Development, Dependency, Discipleship, Disaster-relief, Democracy, & other Dilemmas:

As Christians we are called to care for those in need around us.  If true discipleship means living as much as possible to the example set by Christ on earth, then tithing is a bare minimum, and our generosity to those less fortunate than ourselves should extend to the point where we are making real sacrifices, be they of our resources, our time, or both, for others.  If you open the concordance or index at the back of any bible and look for the words “poor, hungry, justice, widows or orphans” you will find hundreds of references and instructions, from the laws of gleaning, Sabbath and Jubilee found in Exodus and Deuteronomy right through almost all of the prophets, the proverbs, the Gospels and the New Testament Epistles.  (Incidentally, you will find many more references to these issues of social justice in the bible than you will to issues of sexuality, despite our apparent 21^st century obsession with discussing them).

The bible is many things to many people, but there can be no serious denying that it is, amongst other things, a manifesto for a fairer world and a call for God’s people to play their part in making it so.  But how does this work in practice?  Feeding the five thousand on a hilltop with a few loaves and fishes was a wonderful miracle, and one might argue that the World Food Programme achieves a similar feat (although with significantly more resources) on a daily basis in refugee camps all over the world.  Yet it is also clear that this “hand-out” approach to giving has many flaws, the biggest being that it encourages dependency, which also fosters helplessness and despair.  There are parts of the world where people have been living off food hand-outs for generations and know no other way of living.  This isn’t good for them and it isn’t good for the donors who’ve spent a fortune feeding them.

As a development worker dependency is the thing I’m always seeking to avoid.  Whether this is with regard to planning projects to help communities, or dealing with the continuous individual requests for help with school-fees, medical-bills, or a street-kid begging for a small coin, we have to remember that we are only in Uganda for a short period of time and so allowing people to become dependent on BMS or on us individually is harmful in the long-term.  This tends to mean that we put most of our efforts into projects which aim to have a sustainable impact, even if the projects themselves won’t last indefinitely.  As for the other requests we try to think about the alternatives that the person asking us has and whether or not they have already pursued them, and to what extent the request is a real emergency (which medical requests often are), or something routine which will come round and round again (like termly school fees).

In the neatly defined world of academia there is a distinction between responding to emergencies, or disaster relief – which often involves hand-outs;  and development, which is more long-term and aims to help people help themselves, to avoid dependency, and to achieve sustainability.  Yet in practise it isn’t so simple.  Our work in Acholi Quarter, where we are striving to seek sustainability and sometimes have to refuse requests for help which would only encourage dependency, is overlapping with the flooding situation in neighbouring Congo Quarter and the edges of Acholi Quarter, afflicted by a natural disaster. 

You may have read about some small relief work that we did handing out blankets to those who had been driven from their homes by the floods (paid for by BMS and ourselves), and then a week later giving some jerry-cans, cups and plates to many of the same households (funded by US Baptist NGO World Venture).  With larger and better resourced NGOs such as World Vision and The Red Cross feeding those affected in temporary camps at two primary schools, these gifts were the best things we could give that would be of benefit both in the camps and afterwards on their return to their homes.  At the end of May the camps suddenly closed, because there were two suspected cholera cases and the camps were in schools which needed to re-open for the new term so the temporary residents were given 2 days’ worth of food and sent on their way quickly in order to avert a potential cholera outbreak.

Yesterday I went with fellow BMS worker Alex Vickers and his Acholi colleague Genesis to visit Congo Quarter again.  Alex is a soil scientist and Genesis is an agriculturalist and between them they are working wonders with the farmers up in Gulu who have recently reclaimed their land after the 2008 peace which followed two decades of brutal civil war in northern Uganda.  We wanted to investigate how the farm plots in Congo-Quarter have been affected by the flooding in order to see how we could help the farmers to replant next season (which starts in August/September) and regain their livelihoods – their crops for this season were ruined.  Much of the farm land in Congo Quarter is lying underneath between 6 inches and 3 feet of sand deposited by the swollen river as it carved out new routes straight through their community.  With a geologist’s flair, Alex stood in one of the now dry extra river beds and was able to look at all the layers and see not only what had been deposited in the recent flood, but also that the areas must have been flooded a few times before in the last century or so and that at one time the river probably flowed through there permanently.  In other words the people of Congo Quarter are living somewhere which is inherently unstable and liable to flood again.  But where else can they live?  As recent migrants from the war torn DR Congo they arrived with nothing and settled on the only land available to them, where a river provided fertile soil to grow cops and try to make a living in their new country.  Now that soil is buried and their crops have been destroyed.  The good news is that Alex and Genesis have come up with suggestions about how they can mitigate this damage and be able to plant a reasonable crop next season.  We will be working on a proposal to the BMS Relief Fund to help them achieve this, once we’ve got back the test results from the soil samples Alex has taken.

The bad news is that anything we plant in September won’t be harvested until January or February and in the meantime they have nothing.  Their children are being chased away from their schools because they can’t pay their fees and they are struggling to feed themselves.  In Roman occupied Palestine, Jesus and his followers would probably have sold everything they had and shared it with them, although given that there are around 400 people in Congo Quarter even that wouldn’t be simple.  I’m an ordinary human-being though and quite attached to my laptop and my DVD collection, and our boys are very attached to their books and toys so we’re not very keen on giving all our stuff away.  Furthermore, Uganda isn’t occupied by Romans or ruled by King Herod, it is (at least on paper) a modern democratic republic.  Yesterday Pastor Alfonse and I were encouraging the local leader in Congo Quarter to make written representations through the many layers of local government about the plight of his community which seems to have been missed out by the government and NGO aid still going to the people who were flooded in Kilembe.  On paper Uganda was one of the first Sub-Saharan African countries to achieve Universal Primary Education (UPE), but in practice it still isn’t free because even government funded schools charge various supplementary fees, and as there still aren’t enough government schools many children go to cheap private schools run by churches and other charities.  For people who’ve just lost all their crops, none of these schools are now affordable.

So the dilemma is this:  Do we recognise that the people in Congo Quarter are suffering and need help now and try and find some resources to do this?  Even If we can do this how would it affect our efforts to stop putting external resources into neighbouring Acholi Quarter (some of which was also flooded) as we try and encourage them to be more self-sufficient, especially as residents of Congo Quarter go to the church in Acholi Quarter, so the boundaries are blurred?  Even if we could find the resources to help feed 400 people in Congo Quarter how would we organise this?  If helping them becomes a full-time job then what about the long-term development projects which need our focus and energy if they are to succeed?   Or do we help campaign that the Government of Uganda lives up to its fine words and its worthy constitution, and takes better care of those who depend on it?  This is further complicated in Congo Quarter because many of the Congolese residents there may not officially be Ugandan citizens.  As Christians we are called to speak up for the poor and marginalised, and foreigners can at times have an effective voice, but sometimes British people perceived to be interfering in the internal governance of a former British colony can be resented and counter-productive. There can be no doubt at all, given past experience, that any interaction with local government will be extremely slow and frustrating.  Yet if people give up on government and outsiders continually step in to do what the Ugandan government should be doing then where does that leave Uganda as a democracy, especially when Uganda’s economy is consistently growing while the economies of most donor nations are in recession?

The easiest response is to identify the many potential flaws in each possible course of action and then use them as a reason for doing none of them, but that is clearly not the right thing to do.  This article is not a request for money, although donations to BMS are always put to good use, nor is it a request for answers because there are no simple answers here.  It probably is a request for prayer, because we definitely need more wisdom and guidance from the one who created this world in which we live.  Anyway, now I’ve expressed these thoughts online it’s probably time to go and act on some of them, so bye for now!