From Canada: Understanding livelihoods, finding some wheels, and getting some exercise.

This post was started about a month ago when I was still in pre-departure training. I just finished it now after being in Malawi for nearly 2 weeks. Hope you enjoy it.

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Hello my friends!

My experience during one of the weekends in Toronto was so interesting that I couldn’t resist putting together a post about it. For anyone wondering about what sorts of things we learn in EWB before heading overseas, this will hopefully grant you a bit of insight into the wondrous madness that is our pre-departure learning program.

This post is all about something incredibly interesting and challenging but seemingly very valuable called “Participatory Rural Appraisal”, or PRA. What is this crazy three letter acronym? PRA is basically an approach to getting information from the intended beneficiaries of a development program with the goal of making the program as successful as possible for them, and a method of facilitating the knowledge exchange and identification in a community so that they can draw their own conclusions about their situations. Throughout the history of development, projects that have been successful, by which I mean ultimately beneficial for the people for whom it was theoretically designed, have taken into consideration the needs and realities of said people. So, clearly, a method is needed to help people identify and articulate out what those needs and realities are, the process being driven by the beneficiaries and the the conclusions coming entirely from their mouths and minds.

Duh!

This seems like common sense to me: if you want to design a development intervention that works and fits into the lives of the people it’s meant to help, you need to have the participation of those people in the design so that the reality of their lives is understood. Common sense, sure, but you might be surprised how often this hasn’t really happened. So how does PRA make it work? Let’s take a look at a definition first and see if that yields any ideas:

“PRA is defined as a growing family of methods and approaches that enable local people to analyze, share, and enhance their knowledge of life and conditions, and to plan, prioritize, and monitor and evaluate.” – Robert Chambers (Google it)

So, as far as I can tell, PRA doesn’t do anything on its own. It’s a “family of methods” that range from semi-structured interviews to wealth ranking to role playing, plus whatever else you can think of. And if you dig deeper and really look at the members of that family, you find that their value is defined not by the methods themselves but rather by the values and attitudes of the people who use them.

Clearly, this isn’t easy. And as my colleagues and I have tried it here in Toronto as part of an assignment to understand and practice PRA, the art of asking the right questions is a delicate one.

Our task: use some of the methods of PRA to find out whether informal lending institutions (places like MoneyMart, Cash Store, etc) are more of gateway into or a ladder out of poverty for people in Canada. These companies give out advanced loans to people without credit checks at very high interest, orders of magnitude larger than the type of interest you get on cash advances with a credit care. There are many different ways of looking at this. Do people with bad or no credit who need money in a bind find real value and assistance in this type of service? Or does it suck people further into financial stress and put them in situations they can’t get out of? As always, the right answer is likely somewhere in the middle. We are to use PRA to find out where exactly that lands, which basically means we have to talk to people who use and provide the service to find out whether it puts them into poverty or pulls them out of it, if it does either. The goal was to get some experience from the methodology side of PRA, and while this task doesn’t totally fit with the above definition, it was still extremely valuable.

I talked to a number of people a few weeks ago as part of this, the most valuable conversation being with a guy who had an extremely engaging story. His name was Mike, and he was from Toronto originally. He had moved out to Vancouver to work with his family’s business, and according to him, despite his hard work, he wasn’t getting the financial return he deserved. So, he told them he wasn’t going to work for them anymore. It was at that time, at age 32, when he found out that he was adopted and had never been told about it. Obviously I didn’t get the whole story because a lot happens with a person before they turn 32, but you get the idea. Anyway, Mike was a manic-depressive, which made life difficult, especially when he ended up on the street after being disowned by his family and moving back to Toronto. He was on the street for about a year before he managed to get a job selling furniture, and now he manages a store. Mike is doing just fine, despite facing all manner of challenges.

So where does PRA fit into all of this? Well, I asked Mike what he thought of those informal lending institutions, and he told me they suck people dry; he’d never think about using it even when he was desperate. While Mike’s story is one of which I can see just one side, it is still quite remarkable what you can learn about a situation by approaching it the right way. I drank a beer with Mike and played pool with him in the bar. What better context can you find in Canada to find out what people think and feel about a certain issue?

I talked to plenty of other people that night with plenty of different results and different perspectives, the sum of which painted a less than spotless picture of the sector. The real blood and guts of the exercise, however, came a couple of days later when I decided to go out and do some more investigation. I wandered around like a lost puppy for a while, but eventually found myself in Regent Park, one of the lowest income areas in Toronto. As I was investigating a few concentrations of these informal lenders around the town, I was eventually approached by a guy asking me for some money for a burger from Harvey’s. I was busy and didn’t have any change, so I declined, but as I walked away I thought to myself, “Damn! I should have bought us both something to eat and had a conversation over a meal. Missed opportunity! What was I thinking?”

