Thai University Graduate and Undergraduate Involvement in a Participatory Development Project in Gulu, Uganda and Tak Province, Thailand

Thai University Graduate and Undergraduate Involvement in a Participatory Development Project in Gulu, Uganda and Tak Province, Thailand
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Linda Nowakowski, Ubon Ratchathani University, LindaNowakowski@gmail.com

Abstract:

The King of Thailand has proposed the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy as an alternative approach to development. This is an approach requires little capital investment and no assistance from outside international agencies. It is development that makes sense.

Since this development focuses on core sphere activities, it is viewed economically as non-economic or non-productive, traditional measures are not adequate. A development index based on GDP will not see this development as positive. Gross National Happiness indicators would likely indicate positive development changes but the results are of little use to the community to fine tune its development model.

A group has been working for several years in Tak Province in Thailand with a community of Karenese. Their goal is to build a sufficiency economy community and establish a school based on the King’s ideas of learning-by-doing. One graduate student and four undergraduate students from Ubon Ratchathani University will go to Tak Province in the spring of 2008 to help with this project and provide them with the metrics to measure their development. The results of this work will be input to assist in the development of a resettlement village for child-headed households in Uganda in the spring of 2009.

Thai University Graduate and Undergraduate Involvement in a Participatory Development Project in Gulu, Uganda and Tak Province, Thailand

Thai University Graduate and Undergraduate Involvement in a Participatory Development Project in Gulu, Uganda and Tak Province, Thailand
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William Easterly in his 2006 book “The White Man’s Burden” talks of planners vs. searchers. He relates a story of the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s speech in January of 2005 about one of the two tragedies of the world’s poor.

He gave a compassionate speech about the tragedy of extreme poverty afflicting billions of people, with millions of children dying from easily preventable diseases. He called for a doubling of foreign aid, a Marshall Plan for the world’s poor, and an International Financing Facility (IFF) against which tens of billions more dollars toward future aid could be borrowed to rescue the poor today. He offered hope by pointing out how easy it is to do good. Medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only twelve cents a dose. A bed net to prevent a child from getting malaria costs only four dollars. Preventing five million child deaths over the next ten years would cost just three dollars for each new mother. An aid program to give cash to families who put their children in school …. would cost little.”

He then went on to describe the second tragedy. The second tragedy is the fact that nations in the west have delivered $2.3 trillion to what he refers to as the rest and none of the above problems have been addressed.

Easterly proposes that the problem can be looked at as a failure of approach. All of the aid that has been delivered by the West has been delivered by planners. Planners who have no accountability and demand no accountability for the programs they plan. He proposes a new group to lead the way, a group of searchers; a group that is bottom up and close to the people and therefore accountable to them.

In February of this year, I had the opportunity to attend a conference “Localizing Global Change” in Gulu, Uganda. This was not a conference of western academics (except perhaps me). This was mainly a conference of African people who are on the ground working to alleviate the suffering in their communities. They are the very personification of Easterly’s searchers. Everyday they are accountable for what they do or don’t do. At that event I presented a session on the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy of the King of Thailand. It was incredibly well received by delegates from many African nations. Why? Because it is development that makes sense. It is development that can be done without outside support. Shortly after the conference, a number of ideas and opportunities came together and our project was born.

I am a member of the Faculty of Management Science at Ubon Ratchathani University. Shortly before this conference, I had decided to go back to school and work on a PhD in Buddhist Economics and particularly in the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy. I am particularly interested to see if this Philosophy can cross cultures from an Asian Buddhist setting to an African Christian culture.

The overall project will be the development of a sufficiency economy based community for approximately 150 families, primarily child-headed households, that will be resettled from IDP camps in northern Uganda to a village that we will help build using two concepts from Thailand. First, we will be assisting them in learning the concepts of the King’s Sufficiency Economy Philosophy and secondly we will be helping them to establish a “learn by doing” school using concepts developed in the integrated studies program at the school at the Samasikha Sisa Asoke school in the Sisa Asoke community in Srisaket Province. Because of the strong cultural clan system in Uganda, the focus of the project will be providing a boarding school for these students to gain educational and vocational skills. The village will have land that they will farm to provide them with their food and hopefully some additional produce that can be sold in the local market to provide them with necessary cash. The other thing that makes this project such a challenge is the need for developing supportive community to help these children cope with the trauma’s they have been through: broken educations, family members dieing from either the war or the HIV/AIDS pandemic, all of the trauma of war along with some of them having been abducted as child soldiers. The need for support as they work to heal from this trauma and learn to gain control of their lives.

My proposed research is in the development of community metrics required to assist in the selection, progress evaluation and development of the group. The initial survey and interviews will be used to assist in the selection of the community. The community will then use the community indicators developed to help them assess their progress and make necessary changes to achieve their self-defined goals of well-being and prosperity. The program will also involve Khwaundin Singham (a graduate student at Ubon Ratchathani University) and four undergraduate students selected out of the International Business program in the Faculty of Management Science at Ubon Ratchathani University.

