Cultural Parallels and a Little More About ABW

Cultural/Historical Parallels

I am sitting on the veranda at 5AM watching the sun rise into probably the most exotic, beautiful vista I have ever witnessed. The cicadas are already cacophonic - right at that brain-boring 2500 Hertz upper-midrange frequency. But I don't really mind them. I was up anyways.

Today we are travelling into Daaba with an armed guard.  There are groups of young punks in the area with weapons and not a lot to do.  They’ve been robbing vehicles at gunpoint.  I guess the presence of a guard with an AK47 in the passenger seat is the best way to discourage them.  

The road up to Daaba is only 18 km or so, but you need a good hour to drive it.  This place is remote and difficult to reach.  Which brings me to a point about A Better World and NGOs in general.

There are NGOs all over the place in Kenya.  The number of Red Cross, World Vision, and Unicef trucks on the road is surprising.  Towns and cities are dotted with missions and aid organizations.  In some ways, the abundance of people and organizations in Kenya who want to help people is inspiring; however, problems arise when a lack of organization or coordinated effort creates a strange “competition” among NGOs for the aid work that is being done.  This is one of the best reasons why A Better World focuses almost entirely on remote, hard-to-reach, rural areas.  

Most of the areas of greatest need - where people don’t have access to an unwavering source of food and water, where any schooling is unheard of - are difficult to reach and often overlooked by the big NGOs.  In assessing where they can do the most good, Eric and A Better World have chosen to focus on these areas, and it is easy to see why.  A Better World is a small, nimble organization run entirely by volunteers.  (The administrative budget that, in many aid organizations, opponents like to hack on with gusto, simply doesn’t exist.  Along with every single other person in this organization, we are here on our own dime).  As a result, ABW can focus on many of the areas that the big NGOs simply cannot afford to help due to a perceived lack of return on investment.  

This focus is also a powerful example of bridging cultures for the betterment of humankind.  In a lot of ways, the situation in rural Kenya is similar to the sitution that our great-grandparents faced on the Canadian prairies.  People are spread out over a wide, somewhat harsh environment where the effort to produce sustainance occupies a great deal of time.  The distances and the daily workload are simply too great to allow children to attend school regularly.  And yet, most people agree that the key to a high-functioning society is education.  In Canada, we owe so much of our current standard of living to a monumental effort in those days to put a schoolhouse within travelling distance of every homestead.  Most, if not all, of those schoolhouses are gone today, but they are an indelible, hugely benificial part of our past.  In bringing help to areas in Kenya where kids can’t attend school because a) there isn’t one to attend, and b) too much time is spent on tier-1 needs, A Better World is mirroring a process that reaped huge returns in Canada.  And I like the parallel.