Because I am a Girl (8 page)

When asked what they didn’t like about school, each of the girls spoke about the problem of menstruation. Although it’s stating, as it were, the bloody obvious, its worth remembering that on average girls have their period for one week in four, and in a country where many girls can’t afford underwear and almost none can pay for sanitary protection, this is hugely debilitating. The girls told us that they use banana fibres (apparently fairly effective) or plastic bags (rather less so), as sanitary protection, but that the school doesn’t have adequate toilet facilities to allow them to change their protection or clean themselves up. They don’t even have any toilet paper. I tried to imagine dealing with my period with only plastic bags and no toilet paper, and, as so many times on this trip, failed. It’s no wonder that many girls do not attend school while they’re menstruating. Would you?

By the time the fourth girl was complaining about the difficulty of dealing with periods while at school, the head teacher was clearly embarrassed and interrupted to say that these distinguished visitors from England really didn’t want to sit around all afternoon hearing about menstruation, and could they please come up with something else?

So the girl who was speaking stopped, gave it some
thought
, and then said that some girls are mistreated by their stepmothers, who withhold their basic needs, such as food and soap, so they have sex with boys in order to meet those needs, and then they become pregnant and have to leave school.

The ban on talking about menstruation opened a floodgate of terrifying revelations about what it is like to be a Ugandan schoolgirl, all delivered in a matter-of-fact tone and received with no surprise by the other girls or the teachers. This, lest we forget, is what is considered by these girls to be the second worst thing about school, after periods. I wrote everything down as fast as I could in my notebook, trying to capture it all. When I read back over it later, I could barely believe my eyes. (6), I had written.
Good: can become professional – doctor, nurse, teacher. Bad: boys disturb them because they are girls, take them into the bush and make them pregnant. Stepmothers don’t give them food. (7) Good: learn singing, athletics, sport. Bad: very vulnerable to men on way to school. Men grab and rape them. (8) Problem of child marriages. Parents force them into early marriage and they have to leave school. Likes: art and crafts. (9) Admires teachers and studies hard to be like them. Talks about other problem of being raped: ie catching HIV and AIDS
.

The
other
problem of being raped?

On the last day, we finally visited the school which had no latrines. They still had no latrines, though there was a
solitary
man with a spade, digging a ditch for a temporary replacement. It had been six days since we arrived in Kamuli district and read the headmaster’s letter. Meanwhile the school had only been open for half days so that the students could go home and use the latrines there.

Or at least most of the students could. What I hadn’t realised was that this school, as many in the region do, takes boarders. It’s the only solution for families who live more than two hours’ walk from a school. Less than two hours’ walk is considered to be fine. That’s two hours each way, usually in the dark – not at all unusual for a Ugandan child. It is on these walks that girls are most vulnerable to rape, and so there’s a direct correlation between poverty and rape – the poorest children tend to be from the most isolated villages, living the furthest from the schools, and walking the longest distances to get there.

Once we had examined the collapsed latrines (I didn’t examine them very closely), the Head showed me the girls’ dormitory. Eighty-six girls share one room, only half of whom have beds. The others sleep on the floor. The ground is so crowded with bedding that you can barely get into the room, which is stultifyingly hot, even though there is no glass on the windows. No glass, and no mosquito netting. Malaria is the leading cause of death in Uganda and there wasn’t a single mosquito net in this room. Not only are they sleeping on the floor of a barn which smells like the Elephant House at London Zoo, not
only
do they not have a hole to shit in, but these girls don’t even have the most basic bit of fabric which might just get between them and death from malaria. One mosquito net costs 50p. Mosquito nets for every girl in this room would cost £43.

Our work in Kamuli completed, it was another three-hour drive back to Kampala and we gave a couple of the Plan workers a lift so that they could visit their families. There were five of us crammed into the truck, and as one of the women was eight months pregnant it was a bit of an anxious ride, particularly as for the first hour there was no tarmac and the road was extremely bumpy. Once, when I was on a long-haul flight, the woman in the seat next to me went into labour, and afterwards I asked a doctor friend to tell me how to deliver a baby, just in case it ever happened again. It’s not something I wanted to have to try out by a Ugandan roadside, although I did have some antibacterial hand gel in my bag.

