Musings from Kolda

Like many hotels around the world, the custom at the Hotel Hobbe in Kolda is to leave your room key at the desk when you go out of the hotel. But the system here has an interesting wrinkle: when you return to the hotel, the keys are nicely lined up on the desk so that each guest can find her or his own key. It does make it easier, in a place where service is... let's call it leisurely.

Another day battling Senegalese highways. Almost 3 hours each way today to reach Velingara to visit a health center and a health post. At least I'm not driving. Not sure how I feel about how comfortable I've become with having a driver waiting around for me all the time. It feels very colonial. At least Masali, the driver, sat with us at lunch today.

Another day asking people all kinds of questions about their jobs, trying to figure out why the contraceptive prevalence rate is so low around here. The clinics we've seen have all been in pretty good shape, staffed with well-trained people who are committed to their work. But they are not accomplishing their goal of getting women to use contraception. They cite statistics that 60 percent or more of women want to have fewer children, or at least wait more time between children, but in parts of the region, only two percent of women use any contraceptive method. Why? Although there are some problems with availability of services, that doesn’t seem to be the issue. The stigma attached to family planning has been a recurring theme, tied very closely to the relative powerlessness of women in this country.

The whole point of this trip is to figure out what we can do, and so far, that has me at a loss. We have heard a few times that what is needed is to change the men here. In the context we’ve been working, the goal is always to work on men’s attitudes toward contraception, in order to increase the acceptance of contraceptives, and there for increase its use—thereby reducing maternal mortality, population growth, and all kinds of bad things. Personally, I’m not particularly interested in contraceptive prevalence or total fertility. But I am interested in the underlying issue, women’s right to exercise their right to control their own lives.

But how to do that? And what is the appropriate role for a bunch of foreigners to play in such a process? EngenderHealth has a program called Men As Partners (MAP)®, which has been pretty successful in several countries working with groups of young men to challenge their thinking about gender norms, relationships with women, sex, violence, masculinity… And we and other organizations have been successful at making at least incremental changes in the attitudes of the men we work with. But I can’t help but question both the efficacy and the appropriateness of a bunch of white people coming in and telling Africans how structure their society, how to relate to each other.

That said, I really do believe that people—including women!—have an absolute right to control how they live their lives. I’ve worked in human rights long enough to have considered—and rejected—the “cultural” argument against universal human rights. I feel very strongly that while the codification of human rights was done in the West, the core values are universal. So I guess my question is one of means: What role can I, a white man born in the USA, play in supporting women in this deeply sexist society to have control of their bodies and their own lives and bodies at the most basic level?

My questions are not new, of course. Any thinking person working in development must wrestle with them on occasion.

Meanwhile, perhaps we’ll write a few trips to Tokyo into our proposal, so we can lobby the Japanese government to repave the roads.