The penny drops - Looking at the education process

I was reminded today of the importance of the education process and the possibility it has to uniquely shape individual lives.

To close a course on conflict and culture my professor asked the class, as a closing ritual (ritual being one of the key topics we covered during the term), to bring one half page designed in such a way through words, drawings, pictures, or symbols on a theme the class developed earlier in the week: Breaking Barriers Through Change. How you wanted to represent the topic was up to student.

Today, the class spent an hour, our chairs arranged in a circle, presenting our designs and explaining what they meant. It was evident that for many of us the class had struck a certain chord and had changed our perceptions of the world around us. It was a borderline emotional experience and an incredible testament to the professor's ability to facilitate a class to the point where it takes on a life of its own. The half pages were taken from us at the end of class and will be returned tomorrow, compiled as booklets for everybody to take home.

It was not typical way to close a university course.

"I'm not going to talk very much," the professor said. "It's more important at this point that you do."

Those who are accustomed to the usual class setting where the dissemination of knowledge from one mouth to many notebooks is the norm may feel uncomfortable with something like that and might call it unprofessional.

I call it unconventional, but innovative.

I have less notes from this class than from any other I've ever taken but yet I feel like I have learned much more. There are concepts here that I will take with me for the rest of my life. It is hard to argue that there is far more merit in genuinely gained knowledge than in a three-inch binder full of hastily scribbled notes.

Also, this is a class where I know everybody's name and at least a little bit about them. This occurred through class discussion and in-class group work assignments. There a few other classes I have where I can say I've been able to meet everybody in the room. Here I have 25 acquaintances I didn't have before.

The point here is that we need to rethink how we educate ourselves. Too much time is spent talking about grades, papers, and exams, and excuses for why you got a B instead an A. Not enough time is spent actually learning from each other, teaching each other, and genuinely grasping concepts and ideas that you did not have a handle on before.

Earlier in the semester the class talked about "The moment when the penny drops", that "Aha!" moment where you find get it. These are moments of revelation and excitement. They can be daunting as you quickly realize what you believed for so long needs to be changed and that you are entering new mental, emotional, and academic territory.

In short, today ended up being a general discussion of those moments and by the end of the hour there may as well have been a pile of pennies in the middle of the room.

University needs these moments of sharing, community, and reflection. University needs these classes that educate you in such a way that you can take what you studied in class and apply it to the world outside. University needs these kinds of professors who can breathe life in a classroom and elicit knowledge, not simply divulge it, allowing their students to genuinely understand.

University should be about breaking barriers.

I believe the barriers we need to be breaking are of our own construction and the changes we should be experiencing must come from within ourselves. If, by the end of the semester, there isn't a pile of pennies on the floor, you may have to ask yourself, What are we really doing here in the first place?

Nationalism, Uganda, and further reading

On the flight out of Entebbe, Uganda - 40km west of Kampala and home to the international airport - I sat beside a forty-something Ugandan business man. We were on our way to Dubai; me on to Toronto, he to France for a meeting. We got to talking.

He asked what I was doing in his country. I told him a little bit about Hands and what the project does in the Namuwongo slum. He said he'd lived in Kampala his whole life and didn't know the slum was there. I told him nearly 8000 people live survive there. He was taken aback.

It's a common thing; he wasn't the first Ugandan I met that was unaware.

Passing through Kampala you would never see the slum in Namuwongo. It's tucked between a railroad track and a swamp and you'd have no reason to go there. I spent pretty much every day in and out of that slum during my three months there so I like to think I, and whoever else has spent time working with Uganda Hands for Hope, has a different experience in Kampala than most. Even the many of the city locals.

Of course I think of my own city and how much time I've spent in it's own impoverished areas. The answer is, of course, not much. I often ride my bike through the North End community of Winnipeg but to be honest I often peddle faster. We don't know our own cities.

