(Interviews were typically held under trees.)
This past week, I spent most of my time traveling to various communities, conducting interviews and surveys, and learning a lot about Dinka culture (the major ethnic group) in Warrap State.
At its core, the BRIDGE program is geared toward connecting the government with the people and the people with the government. So, the purpose of our visit was to ask community members questions about how they view the government and its services. In theory, if the BRIDGE program was doing a good job, involving the government in all that it does in the communities, then over time, we should see an increasingly positive view of the local government in the communities in which we work. To find out whether this is true, we asked questions about local government responsiveness, effectiveness, and about the community’s confidence in the local government.
Overall, people were more positive about local government than we had anticipated. After 22 years of civil war, even the smallest amount of change or help from the government seemed to result in high levels of confidence in the local government. Some, however, were still critical of the local government, and rightly so. In one community we visited, the community had made enough bricks and collected enough money and volunteer labour to build up the walls of a small 4-room school to the roof level. This was one year ago, and still, the government (or any NGO) had not provided a roof for the school. This type of inaction generally lowered the perception of government effectiveness among community members.
(Traditional chiefs of an area called Tonj, participating in a local government training supported by the BRIDGE program.)
Some interesting insights came out of our first week of implementing these survey questions. First, when community members think about the government, non-profit/ non-governmental international organizations (NGOs) are always attached to that perception. No one ever thought of the government working alone, many argued that the government shouldn’t work alone, and sometimes, it was unclear whether people could really differentiate between the help the government was giving and the NGOs. While this does show that the NGOs are working with the government to give out aid and implement development projects (a good thing), it may also be dangerous. As the situation in Sudan becomes more stable, some NGOs, especially those giving out relief aid, will inevitably leave, taking their resources (money, food, etc.) with them. What then, will become of the perception of local government?
Embedded in this question is that of community expectations of government. In Warrap, we really didn’t ask any questions about what the community expects of the government (although, we have corrected this and added a question on this subject for the next two states). In our survey this year in Warrap, results have been mostly positive. Naturally, as the BRIDGE program continues, you would think that the community’s perception of government would be increasingly positive. In reality, if the expectations of government are raised each year, and the perceived level of service does not meet those expectations, the perception of government could become more negative over time. As a result, even if the BRIDGE program was doing a better job each year; the results of this survey may not show that.
(A latrine being built for a local school.)
A third major insight, or rather, surprise, came when we interviewed a community where BRIDGE was not working. For all those data analysis junkies out there, this community served as our control group. The idea behind interviewing a community we were not working in was to get a sense of how an average community views government without the BRIDGE program. Theoretically, if BRIDGE, a program that is bridging the gap between the government and community, was successful, you would see a more positive perception of government in communities where BRIDGE was present than in communities where BRIDGE was not present. This unfortunately, was not the case for our control group community, Alek North.
In fact, residents of Alek North demonstrated the most positive perception of government of all the communities we interviewed. After asking some follow-up questions, we discovered that it might have been due to the continued presence and distribution of relief aid (mostly food aid) in the community. A colleague told me that the people here know by seeing. Development is slow, but relief is very quick, highly visible, and has a high impact in the short run. In short, it can save people’s lives today, but in the long run, it often does not build the capacity of communities to take care of themselves. At its worst, the community becomes dependent on the relief organization to take care of the community’s basic needs. In Alek North, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), and to a some extent Farm Africa, is still distributing food aid to people. Several people in the community explained that when they are hungry, they ask the government for food, and the government delivers it. Therefore, they believe the government is very responsive, effective, and they are confident it the government. What will happen when WFP leaves and people realize that the government can no longer bring these services to the community?
At the end of the day, this community did not serve as a very good control group. (Unfortunately, having a connection with an NGO working in a community is the best way to speak to community members who you are not working with. If the community doesn’t know you, there is no trust, and the answers we would receive from them would not be 100% true or hones. We had a connection with Farm Africa, they could introduce us to the community, and so Alek North was chosen.)
In addition to the government perception survey, as a part of my own research, the other interviewers and I implemented a livelihoods survey I created. (Livelihoods, for those unfamiliar, is a term for how people support themselves and make a living.) In this survey, I was basically trying to paint a general picture of how community members support themselves and their families in rural South Sudan. In the survey, we asked four simple, open ended questions about the number of people in the household, how the respondent supported their household, if they were able to save anything, and the number of meals they eat per day.
(A women's center in Kuac South)
The picture I have been able to paint so far has been more or less bleak, but interesting. There have been a large number of women who head their household because their husbands either died in the war or died recently in the cattle raiding/fighting between ethnic groups. On average, most people eat 2 meals a day, although I did find people who could only scrape together enough food for one meal a day.
To support themselves, most people farm some combination of sorghum, sim sim (sesame), ground nuts (peanuts), cow peas (I think these are black eyed peas), maize, and sometimes vegetables like okra. (Vegetables are a new development brought to communities from organizations like Winrock and World Vision.) Most also have livestock, some find occasional wage labour, fish, run small tea stands (mostly women), collect grasses used for roofing and sell it at the market, or even brew alcohol (from sorghum). We also found out that since men are allowed to have multiple wives, each wife seems to be her own economic unit. Each wife gets a plot of land, house, and is responsible for feeding/caring for her children. With women responsible for food, they are more likely to farm, and the men are more likely to engage in other activities like fishing, if there is a river nearby.
(Although usually the work of women, these boys carry their small buckets to collect water.)
Livestock is interesting though. Basically, when it is a good harvest season or when you have some extra money, there is no bank to put your savings in. Instead, there is livestock. When you have savings, you buy a cow (or a goat or a sheep). When times are bad and you need money, you sell the cow to buy food. On average, a cow costs about $500 or so: bulls slightly less, and females slightly more because they reproduce. If you compare it to our banking system, it makes sense. The cow or other livestock is the bank account, and it is also an investment. With interest rates in the U.S., your money can grow. With livestock, you money grows when your cow gives birth. Further, just as the stock market can crash and you loose your money, you can also loose your money in cows when disease strikes.
In addition, cows are a culturally mandated when getting married. If you were wondering about the title of this blog entry, this is where it comes in. In order for a man to marry, he must present an agreed upon number of cows to the bride’s family. Without cows, you cannot marry, and cannot have a family. (This cultural norm, however, does have its drawbacks. Girls are often kept at home and out of school for fear that education or the journey to the school will damage or spoil the daughter, reducing the number of cows the family can get for her. Since cows are a measure of wealth, the girls of a family are very important.) One of my Dinka colleagues that I was working with in these interviews, asked me how much a bride costs in the U.S.
“In cows?” I asked.
"Yes," he replied.
“None.” I said. “Brides are essentially free.” (Except, of course, for the very nice ring many brides-to-be receive.) He was quite impressed, and we had a good laugh about how the Dinka should come to America because the brides there were free.
I’m now in Northern Bahr el Ghazal, about to embark on another week of interviewing. Dinka are again the majority ethnic group in Northern Bahr el Ghazal, but I have a feeling there will be some differences between the Dinkas of Warrap state and the Dinkas here. We will see.
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