First Report from Gary in Angola

Quite often, sometimes several times a day, I see a woman coming to and from the well near where we live. She has only one leg and walks with a pair of crutches which occupy her hands.

Quite often, sometimes several times a day, I see a woman coming to and from the well near where we live.  She has only one leg and walks with a pair of crutches which occupy her hands.  Nonetheless, she is always carrying something balanced on her head.  I am not sure where she carries it from the well, but probably at least a kilometre, uphill, where doubtless she has hungry and thirsty children waiting for whatever she brings back.

It is an image which encapsulates a lot about Angola.  I am not sure why this woman is lacking a limb, but she is far from alone in that here.  Perhaps she is one of the victims of the estimated fifteen million landmines planted during the Angolan civil war of 1975-2002, a conflict which claimed about half a million lives.  In any case she symbolises the tragedies and inconveniences of life in the country, but also the determination of the people, and perhaps especially of the women of Angola, to make the best of things.

Seven weeks ago I came with another Development Instructor, Ferenc from Hungary, to the Escola de Professores do Futuro Benguela.  It is a teacher training college outside of the city of Benguela, in central Angola about a hundred miles south of the capital Luanda.  The school’s students are trained to work in some of the country’s rural primary schools, where resources are very limited.

Before I became a development instructor, I had been a teacher for many years at many levels, including teaching English as a foreign language.  Coming here means I have to prove myself as a teacher all over again; but that makes complete sense.  The type of teaching we have to do here is different in many ways from that which I was doing in a privileged western university; one cannot assume that just because one is a westerner one can teach Africans without effort, nor that they will fall over themselves in gratitude for everything one does.  It is not just that here I am teaching in Portuguese, although itself poses many challenges.  Timetabling, teaching structures and especially the level of resources are totally different

This is as it should be, as it is up to us to provide an example to the students in the conditions in which they themselves will have to teach; you can never work in solidarity with others and prepare them to face a situation unless you have experienced it yourself.  It is down to me to rise to the challenge and show I can teach in these circumstances; if I lack skills or knowledge in the Portuguese language for instance, I simply have to show to others’ satisfaction that I can develop them.  We have to come up with inventive solutions which will help the students learn and inspire them to teach: I’d never pictured myself before I came here trying to teach Angolan pupils to sing a John Lennon song, for instance. Sometimes I feel like I am getting through to the students, sometimes not; some students seem to want to learn and some do not: but in this one respect it is not so different from a western university

Angola has valuable natural resources, notably oil and diamonds; but to suggest there must be something wrong with such a country where there is still poverty at the levels found here is to miss the point.  After independence, the Portuguese colonists left Angola with little in the way of infrastructure to exploit its natural wealth.  Thereafter external powers intervened in the hope of gaining from Angola’s resources, a major reason why the civil war was so protracted.  This conflict was a bi-product of the cold war, so that in a sense Angola paid, and is still paying, a terrible price for the comfortable lifestyle we have since enjoyed in the west. 

Outsiders do not realise the destructive effects civil war can have on the psychology of affected communities.  In a situation where peace and stability can be disrupted suddenly at the whim of powerful external forces, there is little incentive to work diligently and to build a life for oneself and others; it is tempting merely to take whatever one can whenever one can.  Meanwhile, what seems like a major crisis to us, such as a lack of electricity or transport, is by comparison a minor inconvenience to Angolans which can be treated casually.

Naturally this can still affect people’s attitudes to life and to other people, and can make it hard to organise groups to complete large projects.  The moment the students here see one person not working for whatever reason, everyone else seems to question why they should be working.  But in my experience British people of the same age are little different in their attitudes to work.  In any case, these attitudes are changing as time passes and as people get more used to peace.  Given a chance to develop, this country and its people can prosper.

One of our first projects here was to start to create a horta organica (an organic vegetable garden).  Our goals are to provide nutritious food for the school, save the school money, and provide an example to neighbouring farmers.  It was the kind of project in which I was keen to be involved before coming to Africa; but I had only a very limited understanding of the difficulties.  Ferenc and I read up about projects in organic agriculture and came up with many ideas which seemed very good, but could not work in practice.  There is a difficult balance to be struck in our role.  We are supposed to be instructors; yet it would be arrogant to assume that just because of our western privileges and training we are in a position to order around people who have far greater local knowledge.  The students themselves came up with solutions for problems such as irrigation that I would never have thought of.

Inspiring the students to work on the garden was very problematic, not least because of the language difficulties.    When I tried to help prepare the bone-dry ground for planting by wielding an enxada (hoe-like implement) myself, it was disconcerting to find a large group of students laughing at me.  I am not sure if my efforts were really that pathetic, or if the sight of a European trying to work in an African field was intrinsically hilarious to them.  But it was important to be persistent and not discouraged, and I felt that at other times the sight of even this pale puny white guy sweating buckets while hacking away at the earth shamed at least some of them to greater efforts.  We made progress, and it was often the women again who made the best workers in the field.  The sense of achievement when the first seeds were planted was a good reward.

Another project in which we have been involved comprises Domingos abertos (open Sundays).  Here we organise events relevant to the school’s mission, with visitors, presentations and other entertainments.  We help to organise the events and invitations.  We have had one such event so far, which was a success, and I hope there will soon be others. 

The heat here is energy-sapping, and I think the racists who stereotype Africans as “lazy” cannot have tried to do physical work themselves in these conditions.  But it is still possible to work and achieve things if you are sensible.  Good nutrition, drinking enough safe clean water, avoiding sunburn and keeping as clean and healthy as possible are all important.

We are also in an area with high levels of malaria, and it is important to minimise the risks.  But as with many of the difficulties of everyday life in Africa, it is necessary to experience the dangers and the problems at first hand, and to see the importance of the world waking up to its real problems and its real responsibilities.  Malaria does not grab as many headlines in the west as some issues which are far less significant by comparison, but it is the biggest single killer of children in Benguela, as it is throughout Africa as a whole, and is a major cause of underinvestment and poverty.  A child dies from malaria in this continent alone about every thirty seconds.  Similarly you have to come somewhere like here to see that climate change, far from being a scientists’ distant prediction which may or may not occur, is happening and threatening people’s lives now.  The project here plants trees which we water every week to fight desertification; without this work, conditions for local agriculture will get still harder, and many years see fatalities from malnutrition during the dry season in parts of this country

I feel as though together we are achieving something here.  I am not sure what difference it will make; probably very little in the grand scheme of things.  But whenever I look back on my previous life of wallowing among the greatest privileges and luxuries a disgracefully unequal world has to offer while achieving no objective of any note, I know I must be making a greater and a better difference here.