“One village at a time”
On June 12, 2012 our family headed to sub-Saharan Africa for the annual visit of a selected country. This year the consensus was to go back to the Masai Mara in Kenya. Our group included thirteen, ranging from six to sixty plus, all of whom love this far away continent. For our youngest family member this would be her fourth visit to Africa.
Everyone was excited to return to the Bateleur Camp at Kichwa Tembo, where their first wild life safari experience began in 2002. These family trips have included visits to more than twenty camps and lodges in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Marcia and I have visited a number more since our first trip to Africa in 1970. The camps and lodges provide desperately needed employment for thousands of villagers. During each visit we made it a point to visit the surrounding villages and elementary schools, which in most cases receive support from the camp and lodge operators and their foundations. We also would visit local craft centers, cottage textile operations and other village enterprises; medical clinics; and animal conservation projects.
In February 1970 Marcia and I accompanied our good friends Maurice and Inez Warshaw on a fact-finding mission to Africa for CARE, UNICEF, and United Nations World Food Program. Over the years Maurice had involved me in several Utah-based charities in which he was a major supporter and contributor. On this journey to Africa the proposed plan was to review education and healthcare facilities; infrastructure projects; and food assistance programs in four sub-Saharan African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
At each stop we met with government leaders, health providers, and educators to evaluate their needs for aid, and visited programs these organizations had under way in the villages. We toured several medical clinics and schools under construction. In visiting schools and clinics already in operation, we noticed they had minimal supplies to work with and great basic needs; also the CARE and UNICEF operations in the villages were understaffed.
Colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa was coming to an end in the 1960s, and young idealists were getting involved in the independence movement. Milton Obote who was a socialist took control of Uganda as president in 1962. Julius Nyerere a Marxist and early Pan-Africanist became part of the independence movement, taking control of Tanzania as president in 1964. Jomo Kenyatta, accused of leading the anti-colonial movement known as the Mau Mau Society, served eight years in prison. Shortly after independence, in 1964 he became president of Kenya. In Ethiopia the autocratic leader Haile Selassie, who ruled for thirty-five years, struggled to hold onto his power.
Our Africa trip began in Rome where we met with the United Nations World Food Program leaders for a briefing on their work in the countries we would be visiting. Soon we were off to Ethiopia where we visited several village medical clinics and schools in Afewerk, Tekle, and Lideta. Wherever we went we witnessed extreme poverty. At the Lideta Mother and Child Health and Community Center mothers with their children waited for hours, and in some cases days for treatment. Medical supplies were sorely limited and the clinic painfully understaffed. They also were unable to deal with the long lines of people in desperate need of medical attention.
At schools the teachers were overwhelmed, and again with little educational material and few supplies. Students shared desks and books. Although many children walked several miles each day to attend class, their uniforms were clean and they looked hopeful. Many parents had expressed the desire for their children to be educated, but hunger remained an overriding factor, and survival foremost on their mind.
In Addis Ababa we met many highly educated people which was a hallmark of the Selassie administration. We were impressed with the quality of educators and students at the Haile Selassie University. Selassie wanted to advance his people through education and modernization of the country, but didn’t have the support of the military. Emperor Selassie was known as the Lion of Judah, because of his belief that he was a direct descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He had come to power in 1930 and was forced into exile in 1936, returning to the throne in 1941. He ruled until 1974 when he was deposed by the military.
In Kenya Jomo Kenyatta’s six-year-old pro-Western democracy was suffering from high unemployment. A weak economy, escalating poverty and health issues affected many of the villages, and was reaching a critical point. At that stage of Kenya’s development, aid from humanitarian organizations was needed. We visited several food distribution facilities which were supplying many of the villages. Wanting to see some of the infrastructure projects in outlying areas we traveled to Nyeri, a village some ninety miles north of Nairobi. Along the way we stopped to inspect several wood bridge structures that were under construction. In Nyeri we visited a mountainside water retention dam and piping system, which served several nearby villages.
We then traveled to Tanzania, which had been called Tanganyika until its independence in 1961, and merged with Zanzibar in 1964. Julius Nyerere was a highly educated idealist who wanted to institute a communal tribal village concept throughout the country. He introduced a collective farming program, and in the process displaced many people from lands they had lived on for many years.
The failure of Nyerere’s collective farming program combined with disastrous floods resulted in critical food shortages and disease in many villages. By the late 1960s Tanzania had gone from being the largest exporter of agricultural products in Africa to becoming a large importer, and one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Nyerere continued to feel that the socialist model was the way forward for his people, rather than a capitalist free market approach.