The other thing I took from this conversation - again something I had come across earlier during my stay - was that Ugandans lack a national identity. When you ask a Ugandan who they are they will more often than not identify themselves with their tribal background. They'll say, "I'm Acholi," for example, before they'll say, "I'm Ugandan," if they make that distinction at all.

What I often found is that they would often throw in a punchline about how so-and-so from so-and-so tribe was a thief, liar, cheat, and so forth. In three months it became apparent to me that even though outwardly Uganda was stable and forward moving, just below the surface simmers something anything but stable.

My airplane buddy let me know he was quite concerned about this and that he could foresee future violence surrounding tribal distinction, rights, and downright ignorance. Akin to racism, tribalism can be a moving, terrible and violent force. He was especially concerned about a future election where Yoweri Museveni - Uganda's president since 1986 - was not on the ballot.

Last week Kampala hit the international headlines when the city was brought to a standstill by rioters. A scheduled visit to Kampala by a traditional Bugandan king was being snuffed by the government and the king's supporters were unhappy about this. It's not comforting knowing that just a little shove is what it took to knock things over the edge.

The BBC reports that over 20 people were killed but I'd imagine the count could be much higher. Shooting e-mails back and forth with a few of my friends in Kampala I was glad to know that they were all safe but they gave eery reports of how streets that you could usually barely navigate during rush hour were empty. Then there were stories of breakneck vehicle chases and last ditch attempts to avoid malicious rioters. Kampala roads are hard enough to traverse on the best of days - indeed, those unfamiliar would think a normal traffic day would constitute the word 'riot' - never mind when the whole place is actually going to hell.

Things seem to have quieted down but my friend, and office manager at Hands, Matt Fast, is worried that things could get heavy again. It's an uncomfortable calm.

In the wake of the riots the use of microblogging (read: Twitter) has emerged an a topic of interest. It's free and easy and microposts can be sent via text message from a cell phone, one gadget most Ugandans of any social standing have access to.

Turns out a few Ugandans took it upon themselves to post daily events and what they were experiencing on the ground. Microblogging in this way is an incredibly powerful news and communication tool.

For an example of such, check out Solomon King's Twitter page.

For more on the Kampala riots microblogging: Asynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting.

For a more in depth look at the riots read this: Uganda - All Things Fall Apart . . . Again.

Uniter Comments March 25, 2009

"There are no slumdog millionaires here - but don't feel guilty about it"

The Uniter is the official student newspaper of the University of Winnipeg and is published by Mouseland Press.

Those people

Four weeks in Uganda and I haven't left Kampala. The weeks are filled with field work and sweaty data entry, the weekends a blur of alcohol. Among the expats, everybody's got a rambling story, an explanation why, and a heart to break. It's the New York of East Africa and at some level every mzungu who stumbles into this city gets stuck here, or at least ends up leaving a piece of them behind. Welcome to the KLA.

Working in the slum is a bit like walking into a prayer service carrying a bucket of marbles on your head. Even if you don't drop the bucket, which you inevitably will, you're still going to make a scene. You walk in there and you're surrounded by 8000 of the poorest people on the planet. We're talking absolute poverty poor, households surviving on less than a dollar a day, people who have never gone to school, have never had a real job, and have experienced some of the worst things mankind has ever produced - war, rape, genocide, and the shit end of transnational exploitation. Forgotten by the rest of the world that is apparently more of a global community than it's ever been, they sit here sweltering under tin roofs held up by mud walls that are one heavy rain away from falling over completely.

You walk among them and you feel like a bastard. You're the one doing the exploitation now, taking their pictures, pretending you feel their plight. The thousands of kids who just wander around the slum all day, the kids who would love to go to school but can't, they congregate and follow. They touch you and then run away and giggle. Some strut with you, as if touching white skin gives them some kind of street cred they didn't have before. The little ones shout mzungu, mzungu. Some of them cry because their older siblings have told them that the white people will come and take them away.

Many of the women smile and wave, especially those whose lives have been touched by us. Touching lives is something I say with humility and with an air of reciprocity because our interactions here are human ones and they go both ways. We're impacting each other on a daily basis.