Ashoka Fellow Christina Jordan who is the founder of Life in Africa is married to Norbert Okec. Christina is a social entrepreneur and Life in Africa is perhaps best described as a cooperative business that assists members to supplement their meager incomes. Most of these members are Acholi people who resettled in Kampala when the civil war in the northern part of the country forced people to leave their homes. About a year ago, Life in Africa opened a second location in Gulu. The two Life in Africa communities constitute a cohesive, supportive community, working in a number of ways to assist the people of northern Uganda. They have worked with night commuters, children who commuted into town from their homes and or IDP camps to seek protection from being captured and taken as child soldiers. They are working at providing the children a solid breakfast and at providing school fees for some of the children. They have established a community guaranteed micro finance program with a small start-up grant from the February conference to provide some of the families with start up money for small businesses and they are starting to build community operated enterprises such as soap making and candle making.

Norbert is a member of an extended family that owns a large piece of land called Opok Farms outside of Gulu. 20 Years ago, Opok Farms was a prosperous commercial farm. His family had made a decision to go back to the farm and start the process of recovering the land from 20 years of absence. When Christina talked to him of all that had happened at the conference, they developed a dream to set up a village using the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy that would allow approximately 150 child-headed households to relocate and start new lives. The Okec family has offered 300 acres of land under a long term lease to the community and Life in Africa will assist in the development. This is the point at which I was offered the opportunity to join this project.

My research program, as originally conceived, was simply to be teaching the group about the principles of the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy and working with the community in the development of the metrics to help select the families and benchmark their well-being with tools that could be used by the community in the future to evaluate their progress. When I returned to Ubon Ratchathani, I shared my experiences there. My students and fellow graduate students were moved by the stories. They seemed to have little exposure to the kind of social violence that had occurred in northern Uganda. They were overwhelmed, as anyone would be, by the overwhelming obstacles facing the people there. And they seemed truly amazed that they might have something to offer to help.

On hearing about the theme of this conference, I was immediately inspired by the possibility of involving my undergraduate students in this opportunity. UBU has a well developed history of participatory development research that has even at times involved students.

The development of the plan started with Aj. Khwaundin approaching me and telling me that she would like to be one of the students to go to Uganda. At precisely the same time, the group in Africa got the go ahead to set up a school as a part of the village. This tied in directly with her research proposal related to the development of the Samasikha Sisa Asoke school. With the 20 year history of broken educations in northern Uganda, the concept of a “learn-by-doing” school fit in perfectly. This would allow people of all ages to learn together without stigma. It would give everyone opportunities for vocational education that could be able to sustain the individuals and families in the community.

Shortly after this, I was talking with a Thai businessman in Bangkok. He was also excited by the project and offered 600,000 baht to fund six people to go to Uganda for 3 months during the university break in March, April and May of 2008.

With this assurance, I presented the opportunity to the three classes in the International Business program. There would be a competition for 4 scholarships to go. Aj. Khwaundin and I would select the four students who would make the best team based on completion of some tasks. These included spending the October break living in a sufficiency economy community where they would learn about Participatory Action Research and its techniques: how to listen, how to interview and survey, how to journalize. They would learn about building a nurturing community, as well as how to do all of the work tasks in the community, including but not limited to recycling, making organic fertilizer, farming, and making soaps and herbal medicines. Secondly, they would need to build their English skills to a level sufficient to survive in an English speaking country doing the research and community building. Thirdly, they would write a report on the culture and social history of Uganda, particularly northern Uganda. Finally, they would be interviewed by Aj. Khwaundin and myself.

The four students to be selected would be expected to participate in the final development of the survey that will be administered to the families who want to participate in the resettlement. They would assist in the administration of that survey. They would work with small groups of children on development of community and the demonstration to them of some of the many things that can be done in their community. When they return to UBU, they will have an option to use the experience and the journals they keep to write a report and earn three credits of independent study toward their degree requirements.

The October break is over and four students have self-selected to be a part of this project. We are very fortunate that they have spent a month together and they form a strong, supportive, cohesive group with incredible enthusiasm. They have demonstrated an ability to work in a community that is different that they are used to with patience and tolerance. They learned techniques of deep listening and loving speech required to build a deep community that can support them in personal development as well as routine daily tasks. They learned many useful things about how to live more sufficiently and they now understand the value of the King’s Philosophy in their minds and hearts. They have learned by doing and know how the concept plays out in real life. They have also gained an appreciation for what life satisfaction and happiness are and how they are not closely related to money.

