Category: Development

in freetown, it’s thanksgiving every day [photos]

David Evans3 Comments

Okay, every Sunday. From January through May.

Every Sunday afternoon from January through May, some school or another holds a thanksgiving parade, thanking God for the blessings of the previous year. This transcends religious affiliation: my Muslim driver’s son’s school had its celebration last week, and I attended the parade of a Methodist school.

The Methodist school not only had its own band playing, its own children marching, its own alumni marching, but it also hired a host of other marching bands from other schools. The results was thousands of happy young people celebrating their education. It was marvelous!

My friend RK, who took me, is closely involved with the school’s music program, so he knew everyone at the parade. Marching bands would stop and play for him specifically. We watched the parade past, then drove somewhere else to watch it again, and then drove to his house to watch the end from a second-story balcony. AWESOME! Here are some photos. [Sadly, I loaded the photos in reverse order; I think it doesn’t matter so much in this case.]

Expanding Horizons book review: Before we were free, by Julia Alvarez

David Evans1 Comment

Taking a brief break from Africana, part of what I did while my tv was in the closet in Freetown was listen to this excellent audiobook, which was part of my list for the Expanding Horizons reading challenge.  I really enjoyed this book (even though I’m not really the target demographic) and will surely give it as a gift when my nieces reach age 12 or so.  My thoughts:

poignant, compelling, revealing, excellent story of life under a dictatorship

Julia Alvarez tells the story of the end of the Trujillo dictatorship (1960s Dominican Republic). She cleverly tells the story from the perspective of a pre-teen girl (Anita) while weaving in major political players and events. She captures Anita’s loss of innocence as the oppressive political regime begins to impact her life first obliquely and then very directly. From the start, Alvarez engages us with her main character as she simultaneously paints on a much larger canvas. [As an adult male (without a pre-teen daughter), I found some of Anita’s talk about growing into a woman and being in love with the boy next door tiresome, but it all felt right for the character.]

Alvarez doesn’t shy away from the fiasco that took place after Trujillo’s assassination, but she does leave off just before the country’s first post-Trujillo elections (which were a farce, leaving a Trujillo crony in power for some thirty years). After you’ve finished the book, re-read the author’s note at the beginning: Realizing Alvarez’s intimate connection to the fictionalized events in the book is all the more poignant.

Note on content: Besides girlhood crushes, there is a brief, non-graphic mention of various forms of torture (ugly but important) and an allusion to Trujillo’s penchant for young mistresses.

For adult readers, this is a sweet complement to Alvarez’s wonderful earlier book, In the Time of the Butterflies, which tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, three key anti-Trujillo revolutionaries. While that book took us inside the resistance movement, having this book narrated by a child opens a window into how children are affected in times of oppression. For another perspective on the end of the Trujillo regime, read Mario Vargas Llosa’s excellent La Fiesta Del Chivo [The Feast of the Goat]; that book is not appropriate for child readers, with graphic portrayals of torture and of violence against a child (apparently accurate to the time and place).

Julia Alvarez reads the unabridged audiobook herself and is perfect for the role (all the more impressive as I’ve heard Alvarez speak in person, and she doesn’t really sound like a twelve-year-old girl).

gambian research round-up

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Yesterday I flew to Banjul, the Gambia, where I’m working on an impact evaluation of an education project.  In economics, it’s tempting to examine the research on the topic and to neglect the place, de-emphasizing context.  To add to the education reading I’ve done, I took a look around to see what other recent research has been done in the Gambia.  For being continental Africa’s smallest country, there is a lot.   

Some of it is far from my subject, like the paper on agriculture-related injuries and rural nursing service.  But other research, despite no blatant connection, has the potential to yield real insights into the context of my work.  A study on childhood vaccination practices uses qualitative methods to explore why some people are more likely to complete their children’s vaccination schedules, and those reasons could inform my hypotheses as to why some parents are much less active than others in the school management community.  Some of the methods used to produce a locally accessible film about tuberculosis could be tentatively applied to make education more accessible. 

In searching specifically for papers on the Gambia, I also found education papers that would never have turned up in a general education search but which provide invaluable background.  One paper assesses the returns to education in the Gambia; another explores the relationships between democracy and the structure of the Gambian education system. I’m learning my lesson: Read spatial, not just topical.

sierra leonean schools

David Evans3 Comments

Last Friday I visited five primary schools, some rural and some urban.  Two were right at the heart of what was rebel headquarters during the war.  Maybe one of the schools had a decent number of textbooks: all the rest had been robbed at some point.  One head teacher showed me the former lock to her office, mangled and broken.  Another emptied a box of broken padlocks onto her desk, explaining why the textbooks were being stored in a teacher’s home.  Here are some snapshots.

flying on a non-existent airline

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This morning I stopped by a local travel agency to confirm my flight for tomorrow from Freetown (Sierra Leone) to Banjul (The Gambia) on Slok Air International. 