Some of the men are cordial and gracious. They stop and shake your hand. Others assume you're from America so some of them shout out Obama! The more cheeky let out a McCain!

Others still, yell at you or mock you by asking for money or telling you that you could never endure what they've endured. Go fuck yourself White Man, is what I imagine is running through their heads. I can't blame them. In any case, the drinking holes where local brew is served - it looks like porridge and smells like a rotten variety of such - are places to avoid if you can.

Before I left Canada I had people use such language as, So you can think you can go there and help those people?

Those people.

How about us. Help us.

We're all in this together and poverty on this scale should be of concern to everybody else in the developed and globalized world. If we really are that connected as global citizens perhaps there should be a greater emphasis on helping our global neighbors.

It's what Jesus would want. Or something.

We call it field work. As if we're archaeologists uncovering some kind of artifact. Put on your sunblock and bug repellent, go out there with your canteen full, your safari vest pocketed and your hat brimmed wide. Export some knowledge, will you. Tell them what they need to know.

It's a social science, this development work. And like any science, you've got formulas, theories, and methods of deduction. Guess and check is a good one. Only with development you're dealing with peoples lives, not trying to figure out how heavy Pluto would be in Earth pounds. Or whether not Pluto should actually count as a planet or just a big rock. Often though, especially in the academic world, development dialogue can be just as pointless.

My answer to the question/statement: So you think you can go there and help those people? was a scripted, Well no, not necessarily, but I think I can go and at least see something new and try and understand it for myself. Of course once you get here there's very little that makes sense.

Aid work is not pretty and aid dollars are not baskets of hope and change. It's a dirty, difficult, disaster of a transaction and very few aid organizations, governmental or otherwise, actually have it even partway figured out. If they do, they're most likely cornered by their donors, political realities and the frustration of dealing in undeveloped locations hampered by corruption and a severe lack of urgency, ingenuity and competence. Everything takes forever to happen here, even simple tasks such as cashing a money order or checking your e-mail.

This might be where a small organization such as the one I'm working volunteering for is somewhat of a shining light. Not that we have expedited bank accounts or broadband internet, but at least we can spend our money properly. All of our donors are small, most of them individual people. We have a staff of less than ten, all of whom either get allowances from a separate organization or don't get paid at all. All of our donations go directly to our own programs tailor-made for the local slum, which right now is either child sponsorship - paying for school fees for vulnerable children - or microfinance schemes - lending small amounts of money to households to either start up or enhance a small business so they can hopefully begin supporting themselves financially.

These are good projects administered by good people for good people - those people. Cheers to those of you who have gotten involved with what we do here.

Uniter Comments January 29, 2009

"A Canada you can believe in"

The Uniter is the official student newspaper of the University of Winnipeg and is published by Mouseland Press.

On the eve of an inauguration

The air in the District is thick with anticipation, everybody breathing heavy energy and on the brink of hugging, kissing, dancing. We're all standing, stomping our feet in the cold, for another few hours until the President-elect will set us in motion towards our new existence. An existence where racial barriers have been shattered and where the screwtop neoliberal gears of the last eight years have at least grinded enough to slow down for a while. An existence where politics as once again shifted from a topdown powergrab to an honest discussion amongst the electorate, the people's government, the real voice of a nation and a planet that is hurting and confused.

All the hope is there, the excitement is there, now we're just waiting for it happen. The change. Even though we know that this far from an instant fix and that there are certain dirty aspects of American policy, particularly foreign policy, that will remain, at least we have a starting point.

We welcome a new agenda from an articulate, intelligent, unprecedented new leader who has reminded us repeatedly over the last few days that he is, indeed, just one man and that what we have been told is possible is only so with the sacrifice and the dedication of a population, not only an administration. It's Politics 2.0 and it's gone wiki. We're all involved and tomorrow it begins for real.

From Washington, DC.