Rascifascifarians

Thangs dun picked up ‘round hurr. Megan is teaching two courses at l’Université Catholique de Bukavu: logic and numerical methods. Because professors only get paid $500 a month, it’s typical for courses to be highly compressed; for example, Megan teaches from 9a-5p, M/W/Sat for four weeks. That allows profs to teach at other universities and to consult to supplement their salaries. Megan is no exception. She’s also working on a report on climate change in Uganda for the World Bank, and she’s acting as an interim financial guru for a social enterprise called The Peace Exchange. TPE consists of about twenty women who sew cloth napkins for export to the USA, along with two administrators. The founder lives in California.
On my end we finished the endline survey of an evaluation of a program to increase agricultural productivity in South Kivu. We sent seven teams of five people each to 94 villages to interview approximately 900 households about their farming practices and standard of living.
One thing that our jobs have in common is the need to create discipline and order without acting like a racist fascist (i.e. a racifascifarian). One of Megan’s classes is for freshpeople (first-years), the other for sophomores. The difference in behavior between the two is remarkable; freshpeople have a much harder time sitting still and shutting up (a colleague who also teaches at the university estimates that 60% fail). There are about 60 students in each of Megan’s classes. So far she has asked two to leave for talking during class. And she’s refused entry to several who were 10 minutes late coming back from a classroom break.
In her other job as financial guru, one of her main tasks is to find out the “real” prices of goods and services around here. As in, are the Congolese employees reporting prices honestly, or are they inflating them and pocketing the difference? Or are they reporting prices honestly, but paying more than necessary? Megan has found some discrepancies, and confronting the employees with them has not been fun.
The research assistants I’m supervising are paid by the day, so they have an incentive to take longer than necessary to complete surveys. The ways in which the time required to complete a survey can be extended are surprisingly many. Perhaps transport wasn’t available – there were no motorcycle taxis around to reach the village. Or maybe there was a taxivan headed to the village, but it took three hours for enough passengers to arrive to fill it up. Or, once at the village, the chief is not cooperative. Or the chief is cooperative, but many of the villagers are already at their fields and so aren’t willing to be interviewed. All of this could happen. But did it really happen yesterday? How the hell am I supposed to know? The options seem to be: trust them, or go racifascifarian. It’s not a pretty picture.
In our last survey, one of the (white) supervisors accused one of the (Congolese) research assistants of conspiring with the parish where we were staying to inflate the price of a room. Let’s call them Scarlett and Randy. Megan had seen Randy take the parish-keeper aside just before he, the parish-keeper, “remembered” that the price of rooms was actually twice as high as he’d initially said. A couple days later, just as we’d arrived in a village to start work, Scarlett accused Randy. She did it in front of the other research assistants and the villagers. Needless to say, it did not go over well.
The next morning, after word of the incident spread throughout our teams, one of the research assistants sent me a text informing me that everyone refused to work until we had a meeting with all 35 research assistants. Foolishly, neither I nor the other supervisors guessed what it was about. Therefore none of us objected to the idea of Scarlett skipping the meeting to catch up on documenting our expenditures. We, the supervisors, were by now sleeping 45 minutes away from the parish because we needed electricity to charge the tablets each night. We drove back to the parish.
Everyone was waiting by the time we arrived and it felt tense. I greeted each research assistant individually in an effort to lighten the mood. Then I sat down cross-legged in the grass instead of on one of the chairs they’d saved for me. That helped a little. They wanted me to start the meeting. I said, too brusquely, “You all demanded this meeting, not me. Let’s hear what you have to say.” I was annoyed at the thought of losing an entire day of work.
One of the research assistants stood up and read a page-long declaration that they’d written collectively, expressing their unhappiness at the disrespect shown to them. Then, one by one, the other research assistants elaborated, explaining that they are people worthy of respect – mothers and fathers, university graduates, intellectuals. They don’t deserve to be accused like criminals. They’re not here to steal. They’re not even primarily interested in their salaries; they’re interested in research and helping the country.
I tried to gently defend my co-supervisor, asking them to imagine what it’s like to be a white woman in Congo, where people are constantly, day in and day out, morning to night, either asking you to pay more than what the Congolese pay for a good or service, or simply asking for money as charity. This culture of having to negotiate every single transaction can wear a sister (and a brother) down. And in addition to that there are the cat calls, the shouting of “muzungu!”, the laughing at you for being white. Now at this point in my little speech I felt precariously close to someone like Bill O’Reiley whining that white male American Christians are discriminated against more than minorities in the USA, so I added that none of the above justifies the fact that the supervisor accused the research assistant so bluntly, and in public.
With my shoddy French, I’m used to people grimacing while I speak, so it was hard for me to discern to what extent the 35 faces around me were scrunched up in reaction to the syntax or the semantics of what I’d said. Fortunately, in any case, our Congolese supervisor then gave his own speech, stressing the importance of harmony and goodwill, and asking for us to move forward. It was brilliant; the tone was perfect, he cracked jokes, and he sympathized with both sides. The research assistants seemed satisfied, but they wanted to have another meeting, as soon as possible, with Scarlett present. And some said that they wouldn’t continue working unless Scarlett went back to Bukavu.
The second meeting happened the next evening. Scarlett had been quite emotional leading up to it, probably feeling like the whole group was against her. When it came time to begin, she composed herself, quite admirably, I thought, and read a short statement in which she both apologized and defended herself. The loudest reaction from the research assistants was that the apology was “too European.” It didn’t come from the heart. I wanted to explain that S had been in tears for most of the previous 36 hours, but I didn’t. There followed a lot more back and forth about the need for respect. The meeting ended with an agreement to keep working together, but some tension remained. Until…
…a couple nights later, when we organized a party to celebrate the fact that (1) our Congolese supervisor had purchased a very large fish and (2) there were only a few days of fieldwork left.

