Three Stories of My Life - Steve Jobs!

Rethinking the high cost of institutionalised education

The increasing cost of education has been very much on my mind since the new term begun. But it was fast tracked to the top of my to-do-list when my daughter presented an invoice indicating yet again an increase in transport charges by the school bus company that transports her to school everyday. The most nagging (and patronizing) aspect was that unlike last term’s increment which had been communicated and discussed in a parents’ meeting, this term, the company didn't even bother to communicate or explain the new charges. It was assumed that parents would "understand" anyway, and pay up. Afterall, we are all working our butts off to ensure our kids get the best education that money can buy, right? Unfortunately, many of us are now spending a lot more than we are earning, as our incomes have not increased to match the level of inflation and the increasing cost of goods and services. A small loaf of bread now costs shs2500, up from 1800. Sugar is up to Shs3400. A good sized fish, enough to feed a family of four costs Ugshs7000, while a kilo of meat is retailing at Shs10,000 upwards depending on where you buy it. Four small tomatoes go for Shs1,000 while a litre of petrol is trading at Shs3850. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost everyone I know has tightened their belts to try and weed out any unnecessary expenditure in order to weather the current recession, which is likely to go on for months, if not years! But if costs continue to rise, and the dollar keeps gaining against the shilling, service providers and middle-men will continue passing the costs onto the end-users and causing many of us to make certain choices out of desperation rather than logic. One of these choices that am currently evaluating is whether to chuck institutionalized learning and try homeschooling my children, primarily to reduce costs, although I feel it would also give them a much more wholesome educational experience that affords them more opportunities to explore their sporting and creative talents. I have given myself up to January next year to do more research, and decide whether to do it or not.

Sierra Leone: Deforestation is seen as an environmental “time-bomb”.

Sweat trickles down Fatmata Sesay’s cheeks as she bends to scoop charcoal from a large brown bag, which she then empties into four small bamboo baskets neatly lined up on the floor.

After filling them up, her 10-year-old son, David Turay, stacks them on his head and sets off for the city centre to sell the charcoal. On average, David makes about 10,000 Leone per day (US$3) - money that his mother desperately needs to provide for him, his six-year-old brother and four-year-old sister.

Like many Salone women who lost their husbands during Sierra Leone’s 12-year civil war, Ms Sesay, 28, has struggled to adjust to her new role as family breadwinner. Selling charcoal is the only way she can put food on the table.

“I sell charcoal because I have no other way of supporting my family. There are no jobs here, so you have to create one yourself,” Ms Sesay says as she arranges the heaps of bags stacked outside the makeshift shelter that she uses as a shop and warehouse. “There is a ready market for it,” she adds, since “almost everybody uses charcoal for cooking”.

Reliance on charcoal and wood

In Sierra Leone, charcoal and wood make up 90 per cent of the total energy consumption. It is the preferred cooking and ironing fuel for both low and middle-income earners. For hundreds of thousands of rural dwellers, sales of firewood and charcoal provide virtually their only income, and allow a quick return on investments.

The use of charcoal and firewood however, is increasingly recognised globally as one of one of the major causes of deforestation and environmental degradation.

Making charcoal entails cutting down trees, thus causing deforestation. Wood has to be burnt in kilns for long periods of time, a process which releases CO2, the principal greenhouse gas that leads to global warming and climate change.

Between 1990 and 2000, Sierra Leone lost an average of 19,300 hectares of forest per year. This amounts to an average annual deforestation rate of 0.63 per cent. Between 2000 and 2005, deforestation increased by 7.3 per cent to 0.68 per cent per annum. In total, between 1990 and 2005, Sierra Leone lost 9.5 per cent of its forest cover, or around 290,000 hectares mainly as a result of shifting cultivation, commercial logging and cutting of trees for wood to make charcoal.

The annual supply of wood is currently estimated at around four million cubic metres, 10 per cent of which goes to Freetown. All around Sierra Leone’s capital, charcoal can be seen being sold in markets and by roadside vendors. The once leafy slopes around Freetown and its suburbs are bare of trees and vegetation. In their place are hundreds of houses, some newly built and others in different stages of completion.

Siray Timbo, Director of IDEAS, the largest Engineering and Construction firm in Sierra Leone, says the unregulated cutting down of trees and construction activity is an environmental time-bomb that could have serious consequences for its citizens.

Cutting down trees is destroying the soil cover by leaving the top soil unprotected and vulnerable to erosion during heavy rains, he notes.

“Last year we had a lot of flooding, and some people lost their lives because there is nothing anymore to stop the water from running down the hills. If nothing is done now, things could get worse,” he warns.

