The Precarity of Living with Ebola

I don't know where to begin.  I've never in my life hoped for anyone to have Malaria (especially after almost dying of it myself), and never even thought much of Typhoid fever.  But right now I am hoping, and asking for any and everyone's positive thoughts and prayers, that Yapo just has malaria or typhoid.

Yapo and Tyson

For months I have been interacting  almost daily with Yapo in Sierra Leone, trying to figure out a way to combat this deadly disease.  Trying to raise awareness here in the US, get donations for food and medicine, and simply trying to get people here to care.  Yet, repeatedly, I have to tell him I've come up empty.


It took us three years to scratch together enough money just to start building a small office/community center in Makeni.  We finally sent the money - $3800 - in two allotments last spring, and started building the foundation for our vision for alternative, community centered not-for-profit "development" in Sierra Leone.  We got this high:

aibia's office/community center...

Then Ebola struck, and everything in the country stopped.  But not Yapo, Throughout it all, He has been working incredibly hard, struggling to make things better.  Proposal after proposal, idea after idea: an information campaign, a door to door awareness campaign, medical professionals, volunteers, etc.  The budget dropped and the plans changed as we came up empty one after the other. What about just food and medicine?   We tried to no avail, but yapo kept working.  He created a group called "save Salone" on whatsapp made up of over 30 professionals and connected people working towards productive responses to Ebola.  From that day I have been connected not just to him, but to his whole network.  This has of course connected my network to him and them.  This website i"m writing on right now, our organizations website (www.aibia.org), facebook, etc.  The world that I know and the people I engage with have been connected because of Yapo's tireless work ethic.  And work done in the face of a deadly disease that is taking life after life around him, and has literally destroyed the entire fabric of society in Sierra Leone and the surrounding countries.  Everything has stopped.  Food, jobs, no one can touch anyone, nothing can be moved around the country or in and out of it really either.  There is only the food you can grow, and the salvation of hope.  An entire population being taught to fear touching another person...

Yet throughout this, Yapo is sending picture after picture, story after story, of what life is like on the ground dealing with Ebola.  Orphans, ambulances, quarantined people, even the dead.  Whatever it takes to have the story told.  But not just to get the story out, but because he is trying to affect local change.  To stop Ebola there in Makeni.  He has been on the front lines trying to make this better, better for all of us.  These are some of his pictures:

Suspected large scale contamination of a village...

A recent orphan...

A little girl being taken to isolation...

A women headed for quarantine...

All of that work came under a different light this morning though.  I got a message from him in his typical humble fashion.

"Tim sorry, i might not be able to followup with the documentary thing for now, because i have some fever, though not too severe for now, they might put me under isolation for observation."

Like somehow the documentary is more important than his fever.  Of course to him it is, because the documentary is a way to get people throughout the rest of the world to know and care about what is happening in West Africa.  The fact that he might have Ebola and a better than not chance of dying doesn't seem as important.  Amazing, the will and heart of some people...

----Break----

Wooo!!!  Update!!!  paused to check phone and he just got the test back, Typhoid fever!!  No Ebola!!  He will have to be admitted to the hospital for three days, but should be ok after some antibiotics.  Never would I have thought I'd be glad that a friend of mine has a disease that kills 200,000 people per year globally, but with antibiotics and a few days he should be fine.  With Ebola, there is no cure, and in this outbreak 60-70% of people with it are dying (compared to .09% fatality rates with Typhoid).

This has been a very scary morning.  A morning that happened to me here in the US just today, but that is happening to the everyone in West Africa everyday right now, every day.  As people die though, we do so little.  Our governments send small contingents of 300 or 600 people, old medical supplies, and pay it lip service.  Only when a man dies in Dallas and his nurses or a nurse in Spain catch the disease do we really stand up an start to take notice.  People claiming Ebola is fear-mongering, the next disease said to be - but that won't be - a threat.  Yes, maybe not to you today, but an entire region of the world is being devastated by it.  And if we don't stop it there, it will make its way here.....              

Recent Orphans... 

Yapo when I was there...

Yapo and I trying to make some bricks!

Step back, reassess

It's been a long month.  I've really started focusing on a few specific things and this sustainable occupy project has really been received well.  I should post the first draft of its concept and then some other things as well in here somewhere.  We are having our first full meeting of it tonight.  Excited.  Sadly most of the crew I tried to pull in hasn't gotten to excited, but there still will be at solid 7 or 8 people there tonight, and that is about what I had hoped to start off with.