After some speeches and eating, someone turned on the radio in our SUV. The group insisted that Megan and I initiate the dancing because we were the only couple present. We obliged:

I don’t know if the shouts of “C’est incroyable!” were ironic or not. In any case, the real magic followed soon thereafter, when the accused asked his accuser to dance. Scarlett really had no choice given the yells of encouragement from everyone present. She and Randy began a sort of slow motion waltz. Randy, who is an unbelievable ham, slowly moved his hand from Scarlett’s back down to her butt. Scarlett slapped it away. The audience roared with laughter. Randy tried a couple more times; Scarlett successfully defended each time. The audience loved it. And then the dance was finished, and harmony was restored. I had visions of Gorbachev and Reagan fox-trotting. Bush and Saddam doing the Charleston. Malcom X and Margaret Thatcher learning how to Dougie. Bob Marley hosting an anti-rascifascifarian jamboree with Rush Limbaugh. No receipt, no cry.

Household surveys and Che Guevara

It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten weeks since we started the endline survey to evaluate Dutch funding of Congolese NGOs, and six weeks since we finished. Over the four weeks of the survey we visited about 990 households in about 75 villages. We were 42 people in total; five teams of seven research assistants each (including two team leaders), six supervisors, and one all-around badass, Koen, the PhD student who organized and led the survey. Here’s a picture of Koen during our first day “in the field”, i.e. in a village where people live year-round. Normally we wouldn’t have this many people in one village, but this was a trial run in a village that was not actually part of our sample. 

Normally, one of the two team leaders from each team visits a village the day before we want to survey residents. She explains to the chief what we’d like to do, and asks permission to come back the next day with five other research assistants. She also visits each household we want to survey to give them a heads up. Each research assistant carried out 2-4 interviews per day. 