Travel agent: “That airline isn’t flying.”

Me: “What?”

“They haven’t flown since November.”

“But I just bought this ticket ten days ago.”

Shrug.  “You would have to fly Gambia International Airways on Wednesday.  Can I book you the ticket?”

Lesson: Always confirm your ticket.  In case the airline is still selling tickets but not actually flying anywhere.

commitment devices and my television problem

David Evans2 Comments

Commitment devices are important.  A friend of mine met a woman in Kenya who planted her sweet potatoes so that they would be ready to harvest just when she needed to pay school fees for her children: that way she wouldn’t be tempted the money from selling the vegetables on other things.  In a project in Tanzania providing cash subsidies to poor families, women asked for the cash subsidies to be conditional on keeping their children in school as a commitment device to use the money well.

When I travel, I’m not very good with television.  I get tired of the silence in the hotel room and end up turning on the tv to have some sound but end up watching more than is optimal.  So I was pleased to see, in my Freetown hotel, that my tv was on a stand with wheels.  A perfect opportunity for a commitment device!  I asked the staff member who brought me to my room if the tv could be removed.  The woman politely explained to me that if I don’t want to watch tv, I can just not turn it on.  I said, I know, but I’d love to just not have it in the room.  I explained my commitment problem; why not?  Can you remove it?  We went and asked the manager, who said, “This is very strange.  I have never had a guest request this before.  If you don’t want to watch the tv, then just don’t turn it on.”  The staff woman explained my commitment challenge to the manager.  He sent another staff member with me to the room to help me.

When we arrived, the man said, “But it’s already off!”  He had been under the impression that the tv was on and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.  “But if you don’t want to watch…”  Yes, I know.  “The people with the key to the store[room] come tomorrow, so we can do it tomorrow.”  Fine.  I unplugged the tv and rolled it into the closet: out of sight, out of mind.  That seemed to largely alleviate my commitment problem, so I didn’t follow up.

A couple of days later, I told the manager that I had resolved my problem.  He answered, “Oh yes, I spoke with the proprietor.  She said, ‘If he doesn’t want to watch tv, he should just leave it off.'”  Oh.  Now I get it.

Africa Reading Challenge: A Long Way Gone – Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah

David Evans1 Comment

Last week, just before coming to Sierra Leone, I finished listening to Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his time running from and then participating in Sierra Leone’s civil war (excellently narrated by Dominic Hoffman).  This morning I visited two schools that served as rebel headquarters during the war; this book was very insightful into the impacts of the war here.  My thoughts:

skilled storytelling drives this tale of a boy who is both normal (for his time and place) and completely exceptional

Ishmael Beah tells of how his village was destroyed when he was just 11 years old, during Sierra Leone’s civil war of the 1990s. He and his friends wandered to escape the war for many months and then were forcibly enlisted in the military. After two years of fighting, UNICEF rescues him and other boys, and we learn how Ishmael is rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian society.

Beah is a skilled storyteller, and he gives a compelling account of how the war affects children like him. The first half of the book is the wandering (which is similar to another excellent narrative of boy refugees, What Is the What by Dave Eggers), and the last third focuses on the rehabilitation and Beah’s life beyond. The relatively small middle portion deals with Beah’s time as a child soldier; I would have appreciated more information on that time, but Beah doesn’t need long to paint a clear picture. (I was surprised at the omission of any role of sexual violence, which was apparently significant in the Sierra Leone conflict.) I felt the eye-opening, unique contribution of this book was the story of the rehabilitation. This was in the early days of UNICEF’s and other organizations’ efforts to rehabilitate boy soldiers, and the challenges they faced are striking.

In some ways, Beah’s story feels like two stories. The first three-quarters are the normal: his experience seems to be similar to the experiences of other children in the period. The last quarter is the exceptional: Beah’s story diverges from that of the other boys as he comes to the USA as a UN representative for children affected by the war. Both are of interest, mostly due to Beah’s skills in narrating his tale.

It is natural to compare this to other books about young refugees and child soldiers in Africa. Beasts of No Nation and Moses, Citizen and Me are both novels about boy soldiers, the former focusing on the conflict and the latter on post-conflict re-entrance into the community. Beah’s account is more compelling than either of the novels, partly because it’s more likely to be fact and also simply because he’s a good writer with a powerful story to tell. Child soldiers play a small but crucial role in Adichie’s wonderful Half of a Yellow Sun. Interestingly, Moses, Citizen, and Me revolves around the boys putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar, and that play also has a role in this memoir.

This book stands out from the others in its vivid and detailed description of the challenge of rehabilitating child soldiers as they withdraw from addictions to both cocaine and violence. A heartening supplement to Beah’s success story is the research of economist Chris Blattman, who finds positive outcomes for former child soldiers in terms of political participation elsewhere in Africa [1].

[1] Blattman, Christopher, “From violence to voting: War and political participation in Uganda,” Center for Global Development and Yale University, 2008.