I took this shot on my most recent trip up there last week. It’s the last thing I remember from the hike:

Go Chimps!

Mark D. Jordahl – Kampala

Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. Deutsch: 1964: Martin Luther King Português: Martin Luther King (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On this day 44 years ago, April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed.

It is interesting reflecting on this sitting here in Uganda where sometimes it is hard to tell he ever lived.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the unfairness of the ex-pat life. There are times it feels like the old south – you go to an expat party and the only black faces you see are those of the servants. We live in nice houses and drive our own cars, spending as much to fill the tank once as we pay our maids for a month of work. We are able to come and go freely between Uganda and our home countries, whereas a Ugandan can spend a lifetime trying to get a visa to enter the United States.

Organizations here even have “local” and “expat” pay rates. I heard from one American woman that she flew back to the US to sign her contract because she would get paid more. A Ugandan wouldn’t have that option. And the benefits packages are often staggering – shipping containers to bring all your possessions from home, flights home for visits for the whole family, private school education for your kids (I must admit, as someone who hasn’t ever had a paying job here in Uganda I am sometimes a little jealous of some of these perks! But then I think about all of the benefits I do have.).

We are given extra – and undeserved – status based on the color of our skin (see my post The Expat/Ugandan Dynamic), and can walk into nearly any venue without being questioned. I have often thought it would be interesting to be a white con-artist here just to see what you could get away with.

I believe all of this undermines the goals of international development, an important one of which is local empowerment. One thing Uganda needs is jobs and business development. Bright, young people with an entrepreneurial spirit that will drive the economy forward. Instead, what they see is that the way to get rich is to work at an international NGO. In the United States, college kids who want to make money go into business. Here, they go into any field that will get them a job at USAID. This leads to thousands of “briefcase NGOs” whose only goal is to come up with a good mission statement and get money without ever delivering any services.

What would Dr. King think if he spent time in the expat world of Kampala (or the capital city of any other nation in the world that has a large foreign-aid industrial complex)? I hope that he would feel there is some good, important work being done with good intentions, but what I see when I imagine the encounter is a look of bewilderment and a tear of discouragement running down his cheek.

Mark D. Jordahl – Kampala

We left here nearly a year ago, and it feels like it was yesterday. The warm, familiar smiles, old friends, soft air, the “dogs of Muyenga” barking all night long, that welcome taste of matooke and g-nut sauce. At the same time we are once again confronted with daily reminders of how hard people here work just to make ends meet, and all the odds that are stacked against them doing so. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that the world is a fair place.

Our lives always feel so split between our attachment to this place and our attachment to family and friends back in the United States. Where is “home?” If only it wasn’t so difficult and expensive to travel back and forth, we’d have the selfish good-fortune of not needing to choose.

Please pass this on, as it is important – AND DIFFICULT – to get the voices of Africans into debates about Africa.

Mark D. Jordahl

Invisible Children (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

OK – after I sent out that last post, I got a lot of questions about whether I have changed my past views on Invisible Children since I chose to promote their video.

I should have been more clear. While I believe they do their work with the best intentions, I am not a fan of Invisible Children, and I would not, personally, send them money.

At the same time, I am a fan of raising awareness about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and nobody else is doing it as effectively as Invisible Children. This video is worth watching even though they completely mislead people about how easy it will be to catch Kony if only people will watch the video.

I must admit that I am conflicted in my feelings towards them. There are a lot of reasons not to like them:

• They twist information to boost their fundraising efforts rather than trying to put out current facts and educate people. I remain convinced that they want people to think the war still rages in Uganda because that is the country their fundraising efforts identify with. Even in this most recent video, they refer to Uganda as “relatively safe,” without coming right out and saying that the LRA has not been active in Uganda since 2006.
• They take sole credit for the advocacy efforts of dozens of people and groups.
• They simplify the issues in a very mainstream-media sort of way, which can lead to misguided activism.
• They have never had their finances independently audited, and they have no board of directors. (updated 3/8, apparently they have done audits and have a 4-person board, but have no standing audit committee)
• Most of all, they have a pretty lousy reputation in Uganda which, to me, is one of the strongest indictments.

And some big guns like the One Campaign (who asked their field staff not to promote Kony 2012 as a representative of One) and the Council of Foreign Relations have either distanced themselves or flat-out shot them down publicly.

Many of the criticisms being leveled against them are bogus. People are crying out about the fact that the top three staffers/founders are each making over $80k. Come on – they are running a $13 million operation, and probably are at it 80 hours per week. That is around average compensation for Executive Directors at organizations with half that budget, and we live in expensive times. If they were working for USAID or the US Embassy in Uganda, they would be making far more, with a benefits package that would blow your mind.

People also complain that they don’t put enough money into programs in Uganda. It is true that they are doing very little on the ground there, but that isn’t actually their main goal. They are a United States lobbying and advocacy group. The problem is, they pretend they are having a huge impact on the ground in Uganda rather than just being honest about it. This is one of the main reasons they aren’t viewed well in Uganda.

They seem to be kids on a joyride who are quite fond of themselves and are very good at what they do, which is media campaigns, not humanitarian work.

And really – is it just me, or is it downright creepy to wear a bracelet with Joseph Kony’s name on it as if he’s your boyfriend?

If Invisible Children would be more honest about what they do and don’t do, if they had a higher financial transparency rating on Charity Navigator, and if they made more of an effort to provide accurate, nuanced information about Africa, I could potentially become a fan since I ultimately support their goal of catching Kony. And really – what am I doing to help? At least they are diving in.

Here are a number of links that dive more deeply into the controversies around IC:

http://siena-anstis.com/2012/03/07/on-invisible-childrens-kony-2012-campaign/
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/should-i-donate-money-to-kony-2012-or-not
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble
http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-causes-badvocacy.html
http://innovateafrica.tumblr.com/post/18897981642/you-dont-have-my-vote

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, whether you agree or disagree with me. And feel free to send it on to others so they can add it to the mix of deciding whether or not to become active in the Kony 2012 campaign.

Mark D. Jordahl