The Africa work is as well moving forward.  Yapo and I have been emailing back and forth every day or two for weeks now.  Making plans, getting things moving forward.  It has been really tough now though as I'm flat out mannying 50 hours a week, had car issues that took away the free time on the weekends, and just started this farmers market job.  The hiking place fell through.  Amazing story.  I said I didn't feel comfortable working for them until they could pay me and they responded by saying they were going to let me go because they didn't think I was committed enough to the company or working as a guide.  As if everyone should work for free for the owners longer-term benefit... Crazy!  But I think I'm gonna try to sit for the hiking guide exam in September anyway.  It could lead to some doors that I might not mind being open some day.

Anyway, the Africa stuff is looking quite positive and with the other things bringing enough income in to live, I should be ok.  I've got time to put into sustainable occupy and alternative systems research, and the development work in Sierra Leone, the two things I am really excited about right now.  Things are going pretty well.

Educating Women and Girls in Sierra Leone.

So today was Africa day.  Earlier this week Yapo sent me a whole bunch of info on a possible funding stream through the UK government that he wants to apply for.  It's a stretch at best.  All of a sudden we are going to switch gears and apply for funding for a girls/women's education program.  We have till June 8th to get in a concept proposal.  Now believe me, I am ALL for this type of work.  It was something always in the back of my head while I was there.  Both education and gender issues are very important to me.  But as I was there talking to people and assessing the root causes of many issues I was hearing about, it all seemed to come back to income and capacity to sustain one's self and family first.



Education is free through sixth grade and then following that everyone must pay for middle school and high school tuition if they attend. Yet still there are many children that may have to drop out even of primary school, or work before and after, just to help their families stay afloat.  Seven and eight year olds working dawn till dusk and then trying to do homework with no electricity.  12 and 15 year old kids working before and after school to be able just to go to middle school and high school because their families can't afford it.   

It is a huge problem with roots that go far deeper than pedagogy, curriculum, or a teacher; its systemic and courses through the whole of society.  So no matter how important education is to me to, getting girls to school is far more complex.  Both the national and local economy has to provide economic opportunities allowing households enough to be able to have extra money to send kids to school with.  This is of course a simplified picture of the country's issues.  Woman are far more likely not to be in school as early pregnancy, stereotypes, cultural issues, and trafficking issues all play in in very different ways than with boys.  On the whole Sierra Leone is a long way away from sorting out this issue (nevermind us in two weeks) as getting these kids in school is SO much bigger than one or two development programs. 

Not only that, but our focus has been on hybrid styled non-profit revenue generating business models that give back to the community and local populace through jobs and public works.  Education is a change of gears and thinking for us.  One I'd like to do, but am not sure I can get my head around in two weeks that quickly.  (help is always greatly appreciated!).  As it is though, I've got time to think about it and plenty of time with a young impressionable little lady to brainstorm with! 

Of course on a side note we also have to be able to qualify for the funding stream.  That is where a good deal of my attention went today.  I know that on US government funded projects the principle organization should have three years of solid revenue, which we do not.  So if the UK is similar, we may not even be eligible unless we apply through another organization.  Which we then have to find and convince to do this in two weeks.  Sigh....  So yeah, what all this Africa work really needs is a concerted, undistracted effort at picking a project, designing it, and making it happen.  We are a ways away from there right now.  Like another entire person (yes, please join!).  But, no matter, I just want so badly to make something work.  It has been too long in the works.  A plan and funding is all we need.  It has to happen. 

Africa!

So timing is something that I will never quite understand, and probably shouldn't even attempt to...  On Sunday April 15th I learned I would not be starting a Phd program in September, that Wednesday I lost my job and my relationship was in dire turmoil.  Seemingly every part of my life had schismed aimlessly within just a couple days of each other.  Time as I knew it had stopped. 

What do you think happened that very next day?  I was standing in Union Square talking about getting a think tank going, and to people about this crazy couple of days when my phone vibrated and three quick successive emails came through.  They were from Yapo!  Now, anyone new to this blog won't know him, but he is my guy in Sierra Leone.  Around the turn of the year I had scratched together some money for our Africa work and sent it out to him.  We needed to get our national and municipal registrations up to snuff for our community organization in Sierra Leone and the bank account open.  We went back and forth for a while as it took me longer than expected to get the money and get it to him.  Things had kinda gone quite  and then when I sent the money I didn't hear anything.  He had told me he would be doing some election monitoring and be a way for a bit so I didn't know what happened.  I was worried, but Sierra Leone is an interesting place.  There is no electricity pretty much anywhere and communications are really tough.  He basically never got my messages saying the money had been sent, thus never picked it up.  He thought I just didn't send anything.  So he slowly got together some cash to do the registrations himself.  When he sent me the certificates I immediately asked if he had gotten the money.  No!  He went that night and got it all.  So now we have a sizable chunk of cash sitting in the bank!  We still have to do a couple administrative things, but we are up and running!

