Back to School...

I hate starting sentences with “In Canada…”

One initiative that my work is trying to implement is its Program for Continuous Education”. Basically, training courses for health care professionals right now come from mostly East Africa, but we hope, worldwide. So when I found out that we were offering a course this week on “Community Based Health Development” I jumped at the opportunity to grab my pen and paper and audit the course for a day to see what its like.

Well…to begin with, its just like every other training course I’ve been on. Introductions in the morning, coffee at 10, lunch at 1, and the token guy who will just keep talking and talking with no regard for time (yes I know…African time). Actually, and I mean no disrespect here at all, what surprised me was just how little we were covering! (Yes I realize that I’m talking about a course being offered by own workplace). It took us 2 hours to come to the conclusion that the household was the “structure” which influenced health the most….i mean...its an important fact..but really..2 hours!?!? We then spent some time discussing Community empowerment and how we could best empower grassroots action…finally the good stuff! It was a bit of a circular discussion, and basically the class felt that NGO’s and international donors should not provide support at the grassroots level as there are many levels of hierarchy to go through (sigh…). The talkative dude then went so far as to say “They should just give the money straight to the government and let the government decide how to spend it.” Bite my tongue.

If you’ve been reading anything about Kenya, you can’t read more than 2 sentences without seeing the word corruption…its everywhere! As much as I wanted to pipe and say “really??..like you want me to give you my tax dollars (via CIDA) to your government so they can buy themselves another Armani suit they saw?" Ok fine…unfair generalization, but I don’t think giving to only to government is the answer - at least not in the current system. But I also didn’t want to risk an international incident and possible lynching by insulting their government. Turns out though..i didn’t have to! The lady beside talkative dude…just blurted out “I’m a proud Kenyan, but our government is just too corrupt!”. Sweet! What ensued was a huge rant on government corruption and how if donors gave money directly to government, nothing would ever happen. Finally i see some passion! Props to talkative dude here, he somehow rearranged his argument to convince the class that “no..maybe donors should be giving only to government”. Ok…now I had to pipe in (either that or the teacher saw the huge smirk on my face and couldn’t resist). I tried to choose my words carefully and basically posed the question “How can we create confidence in the international community that corruption will not eat away at international aid?” (this is where I tried to refrain from the “In Canada…”). What I was hoping for was a spirited answer surrounding making governments more accountable and increasing transparency….power to the people!

Instead what I got was complacency. An answer of how to simply work with the system. “Well, if there’s so many layers of red tape and therefore many more chances for corruption, lets try to remove some of the layers…the people will still be corrupt, but there’s just less of them.” Nuts. Not what I was hoping for. I guess that was enough for one day.

Anyways, it’s a 2 week course and they’ve invited me back to attend next week so who knows…either I’ll dazzle them with my wit and intelligence, or I’ll be on the 6:00 news and home a lot sooner than I planned.

Oh, and I almost got run over by a matatu on the way home.