Environmental conservation initiatives

However, Syril Jusu, Director of Environment for the National Commission of Environment and Forestry, set up by an act of Parliament in 2007, says that there are some environmental initiatives that are beginning to bear some fruit.

Last year, Sierra Leone's government banned the exportation of timber in an effort to curb illegal logging by Chinese and other foreign businessmen. The ban is a move to prevent desertification as well as the loss of rare tree species that were being smuggled out of the country to meet demand from Asian woodcarvers.

Sierra Leone is also one of the first Commonwealth countries to set aside a forest for purely environmental conservation. The 75 hectare Gola forest, which borders Liberia, has been elevated to the status of a national park with local communities paid to compensate them for loss of income once generated from logging and diamond mining. The forest is home to leopards, chimpanzees and forest elephants, as well as 2,000 different plants and more than 250 species of bird, 14 of which are close to extinction.

The Gola project is being jointly funded by a US$12m trust fund set up by the European Commission, the French government, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the United States-based Conservation International Aid agencies.

But far more important than its local environmental value, the Gola provides a model example of how poor countries could earn more from preserving trees than chopping them down. The Commonwealth is promoting a similar initiative – known as carbon financing - as a way of helping member states to reverse climate change.

Commonwealth ministers call for urgent action

Carbon financing is now seen as one of the most promising mechanisms for increasing investment in forestry and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It could make it possible for countries to keep their forests, which would otherwise be cleared, in exchange for payment from industrialised countries looking to reduce their carbon emissions.

Last month, on 20 February, the Commonwealth Consultative Group on the Environment met in Monaco to discuss carbon financing. They agreed that it was important to take action now and not to wait for the international community to conclude their negotiations on climate change before beginning trials on new approaches.

Still, many experts contend that initiatives like carbon financing will have little impact without addressing the underlying problems of poverty and unemployment that face some of the poorer countries.

Sierra Leone for instance, is currently rated as the poorest country in the world, with about 70 per cent of its 5.6 million people still living on less than a dollar a day, and 70 per cent illiterate, according to the UN Human Development Index. An estimated two million youths, most of them former combatants, are unemployed.

With the country’s population expected to reach seven million by the year 2010, the use of wood and charcoal as main sources of household energy is likely to result in severe problems of availability if no attempts are made to ensure that the supply is sustainable, experts say.

“Efforts must be made to find alternative sources of energy like cooking gas, and people need to be educated and sensitised about why they need to switch to such fuels. Even more importantly, they need to be able to afford such fuels, so they need to be employed and have regular sources of income,” notes Dr Oguulade Davidson, an energy expert at the Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.

The advantage of switching to gas would be two-fold: it would reduce the use of charcoal and firewood in households; and it would also create a new industry of gas suppliers, one which could potentially provide employment for women like Sesay.

“It would be a win-win situation; you protect the environment while at the same time, creating jobs for people, which is really want people want,” says Dr Davidson.

Originally published in the Commonwealth Quarterly -http://www.thecommonwealth.org/EZInformation/176101/060308efforts/- on March 6, 2008.

Alexander Mackay: The wizardry missionary of the Great lakes.

ALEXANDER Mackay liked to tell the truth. Even when it hurt. Or shocked. Or saddened. Just days before he set sail for Uganda in 1876, he made an unusual observation which was to come true.

"I want to remind the committee that within six months, they will probably hear that one of us is dead," he told the committee of the church missionary society at a send-off party for him and eight other missionaries.

Everyone was shocked. People could be seen whispering amongst themselves, according to a report in the CMS Gleaner.

"Yes," he continued. "Is it at all likely that eight Englishmen should start for Central Africa and all will be alive six months after? One of us at least - it may be I - will surely fall before that."

"But," he added, "when that news comes, do not be cast down, but send someone else immediately to take the vacant place."

In less than two years, Mackay wrote home to say that of the eight missionaries, two had died of tropical disease, the natives had murdered two and two had returned to England very sick. Others followed in their footsteps, and some met the same end.

Bishop James Hannington was murdered on his way, as was Bishop Parker. Alexander Mackay outlived them, but only for a little longer.

His story is a fascinating tale of purpose and perseverance amidst persecution. And for this, it has been told and retold by a whole generation of authors in the last century.

In The Story of the Life of Mackay of Uganda, Pioneer Missionary, his sister J. W. Harrison sheds light on his childhood and the events that shaped the man who is sometimes referred to as the modern-day John the Baptist.

Mackay was born on October 13, 1849 in Rhynie Aberdeernshire in Scotland. His father, Alexander Mackay, was a church minister in a remote parish of the eastern highlands in Scotland. Mackay was unusually bright, and by the age of three, could read the New Testament.

