| 33. Development in Lesotho: Sustainable? |
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I have seen a lot of Lesotho now and met and talked to many people about the struggles of life, development and foreign aid in the country. I have seen enough to build up questions like, what is sustainable development in third world countries? Are communities receptive enough to continue introduced practices? Does foreign aid make people in the receiving country lazy and dependent on others? Can you help people who won't help themselves?
I have all of these questions because of my experiences so far. One experience, which triggered my question of sustainable development, was visiting Plenty, the Canadian Aid community in Quiting, where I lived with my family for many years. Plenty which was a aid organisation working with Agriculture, Water Supply, Sanitation, Forestry and Soya Bean products, trained many people in these trades over the 10 years or so that the organisation was in Lesotho. When I visited Plenty to retrace my childhood footsteps, I found that the international community had been gone for a long time. They had left the project in the hands of a local guy, who apparently soon after, embezzled money and sold most of the equipment, furniture and everything really. He apparently now owns a hardware store in Mount Maroosi, probably fueled from his embezzlement. Many people in the villages around Plenty had always been jealous of the community and when they saw that everything was being sold off, they also went in for the kill. One of the buildings (the one in the orchard below the cliff, for those of you who know the place) had its roof taken off, beams stolen and they even bashed the window frames out of the walls. Plenty was an extremely successful project while it was there and many people, local and international, still praise their work in Lesotho. The Basotho people had the opportunity to continue the project to better their community, but they chose to instead ransack the place for immediate material satisfaction. When everything was stolen, the only thing left was the library; they weren't interested in education. The people were jealous but wouldn't do the work for themselves to gain what they were seeking. It was not due to lack of education, facilities or training, it was a case of a community not wanting to help themselves in the long run. Frustratingly, I have come across this many times in Lesotho. Lesotho has an unemployment rate of 45%, which has stimulated some people to make money any way they can, like selling fruit or making crafts. Unfortunately this is mostly not the case. At the Katse Dam Lodge, Alta, the lady who would help me sell Larlie, explained her efforts to motivate people to make crafts to sell at the Lodge. Alta said she organized a meeting with many villagers, to talk about the demand for crafts by tourists at the Lodge. The meeting seemed successful, with everyone very keen to help and make some money. However, even though they agreed on having things ready within two months, there was nothing done! People didn’t want to work! The opportunity was biting them in the butt! You would think that if people were extremely desperate with poverty, that they would grow their own vegetables. Well, I have seen many times that where there is soil and water available, many people don’t have gardens! I have heard, from the mouth of the Basothos that they don’t like foreign aid because it makes people lazy to help themselves. The world food organisation supplies even those who can afford food, with maize and people simply wait for their ‘presents’. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against foreign aid, I simply am skeptical because of what I have seen and it has formed many questions about development in Lesotho and many third world countries. Many western countries and individuals, who donate money to aid organizations, think that pouring money into developing countries is a solution to their problems. Unfortunately money is not always spent wisely and sustainability is not always the first priority. For example, there is a project called Partners in Health, which is an American organisation working with the Basotho government to build 10 clinics in extremely isolated places around Lesotho to provide free healthcare to the surrounding communities. It’s an amazing projects, with great goals, however, what I saw when I visited one of these clinics, was an extreme waste of money. The first thing I noticed about this clinic was that it was still under construction but had an airstrip and a helicopter pad, with its own helicopter. The helicopter had been on the move all morning, from what I could see from a distance. When I got there I noticed that what they were in fact doing with the helicopter, was flying in cheap cement bricks for building! Lesotho has on of the richest limestone resources of any country in the world, and here they were spending god-knows how much money, to fly in poor insulating, cheap bricks from a different area. For the same money they could have set up a community business to either cut limestone themselves, or to build a brick factory on the nearby river.
When I walked into their office asking from an interview, which I was denied because the lack of a press clearance, I saw that the doctors and technicians were very well equipped. They were all sitting around with their laptops on the internet, with satellite phones and other gadgets. I knew the Basotho by then and could not help thinking of how people in these positions would use this avenue of money to flash their ‘modernity’ amongst the poor surrounding communities.
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