The interviews normally took place in the interviewees home. For example:

 Sometimes they took place outside. Here’s Nicaise entering responses into his tablet:

And sometimes the interviewees were only available out in their fields: 

The villages that we visited were in the southern part of the province of South Kivu, in the territories of Uvira and Fizi. If, like me, your passport was sent to Kinshasa for three months for a visa, then you can’t travel southeast from Bukavu through Rwanda, with its fancy “paved roads”, and arrive in Uvira in about an hour. Instead you have to drive over “The Escarpment”, a bumpy four hour ride on the road that you see to the right in this picture:

To the left you can see the Ruzizi river. The Ruzizi marks the border between Rwanda and DRC; and further south between Burundi and DRC. Many of the villages that we visited were in the Ruzizi Plains, a fertile area where, for at least twenty years, there has been a series of violent conflicts between people with farms and people who graze cattle.

Further south, in Fizi Territory, the Ruzizi meets Lake Tanganyika. It was in the lakeside mountains of Fizi that Che Guevara and a small group of Cubans arrived in the DRC 49 years ago. They joined some rebels led by a young Congolese man named Laurent-Désiré Kabila. After seven frustrating months, Guevara and the surviving Cubans left. In his (published!) diary about that time, Guevara wrote about Kabila: "Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour." Thirty-two years later, Kabila would be hand-picked by the presidents of Rwanda and Uganda as the frontman for the invasion that brought an end to Mobutu’s 32-year reign in the DRC. Kabila lasted four years as head of state before he was assassinated by his body guard, a former child solder. Kabila’s son, age 29 at the time, was appointed as the new president and subsequently won the elections in 2006 and 2011, meaning that the constitution requires him to leave office by the next elections in 2016…unless he changes the constitution. That seems to me to be the main topic of conversations about politics at the moment.
 Sorry, was I writing about a survey? 

Let the artefactual field experiments begin!

The first project I was involved in here was an evaluation of Dutch funding to Congolese NGOs. We want to know if the NGOs did stuff that improved the lives of Congolese people (Like massages? No, like help with farming or schooling). To find out, we carried out a survey of about 1,000 households in about 100 villages in Uvira Territory and Fizi Territory in the Province of South Kivu (of which Bukavu is the capital). That required recruiting 35 research assistants. We put up signs at l’Université Catholique de Bukavu (UCB), sent out emails, and called people in our database. Altogether we collected about 120 CVs. We invited the most promising 60 to take a tablet-based general intelligence test with questions like, “If you add every third number between 1 and 50, is the result odd or even?” The top 40 from the test were invited to two weeks of in-class training. Here’s the group on Day 1 in a classroom at UCB’s new campus:

And here’s a view from the back of the class:

We went over the tablet-based questionnaire again and again:

And went through practice scenarios:

The training was so long because the survey included behavioral games a.k.a artefactual field experiments (AFEs) (by those who don’t play no games), which are tools for measuring trust, risk preferences, time preferences, and other characteristics for which self-reports may be unreliable. This survey had two AFEs. In an AFE to measure trust, the interviewee was given six laminated cards with a bushel of corn on one side and 500 FC (500 Congolese Francs is about 55 cents) on the other side. She was told that they could donate as many or as few as they want to a randomly selected member of their village, but they wouldn’t find out who, and neither would the recipient ever know their identity. NOW HERE’S THE KICKER: each bushel of corn that the interviewee donates becomes THREE bushels of corn (it’s, like, an investment). And THEN, after the corn multiplies, the anonymous receiver can send as much or as little back to the anonymous sender. Get it? The wealth-maximizing choices would be for the interviewee to send all six, which become 18 (18*500FC = 9000 FC = $10 USD), and then for the receiver to send back nine. That requires trust on the part of the interviewee. 