Mackay's father was a friend of a number of academics and scientists, one of whom was Sir Roderick Murchison, David Livingstone's sponsor and after whom the Murchison Falls is named. At 14, as he was about to join grammar school, Mackay lost his mother and he was never the same again.

His sorrow and loneliness kindled a thirst for adventure in him and a deep fascination with machines. It is said that he would often walk for miles just to see a railway engine.

His parents had hoped he would follow in his father's footsteps and become a church minister, but while at Edinburgh University, Mackay begun to concentrate on engineering and soon, he was studying higher mathematics and surveying.

In 1873, he went to Germany to study German. While here, he got a job as a draughtsman at the Berlin Locomotive Works and invented an agricultural machine, which won first prize at an exhibition of steam engines in Breslau.

At the teacher training college in Edinburgh, he had had a reputation as a loner and he did no better in Berlin although he wrote frequently to his family.

"Here I am," he once wrote, "among all these heathen people; almost all are infidels, but agree in so far acknowledging the existence of God as to continually use the expression `Ach Gott (Oh God)' often more than once in the same sentence.

On this account, I am obliged to have as little conversation with them as possible and hence cannot have the advantage of German conversation as I would like."

During his stay in Berlin, Mackay resided with the family of Hofprediger Baur, one of the ministers of the cathedral there. Under Baur's influence the fascination of missionary life, which he had felt in his youth, was revived in him and he begun to study the Bible.

It is while he was in Germany that his sister wrote to him, and told him about a missionary expedition to Madagascar, which Mackay decided to join as an "engineering missionary". His vision was to connect Christianity with modern civilisation and he hoped to do so by establishing a college to train young men in religion and science.

He also wanted to build railways and roads, which he described as "an enormous enterprise for one single-handed".

Months before he was due to set off for Madagascar, the mission fell through, and he was asked instead to go to Mombasa to oversee the settlement of liberated slaves.

This journey too, hit a dead end, and someone else got the job before Mackay's formal application went in. It was around this time that the London Daily Telegraph published a letter from the explorer Henry Morton Stanley asking for missionaries to be sent to Uganda.

Mackay applied to the CMS to be part of the Uganda mission, also known as the mission to Nyanza, and on April 27, 1876, set sail on the steamship, the SS Peshawar, from Southampton.

Arriving at Zanzibar on May 30, 1876, Mackay and about eight of his colleagues set off for the interior. It took him well over two years to travel from the coast to Buganda. One after another, his colleagues died along the way until he was the only one left.

All through his travels, he kept a journal (currently kept at the CMS archive library in London) in which he jotted his impression of the people and the culture and lifestyle of the various African tribes he visited on his journey.

In one of his entries he observes: "Go where you will, you will find every week and, where grain is plentiful every night, every man, woman and child, even to suckling infants, are reeling with the effects of alcohol."

Because of this, he writes, he became a teetotaller from the moment he left the coast.

In November 1878, Mackay arrived in Buganda and established his headquarters at Nateete, where he set up his printing and engineering workshop. In time he built a medium-sized storeyed bungalow.

His was the first house ever in Uganda to be built with bricks. The house's foundation was made of burnt bricks while the walls were built with sun-dried bricks.

In March 1882, Mackay baptised his first five converts among them Sembera, and three of the king's pages, named Mukasa, Kakumba Lugalama. Others soon followed.

It is said Mackay would print large letters on sheets of paper, which he used to teach his young converts to read and write Swahili. He also translated the gospel of Matthew into Luganda.

His first printing press, a small hand-operated machine, is on display at the Uganda Museum, while a church and school (Mackay College) now occupy the place where his workshop once stood.

Mackay was not only keen on winning more souls for God, he also put in long hours teaching his new converts new skills such as building roads, houses, machinery, and boats as well as reading and writing.

It is evident from Mackay's journal that he was a good friend of Kabaka Muteesa's and the two would talk often. In one of his entries, he recounts that the Kabaka once asked him to help him obtain an English princess, so that he could add her to his numerous collection of wives and was astonished when Mackay told him that in England "no woman could be given in marriage without her consent".

Another time, Muteesa said: "Mackay, when I become friends with England, God in heaven will be the witness. God will be the witness that England will not come to make war on Buganda, nor Buganda go to make war on England.

Everyone will say: `Oh Muteesa is coming,' when I reach England, and when I return: `Oh Muteesa is coming back again.'"

Although the Kabaka never did make the royal journey, three of his emissaries eventually did, one of them Ham Mukasa Mulira.