This project has not only lit a fire in these students in Thailand but it has lit fires around the world. There are financial sponsors from Thailand, the US and the UK who are providing money for doing the initial land clearing. There is a man from Israel who spent several months on the farm in July and August volunteering to oversee the workers, survey and find water sources. A man in the UK has organized a group of ornithologists in the UK and Uganda to do bird surveys and is working for the development of a part of the acreage as a potential eco-tourism site. A man from Canada plans to be in Gulu in November and help to build a temporary structure that will act as a group meeting place. We have cooperation from Makerere University in Kampala and Gulu University in Gulu in identifying indigenous crops (the children do not know these things and most of the adults who knew the information have died either in the war or from the HIV/AIDS pandemic). There is an additional attempt to find immediate funding for development of infrastructure such as a water purification unit, sanitary facilities and group housing.

This program is a program that is important to the resettlement of northern Uganda. This program will happen. Unfortunately, our participation in this program will not be in the spring of 2008 as originally planned. With peace settlement at hand and the closing down of the night commuter centers, millions and millions of dollars has flooded into northern Uganda. This has created a social situation that Christina Jordan of Life in Africa, Norbert Okec of Opok Farms and I have in just the last couple of weeks, judged to be unstable and dangerous. Our work in this community has been delayed in order to allow time for rational behavior to return to the area. That is one of the advantages of the Sufficiency Economy model for development: it doesn’t require huge inputs of international aid to make it work.

I do not want to or intend to delay my doctoral work for a year while the people in Uganda fight over who is going to get all of the International aid. Instead, I have talked with Dr. Vachara Li Sapsuwan in Bangkok about assisting him on a project that he has been working on for several years.

In 2002 he led a group on a medical care mission to the Karenese people in Tak Province. They visited Tha Song Yang and Wat Mae U-Su which is about 15 km from the town. They learned of a group of Karenese children who live mainly on farms remote from the temple. These were walking to town to study at the Mae U–Su school. Over the last 5 years, working with Luang Por Thammasak from the temple, volunteers with the FTBI Foundation and other volunteers from the Tzu Chi Foundation, are continuing a program they have established in the area. They have built a dormitory to house the girls and the boys live at the temple. They pay for a cook and provide the children with food when they are at the school. There are currently about 200 students, boys and girls up to Matayom 3.

We have been discussing, for quite some time, his plans to follow the same path as our Uganda plan and build a sufficiency economy based village project, provide some simple income generating businesses and a learn-by-doing school. They have started working with the farmers to teach them state of the art organic farming methods and sufficiency agriculture techniques. With the developments in Uganda, we have talked with him and in March, April and May, the four undergraduate students and I will travel to Mae U-Su and do the same kind of work we trained for for the trip to Uganda. The students are still very enthusiastic and I think in some ways relieved to know that they will not have to spend 3 solid months speaking English. On the other hand, I have started intensive lessons to improve my Thai.

I will do the development of the metrics tool kit and then we will work with the Karenese community to see how they will define what progress in development will look like in their community. This will give us a good testing ground before we take the tools to Uganda in 2009. The students will practice their research skills and community building talents, testing them first in their native language.

The undergraduate students are all still interested in going to Uganda the following year and all will still be in the University. I will be working on finding funding to enable that to happen over the next 6 months or so.

In February of this year, the plan is that I will host two of the project leaders from Uganda here in Thailand where they will gain first hand experience in the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy and different implementations and will be able to observe the Samasikha Sisa Asoke school first hand.

I have good feelings about this project. These students are going to be exposed to and participate in real life research projects and see first hand the application possibilities of some of their course work. As it now looks like I will be working with these students over almost 2 years, I will be encouraging them to think of their own research questions and to develop their own mini-research project. They will have the opportunity to experience different cultures in depth and will have to negotiate the intricacies of learning to communicate with people who are different than they are. They will learn to appreciate the obstacles that other people face in their lives. The community building skills can provide them with tools for deep listening and gentle speaking that will benefit them for their entire lives. I believe that in 6 months time, Thailand will have four citizens who are recognized members of an international community and who have discovered their power to make good things happen in their country. With some assistance, after another year, they will have become world citizens and demonstrated what Thailand has to offer to the world.

REFERENCES:

REFERENCES:
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1 Easterly, William. (2006) “The White Man’s Burden : Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good”. New York, Penguin Press.

2 Khanderia, Arti. (2007) Connection Head, Heart and Hands: Innovations and Potentials Demonstrated by the Integral Development Studies Program, Ubon Ratchathani University, Thailand. A professional project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies, The University of British Columbia.

3 Khun Chinavais Sarasas.

4 Dr. Sapsuwan has been trained as a medical doctor but makes his living as a compassionate network marketer and motivational trainer. He has founded the Free Trade Business Institute (FTBI), FTBI Credit Union and the FTBI Foundation that gathers like minded individuals and helps to fund these compassionate goals. The FTBI Foundation is chaired by Khun Vorarattana, the retired Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Group Executive Director of SGS Group of Companies in Thailand. He is currently active as a network marketer, providing training in personal & organizational development and is a freelance management and financial consultant.

Linda Nowakowski is an American citizen who has been living in Thailand for most of the last 10 years. She is currently on the faculty of Management Science and a full-time graduate student working on a PhD in the University’s Integral Development Studies Program.