In an interview with Clara Williams, who sounds like a super volunteer to the Gambian Ministry of Health with the Peace Corps, she talks about her work in The Gambia to decentralize health care decision-making, medical supply procurement as well as assisting the national government with polio eradication and the first national census in decades. Clara took on some amazing work that is central to our organizational beliefs, especially with her work to make health care more community focused and controlled. Do you think volunteers from other countries can have a real impact on health care in African countries?

We’ve all heard about how women in many parts of the world are still marginalized and considered second-class citizens; we even continue to struggle with gender equality in the United States. However, before moving to a developing country, I never really understood what it meant to be a woman in such a culture.

Here in Uganda, the men are definitely the decision-makers, the ones with the power. While urban areas are becoming more gender-equal than before, most people still consider women and men to hold very distinctive gender roles, with the household work left to the women but the household decisions and prestige being given to the men. Women are seen as weak, yet they are the ones doing most of the manual labor for the home, such as fetching water (jerry cans are heavy!) and firewood. The women care for the children, but if the couple ever separates, the children generally belong to the father (who never actually cares for them – he either hires someone or already has another wife). Here, there is no such thing as rape within marriage, legally or culturally. Men pay a bride price (often paid in cows or other in-kind payments), which means the man has a huge amount of leverage over his wife.  She belongs to him, and has no right to refuse something like sex.  While becoming less common, “marriage by abduction” does happen, in which a man kidnaps a girl who has refused to marry him and rapes her. The girl’s ‘purity’ is then ruined, and out of shame, she accepts to stay as his wife – she usually feels she has no choice, as many families and communities would disown her at this point, and few other men would want her. If a woman wants to use a condom with her partner or go for HIV testing, she is accused of sleeping around (even though it is commonplace for men to have extramarital affairs, thus putting women at risk for HIV infection from their own husbands. 42% of all new HIV infections in Uganda are intramarital).

As a female Peace Corps Volunteer, my struggle is mainly from issues of harassment. Many Ugandan women (unfortunately) have become used to sexual harassment or even assault, so consider it a normal part of life. For myself and my fellow female PCVs, however, harassment is probably one of the biggest issues we face. It can be everything from cat calls (“Hello baby!”, “I love you!”, “My size!”) and blatant inquiries for sex to sexual assault. I have never been assaulted, but several of my friends have. The emotional effects have serious consequences for us as volunteers – some are afraid to leave their houses for fear of unwanted attention or worse. I find that I avoid most Ugandan men, which is something I wish I didn’t resort to because of the potential for positive, professional relationships. Unfortunately, I’ve heard too many stories of female PCVs thinking that they have great friendships and working relationships with co-workers, only to later be propositioned for sex. I have faced very few issues in my small village – everyone knows me and respects/looks out for me. The main challenges occur when I go to bigger cities.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m trying to improve the lives of the girls and women around me. I’m going to start teaching life skills (such as setting life goals, communication skills, decision-making, healthy behaviors, etc.) to girls in my community soon. As a health volunteer, I’m promoting family planning options, such as condoms or birth control, to try to curb the high fertility rate of about 7 children per woman, but I believe that the only way to truly reduce family size is to empower women and give them other options in life besides having lots of children. Make sure they get a good education and are able to make their own life decisions, allowing them to pursue a career or envision a different path for themselves, and then they will probably choose to have fewer children. This opinion was solidified after reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and WuDunn – highly recommended book. Peace Corps Volunteers in Uganda have started an annual program called Camp GLOW – Girls Leading Our World – which is a week of empowering activities for young girls which I hope to be really involved with at the end of 2011; I can even nominate girls from my village to attend. Of course, to empower women, you must involve men and change their ideas about gender roles, so ‘women empowerment’ should involve both men and women. I’m helping to organize and facilitate an HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop at my organization, The Hunger Project, to demonstrate the link between the lack of women’s rights in society and the spread of HIV/AIDS. While I won’t single-handedly change the gender roles and treatment of women in Uganda, I hope I can help improve the lives of a few women and girls around me.

As a Peace Corps Trainee in Uganda, I have learned a great deal during the 10-week training period about topics from language (I’m learning Runyankore-Rukiga, but there are 7 other languages being taught to other Trainees), cross-cultural issues, income generating activities, community health, agrobusiness, water and sanitation, etc. However, no matter which topic we are discussing, it is all based on the Peace Corps’ approach to development, which is a grassroots, assets-based (rather than problem-based) approach. Essentially, as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), our role is to act as change agents and co-facilitators to help communities realize the resources they already have to change their lives. The idea is to break the traditional cycle of dependency on outside aid for development to happen, and to empower people to stop thinking of themselves as ‘poor and helpless’, as the Western world has so often labeled them, but rather to believe that they have control over their own lives. We are here to share skills and ideas, and to motivate people to use what they do have rather than thinking about what they don’t.