In the AFE to measure risk preferences, the interviewee was asked to choose one of six lotteries. Each lottery had two outcomes, each with a probability of 0.5. The interviewee would literally put her hand into a bag with a black ball and a white ball and pull one out. In the least risky lottery, both the white and black ball yield 4000FC (~$4.5 USD). In the most risky lottery, the white ball yields 1400FC (~$1.5 USD) and the black ball yields 8200 FC (~$9 USD). So the expected value of the riskiest lottery is 1400*.5 + 8200*.5 = 4800 FC. Thus, if an interviewee chooses the least risky lottery, she is giving up 800FC (almost $1 USD) in exchange for less uncertainty about the outcome. To see how intra-household bargaining influences risk preferences, we asked husbands and wives to play separately and then together.
In a country where the average daily income is roughly $1USD, these AFEs involve significant decisions, so, the theory goes, they should reveal interviewees’ true preferences. I was a little weirded out at first by the idea of asking subsistence farmers to play games with money, but two factors help assuage my concerns: first, it’s impossible to lose money. Every interviewee receives 1000FC in addition to the payout of one randomly selected AFE, and none of the AFEs involve losses (you can only win less). Interviewees could make up to 10,000FC (~$11USD). Second, village life has been described as boring by more than one villager, and it’s possible that these bizarre AFEs would be kinda fun. It’s also possible, though, that the stress of making these choices involving relatively large amounts of money outweighed the benefits. In my next post I’ll write about how it all turned out. 

The massacre at Mutarule

Megan and I have just returned from two weeks in Uvira and Fizi supervising (along with four other colleagues) a survey of about 1,000 households. My next few blog posts will be about that. But first I want to post something about the massacre at Mutarule on June 6.

Mutarule is a village about 6 hours drive from Bukavu. We passed it on the way down to Uvira. Everyone in the car recognized it immediately because of the graves by the side of the road:

On the evening of June 6, 33 people were killed in Mutarule, most of them in a church that was burned down while they were inside. Here's what's left of the church:  

The massacre was only the latest in a long series of violent incidents between the people in the area who have farms (the Bafuliro) and the people who raise cattle (the Barundi). If that sounds similar to the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, it's because it is. The fact that this is all still happening 20 years after the 1994 genocide is hard to believe...although when one considers what's going on in Israel and Palestine, it's clear that conflicts like this don't end quickly.

There are many people trying to figure out how can these communities reach a mutual understanding that peace will bring greater well-being to everyone involved. I'll post about that work as I learn more about it. To that end, if anyone has recommendations for people to contact or articles to read, please let me know.  

In and out of the flow

How different are Bukavu and Cambridge, really? Teenagers wear skinny jeans and flat-billed hats. Professors talk too much.  Kids play with balls. In the stores you’re offered a plastic bag with your purchase. Just when you think that life here is the same as life there, you walk into a difference.

One of my favorite things to do anywhere is to walk where there are no cars. So I really enjoy the shortcut close to our house that connects our street, Ave Nyofu, with a street about 100m above it, Ave Lumumba. The ascent begins with a small wooden bridge over a trickle of water and waste. Usually there’s a man just beyond selling charcoal and wearing a golf cap. “Bonjour! C’est comme en Europe!” he says to us without fail. After passing him, one enters a narrow corridor with just enough space for one stream of humans to climb while another descends. As one climbs, there’s a brick wall 4m high to the left and to the right there are three wooden shacks with their entrances facing the corridor. In front of each shack there’s a grill and a young man tending to sizzling meat. Then, climbing still, there are stone steps in the red dirt that lead into a covered passage, the narrowest, final part of the short-cut. One passes under a tailor’s shop and out into the street.

It was there in the final covered passage, one day last week, when I noticed something had happened. First of all, the stream of humans had stopped, something that never happens normally, and blocked my entrance into the passage. I said “Excusez-moi” and started to gently push through the crowd. There was a man breathing heavily and rapidly to my left, but I didn’t see him well because I was watching several people in front of me who were pointing at the wall and speaking animatedly in Swahili. They were pointing at a divot or small hole. I noticed also that there was a large crowd at the end of the short cut.  

