Category: Resilient Development

Be Known By Deeds

The Unity Project-Uganda

The Unity Project has launched a major initiative in war-torn northern Uganda.   A “Unity Assembly” composed of 9 schools, public health, micro-enterprise, community organizations and media outlets has been created as a vehicle to begin a process of sustainable development and community healing in Lira, Uganda.  The district Ministry of Education has asked that the Unity Project’s efforts be extended to all the schools in the district.  This pilot effort holds great promise as a model for reconstruction throughout northern Uganda, the region and any post-confict area.

For 23 years, the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led a macabre and vicious campaign of cruelty throughout northern Uganda in an effort to overthrow the government.  The primary methods of recruitment of these criminals was to kidnap children and turn them into soldiers and sexual slaves.  The children were typcally forced to commit atrocties against their own families to fracture family bonds and brainwash the children into submission.   The LRA bizarrely claimed that these methods would help institute the  rule of the 10 Comandments in Uganda.  Leaders of this psychopathic cult have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In October, 2011, President Obama announced the dispatch of 100 US advisors and special forces to apprehend the criminal leaders of the LRA cult to bring them to justice.

The Unity Project will provide a series of services to launch a locally based sustainable spiral of growth for the Lira area of northern Uganda. Together, our partners reach many tens of thousands of young people, 60,000 by recent estimates. From our Unity Assembly of partners, we engage youth in service activities that build upon locally identified needs which also align with the Millennium Development Goals. This service activity “mines the gems” of potential strengths, talents and character in our youth. These “gems” are then refined through our expertiential “Transformation Exercises” into practical personal skills that can be used to provide a vision for a life of useful service to the community. In the process, the community benefits from the service and strengthens its institutional and community capacity through the growth of the Unity Assembly.

Currently, we are focusing on 4 “Legs” that support the over-all “table” of this project. These are:

1.) Education: This involves the training of teachers and the staff of partners in resilience building theory and methods to be incorporated into school curricula and youth programs.

2.) Economic Development: We are creating a team to put together a farmers’ cooperative to finance the project and to assist local farmers to be paid a fair price for their crops in exchange for their keeping their children in school and participating in Unity Project capacity building programs. In this way, the project can become self-sustaining while building capacity. Entry level IT opportunities and the marketing of local crafts are also being explored.

3.) Health: Working with our local partners as well as local, national and international agencies, we are developing service teams in each of the following themes: malaria eradication, HIV/AIDS, water purification, gender violence and maternal and child health.

4.) Learning Community: A significant innovation of our methods involves mobilizing young people to help define the information that is needed to create meaningful service plans. Youth will be directly involved in defining the information needed, collecting and analyzing it as well designing and implementing relevant and manageable service activities based on information they collected. In this way, a learning culture can evolve that is built upon the feedback of accurate and relevant data, cooperative reflection and planning and the united action and assessment of results. This process will greatly increase the effectiveness of the community and build local capacity.

The Lira District Ministry of Education has requested that the Unity Project extend this initiative to all schools in the district. We have also been invited by the Council on Higher Education in Rwanda to provide this model as a best practice example for the development of security and economic development in the region.

We have been approached by many high school and college students asking to do internships with the Unity Project. An application will be available soon when our website update is completed.

We welcome inquiries into this work. Also, we are now launching Unity Project chapters in the US to implement this resilience building model to develop youth capacity. Feel free to ask how you can start a Unity Project chapter in your community. Also, we are very grateful to those offering to help raise funds to support this work. Thank you! If you would like to have a lunch or dinner to raise funds among friends and colleagues, we’ll be happy to help you do so.

We’ll be posting more as this rapidly growing movement takes shape!

Dec 01, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
Don’t just do something. Stand there!

Don’t just do something. Stand there!

Should I stay or should I go?

An article in yesterday’s USA Today caught my attention.  In it, an emergency room doc, Scott Plantz, recounts his voluneteer experience in Haiti.  He describes it as working in a “chaotic hell” with  the presentation of patients with broken bones that were  ”the worst injuries I have ever seen.”

He expresses his frustration at the lack of coordination between hospitals as a real problem.  Some faciltities have far too few of desperately needed neuro and vascular surgeons.  The facilities he worked at, Project Medishare and the University of Miami Global Institute Hospital, had four orthopedic surgeons.  Down the road, at another facility, patients with broken limbs were being turned away and told to return in two weeks due to a shortage of the orthopedic surgeons which his facility had too many.

This reminded me of “Woodall’s Axiom: There is no such thing as an adequate response to a catastrophe.”  One can not expect things to run smoothly after a horror like what Haiti experienced.  But, we only hope to get closer and closer to acceptable responses to the overwhelming challenges.

Of note, Dr. Plantz describes what I have seen many times,

“I flew down with a group of 200 college students with no association with Project Medishare- probably the most frustrating aspect. They came down to “help out,” each at a cost of $500.  They had no construction or medical skills.  When you realize that $500 will keep two Haitian children alive for a year, watching anyone arrive that is not trained is aggravating.  Funding the sending of carpenters or one bulldozer would have been 1,000 times more effective.”

