Ntlafatso

I was not, before entering the Peace Corps, particularly aware of the mountain of literature written and research conducted about Development. A few college friends were anthropology majors (they’re really not such bad people once you get to know them), and I would occasionally pick up different snippets of information on the topic, but I did not attempt to engage any further. I think the only thing I read remotely related to Development (far more related to colonialism, I suppose) before coming to Lesotho was a sort of dark-ironic book called How To Win Friends and Oppress People, composed of fragments from Victorian-era travel literature. It’s been a while since I read it, but I will hazard to say that the book’s advice was probably not terribly politically correct.

But naturally, Peace Corps attracts the type of person who is very interested in Development, and for a while I sat on the periphery of their conversations, sometimes interjecting highly amusing comments to the effect of “Sachs and Easterly? When are those two going to make out, huh?” So I was quickly excluded, and forced to conduct my own research. In the weeks before coming, I met a gentleman on an Idaho horse ranch (naturally) who told me, after learning of my plans, that he had read a book specifically about Development (ntlafatso) in Lesotho during college. I picked this book (The Anti-Politics Machine) up and, along with William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, it has given me some needed background into this big, big project that I’m a small, small part of.

One of the central ideas in Easterly’s book (excluding those that used confusing economics-related terms, like “market”) was that development agencies are responsible to the people who fund them rather than people they provide services to, so there isn’t much incentive to gather data from the latter group and see if things are actually, you know, working.

School at Matholeng Primary starts each day at 7:45 with the morning assembly, which includes a hymn, recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, greetings, presentations, and a marching song. My favorite part is the  presentations. Each week, a new topic is given, and 5 students present on it each morning. The first two topics were “Resolved: Children’s Rights Are Spoiling the Kids” and “Resolved: Adolescence is Nothing But a Time of Trouble.” After a full week of arguments against “adolescents making sex without condoms,” one of the teachers stood up to make a correction. “Students. We do not make sex. Is it something you can look at? Can you hold it in your hands? No, we do not make it. We perform it.”

One massive Development organization is the World Food Programme (WFP), which provides meals to schoolchildren. This is, at face value, terrific. Free meals for going to school is a great incentive, and students who have been fed can naturally pay attention and get more out of school than students who are, for example, angry and upset from being hungry, or too dizzy to focus on the board. And according to the menu distributed by WFP’s Qachas Nek office to schools, the students are getting balanced, nutritious meals.

When this week’s topic, “Resolved: WFP is good” was announced, I was very interested to see what the kids had to say; I was about to see something that, according to Easterly, is incredibly rare (or was in 2006; again, I have read very little on the topic, and don’t know how the Development complex has responded to his criticisms): direct, unfiltered feedback about a Development program from the people that program aims to serve. The students on the pro-side (and there were more of these) argued things like “Yes, they are good because they give us food, and we can listen in class now.” The students on the con-side argued: “No, they are not good because they give us fish everyday, and only little food so we don’t get satisfied.” They also said “they give us the fish with the worms,” but I am convinced that this is more a school-age rumor along the lines of I hear the meatloaf is made from the kids who get detention than it is a real, observable phenomenon (talking with Ntate Shakhane confirmed this, telling me that this rumor likely stemmed from the fact that some food aid is sometimes rotten or tainted, but that WFP’s school lunches are safe).

I had wondered about the preponderance of fish. Every day save the first two or three, the students have gotten for lunch a few scoops of papa (corn meal and water, the staple food of Lesotho) with canned pilchards. We have had meroho (translates to vegetables, but usually Swiss Chard) once, maybe twice, but apart from that it’s been papa and pilchards. According to the WFP menu, students are served fish only two days each week.

These observations are drawn from just one month, at a particular primary school in a particular district in a particular country served by the WFP, so I do not mean at all to make any broad insinuations about the programme overall. But it’s very (for lack of a better word) interesting to be on the ground and see the daily implementation of one of these huge aid operations that you hear about back home and maybe hear someone praise or gripe about on the news every once in a while.

I also appreciated the simplicity of the question “Is WFP good?” because the academic writings on Development avoid value statements of that nature, so it’s refreshing to see the topic tackled by schoolchildren who can outright answer “yes” or “no.” It was a funny counterpoint to the reassurances in the Ferguson book that he was utterly uninterested in labeling development “good” or “bad,” while at the same time excoriating the project that was the book’s focus. The takeaway was something like: well, the Thaba-Tseka Development Project did not accomplish any of the things it set out to do, a failure it masked by setting out to accomplish even bigger things while simultaneously (a) bringing a single-party-controlled government’s bureaucracy into the rural areas that were the only pockets of resistance to said government and (b) displaying a stupefying ignorance of local cultural norms and eventually collapsing under the weight of its own bloated incompetence but really, who am I to say that this is somehow a “good” or a “bad” thing?