We fell into conversation about a family we had just visited, a man with two wives and two daughters, one from each wife. The girls were part of a Plan cohort study that my chaperone was coordinating of 135 girls worldwide, from birth up to age nine, called ‘Real Choices, Real Lives’. The theme for the 2009 report was Girls’ Economic Independence. The girls in the cohort were two years old and didn’t seem very economically independent to me, but then again, I’m not an academic. Anyway, at first the
man
had pretended that one of his wives was his sister because he was worried that otherwise the girls would not get into the study, and therefore they would miss out on the benefits of taking part. But there are no benefits, because that would be inequitable to the other people in the community, so it wasn’t really worth the deception.

The Plan workers – both Ugandan, both married women – told me that polygamy is still common in Uganda. I thought back to what the girls in the school I visited told me about their stepmothers not giving them any food, and wondered what it would be like to be the child of the least favoured wife. I asked the Plan workers whether the arrival of a new wife is something that women find particularly welcome. Answer, not very surprisingly: no, but they don’t have any choice. I asked whether women ever take a second husband, and the Plan women descended into fits of laughter. Then one of them said that if a man is unfaithful, it makes his wife very sad, but she learns to live with it. I asked what happens if a woman is unfaithful. ‘Her husband will kill her,’ she replied. I assumed that this was just an expression, like
If you leave the milk out again I’m going to kill you
, until she went on to talk about the problem of domestic violence in Uganda. There is no specific law against domestic violence in Uganda, and even where a woman does report an assault it is generally dismissed as being a private matter, to be resolved between the couple at home. Surveys
consistently
show that around 70% of Ugandan women have experienced domestic violence, but I was not brave enough to ask the two women in the car if they ever had. Anyway, they had gone back to giggling and imagining how their men would react if they got home and announced they were taking another husband.

Coming back to Kampala after my time in Kamuli felt like coming home. Despite the noise and the dirt, the bustle of the big city was reassuring, all the activity suggesting that these people’s lives were going somewhere, that these people, at least, had hope. I thought that the worst of my trip was over, now that I was back somewhere familiar. After we’d dropped our passengers off we drove to Plan Uganda’s headquarters in a smart suburb of Kampala, to debrief our visit. Every single building along this road appeared to house an NGO. According to DFID there are well over 2,500 NGOs operating in Uganda, which is about one for every 10,000 people. Or to put it another way, there are almost three times as many NGOs as there are doctors.

My chaperone and I were greeted warmly and shown to a meeting room upstairs where the head of Plan Uganda and two senior employees were waiting for us. We had a lot to talk about, and many questions to ask. My chaperone had only been with Plan for a few months and had never been to Uganda before, so everything we’d seen had been as new to her as it was to me.

We began our debrief, taking turns to tell about the people we had met and the deprivation we had seen. We had our own areas of interest: I had been most horrified by the schools, while she had been chiefly appalled by the clinics.

But – ‘Did they ask you for money?’ interrupted the American (or Canadian) man.

Well, yes. The schoolteachers showed us the overcrowded, falling-down school buildings, the lack of desks and books, and asked us for money. The people in the clinics told us of the huge demand for their services, and the lack of medicine and equipment, and asked us for money. The families we visited greeted us with politeness, offered us drinks, answered our questions, sometimes for several hours, and then, when we asked if there was anything we could do for them, asked us for money. Everybody asked us for money. This was understandable. We had money and they didn’t. Moreover, we were representing the NGO who are working in the area with the stated aim of helping them. Of course they were going to ask us for money. We didn’t give them any, but I didn’t object to being asked. Had the roles been reversed, I would have asked them.

The American (or Canadian) shook his head. ‘They always ask for money,’ he said. ‘They ask us for everything.’ He said that there’s a problem with a culture of dependency. You can’t just give people what they ask for, or they’ll never stop asking.

What this meant in practice was: no buckets for the AIDS workers, no reagents for the CD4 machine, and no latrines for the school. None of the things that we’d seen were going to get done.

What about the sexual abuse, I said. Everywhere we went, there were signs and posters and projects to teach girls to say no to sex. But very little seemed to be being done with the men, to stop them from abusing the girls.

‘There is a culture of submissiveness amongst Ugandan women,’ said the American (or Canadian). ‘It’s not as if anybody is holding a knife to their throats.’

This is the point at which I started to cry. I don’t know what I said exactly, but between sobs and snot and mouthfuls of spit, I managed to get something out along the lines of: How dare you. How dare you suggest that these girls are to blame for getting raped. How dare you bring me over here and show me all of this need and then tell me that you can’t help these people. I am just an author from London, an author of lightweight novels, I do not know anything about the culture of dependency or the culture of submissiveness, all I know is that I have met these people and they are poor and they are desperate and they are being raped, and they asked me to help them and I said that I would, and now you are telling me that you can’t help them because of the culture of this and that, but what you can do is fund a cohort study into the economic independence of two-year-old girls, and what you can do
is
pay for an author to come over from London to write a piece for an anthology which will make people think that if they donate money it will go to the people that she met and the problems that she wrote about, only it’s not going to go to them because of the culture of bullshit, so where the fuck is it going to go?

‘What do you want?’ said the head of Plan Uganda.

I just want those kids in that school to have a toilet.

‘We will build them a toilet. You can come back and have your photograph taken with it.’

This is when I stopped crying because I was so angry. But, I said, you said that you couldn’t build it. Because of the culture of dependency. What about the culture of dependency? Doesn’t the culture of dependency matter any more?

‘We will build them a toilet,’ the head of Plan Uganda reassured me, as if this answered my question. Which, in a way, it did.

And this is when the man said: ‘So, did it change your life?’

And I said: ‘I don’t know.’

But I do know now. And my visit to Uganda totally changed my life. I discovered that I have more power in the nib of my pen than 1,250 Ugandan children with no toilet. And I discovered that, in order for anybody to hear you cry, you need to be rich and white and sitting in the right
office
. But in the end, who cares whether this visit changed my life. The real question is, did it – will it – change their lives, the people of Kamuli?

‘HAD I NOT
on several occasions, spent sleepless nights after witnessing horrific poverty or injustices?’ I asked myself. Author Marie Phillips had just returned from the Nawansaso Primary School in an area yet to benefit from Plan’s work. She had witnessed how girls at the school sleep on the floor. It had an understandably and visibly profound effect on Marie.

‘Guilt,’ I thought, ‘We all seem to go through the same stages.’ Flashes of my own first experience of intense guilt for my ‘privileged life’ passed through my mind, as I put my arms around a sobbing Marie. She is as young as my own son, and I felt protective of her.

‘What do YOU want to do?’ I asked Marie, I empathised with her.

‘I want to raise money for the school and make sure the girls have a decent dormitory and toilets,’ Marie responded.

I visualised another school, the Kamuli Girls’ School – one not visited by Marie. The well-maintained school,
built
with community support and with funds raised by Plan now has clean toilets, a modern kitchen, a large auditorium, borehole, income-generating projects and soon the girls will be getting a new dormitory. The confident girls at this school lead their area in two key campaigns ‘Because I Am a Girl’ and ‘Learn without Fear’, both of which focus on the rights of young women like them to a decent education and to real opportunity.

‘OK, then. If you raise the money specifically for the dormitory and toilets, we will use the money for just that. And when the toilets are ready, you can come here and have a photograph taken in front of the school,’ I said, imagining the smiles on the faces of the children who would use the new toilets with funds raised by Marie Phillips.

But money alone will not fix anything. We had obviously failed in explaining to Marie the child-centred rights-based approach to development where, to quote President Obama’s now famous ‘African speech’, ‘we are partners in bringing transformational change. Aid is not an end in itself. The purpose of foreign assistance must be in creating the conditions where it is no longer needed.’

Plan works towards this goal by focusing on activities that are best for the children. We go through a rigorous fiveto six-month planning process with the people living in the communities. All family members – children, women and
men
– local government officials, schoolteachers and any other community members spend weeks discussing the problems and how we can resolve them. Based on this we come up with an action plan, which lists the activities that must be implemented in the next five to six years. Usually the list of things to do is very long. We have a rough estimate of the funds Plan might raise for Uganda. Based on this estimate we decide on activities the members of the parish/school/government will do and others that Plan can support them to implement.

For example, while conducting a planning exercise, some community members told Plan that the health clinics that we had constructed did not have malaria tablets and requested Plan to purchase these. Plan staff stood firm. The government must stock its clinics with malaria tablets. I had followed up this issue with the State Minister for Health. ‘Plan should never supply malaria tablets to the district,’ he told me, ‘because we send money for tablets, or stocks of malaria tablets to the districts. This means the district officials are pocketing the money!’