The short cut ends on one side of a very busy road with a large market on the other side. The sound of horns is constant. Motorcycles weave through taxi-vans, white NGO SUVs, and SUVs of color that belong to the rich. On the sidewalk yet more motorcycles wait for customers, crowds of people walk for their daily errands, and street vendors sit at their wooden tables under advertising-laden umbrellas. Some of these vendors sell Congolese francs for American dollars. The American dollars have to be pristine – no tears, no writing. The exchange rate has been 900 francs to the dollar for the last four years. These franc vendors sit with piles of 500 franc notes on their tables waiting for customers. Since arriving here I’d marveled at their confidence being in the open air with so much money.

On the day of interest, at the end of the short cut, pushing through the crowd in the covered passaged, I came upon the large crowd previously mentioned. The crowd was gathered around a one of the franc vendor’s wooden tables. There was no umbrella, no money, and no vendor, just a table with a bright red smear of blood across the surface.

I’m not used to seeing blood, and crowds in poor countries make me nervous, so I walked away a few meters. I asked someone what happened. “They killed him.”

That seemed to be enough information for now, so I took a taxi to l’Universite’ Catholique de Bukavu as planned. There, I asked our Congolese colleague Janvier if he’d heard what had happened. “Of course! Last night even.”

“Yes? So what happened?”
“The vendor was shot last night at 20h.”
“Did they catch the guy?”
“No. And they even killed his friend a few months ago.”

Over the next couple days a crowd remained around the table, no doubt sharing stories about what had happened. On the second day someone taped a photocopy of a picture of the victim on the concrete storefront behind his blood-smeared table. “Jean Katabisimwe. 1989-2014.” By the third day the picture and the crowd were gone and the steams of humans flowed through the short-cut just like they had before. 

Megan in Africa!

By popular demand, this post will feature mostly pictures of Megan. 

Megan's first night in Africa: at Chez Lando in Kigali after a long flight from Amsterdam to Istanbul to Kigali.

 

Megan and my colleague, Koen, as we depart from Day 1 of our workshop at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture just outside of Bukavu.

Sorry, no Megan in the next picture. During the workshop representatives from each of the six Congolese agriculture-focused NGOs who distribute improved seeds, fertilizer and inoculants as part of N2Africa were asked to describe their theory of change as to what results such distribution would produce, and how. I'm holding one group's description while the NGO rep explains. Koen is taking notes on the projected screen.

The crossover: Cambridge to Bukavu

It's been six years since I lived in Entebbe and posted on this blog. Megan and I have been in Bukavu for six days now and, since we'll be here for the next year, insh'Allah, (and because we just had lunch at a fancy hotel with relatively fast internet) I decided to resuscitate it. 

We're here because I just started as a research fellow with the Development Economics Group at Wageningen University (WU). Megan's looking for work in environmental policy research or university-level math teaching (so please holler if you have any leads). While we look for an apartment we're staying at Chez Mundi, a large house, really a complex, in the middle of Bukavu. Mundi coordinates the Universite' Catholique de Bukavu's collaborations with several Belgian and Dutch universities. His home has at least eight bedrooms, a backup generator, reliable (albeit slow) internet, and, until a truck ran into a water main two days ago, running water. His wife, mother, and seven beautiful children ranging in age from around 3 to 21 live at the house. The kids are usually on their laptops. When Megan and I arrived we were with two profs and a PhD student from WU. In addition to our squad, two Belgian profs, a Congolese prof, and a Belgian med student were also staying at Chez Mundi. Over dinner the first night one of the Belgian profs claimed that half of DRC prefers dry sex while the other half prefers wet sex, and that there are herbs, "easy to find", to facilitate either style.   

On a completely different note, here's the view from our bedroom:

We spent the first two days in meetings with directors or agronomists from the six Congolese agricultural NGOs with whom we're working, through the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, on a DFID-funded, ESRC-coordinated, RCT to test the effectiveness of a package of seeds, fertilizer and inoculants as part of the Gates-funded N2Africa project. Megan valiantly took minutes of the proceedings, which were almost entirely in French. I understood about 50%.

On the fourth day, after Janneke and Lonneke went back to Holland, Koen showed us around town. When we found AI on the wall of a barbershop, I had to get a photo:

Ballin is universal.