“Try!” she said, grinning at me and reaching for my hand. I scooted over next to her on the reed mat and pulled up the right leg of my pants to reveal a bare surface on which to roll the fibers. She took my soft academic’s hands in her callused palms and twirled the golden-pale threads smoothly underneath her fingers, pushing them down towards my ankle and pulling them back up to my knee. The wispy strands curled together, spiraling and thickening into a twist that she pulled to the left. Separate the two bunches, hold the twist in your left hand, roll the split-in-two end with your right, pull to the left, repeat. Moisten with some water (or spit) if they get too frayed, and continue. I spun a short section, perhaps a foot long, and she inspected my work. With bubbles of laughter Rosemary nodded her approval and held up the strand for others to inspect. I passed.
Spinning string went better than crocheting it into a small purse-sized bag to be sold at the craft market. Another woman held out a few inches of dense stitches for me to continue with, and I did try – but she took it back within moments. Loose African conceptions of time notwithstanding, it was still not to be wasted in this way. It was my turn to laugh. Which was good practice, because it was certainly not the last time I would appear foolish in the course of a week-long crocheting workshop.
IRDNC (Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation) is the organization I work with here in Namibia, where I’ve landed to do some research for about six weeks. I’m just across the border from Botswana, and I hope to spend a lot of time working on both sides of this boundary, considering everything from the local effects of wildlife migration to women’s participation in conservation. I’ve been here before – four years ago when I started fieldwork for my dissertation – and I’ve been fortunate enough to be welcomed back by many of the people who helped me then. The primary difference is that now, I have a bit more to offer than a green, wide-eyed grad student intent on Africa but needing some time to really stand on her own two feet.
Simply put, IRDNC focuses on supporting local groups in ways that are sustainable. For example, this means that they try to fund training (like craft workshops) and pay for things that have one-off costs (like a fridge from which to sell cool drinks), rather than encouraging reliance on something regular that will just disappear if and when IRDNC itself goes away. This, in most ways, makes sense. But having just spent a week talking to women who can’t get access to the palm leaves they need to make (and sell) baskets because IRDNC doesn’t drive them to harvest it any more, it makes me wonder. Would I refuse to feed a hungry friend tonight because I know I’ll be out of food tomorrow? Would I refuse to help a kid pay school fees for her last year of high school because I knew I couldn’t send her to college? I hope not.
I suggested we talk about the problem as a group and try to come up with ways to address it. Though it isn’t a new issue, it remains a sore one. The first comment went along the lines of, there’s nothing we can do. One of the women added that they had planted a palm garden and it didn’t work, so they failed and that was just it. Being me, I couldn’t resist. “So, that’s the end. No one will ever collect palm or make a basket again.” A few women snickered, but the gardener was pretty annoyed with me. I didn’t really mind. Finally, a few possibilities came out – but only from those who work for IRDNC. It will, like most things here, take time to see if any of these ideas take shape.
In the sustainability game, local capacity is more and more important, even as it develops more and more incrementally. I found myself listening to woman after woman saying the same thing and thinking, well, I know this isn’t a long-term solution, but I bet I can get hold of a truck, pick them up, drive them to Chefuzwe, pay for the forestry permits, help them harvest the leaves, and drop them at home for not much more than what I’d spend on a good pizza and a six pack of beer at home. And no, it’s not sustainable. But it has to be better than nothing. So I’m torn between a desire to just do something, and the need to stay within the framework that my colleagues here emphasize. The small bits of money that women make from selling crafts seem inconsequential compared to the funds that come in from trophy hunting, but they are used in ways that spread benefits around. Nearly every woman I spoke with said she pays for school fees and uniforms for her kids out of her craft income. A woman named Salina told me that she’s been selling crafts for ten years, and her daughter is about to finish high school because she’s been able to pay for her education during just the right time. So when donors argue that craft isn’t sustainable because women don’t make enough money, I beg to differ. Or at least, the next paper I write will tell a deeper story.
The week I spent camped out behind the craft market, however, was peppered with other moments that stick and ask for further thought just as sustainability does. A German couple making a documentary stopped by two days after they said they were coming to film the women in action. So in welcoming form, the women got up to dance and sing for them. “I don’t want them dancing!” sputtered the cameraman. Apparently they had about half an hour to waste with us before moving on to more important things, and he wanted the women to sit and crochet, singing softly as they often do. I had more than half a mind to suggest he might be better off taping a circus if he wanted stereotypical images of trained local wildlife that would fulfill his need for images that everyone expected to see on the screen. Instead, I sucked in a breath that didn’t help and said, “Just let them be for a few minutes, they’ve been sitting and working all week.” After a few songs I asked them to show the crew what they were working on, and they sat on their mats and picked up their stitches, voices rising softly together as they’d been doing before the camera intruded. Once again I’d felt like I was pushed into the middle, and there I sat – liking my own actions less and less, layering them over with my extensive training in justifying and qualifying.
Without running water, we had to rely on someone going past in a truck to make a daily trip to the river with plastic jerrycans to fill so that we could drink hot tea in the morning and cook porridge at night. Bathing, to me, was out of the question. Some of the women running things, however, were of another mind. Every day they heated water and disappeared behind a reed screen to wash up. If I wanted to have a shower, Joyce kept telling me, she could escort me in my little borrowed car to a campground and talk to the staff there. I said no, I was all right. It wasn’t so hot, I added, and I didn’t mind. Her disbelief was almost comical. At first I thought maybe she was trying to tell me something about how I smelled (and, probably, rightly so). But I think it was more a matter of having different standards for what constitutes ‘important’ under these circumstances. Cleanliness is important here, with or without running water. I just couldn’t bring myself to get in my car and drive to a campground to shower when there were fifteen women sitting on the dusty ground crocheting for twelve hours a day to make the equivalent of less than five dollars by the end of the week who had no shower in sight even when they went home. It seemed unfair. There was a pink bathtub waiting for me in my sister’s house when I got back to Katima on Friday, and that was already more than enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment