Stranger Than Fiction

David with the coconut he carried around with him all last week.



I was a great fan of a certain kind of paradoxical dystopian literature of the ilk of Kafka or Joseph Heller.  I have even written an earlier blog entry (Nov 29, 2009) comparing a particular experience at the phone company with Kafka's The Trial.  Now we are once again confronted with a problem which would make for mirthfully ironic wit in a Heller's Catch 22, but is a sad sick trap when it concerns real people struggling against hunger and the grip of poverty.

To be precise:  I had mentioned in my blog 2 weeks ago that because of delays caused by the port authority in Bujumbura, 25 metric tons of corn destined for a food for work program we run, sat for 3 months in customs and rotted to the point where it was unfit for human consumption.  This was a grave disappointment for Help Channel our implementing partner who had been trying hard to release it.  The delay was caused by a new level of scrutiny of non-profit imports.  There is great concern about people representing items as not for profit that will later be sold on the market.  Despite Help Channel's long and respectable history of importing food aid, the bureau of revenue did an exhaustive investigation of them.  They did apologize for the slowness which resulted in the spoilage and did finally issue the tax-exemption for the spoiled grain so it could be released.

They asked what Help Channel would do with the grain since it was now inedible by humans and Cassien explained that they would try to find a chicken or other animal farm who might buy the grain so Help Channel can recoop some of the loss and replace some of the inedible grain with edible grain to continue the food-for-work project.

WAIT FOR IT....  We thought we were good to move forward, but the next morning, when Help Channel went to take the grain away, the revenue authority said:  "Since you now intend to sell this grain, it is no longer a charitable donation, so we are revoking your exemption and in order to release it, you must pay full duty if you want to take it."

So now we are stuck again, still waiting for the release of grain, the clock is ticking on the number of days that this grain is even consumable by animals.  If it cannot be released on time, it will have to be burned at the port in the presence of the police, revenue authority, and the supplier.  The final clencher is the fact that we will get a bill for the time this grain has been in storage at the port, delayed because of their inefficiency.

I don't even want to try to draw out a moral here.  Suffice it to say, truth is stranger, and more frustrating, than fiction.

Inspecting an MCC supported bathroom at a school
run by one of our partners.

By comparison, the rest of the week seemed pretty easy.  We had several meetings scheduled including one with Cassien of Help Channel, to talk about this matter.  We frontloaded our week with business in Bujumbura because on Wednseday afternoon we had plans to head up to Rwanda for a last round of meetings with partners before our homeleave begins in June.   There was a considerable amount of preparation for this since we had a very ambitious schedule for the 3 days we were there--field visits, advisory board meeting, shopping, worker care for our volunteers, etc.  With Oren and David in tow it also means that one of us must always remain on parent duty.  We left at noon with our family as well as our program officer Felix, and Joshua Miller our short-term volunteer here.

We stayed at a guesthouse near the Friends Church (Amani Guesthouse) which is nice for the kids.  There are lots of levels of gardens and covered verandahs and walkways where Oren can ride his scooter. The kids' favorite activity though, by far, is catching animals--frogs, millipedes, geckos and in this case, grasshoppers which were plentiful at the Guesthouse.

We got to Kigali late on Wednesday.  We were delayed by a spectacular wreck in Kayanza, Burundi.  A tanker truck had lost control and turned sideways and completely wedged itself between the 2 embankments of the 2 lane highway.  The route was impassable and we had to take the much longer way to Kigali.  We got in about 8pm.

Thursday Rebecca did meetings with the legal rep at the church, and among the topics of conversation was finding housing for 2 new SALT volunteers who will be working in Kigali beginning in September.  Ruth and Krystan were part of the conversation and will help identify housing this summer while we are on homeleave.

Friday was very full, so full in fact that Rebecca and I found the need to 'divide and conquer'.  I went with Felix to a meeting with Friends Peace House to discuss their programs, while Rebecca took Josh and the kids on a field visit with another partner.  She went and visited a self-help peacemaking group who had, on their own initiative, created a preschool!  It was small and crowded, but Rebecca was very impressed by the capacity of the group to take this initiative with no outside funding.

Oren and David liked the rabbits they raised best of all and found the rest of the trip quite uninteresting.  (In all fairness, when they go they often endure the brunt of the gawking and teasing from those who are not accustomed to seeing mzungus.

Rebecca and I had an advisory board meeting at the guesthouse in the afternoon and did our best to keep both boys entertained with a movie while we talked.  (Their current favorite movie is Wallace and Grommet, Curse of the Were-Rabbit--don't ask me why).

We had a great Indian meal together with Ruth and Krystan on Friday night and planned to head out Saturday morning.  Rwanda definitely seems more modern and Western than Burundi now.  The internet speeds seem staggering, and even the availability of goods like mozzarella cheese, bagels, hummus, etc, make it quite a contrast to Bujumbura.

We got back Saturday afternoon without incident.  But on Sunday Oren threw-up right before church so I stayed home Sunday morning with the boys while Rebecca taught Sunday school.  Oren felt better in the afternoon and we did take a refreshing swim which seems like such a necessity after a long car ride.



UPDATES:

Two updates worth noting are
1) We got a call while we were in Kigali that the book container has arrived in Burundi!! These are the books I have talked about in other blogs that have been sent by MCC to help the Hope School and other MCC Burundi/Rwanda education programs.  We will begin Monday the process of getting them out of port.  We are off to a bit of a bad start as the original documentation was sent separately to Help Channel and was apparently jammed-up by DHL in Europe.  It should get here Monday though.  I am not sure when we will get all the books distributed in the next 3 weeks before vacation, but we will do our best.

2) The other update is my friend who is prison.  I have been reticent to write details, but I will say a bit more now.  He has been charged with marketing expired drugs (in his pharmacy.)  The problem is that there has been no evidence to support this and he says the allegation is patently false.  They have been before every court up to the Burundi supreme court and all the courts, after hearing the case have declared themselves 'incompetent' to render judgment.  So that means that he remains in prison without any trial or conviction.  It seems clear that there is someone high up in government who wants to keep this person in prison for some reason and 'lower' civil servants, do not want to contradict this.  I don't know who would be behind this, but it is very hard to see my friends victimized by this 'big man' system of injustice.

Beads were a gift to Rebecca during her field visit.

I would say tha in the above cases of frustration, I have found what I think is the basis of bureaucratic 'Catch 22' behavior.  I call it Authority without Responsibility.  This is often the manifestation of power and influence of mid-level civil servants in a 3rd world bureaucracy.  To wit:  Many people have authority at different levels, especially to halt a process.  They may do so for personal gain, or confusion, or orders from a superior.  But they would never consider themselves  'responsible' in any way for bad consequences of their actions (someone above is always to blame, except the 'chief' who is never wrong).  It is really quite an ideal way to wield power.  Have authority to do what you want, but experience no consequences for negative outcomes as a direct result of your actions.  (I think that might be a bit like what happened to bank owners in our last financial crisis.--taken right out of the playbook of Franco-African bureaucracies.)