It is common knowledge amongst all development and social workers that if individuals contribute even nominal amounts for services or goods, then they take more responsibility for themselves and take good care of what they have paid for.

Based on this lesson learnt, Plan provided the district clinic with a Cell Differentiation Machine, the CD4 machine
mentioned
in Marie’s story, which is used to detect the level of immunity for HIV and AIDS blood cells. Plan also provided the first instalment of the reagents, chemicals used by the CD4 machine to test the blood for HIV and AIDS needed to make it work. We trained medical staff on how to use the machine and fix it should it break down. Users are expected to pay 5,000 Ugandan Shillings for this service which costs 55,000 in private clinics. The collected fees are used to purchase the next batch of reagents. But like most other drugs in Uganda, reagents were not available when Marie visited the clinic. To date, Plan is subsidising the government clinic to purchase reagents because the 5,000 shillings paid by the people tested so far in Kamuli is insufficient. With the machine and reagents supplied by Plan, 800 people in Kamuli have tested their HIV and AIDS status. Those tested positive are on medication; with new purchases of reagents more people will be tested. We work in very difficult political and social environments and if we compare hospitals in the developed world with the developing world, we will definitely be shocked. We need to ask the question as Marie asks, ‘Has Plan impacted the lives of the children and people we serve?’ We definitely have. In this case 800 people now know whether or not they need treatment. More will follow. And we know for sure that getting people to test their status is the first most difficult hurdle to overcome when we work in HIV and AIDS.

*

I had come to Uganda in June 2008 to take over as Country Director of Plan. During the three-week handover, my predecessor and I had travelled to the four districts where Plan works. In Tororo district, I had been deeply impressed with one particular project. I understood that Plan had built on eight years of experience and lessons learnt on HIV and AIDS to design the pilot Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission. There were initially fifteen partners working on this project. The model that was developed is lauded all over the world. But it took us almost fifteen years to achieve such results and we have saved the lives of more than 3,000 people who suffer from AIDS. Plan is preparing to hand over this project to the government. That is what we aim at – to build the capacity of government to discharge their duty to the citizens of the community Plan works in.

In Tororo I had also admired the community in Mublua. The women’s craft group export their handicrafts to Ireland. It takes patience, and several years of training, to enhance the rudimentary skills the women and men have to produce quality export goods, and find markets. This is the kind of independence Plan aims to achieve in all we do. For the purpose of aid, either government aid or NGO aid, is to create conditions where aid is no longer needed.

It is with pride that I can say that Plan has supported over two hundred schools in Uganda with building construction, boreholes, school furniture, textbooks, exercise books, and
pencils
, so that parents who cannot afford to purchase these materials can send their children to school. We also try to make sure that girls have their own toilets, because we know, as the girls have told us, that once they reach puberty they want privacy.

Like Marie, I too was upset that all messages on sexual violence were aimed at girls. But I understood the context: Ugandan schools, supported by Plan or not, were displaying messages approved by the President of Uganda, who was imitating the US President Bush’s ‘say no to sex’ campaign.

I can easily relate to the social context in Uganda, because my frame of reference is my own country, Nepal, not the UK. So I empathise with the Ugandan women who, like the Nepali girls of my generation, are taught from childhood to be ‘obedient and submissive’. Yet I am shocked by how Ugandan men take advantage of this submission and have several wives or children from several wives; shocked that some men abandon their families and feel no responsibility to the children they have fathered.

The Moonlight Stars, the group of sex workers who Marie describes in her write-up, receives Plan sponsored reproductive health services. These include information and training on HIV and AIDS prevention, training on how to educate peers, training materials, post-abortion care, tests
for
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), contraceptives and counselling. They also spread the message on HIV and AIDS, and inform others like themselves where they can get health support. This is very important in the Ugandan context, because in most developing countries women do not know where to go for treatment, and have no information on how they can get infected with HIV.

The members of the Moonlight Stars and I talked woman to woman: ‘How is it for women in your country?’ they asked me.

‘Well, we too are second-class citizens, but sexual abuse is not so prevalent, nor do men abandon their children as they do here. Our family system is much, much stronger.’

We laugh. Some smiles are sad.

‘I wish our men were more like the men in your country!’ says one girl.

I looked at the male Plan staff who accompanied me.

‘That is true. Nepali men are far more responsible for their families.’

