changing Africa, part one

I anticipate there are some naysayers in the crowd, so as a follow-up to my post from yesterday, over the next few days I am going to post a few stories from my recent trip to Uganda. These are actual stories of life-change in Northern Uganda.

If you are not familiar with the area, let me give you a brief history. A few years ago Northern Uganda was the site of some terrible violence. The Lord's Resistance Army known as the LRA (they are the one's now causing troubles in Sudan) had displaced hundreds of thousands of people. They were stealing children to be soldiers, as well as labour and sex slaves to their troops. Lira, Uganda had become a settlement site for many of these displaced people. That is when we came in. Our first project in Lira was managing an IDP camp (internally displaced people). We were recognized by the UN as having one of the best run camps in the area. In fact, the manager of that camp was invited to a UN Summit to share best practices because the work was so extraordinary.

At that time we had two HIV projects running. You can think of it as a mini-experiment, though that wasn't the intent. One project followed tradition relief guidelines...find the sick and offer them compassionate care. That means we would clean for them and give them food, the hand-out model. We had a relatively large staff to do the home visits and distributions. The second project was a church mobilization project. We asked for community volunteers to come to a training, in the training we look at community resources (individual and corporate), then work with them to develop a plan or strategy to take care of their perceived and real needs. These are people with multiple needs; they need shelter, food, educational opportunities for their children, there are concerns about safety and employment. That is their reality; the needs are many, the resources are limited...some may wonder, where to even begin in order to make a difference.

One of the exercises we do with the community groups is called "problem tree." One of our staff, usually a national from the area who speaks the language and knows the culture, will walk them through this exercise. We draw a tree not to dissimilar from the one below.

We write the problems they identified on sticky notes, then we rank them - most difficult at the top and less difficult problems at the bottom. The problems at the bottom are called "low hanging fruit." That means there it is something the community can solve given their existing resources and talents. Then we help them solve the smaller problems and if necessary will address the larger problems if it helps them get further faster. This is a very empowering exercise because they quickly realize how much they actually have in their community. It helps to restore dignity and promote future problem solving, because they are addressing the needs themselves. In the long run, this is so much more effective than a hand-out. I will begin to share some success stories tomorrow.