in front of you. Can’t you look it up?’

  ‘No, I can’t find this information. Please sit down.’

  The Brits may have invented bureaucracy, but India practises it as a form of meditative discipline. I remember thinking, She wants me sitting at her convenience for whatever she deigns to give me, and I don’t want to trust my son’s birthday to her whims.

  When I was quite young my brother taught me chess. When I was losing and about to run off and sulk, he would turn the board around. And he’d still beat me. Somehow it taught me that, in any situation in life, there is a best alternative, and if the right person were here they would think of it. So I sat and thought. I saw the first-class check-in was free. I had no status with this airline, but since the attendant wasn’t busy I approached her and explained my situation.

  ‘Yes, there are flights and we should be able to get you there. But it will be a very tight connection.’

  ‘Is it possible to give me the Qantas number in Delhi so I can call to tell them I am coming?’

  ‘Sure, let me look that up for you …’

  Just then, dragon-lady-in-charge spotted me and stopped the process.

  ‘The next flight is completely full, so you will most probably be on the last flight. Please sit down and wait.’

  As it turned out, dragon-lady-in-charge put me on the next flight, and when I boarded it wasn’t very full at all. But transferring to the other terminal in Delhi was not straightforward. Too many passengers, insufficient buses
, massive lines, and I was already running late for my flight. So I spoke to someone and they put me ahead of the long queue into the very next bus to the other terminal. I even boarded at the front so I could get off first. But … the driver just sat there. He didn’t start the bus. Other buses slowly filled up and left. After ten minutes, he walked off. Shift change. So that’s what he’d been waiting for. Finally the new driver arrived and we drove off. I knew that check-in would close soon and in the sweltering heat I was becoming desperate to get home for my son. When we arrived at the international terminal they were taking ages to unpack my bag from the bus. A kind stranger beside me offered to help – he said he would mind my bag so I could run in to tell the check-in I was here. So I literally sprinted in the sweltering humidity to get to the gate. But the gate had been changed. Having run the full length of the airport I now had to run back to the other end. The sense of panic grew. Finally I made it through security to reach check-in and told them I was here.

  OK, so now they knew I was going to be on the flight, I sprinted back out through security to find the friendly stranger and my bag. Gone. Did he steal it? I asked some officials and they escorted me to an office. As I entered, the man sitting behind the desk looked like I imagine a school principal would look like in India. And he had my bag.

  ‘This is your bag? You left it in the airport unattended?’

  There was not much else to do other listen to the lecture with yes sir, no sir, and avoid any slip of the tongue like three bags full, sir.

  I made that flight. Just. Before I boarded I went into the bathroom and removed my shoes, socks, shirt and trousers to try to dry the sweat literally pouring off my body. I felt quite sorry for whoever I was going to sit beside. Thankfully I ended up with a spare seat next to me. I made it home for my son’s birthday.

  Travel idiot warning #13: Arrive at the airport before your plane departs.

  Travel idiot warning #8: Do not leave your luggage unattended. (They do, in fact, announce this at airports.)

  CHAPTER 6

  The Lord’s Resistance Army heads South

  In 2003 I was sent to Uganda for an evaluation near Soroti town, about six hours north of Kampala. I had no idea what I was flying into, and the community didn’t know what was about to hit it. The whole experience was an encounter with humanity that deeply affected me. And I was to meet a girl who would become one of my biggest inspirations, someone who is never far from my thoughts.

  Development work takes you into communities that are off the edge of the tourist map. Participatory evaluation means we look through people’s eyes into their world – their hopes and aspirations, their struggles, what matters to them. You step momentarily into the gentle beauty of their culture and interactions, the life they live. You duck your head to step inside their homes or huts or pueblos or lean-tos, depending on where you are in the world. The world, according to those who were born into that world. There’s no pretence that you understand it in depth. The encounter simply builds an appreciation.

  Evaluations need to be sufficiently technical to provide the evidence base for learning and for reports to donors. The risk with overemphasising the technical aspects is that community members often don’t understand our evaluations with all their graphs and confidence intervals. Yet this is their world. They should evaluate the work and decide what is meaningful to them. Sometimes they learn little from the constant stream of extractive questionnaires from government workers or NGOs at their door. I believe that the evidence and learning must be accessible to the community members. Participatory. As an old man in a Zambian village patiently explained to my colleague, ‘When you came to this community you found us already here. When you leave we will still be here. What we need from you are better ideas and ways to care for our children…’ Yes, they will be there after we pack up and fly back home as we select the chicken or the beef.

  Participatory assessments and evaluations put the community front and centre in the process. Together we draw out the perspectives of different groups, particularly the less powerful, the vulnerable, the women, the children, the poorest. It’s easy to objectify the vulnerable as an abstract concept – but they are people, with something to say.