But despite their friendship, Mackay despised the "heathen" practices of the king which prevented him from being baptised. He writes how the unfortunate victims of Muteesa's displeasure would be slowly tortured to death, their noses, ears and lips cut off.

For others, he says, the sinews of their arms and thighs would be cut out and roasted in front of their eyes, before these were put out and the body itself burnt alive.

"The wretch who orders all this to be done for his own gratification is he who is called in Europe `the enlightened and intelligent king of Buganda'".

He also writes about some of the barbaric practices of the king such as the kiwendo (a great human sacrifice to secure blessings from a departed king). For instance his journal entry of February 6, 1881 reads thus: "Two years ago the king gave orders for a kiwendo and 2,000 innocent people were slaughtered in one day.

Less than a year ago a similar atrocity was committed. Two thousand poor peasants were caught, fastened in forked sticks, kept in pens and murdered on the set day, as an expiatory offering to the departed spirit of the former king, Suna.

Now another kiwendo is about to take place, because the king is ill and a sorcerer has told him that only a great slaughter can heal his sickness." Risking his life, Mackay wrote the king a letter, pleading for their lives, but his plea was disregarded.

Muteesa, for political reasons, played off Catholics, Protestants and Muslims against each other, and played all three new religions off against the traditional priests, working them all to his own advantage.

Mackay and the White Fathers played directly into Muteesa's hands, spending more time maligning one another than they did working together.

Life, however, became increasingly difficult for Mackay after Muteesa's death. He writes that the new Kabaka, Mwanga II, had a cruel streak and was easily influenced by his chiefs. "Our young king has some good points, but I fear few.

He is much afraid of his older chiefs when it is a question of doing anything in what we would call a right direction. No such scruples seem to come in way when he wants to kill a score of two of his subjects."

The new king was also under the influence of Arabs at court and he had become addicted to smoking bhang like them. Much worse, he had acquired a taste for sodomy.

Indeed, Mackay writes that the martyrdom of Christians in Buganda was sparked off by a related incident after one of the pages, Apollo Kaggwa, refused to service the king. In his journal, he describes the incident as "an act of splendid disobedience and brave resistance to this Negro Nero's orders to a page of his, who absolutely refused to be made the victim of an unmentionable abomination".

Mackay says that the king went berserk and summoned every page at court. He then asked those assembled which of them was a Christian. Thirty stepped forward and thus began the Christian martyrdom.

And when his palace burned down one day, all blame was laid squarely on the Christians (the thatched roof had accidentally caught fire when one of the pages was out praying). Three Christian boys - Seruwanga, Yusufu, and Lugalama - were arrested, tortured and burned on a slow fire for their negligence. Another Protestant page was speared to death.

Then three Catholic pages were beheaded. The next day, two more Protestant lads were castrated and died, while a couple of Catholics were hacked to pieces. Others were picked off in ones and twos.

For a few months, there was a halt to this carnage. Then in 1886, 26 of the pages - 13 Catholics and 13 Protestants - were marched 16km from the capital and burned alive in a huge bonfire at Namugongo.

In all, about 200 Christians were tortured and burned. Their death and Mwanga's continued persecution of Christians weighed on Mackay's conscience as he could only watch helplessly as his former pupils and friends were murdered.

In 1888, it seemed the persecution would stop when Mwanga was driven from his throne by the Muslims and replaced by his elder brother Kiweewa, during the inter-religious wars. Mackay held on, despite the bloodshed and the civil war, and was always hopeful of establishing a permanent station.

Months later, Mwanga was re-installed by the Christians after defeating the Muslims, his suspicion and growing dislike of Mackay continued and he decided to leave.

Twice, Mackay and Ashe tried to leave, but they would always be intercepted and marched back to Nateete by the king's chief warrior. A year later, on July 21, 1887, Mackay was allowed to leave Buganda and he travelled to Usambiro on the southern shores of Lake Victoria, where he stayed for the remaining three years of his life.

A great deal of his time was spent urging the British government through the consul at Zanzibar to annex more territories in Africa to prevent "dictatorial rulers" such as Mwanga from "inflicting atrocities on their own people."

Mackay was also shocked at the apparent indifference of Christians in Europe to the martyrdom of black Christians in Africa when at the same time, they could be roused to a fury at the murder of a white Christian bishop like James Hannington.

On February 14, 1890 Mackay caught malarial and four days later he died at Usambiro, the last survivor of the little band of eight that had set out for Uganda in 1876.

He was buried at Usambiro and his remains were later transferred and buried at Namirembe Cathedral.

Originally published in the Sunday Vision in 2006.