By: Hannah Nemer
Americans have the watches but Africans have the time.
The most noticeable difference between the United States and Uganda is how people sense time. The watch I wear has become meaningless, as there is little likelihood of having a meeting start at its intended hour.
Conversations too seem to take place in a different time dimension. Here, a quick exchange (oh-so-common in the United States) is rare. More likely, a first time exchange becomes a long conversation, with topics spanning from one’s current state of mind, to the health and well being of family members, to future goals; generally a joke or two is thrown in as well.
In this way, the pace of Uganda is unhurried. This movement, while often irritating to short-term volunteers who want to shape immediate change, has the power to blossom into exceedingly patient, close-knit communities.
On Monday, Lindsay and I traveled to Kagoma, a bit outside of Jinja, to see a well that Kibo Group is helping to repair. This well signifies much more than a broken water source, but instead the broken nature of foreign aid approaches that rely on quick fixes.
The well was built by an implementing agency that spent little time on actual implementation, focusing instead on the quantity of its deliverables. In fact, before the well had been built, Kibo Group had done a survey of that location and had determined that it was not conducive to a long-term water source. Still, the implementing agency charged forward, leaving the well without establishing a long-term strategy for its integration into the community and without a means of oversight for its future repairs/rehabilitation.
Now, only a few years after its construction, the well is unusable – the pipes corroded, the cylinders broken, the rods problematic. The only thing that will repair the errors of a speedy-job-done-wrong is patient diligence – which Kibo Group and the individuals we met from Kagoma seem to have in spades. After having designed a way to lower a video camera into the well to better identify the necessary repairs, Bobby worked with Paul (the treasurer of the Kagoma-initiated community water committee) and several others for a few hours in the scorching sun. This is not the first time they have worked with the well in Kagoma and it certainly will not be the last. Yet, they have not lost hope that with time they will both identify the well’s problems and unite a community divided over the financial woes of maintaining it.
Time cannot solve all problems, and yet in Uganda I have witnessed the power of a measured response in the face of adversity; I have also seen good times made all the better by taking them at an easy, slow going pace.