There was a saying I remember from my medical training that seems absurd and counter-intuitive.  ”Don’t just do something.  Stand there!”   This saying was meant to tell us to think carefully about what the most strategic and helpful intervention would be to help a patient.  We were asked to resist immediate actions based on our own emotional responses that might make us feel good because we are doing something,  but that would not really be in the patient’s best interest.

It boils down to a question a doctor is trained to ask themself: “Is my acting based on me trying to prove to myself I’m useful, or is it really in the best interest of the patient?”  The patient comes first, not my desire to feel helpful, or to calm my anxieties about how bad things are,  or prove to myself I have a life’s mission, or to launch a new phase of my life, or gain recognition for being a humanitarian.   These all get checked at the door.  The patient’s real needs come first.

Then, the sober analysis must begin as to how one can be of the most help.  Dr. Plantz felt that these 200 college students were treating their own desire to be seen as helpful, while likely being of very little actual help.  It is very likely that they consumed food that was not readily available, contributed to an already overloaded sewage capacity, took time and resources away from generous hosts who had to accomodate them.

It may be that such “missions” can have some positive effect.  But, there may have been 100 other interventions that would truly be more effective in helping many more people without burdening already broken systems.  Such modest interventions  might not allow for  a “life changing experience” for the person who wants to go to help.  But, it is not about the care giver having a life changing experience.  It is about actually helping those in need.

So, for now, it seems to me, that if you can help medically treat or nurse this child, find a way to go to Haiti, preferably by connecting to an agency that is established there to maximize your efficiency.

If you can provide a way to clean up sewage and treat water, by all means, get yourself to Haiti.  If not,  it is probably best you stay home and raise funds for those who can or provide material that is specfically requested by agencies on the ground in Haiti that have the means to distribute it.

If you can help to clear and rebuild this, consider going to Haiti.

There will come a time when the emergency phase of this calamity is over.  That will be a time for other types of services to be brought to Haiti in earnest.  That will be a time for non-specialists.  But, until the sewage and water systems are intact, until food is readily available, until basic accomodations are there for Haitians at the pre-earthquake levels, consider the strain you are putting on the system by trying to be of help.  Honestly ask if your personal input is more valuable then the strain your presence puts on these systems.

Be honest.

Wanting to help and being willing to sacrifice yourself to help are different than actually being helpful.  Your best intentions to help may best be fulfilled by not going and doing something here that benefits many there.  No one may know of your effort, but that is really the measure of who you are really going for.

If you would regret if no one knew you went to help, don’t go.

If you have no specific skills to render at this time, seriously consider not going.

If you have no systematic plan to be of help, seriously consider not going.

Be honest.

Mar 04, 2010 | 3 comments View Post
In Haiti: first, find the women who can find diapers

In Haiti: first, find the women who can find diapers

The women who can find diapers are the most important people in a disaster response.  That’s the way it always works.   Finding these women and empowering them in creative ways is critical right now in Haiti.  The biggest challenge is the same that accompanies every major disaster: connecting the resources that are pouring into the country with the people most in need.  As we are seeing increasingly there and as has always been true in disaster responses, this is enormously difficult to do. The reason is the lack of local capacity to channel the resources through.  Here’s where we pick up on the ladies and the diapers.

To the savvy manager of an aid agency, you look for the women who have figured out what the needs of the most people are and have used their wits to meet them.  That’s the person you want to work with to set your priorities and develop the best method of delivery of resources.   This is what happened in Bosnia and Croatia when I was running a trauma response program during and after the war there.   In town after town where the disaster spread, I’d see women looking everywhere for water, food, diapers.  The woman who was the most resourceful in finding these the quickest became the “go to” person.

Reports of mass confusion and increasing levels of threat are mounting as frustration turns to desperation from the inevitable inefficiencies of a disaster response.   The chief bottleneck happens at the final point of distribution.  The current model of crisis response is like a factory conveyor belt.  Deliver material and dump it at the end.  We are good at sending material down the conveyor belt.  We are not good at distributing the material at the end of the belt.  There is another way.

The women who use their wits to find the diapers, food and water need to be empowered to organize clusters of families into Action Teams. These Action Teams consult together about what the needs of the cluster are and what resources are needed to meet them.  They prioritize actions that they can take themselves without waiting for understaffed aid agencies.  These Action Teams can be organized into a Unity Council in a village to coordinate the delivery of services and to interact as a united and coordinated voice with aid deliverers.  By itself, this would greatly increase the sense of empowerment of the people most in need.  It would decrease social tension born from chaos and desperation.  It would undercut lawlessness and violence.  It affords the people the chance to become partners in their own recovery, builders of their own hope and role models of active and creative resilience instead of merely passive victims who receive aid.

Please post this to your own blog or Facebook page!  Follow my posts by clicking the RSS Feed above.  Let me know what you think, comment below!

Jan 27, 2010 | 4 comments View Post