Village People

The past few days we have been going into villages to gauge how much interest there is in starting businesses and new products and services. The first day we were working directly with a group that is based out of an Internally Displaced Persons camp called Rochacoco and who serves windows. They try to help them develop useful skills in things that they are interested in so that they can provide for their families. Many of the widows take care of more than 5 children as it is typical in this culture to pass of your children if you can’t provide for them. Families will only have a few kids but will be burdened with providing for as many as 10 as others simply can’t provide for their own. We learned more about their organization and discussed different partnerships that we are thinking about entering into with them then took a tour of the town. The IDP camp had previously held almost 10,000 people but now many of them have returned to the villages and things have become very quiet. After walking around for a while, and being stalked by a group of easily 50-60 children, we met up with a few of the widows and talked with them for a while. The women in this culture are very willing to start new businesses as the income gained greatly helps when supplemented by the income gained by their husbands. With this group there were no husbands so they were very eager to pose ideas about the types of businesses they would start if given some start-up capital and it was interesting to hear a few of their ideas. None of the ideas were really anything radically different from what we have heard before and there is really a lack of imagination when it comes to thinking of new products and services.

Yesterday we went out to the home village of someone that the professor I am traveling with had met walking in-front of our house (?). She had mobilized the village and we had received many of the local head councils of the various smaller villages outside of the main village, Aromo. We had decided to break-up into different groups as to not speak and ask questions to the larger group as a whole. I had said that I would work with the men and later on found that this was going to be a very daunting task. Derek, my colleague, had taken the “youth” group which included people from 15-35, so that meant that I was going to be working with all of the “older folks” in a culture where the life expectancy is 45. All of them were farmers and most had been since the left primary school (7^th grade). As I probed I found that nearly all of them were growing the same 5 crops and when the prices of the crops went lower, they all suffered. I tried to ask if any of them had any ideas about how to avoid the low prices and they said if they had businesses that made a lot of money then the prices would go up. I responded by asking questions about the type of businesses that they were thinking of and kept hearing responses that talked about what they would do if they had more money. What I had learned was that in these smaller villages it really takes them being given an idea to try out rather than being given money to creatively use to generate income. I had a type of a break-through when I asked about what they would do to generate income if they were “fearless” and having “no risk” in starting anything. The answers I got relayed to me fears of the rebels and from thieves. It made me realize that in the US we talk about people having fear from starting a new businesses and being worried about the businesses going under. These people had no experience with this type of failure at all and really hadn’t seen start-up businesses generate any successes because there really were no start-up businesses. This group of older men had lived through not only the Lord’s Resistance Army burning their school as recently as 4 years ago to the rein of Idi Amin. They didn’t speak in terms of successes and failures but were hardened by living a life where things were either given to them or taken from them. By the time the conversation had ended and they stopped asking me questions they had asked me for help rebuilding their school, help in getting water, help with higher fuel costs, help with low food prices, help with rebuilding their church, money in general, and a soccer ball. It’s tough sitting in-front of all of these people and repeatedly saying that I was eager to hear ideas that would enable them to be able to help them generate their own income to solve these problems. I’m sure they wrote me off after a while as being able to help them at all. However; they did say that they are eagerly waiting for me to return.

All around here the people are so distanced from the flow of aid, business, whatever that when they see us Westerners it’s like the rest of the world has come to sit and listen to their problems. Americans are constantly relevant in the stream of global progress and when we come it’s like plugging them into that global stream. When we leave they get disconnected again and struggle every day until we come back and hear their problems. Even if we promise them nothing there is the sense that their hope stems from us simply being there.