  We use simple, interactive processes that are accessible to people who lack literacy or who may be disempowered within their own society, such as scratching out huge maps on the ground that everyone can walk around and tell their story of their community.

  I remember being in an isolated village in Laos, sitting in an open meeting room with adults seated and children leaning in the windows, pigs snuffling around outside. We asked the community members what they had learnt through the participatory processes they had just completed. One man spoke up.

  ‘We saw our village for the first time the way a bird sees it.’

  It took me a moment to understand what he meant. He was referring to the village mapping exercise. It took me another moment to realise that a map is something we are taught. There is a literacy involved in understanding maps and graphs that should never be taken for granted. This map opened up many insights, such as who was landless or had insufficient land and had to rely on working the fields of others to survive. The Laotian villagers told us they had already discussed the map among themselves and made some changes to help poorer families, based on their insights.

  Sometimes we create timelines on the ground: the whole year, to analyse life across different seasons. People might talk about the periods of hunger or water-borne illness during certain times of year. Sometimes we ask the men to draw a day map to discuss what they do during the day; the women draw a separate day map describing their daily tasks. The surprise happens when the men come and view the women’s map and listen to the women as part of the exercise. They are often amazed at everything the women need to do in a typical day. Perhaps Australian families should do day maps, too.

  Children contribute their perspectives as well. In one community in India the men had listed a set of priorities that included building a bridge. When it was the children’s turn, they looked at the men’s priorities and said, ‘They only want that bridge there because that’s where they go to buy alcohol.’ They then went on to talk about the things that were important to them. When this was shared with the men, they were a little bit sheepish and admitted it was true. The men were then quite taken with what the children had shared and started to engage at a different level. Children are not just the future of the community; they are part of it now. They have a perspective. They have ideas.

  You also hear stories of tenacity and courage in the face of overwhelming odds. You see the generosity of the poorest. This is the inspirational beauty among the poor that never makes it to television screens. I remember meeting a woman in Tanzania who, like many of her generation in communities ravaged by HIV/AIDS, was bringing up her children’s children. She had taken in her grandchildren because her son and his wife had died of AIDS. Already struggling herself to make ends meet, she couldn’t bear to see children suffering on their own, so when she saw other children in need, she took them in as well. She ended up with sixteen children. There are some amazing people in Africa. They might not make the news headlines, but they are bigger people than most of those who do. This story is about one of those people.

  A group of us left Kampala and headed several hours north towards Soroti, a town of maybe fifty or sixty thousand. Our program in the community of Arapai was just a stone’s throw north from there. As we drove, two Ugandan staff were chatting amiably in the back seat. Then one of them mentioned he didn’t know where Soroti was because he didn’t read maps.

  ‘But,’ his Ugandan colleague puzzled, ‘you travel to projects all over Uganda. If you can’t read a map, how do you get there?’

  ‘The driver takes me.’

  ‘Yes, OK,’ she continued. ‘But you also must travel home to the village or go to other places in Uganda. If you don’t know where these places are, how do you know where to go?’

  �
��I take the correct bus,’ he responded simply.

  Arapai feels like a collection of mud and grass huts plonked into an arid location for no particular reason that you can see. There’s no river flowing past. It’s as if the people made a random choice to just set up their lives here, as if they thought, Hang it, this will do. It feels like a place on the way to somewhere else. We were probably about a week into the evaluation when we heard that Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels had attacked a community about thirty or forty kilometres north. This was surprising. They had never been this far south before. They attacked several villages. At least two police and a soldier were killed. They looted and burnt down the market, fifteen shops and more than a hundred grass-roofed houses. As was their pattern, they also abducted children.

  The next day as part of our evaluation two of us visited the local Catholic bishop for perspective on our program. Aid agencies often cooperate strongly on the ground, so we interviewed a number of local stakeholders. He was a busy man, this bishop. He greeted us and then asked us to introduce ourselves and share our agenda. As we were speaking he seemed to be barely listening. He was distracted – listening to the radio, talking to anyone who came into the room, and he was also reading something. I thought, This man isn’t even paying attention. It was a bit frustrating.

  I had misread him. When we finished, Father Mubiru summarised everything we’d said and responded to it meaningfully. He informed us that at this moment the diocese was evacuating some of their people from the LRA attacks just up the road. The government had been assuring Uganda that the army was in Soroti taking care of everything. This was simply incorrect. Soroti was only a few hours’ drive from Kampala but the army had not arrived, even after several days. The bishop’s church also ran a local radio station, which was broadcasting this fact along with interviews with people who had experienced the attacks.