However, this approach is not without difficulty. Since so many NGOs and short-term volunteers have already been working here in Uganda, and indeed throughout Africa and the rest of the developing world, many Ugandan communities have come to expect that a muzungu (foreigner or white person) brings money and outside resources. While monetary aid does have its place in certain contexts, this dependency on resources that come from outside the community is unsustainable and discourages people to rely on themselves and take charge of their own development. While the problem exists all across Uganda, I have heard PCVs serving in Northern Uganda complain of the “war tourism” occurring there as short-term volunteers and tourists flood the region in the wake of the devastation caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The existence of war tourism makes their job as PCVs much more difficult because of the expectancy that the muzungu will come, build a school or make a donation, and then leave, while the PCV comes for two years with motivation and skills but no funding to speak of.

My purpose is not to bash foreign aid, more traditional development work, or short-term volunteers (indeed, most PCVs have been short-term volunteers themselves at some point, which could have been the spark that inspired them to serve in the Peace Corps), but rather to encourage people to think differently about the impacts that these approaches have on the communities which they are trying to ‘develop’. Sustainability is key in any development context, and the assets-based approach that Peace Corps takes aims for sustainability through community-driven development. After all, only when people take ownership of their actions in order to continue improving their own lives long after an NGO or volunteer leaves can development work be truly sustainable.

As a previous member of the Michigan State University SCOUT BANANA chapter, I am absolutely thrilled to begin my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda starting in just a few weeks.  I know many young (and older!) people who have considered doing the Peace Corps, so I’d like to detail what my work will probably entail (not to mention the equally-challenging cross-cultural adjustment, language acquisition, being far from home and family for 27 months, etc.).  However, every volunteer is in a different situation and has a different set of skills and experience – therefore everyone ends up doing many different things!

I’ve been given a job title, program, and job description, but nothing about the details of my job are clear yet, and probably won’t be for a long time to come. Part of the model of Peace Corps, and any type of grassroots participatory development work, is doing needs assessments in your community and doing what the people there are interested in and need, not what your international organization deems necessary (radical thinking, I know). So the details of my work are still yet to be determined, but here is the general idea of what I’ll be doing:

Program: Community Health and Economic Development (CHED)
Job Title: Agricultural Extension Volunteer
Your Primary Duties: Volunteers in our Community Health and Economic Development Program work as staff members in a variety of host organizations in Uganda. Uganda’s Ministry of Health, and local and international organizations request Volunteers to assist them with developing and implementing programs with the goals of improving overall levels of community health and economic development, preventing HIV/AIDS among adults and youth, caring for orphans and vulnerable children, and supporting people living with AIDS, their families, and their caregivers. As an Agricultural Extension Volunteer it is important for you to know that more than 80% of Ugandans depend on subsistence agriculture for livelihood.

The info packet then goes on to explain a number of activities with which I could be involved with the overall goal of improving livelihoods through agriculture, especially for people affected by HIV/AIDS and youth. I’m really hoping for a livestock/animal husbandry post (I majored in animal science and plan on veterinary school after Peace Corps)! However, volunteers always get involved with secondary projects, as described below:

While your primary assignment will be work in an advisory role full-time with a local host organization or government agency, there is little that goes on in your community that falls wholly outside of your role as a Community Health and Economic Development Volunteer. Your primary assignment will be the door through which you enter and initially come to know your community, allowing you to identify activities that are of interest to your community as a whole, and that further enhance your sense of fulfillment and professional development…

Oftentimes, secondary projects are among the most fulfilling to Volunteers. Such projects may include working with a local women’s group to improve their health practices; teaching adults basic computer skills; teaching English or basic reading and writing to low-literacy adults in your community; setting up girls’ empowerment or sports camps with students in local schools, to name a few such possible secondary activities.

Hopefully that gives you some insight into what some Peace Corps Volunteers do!  Others going with me to Uganda include economic development, NGO development, youth development, and community health volunteers, so we will all be involved in a variety of projects.  I leave the U.S. on August 10 and will be in training until October 21, at which point I will begin service at my assigned post.  While I’ll be focusing most of my posts on this blog on my actual work, thoughts on development and aid work in Africa, etc., I’ll also be posting more of my personal experiences on my own blog for those who are interested.