While in Dar es Salaam, we visited several villages, clinics and schools. We found employment was scarce, medical supplies and education material nonexistent, and poverty paramount. Some farmers were lucky enough to eke out a living on a few acres of arable land and sold their products at local markets. Others traveled miles carrying wares on their heads and backs for trading and bartering. Not all city dwellers had a roof over their head, but in the villages no matter how simple their small huts most people had shelter.
China had had diplomatic and economic relations since the 1950s with a number of sub-Saharan African countries. Destabilization in some of these countries after independence in the early 1960s provided an opening for China and eventually the Soviet Union in the region. Nyerere was particularly influenced by Communist China and established a close relationship with the Beijing government; over the next several years Tanzania became China’s most important African base of operations.
In Uganda Milton Obote in his quest for power had nationalized major businesses and banks. The political situation by 1969 had become unstable, resulted in an attempt to assassinate Obote. The situation was tenuous, but we still visited several village schools and clinics. Again we discovered people were in a desperate need of food and supplies. Food shortages saw skyrocketing prices and the instability spread. In 1971 Obote was toppled by the military led by General Idi Amin.
We were cautioned not to travel to outlying villages. Since we had twenty-four hours to spare before departing Uganda, it was suggested we take a side trip to see Murchison Falls, a short distance from Kampala. We flew on a small plane to a picturesque tented camp, nestled in a wooded area adjacent to the White Nile. Imagine having afternoon tea brought to you in a polished silver tea service (a British legacy), and sitting outdoors in the wild, with hippos and crocodiles all around you. The glorious red sunset added to this picture.
At five o’clock the next morning we were greeted with tea and biscuits. Soon after an incredible yellow sunrise, we took a short guided tour on the White Nile, alongside hippos, crocodiles, and a variety of bird-life. After this memorable twenty-four hour experience we were hooked. Marcia and I immediately fell in love with Africa’s beauty, charm and vast open savannah’s filled with nature’s wondrous wild life. The tribal cultures there also have a rich history which goes back thousands of years.
In leaving Africa we were frustrated by the humanitarian needs there, only a few years after independence from their former colonial rulers. On exiting they did not prepare new leaders to take over. There were infrastructure needs; institutions for good governance were weak; rule of law and respect for human rights almost nonexistent; and agriculture production in disarray.
Now fifty years later, numerous dictators and weak governments have come and gone, with few democracies having been created. Billions of dollars of U.S. aid and loans have been pilfered by corrupt leaders, and poverty still exists for over 400 million people. Tribal conflicts, border disputes, civil wars and genocide have left millions dead, and millions more disbursed throughout neighboring African countries; and a large Diaspora living in distant lands.
At the UN Summit of 2000, 147 countries had agreed upon eight basic Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for Africa to be achieved by 2015: eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achievement of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction in childhood mortality; improvement in maternal health; progress in combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; environmental sustainability; and the implementation of a global partnership for development.
The MDG’s were to be a guideline for the sub-Saharan African countries, but have not shown a significant achievement to date. Even if some of these goals were met, more than 400 million people would still be living on $1 a day, without safe drinking water; at risk of HIV infection and malaria; malnutrition; lack of maternal healthcare; substandard education and limited job opportunities.
While serving as U. S. Ambassador to Mauritius, Seychelles and Comoros, I attempted to address some of the MDG issues, but did not make much headway. Congressional funding was highly limited, and State Department priorities did not have these African countries on their radar screen. The few programs our embassy was able to institute were greatly appreciated by the host countries. However expansion of Peace Corps and USAID programs would have gone a long way to improve people’s lives in the villages.
In 2002 our family visited Mauritius in time to attend the Fourth of July celebration. We planned to go to Kenya thereafter for their first safari experience. We had heard about Conservation Corporation Africa ( CCAfrica, now “and Beyond”) the operator of twenty camps and lodges at the time, in six sub-Saharan African countries. Their mission statement read: “Care of the land–Care of the wildlife–Care of the people”. We chose their Bateleur Camp at Kichwa Tembo. We were the only guests at this small camp nestled in a wooded area on the edge of the Oloololo Escarpment, which is on the western border of the Masai Mara National Reserve in southwestern Kenya, along the Great Rift Valley. Overlooking the plains of the Masai Mara, we were in the direct path of the annual migration of wildebeest and zebras traveling from as far away as the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania.
While at Bateleur Camp we visited a Masai village, many of whom were employed at the camp. We also visited the Emurutoto Primary School which was in need of many projects, including classrooms, a dining hall, and toilet facilities. We decided to help the school headmaster with seed money to build a classroom building. CCAfrica committed ten percent of their profits to the villages for education, healthcare, and income generating activities. We made a resolve that in future visits to safari camps and lodges we would support only those operators who employ people from neighboring villages, and give back a portion of their profits for education and community projects.