The men are not happy. Some male staff think that this female country director favours women. But I don’t really care. I have heard this before from other men in other countries, including my own, and I know that my actions will bring some change. That is the most I can expect.

Given this context, perhaps it is not surprising that five months into my work, when I dropped into the office of one
of
Plan’s technical advisers, a Ugandan man, to follow up on some work, he was horrified by this female intrusion.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he questioned.

‘If I don’t want to know who else will?’ I asked, rather shocked. It soon dawned on me that this was the first time that Plan Uganda had a woman as Country Director.

‘Not again!’ I thought. Every assignment I have had in Plan, I have been the first woman to hold that position in that country. And over the years, I have learnt to take these firsts in my stride – as a challenge I must overcome so that I pave the way for other women. After a number of such encounters with this male, I asked some female staff, ‘Why does X behave like this?’

‘Oh!’ they laughed, ‘He belongs toY tribe. The men in that area think they are definitely superior to women.’

‘And you don’t confront him?’ I asked.

‘Why create tension?’ was the response.

I confronted Mr X. I told him how I felt. He was shocked. He had not realised that a woman found his behaviour unacceptable, and was even more amazed that she could tell him so!

And this self-realisation in him is the first step towards a possible change in his behaviour.

It is deplorable that we must live with this prejudice against women, and inevitably creates a bad impression on outsiders.

*

Marie’s article brings up many other issues. ‘Didn’t you know that Marie is a writer?’ I asked staff after reading Marie’s write-up and her objection to the way she was introduced.

‘Of course we did. All of us knew,’ retorted Monica and Harriet who accompanied Marie Phillips and Dr Pauline Lane on their trip.

‘I slipped once, while introducing Marie,’ confessed Harriet, ‘I called her a consultant. But does it really matter? All
musungus
(white people) are the same, especially to the community.’ Will deprived, malnourished people be truly interested in the career differentiation of a people they have a blanket name for –
musungu
?

Recently, a year into my work in Uganda, I told Jim – the same Jim who asked Marie if the visit to Kamuli had made an impact on her – ‘I am happy that some members of staff are opening up to me … the culture of silence is gently cracking …’

‘Not with me – and I have been here four years,’ Jim responded.

‘Well, you are a
musungu
!’ I teased.

Transparency International, in its 2008 report, has listed Uganda as the third most corrupt country in the world. The sequence of events leading to the suspension of the 201-million-dollar Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria
allocated to Uganda because of ‘mismanagement’ by its govenment is but one example among hundreds of similar cases. Donor funds provided to investigate this mismanagement also disappeared from the bank accounts. After this, newspapers reported that thugs vandalised the Directorate of Public Prosecutions which housed the financial records of the Global Funds!

Many international NGOs like Plan also discover corruption in some form within their own employees. After investigating one such misappropriation, I terminated the employment of a Program Manager.

The very next day, I was told by three Plan staff that this same manager had been sexually harassing female staff.

‘But why were you quiet before?’ I asked, deeply disturbed. I travelled around the four Plan district offices, talking to staff about our sexual harassment policy, the whistle-blowing policy, and what I thought was a ‘culture of silence’ in Plan Uganda.

‘How can we teach communities about gender equity, if we do not practise it ourselves?’ I asked.

I was still tossing and turning in bed, worrying about this culture of silence until, in June 2009, I was watching TV news. The results of a study on abuse of children by the church-affiliated schools in Ireland were being publicised. ‘No one talked about it’ wrote an Irish journalist in the
NewYorkTimes
. ‘There was a culture of silence for decades.’

Female staff in Plan have developed a gender equity
training
proposal for all Plan staff in Uganda. I am confident that within my remaining four-year term this training will bring about some change and that perhaps a few ‘positive deviants’ will courageously take the lead for other men and women to follow.

So, Marie, should you decide to raise funds for the girls’ school in Kamuli, you will use the might of your pen to bring about some positive change for girls and women less privileged than you. But if you merely use your pen to write about how overwhelmed you were to see the sufferings of girls and blame Plan for working for change in this extremely challenging culture for girls and women, then you will be blocking positive change for the very girls you want to help.

Real change will come, not by merely providing schools, water, clinics and drugs, but when, as President Obama says, Africa (Nepal too) has strong institutions, including strong government which as the major duty bearer will use its resources to implement the rights of its citizens. And this is the change that Plan works for. This change, fundamental, sustainable and enduring, takes a long time.