PrintIn the last few weeks, I have been called “Mzungu” (“white man”), “Barack,” and “Christiano Obama,” an amalgam of the Manchester United star and the new U.S. president. I am spending the month of January working in Kenya and Uganda for an organization called Village Enterprise Fund. VEF provides business training and micro-grants to aspiring entrepreneurs in East Africa, so that they might start small businesses to support themselves and their families.
I’m currently living on the outskirts of Soroti, Uganda, at VEF’s office compound here, which also doubles as a guest house, pub, and “TV Hall,” where individuals from surrounding neighborhoods gather to drink and watch Al Jazeera and Manchester United games. Immediately outside this compound are a number of straw-topped huts, ubiquitous in Uganda, teeming with sixyear-old Africans who enjoy yelling things at me like “Mzungu! Give me a bicycle!”
When I arrived in Nairobi a few weeks ago, I didn’t really know what to expect. Yet, when my plane touched down, I wasn’t surprised: I have family in India, and Nairobi reminded me of Mumbai or New Delhi—lots of grays and browns, streets with potholes, mostly dilapidated buildings, and foreigners getting waved at by children and stared at by adults. As I spent more time in Uganda and Kenya, I gradually learned about the peculiarities that differentiate both from other developing countries and how Africa is portrayed by the media.
While driving past some of the greenest landscapes that I saw in Uganda, a Kenyan I was traveling with casually mentioned that, due to the tall grass, this had been a favorite ambush spot for the Lord’s Resistance Army—the insurgent group responsible for Uganda’s civil war, known for its brutality and recruitment of child soldiers, and currently a driving force of violence in the Congo. A few days later, I learned that a public bus I had ridden only the day before had been attacked by a “band of thugs” working for a rival bus company. While I was planning on asking all of my future bus drivers if they had any known enemies, I was surprised to find that African individuals both accept these difficulties as the facts of life and refuse to let fear become the driving force in their decision-making.
Yes, Africa is poor, but it is also a study in contrasts. I was surprised when, on a recent trip to an Internally Displaced Peoples Camp, I picked up a wireless signal outside the camp’s entrance. Every morning, I ran by a pipe from which the nearby village’s inhabitants filled water for the day, while simultaneously talking on pay-as-you-go Nokia cell phones.
The individuals I have met in Kenya and Uganda have indeed been shaped by past and present ethnic and tribal conflict, but are determined to be agents of progress. In my time here, not only have I had numerous individuals address me with their personal plans to get the region out of poverty (“what Uganda needs are well-financed entrepreneurs to access the fresh fruit markets in Europe”), but through my work I have met people who started with the amount of money one might spend over a few nights at a bar, and built businesses that have supported their families and sent their children to school for years. One Ugandan I met began with a $150 grant, followed by another $350, and through calculated risk-taking and 10 years of hard work now has acquired a 150-acre farm. Matthew and Jessica Flannery conceived the idea for Kiva.org, now the world’s most successful microfinance schemes, while staying at his farmhouse.
While Africa may have problems—which are enormous and need solving—one would be mistaken to think that the whole continent consists of disease, poverty, violence, and hopelessness. Rather, Africa is filled with individuals determined to take charge of their surroundings and build a future for themselves, their families, and their nations. It will take innovative and enterprising minds to bring this trend from the micro level, where it currently resides, to the macro level, where it needs to be.
Rajiv Lalla is a Columbia College junior.