We do not have a specific project yet that we have committed to, but as of right now we are strongly looking at verma composting (composting with worms) of waste, and also at a sustainable internet cafe/office to work from.  That is where the most interest came from the government and seems most viable.  It is really tricky though as without personally going there and getting to work on it, it is very difficult to make things happen. 

All in all though, it was fortuitous that he simply popped back up when he did.  Down to the day itself!  Perhaps there is something to our connection that is in fact incomprehensible!?  Or maybe things just happen incomprehensibly... But I do know that it brought a huge smile to my face, and I immediately ran around the park and told everyone.  Any rain on my face that day was quickly washed away...  I had hope again of finishing what I started.  :)

Different world

So I wanted to touch on a few things from yesterday's meeting that illuminate business here. Obviously it was difficult to carry on a meeting with one person, and the oldest most senior one, sleeping. More important though were the differences in his business ideology and that of the others as well.

Firstly, there was a lot of respect for the laborers - hard work. Obviously in Western business culture education, experience, and management are valued more wage wise. Kevin showed a lot of respect for diggers, and brick carriers, and Kaps didn't think a supervisor should be paid more than the machine operator. This is refreshing to see as we in the West seem to have lost sight of the value of manual labor in our lives. Kaps actually didn't even really see the value of a supervisor. "Why should you pay someone to just stand around and watch everyone?" There is a logical sense to that statement. But it was as if the concept of a site supervisor made no sense. I had to spend a good 10 minutes explaining why a supervisor would be needed. There would be 17 workers to supervise on site with only one machine running, and this would increase with more machines. Digging, sieving, mixing, moving, operating the machine, dealing with supplies, curing bricks, loading/unloading, shipping, a cook for lunch, etc. It is not a simple process, and someone needs to know how to do it all, they need to know all about bricks, they need to be able to organize it all in their head, and to motivate people to work at a high level. Every minute we would not be producing is 4 bricks missed. A lag here, a lag there, mixed soil isn't ready, whatever, and production would be way down. It all has to run fluidly. But having a person to make all this function smoothly didn't make a whole lot of sense to him.

He also wanted to cut out workers. The company that makes these machines has a specific tried and tested method for producing the maximum number of bricks. They work in over 50 countries, and have a brand to uphold. They WANT anyone producing there products to be giving them a good name. Kaps had little interest in their well tested staffing, he wanted to just cut down workers. Hire less pay more. I started to get feelings of hierarchical thinking, jealousy perhaps at the wages. There are no salaries yet for board members, only workers... He just didn't seem to like anything he was hearing. He thought we were going to pay to much. He wanted to pay 5000 Leone a day - $1.25. According to Yapo, minimum wage is 15000. Now I know everyone isn't paying that, and there does seem to be a lot of variance in "minimum wage" concepts here, but I want to do things legally. I also wanted to pay taxes, and into workers social security funds, etc. This saw apprehension from him for the most part.

He also struggled with the concept and way of running a business. He wanted to be able to give away, or sell bricks below cost. I said, we can't do that, we can only give from excess revenues (profits). We can use our donations in terms of bricks if we wish, but we can't be a brick charity. It was as if the entire concept of running a business to make more than we spend - and to do it meticulously - was a completely foreign concept.

This is going to be a tricky situation, we have to be able to be sustainable. And our costs after this exercise may not even make the project feasible. I will have to crunch the numbers today if a computer is functional. But Kaps didn't think we could charge for each brick what we would need to cover our costs of production. That is partially because he seemed to value these specialty bricks little more than hand made clay bricks. Yapo saw it completely differently and thought we could charge a premium. But it is a struggle amongst them.

The result today though is that we will have to stall signing any kind of agreement and look much more directly into the numbers and what the market will bear. I knew it!! But I just couldn't get them all to see the value of making a list and sitting down and going through every number. For two and a half weeks I have been trying to get the list I gave them filled out with costs, and to all sit down, but nothing. In today's meeting, we started to talk about the equipment and still had no figures. Yapo made one call, left for maybe 15-20 minutes, and came back with a list!?!? Over two weeks of telling me it was done, was being done, some things weren't here in Makeni, blah, blah, blah, and then in 20 minutes they get one done. This is the way it is here, this is what we're up against... :-/