In 2003 our family stayed at CCAfrica’s Ngala Camp located adjacent to Kruger Park in South Africa. At the camp we met with the CCAfrica public affairs officer, and other senior camp staff who took us on a tour of nearby village projects they supported. We also visited the Welverdiend Primary School, where class sizes were quite large, with only eleven teachers for several hundred students. It was a delightful visit: students practiced their English by singing American songs for us, lovely dances and gymnastics were performed, and one girl read a charming poem. However most of the students would have little chance of an education beyond the seventh grade we were told.
Our son Steven brought along fifty school kits packed in shoulder bags made out of surplus airplane seat fabric. Each bag contained several pencils, a sharpener, writing paper, a small chalkboard, chalk, a twelve-inch ruler, and some hand tissues. The school kits were presented to the best students in each class. Steven who coaches soccer also brought a number of soccer balls, and with his son Garrett an excellent player, gave the young villagers some lessons, leaving behind the balls for them to enjoy. The barefoot children were elated to receive some soccer lessons and the inflated balls, since they had been using tightly rolled cloth strings making a round semblance of a ball.
We again left some seed money for the school building fund. The village elders and school headmaster were very thankful. However they asked for help from the United States for sustainable development programs, infrastructure improvements, medical and school supplies. Classrooms and clinics cost less than $10,000 to build we were told, but with the villagers contributing their labor they could be built for substantially less.
Marcia and I felt it was important to continue to expose our children, their spouses, and our grandchildren to sub-Saharan Africa. So in 2004 we went to the Sandibe Lodge located on the southern edge of the Moremi Game Reserve, on a tributary of the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana. From there we headed to the Ongava Lodge on a privately owned ranch adjacent to Etosha National Park in northern Namibia. Thereafter we visited the towns of Walvis Bay and Swakopmund, before flying down the coast to the Sossusvlei Desert where we stayed at the Little Kulala Lodge, sitting on a private preserve adjacent to Namib-Naukluft Park, where “Big Daddy” an extraordinary sand dune a thousand feet high was located. We continued each year to visit safari camps and lodges, and neighboring villages, in several sub-Saharan African countries, except in 2009 when the U.S. economy dictated otherwise.
The Price Family Foundation supports village projects in several African countries, some in conjunction with non-profit organizations. In Kenya CHOICE Humanitarian recently completed a community dairy north of Nairobi. In Somaliland we are building four classrooms in Hargeisa, with the Somali and American Fund For Education (SAFE). In Comoros we are planning to help build a cooperative for farmers of ylang ylang and vanilla, to better market their products.
Currently we are in sub-Saharan Africa for our Ten Year Anniversary, back at the Bateleur Camp. We were warmly greeted by Milka Kerubo the operations manager, who was there during our first visit in 2002. She introduced us to Africa Foundation coordinator Julius Mokita, who accompanied us to the Emurutoto Primary School. We were pleasantly surprised by the progress made there in the past ten years. Several new classrooms have been added, a dining hall, and an earthen pond to store water from underground springs and rain runoff.
A kindergarten classroom, library, student dormitory and indoor toilet facilities were still needed. Our Foundation is planning to fund one of these projects in conjunction with the Africa Foundation. The “and Beyond” group has grown to forty-six camps and lodges, employing several thousand people from the nearby villages. They truly are making a difference with their dedication to the villages.
From Bateleur Camp we moved onto the Amboseli Tawi Lodge, located in the foothills near Mt. Kilimanjaro. The Masai community run-conservancy, together with African Wildlife Foundation promotes and maintains a harmonious development for the wildlife and Masai people along the corridor between Amboseli and Chyulu Hills, where Tawi and several other safari camps and lodges are located.
The Amboseli Tawi Lodge is privately owned, but by its mission statement is dedicated to the well being of the surrounding villages. They currently have twenty-five employees at this lodge. Ron Guijs the general manager, assisted us in a visit to a nearby Masai village and the Lemong’o Elementary School. The Tawi owners support some of the needs of this school where students range from age three to nine. Their current needs include uniforms, books, school supplies, and an electrified fencing to keep the wild animals out of the school property. Our foundation plans to fund the fence project to protect the school children.
Each time we return to sub-Saharan Africa we are overwhelmed by the wild animal habitats, beautiful sunrises and sunsets, cultural diversity and rich history. However we find that life for most Africans has not improved much over the past fifty years. Seeing an increase in the number of individuals, private foundations, NGO’s and corporations who are investing in village and community projects is very encouraging. At the same time the United States needs to make more of an impact in sub-Saharan Africa by actively engaging these countries. In doing so we will have a greater chance to leave a positive footprint, and guide these countries onto the path of freedom and prosperity, eradicating poverty, and reducing the impact of disease–one village at a time.