Mobilising Resources

Before I proceed I need, as do all VSO Volunteer bloggers it seems, to disclaim VSO’s responsibility for this here blog, so let me this do so paraphrasing the words of a friend; “the views expressed in this blog are the author’s own and do not reflect those of VSO. Indeed they probably won’t reflect mine in 10 minutes, so chill…”

Return to Zanzibar?
Nomakanjani, the vibrant dance/drama group I volunteer with, have been invited to a festival in Zanzibar in February 2011. I’ve been temporarily promoted to be their manager so I can be included in the invitation! Most of the group are in their early 20s and have yet to leave their country, see the sea, travel in a train or boat, let alone experience another country so it would be great if we can go. The problem, of course, is money. Buying passports for most of the 18 people in the group, then getting them to Zanzibar and back is out of our league, so I’ve been trying my hand at ‘resource mobilisation’; trying to persuade the Zambia-Tanzania train company that 18 free tickets is money well spent given the great PR we would give them. They haven’t as yet said no. Keep your fingers crossed.

And another placement
As hinted in my previous entry I’ve recently changed placements (yet again), and now work 4 days a week in a hospice-cum-AIDS clinic. (The fifth day is with Nomakanjani, although it seldom works out that neatly). It became clear that my previous placement didn’t actually need me – maybe they just fancied having a mzungu (white western) volunteer to show off to visitors. So, with commendable haste, VSO moved me to placement number 4 – a hospice in one of the poorer compounds (or ‘peri-urban areas’) of Lusaka. The need for my services there is all too clear.

Due to alleged dodgy dealings in high places some of the big international funders have withdrawn from giving money to health projects, leaving organisations like the hospice in dire straits. Over 3,000 people use its clinics on a regular basis, whilst hundreds of people come for intensive treatment in its 30 beds, or to die pain-free and with dignity. Zambia’s overall adult HIV prevalence rate is around 15%, but this rises to 40% for women aged from 25 – 39 who live in urban areas (such as where the hospice is located). An estimated 89,000 people die as a result of AIDS a year, (dying from ‘opportunistic infections’ such as TB, Gastroenteritis, Meningitis or Malaria), contributing to the 800,000 AIDS orphans, and to an average life expectancy of just 42 years. Many of the services of the hospice will be forced to close if funding is not found, so more resources for me to mobilise, somewhat urgently.

Meanwhile, in not so high places…
The Executive Director of a Zambian NGO, whose raison d’être is to disburse funds to HIV-AIDS organisations (like the Hospice) is currently under investigation. Reportedly the salary she has been paying herself – in full knowledge of the auditors it seems – is pretty much identical to the entire salary costs of the whole hospice. There’s just one of her, and 67 people employed by the hospice.
Fat cats in the developed world who pay themselves over 100 times what their subordinates earn are fairly contemptible in my book, but those that do so in this context – depriving people on the ground of money they need literally to survive, so they can have more cars or bigger swimming pools; well, what can you say?

Website
To finish on a cheerier note, check out a couple of websites. Firstly, Helen and I went to Kafue National Park, a few hours west of Lusaka, last weekend, and saw some lions! You can see photos of them on my Flickr site; http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan_sat/ Secondly, have a look at Nomakanjani’s website; www.nomakanjani.org, designed and implemented by myself and a couple of friends in the UK. We now own a video camera so links to performances online will follow as will, no doubt, appeals for cash to get us to Zanzibar! Look after your resources before I mobilise them in our direction…

Dan

Sanitation Week 2010

In the blog entry I wrote on August 23rd, entitled ‘On Workshops’, I talked about some of the work that has recently taken my time for ZARAN, the Zambia AIDSLaw Research and Advocacy Network.

Now it’s time to talk about my other placement – working to develop the Zambia NGO WASH Forum. WASH stands for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene education, and the Forum was set up as a national networking and sharing facility for NGOs working in that sector. We’ve got about 22 member organisations as members, including the ‘big boys’– WaterAid, Oxfam, etc. – but also small community-based organisations working at grassroots level to improve water and sanitation in their communities.

The Forum has been going in its current form since 2007. The idea is that by working together the NGOs – as representatives of civil society – can have a louder voice in terms of influencing national water and sanitation policy, but also learn from each other, ensure minimal duplication of efforts, and work together for the benefit of communities rather than be in competition. The Head Office of the Forum – or Secretariat being the term they use here – transferred from UNICEF to a local NGO, the Water and Sanitation Association of Zambia (WASAZA), in April of this year, and that’s when I joined it. Working with the WASAZA staff members allocated to support the Forum – particularly Nina and Annie – I was set the objective of transforming the Forum from an informal network to a formally registered organisation. This involved supporting the member organisations to come up with a Constitution and Strategic Plan that reflected the purpose of the Forum, formalising the membership process, and working towards the holding of the organisation’s first AGM.

These things we have done, or 90% done. But plans and constitutions are all well and good – they don’t mean an organisation is effective! I’d bet most NGOs in Zambia have shiny Constitutions and Strategic Plans that no one ever reads and bear very little relationship to what the organisation does on a daily basis. The Forum will never get independent funding, or be sustainable, if it can’t demonstrate that it delivers added value in practice, not just in theory!

And then along came Sanitation Week 2010. A great opportunity for the members to work together to achieve something tangible. And nicely timed a few weeks before the start of the rainy season when all sorts of nasty water-borne diseases including cholera can hit the capital of Zambia. And we did it!! Between Sunday 10th October and Friday 15th October – Global Hand Washing Day – more than 10 member organisations worked together to make some amazing things happen. Six teams of staff and volunteers from Forum member organisations distributed soap, chlorine, and hygiene training to hundreds of children from 26 schools in cholera-prone areas of Lusaka. On Global Hand Washing Day we held a Sanitation Fair and Concert attended by just under 300 children, also from these areas. We had exhibitors, art and drama competitions for the children to participate in – the very popular ‘draw and colour in a picture of a toilet’ coordinated by Nina on the WASAZA stand being my particular favourite! – as well as three live musical acts. The children all washed their hands together before having the lunch that had been laid on. The event was even opened by the Mayor as well as being attended by a representative of the Minister for Local Government and Housing, both of whom washed their hands to demonstrate to the children how to do it properly – to the great interest of the TV cameras!

By all accounts the week was a great success, and it was so wonderful to be working together with such motivated and committed people towards a common purpose. The challenge now is to get the other 10 or so members of the Forum who didn’t participate this time to see the value of this kind of cooperative working and to do their part in future. And to start working with donors so the Forum can be sustained into the future. And to find and support someone to replace me in coordinating the Forum activities when I return to the UK. Good thing I’m still here for another year!

And it’s World Toilet Day on November 19th!

See the Sanitation Week photos on

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2094827&id=1269166417&l=9a867df5f7

Helen

Trip to the UK

We are recently returned from a frenetic fortnight in the UK, seeing friends, family and attending two weddings.

People talk about a ‘reverse culture shock’ that you can experience returning to your home country after immersion in another, with everything that was once taken for granted feeling alien, strange and uninviting. In my case after 11 months away I felt a bit like a tourist in my own country; it felt like home but not home, very familiar but slightly distant. Which was not unpleasant! At one point I was watching the Thames from the South Bank, thinking just how nice London is, with its multicultural mix and its incredible history on display round every corner, comparing it to other places I could have been like Paris, or Lusaka… Picking up a hire car and driving round the M25 was perhaps not the high point of our trip but it struck me just how easy everything is in the UK and how affluent – compared to Zambia anyway everything is bright and shiny, and works! Also, as a recently returned friend commented, Britain is very green.

Over the course of the fortnight we saw all our family and many of our friends, attended the wedding of good friends in our old stomping ground of the Chilterns and, the focus of the trip, attended the happy event of my eldest brother getting married. It was our first meeting with Tanja, the bride, as Hal and she had met just before we left the country last October, and she’s lovely! The wedding itself was in a church, but thankfully the Vicar led the service in such a way that catered for the large proportion of Godless sceptics in the congregation! I was official photographer for the event, which was slightly scary; you can see some of the pictures of the day at my Flickr site here.

When we weren’t being fed and watered by our friends and loved ones we were shopping with a vengeance, returning with bags bulging with new clothes, DVDs, and enough Marmite to feed my habit for, well, at least a few months… The flights were not good for my poor ankle which swelled up to enormous proportions, but I’ve since started a course of anti-inflammatories and my right leg, at last, now looks and behaves pretty much like my left one.

Shortly after returning to Lusaka the Volunteer Conference kicked off, and as Helen and I are co-chairs of the Volunteer Committee, no less, and the Volunteer Committee was organising one of the two days and helping with the other, we were busy. I usually approach these events with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the dentist, but in this case the event went really well, with high points being a presentation from DFID on how they were planning on spending their budget in the foreseeable future here in Zambia, and one on next year’s elections here and the possible implications for us as volunteers. (One scenario is that the incumbent President, in true ‘Big Man’ style, loses but follows the example of his friend and neighbour and refuses to accept defeat, with all the instability that that would bring).

The most poignant part of the conference however was a trip to one of the Lusaka compounds to visit an AIDS Home Based Care group. We, a handful of us who volunteer in the area of HIV and AIDS, were met with singing and dancing by the volunteer carers in the group, who then proceeded to tell us their individual stories. All were positive about their positive status, and used their own vitality and health as key messages to the very sick people they supported in the community; ‘listen’, they’d say, ‘I too was like you, bed ridden, depressed, stigmatised, and now, thanks to Anti-RetroVirals (ARVs) and the support of others, here I am, very much alive’. A few of us went to visit a man in his house that the carers were supporting; he was obviously very unwell, unlike his younger wife although she too was HIV positive. Their three kids, all clear of the virus, wandered in and stared at the muzungus in their house!
It says something about the stigma of the disease that despite one in eight of the population having the virus this was the first time I’d met people who were prepared to openly state their positive status. I’m hoping to do some organisational development work at an AIDS hospice shortly; despite the fact that no doubt I’ll be doing more of the same I’ve done ever since I arrived here – create databases, help with funding applications, teach people how to use spreadsheets and the like – it would be fantastic to do so at the coal face, as it were, where those that benefit from the organisation are all around…

We’ll see what happens. Right now I better get back to my ‘Teach Yourself Access Database’ course, perhaps with a slice of toast to keep me going; now, what shall I put on the toast..?

Dan