So I walked on, and was approached by a fellow riding a bike.

“Hey buddy, wanna buy a bike?” he asked in a somewhat sketchy way. “Buy that bike?” I replied.

“Yeah, 5 bucks.”

I took a look at the bike and at him, and with a listen to the tone of his voice and a ponder about the price, I formed my hypothesis.

“Did you pinch it?” I challenged him, not really thinking about it that hard.

“Ahh, (explicative)”, said he, as he rode off.

And as I continued down the street, it occurred to me: another missed opportunity! This man had offered to sell this clearly stolen bike and instead of just talking to him about it and buying it from him, I had stuck to what I was used to. Annoyed with myself, I decided to rectify my mistake, so I had to run up ahead a few blocks to intercept him as he parked his bike at the Beer Store.

“Hey man, I changed my mind, I’ll buy the bike.”

“Huh?”

“The bike, I’ll buy it off you for 5 dollars.”

Apparently there was a cop in the Beer Store, so the guy told me that we ought to move around the back of the store so that he couldn't see. I ventured a stab at getting into a conversation.

"So, I'll buy your bike, but I want to talk to you for a few minutes. Look, I'll even give you $10 for the bike" I said.

"Are you a cop?" he replied angrily, understandably so.

As we went around back of the store, in between thinking about where to go next and hoping that we didn't get busted by the guy inside the Beer Store, who was a cop, I asked myself what this person, to me a stranger for whom I felt some kind of compassion, and myself to him a potential adversary, must be thinking. Putting myself in his postition: why would some random, young, unshaven guy come running and offer to buy a stolen bike under the condition that we have a conversation? In his reality, the natural assumption would be that I was not his friend. To his mind, of course I wasn't. How could I be?

"No, man, I promise you I am not a cop." I said, trying my best to bring the genuineness that was in my heart to the forefront of what I was saying. I'm not sure it worked.

"You'd better not be a cop, or I'll (explicative) take you out." he replied.

I felt like he meant it.

"Man, I swear to god, look me in the eye, I am not a cop, and I don't want to (explicative) with you, I promise." I pleaded.

"I'm a big guy, I swear I will knock you out if you're lying to me." he reiterated with conviction.

He was indeed a big guy, and, as such, I wasn't scared because I was quite sure I could outrun him. The bike was too small for him so that would only slow him down. I was totally safe.

I told him that he could see my ID if he wanted to see if I was a cop. He wasn't totally sold on this idea because he said I could be hiding ID somewhere else. I showed him my UBC Student ID and explained who I was and what I was doing, and I reminded him that, if I was a cop and lied about it in that situation, it would be a wrongful arrest if I took him in, so I wouldn't risk doing that over a cheap little bike. That seemed to convince him.

So, we got to talking. The conversation was rushed because he just wanted to complete the transaction and get into the beer store before the cop saw what we were doing. I asked him my questions about informal lending, and his perspective was that people in his situation are totally screwed if they use the services to pay off other debts, but if they really need money for something urgent, they don't really have a choice.

With that, he refferred me to a loan shark on Egglington Street that would give out up to $100,000 at 20% interest. I politely thanked him for the referral, and as we went our separate ways, he did something that surprised me. He gave me a big hug. He reeked of whiskey, but the hug was worth it as it made me feel that he had really decided I was not a cop. I am still asking myself what else it meant. Was he astounded that I genuinely did not want to hurt him? Was he lonely and simply amazed that someone really wanted to talk to him without an alterior motive? Or am I totally off base? Was he just drunk?

I guess I'll never know, but at least I bought a decent bike for only $10.

Now that I was mobile, the city was my oyster. So, I decided to fly over into the area when I had seen another one of these places on the internet. This was one that was a bit sketchier as it was not part of any big chain. It was pretty far away, but since I had the bike I could make it no problem. As I got further into this low income area of Toronto, I made a startling discover that there was a whole nest of the places concentrated at Gerrard and Parlaiment. Why hadn't I seen this when I was searching on the internet? It seemed that these places were all smaller establishments, and none of them were members of the CPLA (Canadian Payday Loans Association). This was a Sunday, so they were closed, and I was left wondering what this meant. They were unregulated, independant establishments right smack bang in the middle of Regent Park, the lowest income part of Toronto. In addition, what does this mean in terms of the biases we get from our standard information sources? According to the source of all truth and knowledge, the internet, there was no concentration of informal lending at Gerrard and Parlaiment. But according to reality, there clearly was. Reality wins.

To make a long story even longer, the next phase of fun came when I tried to return the bike to the police. A lesson I learned from this: if you ever acquire stolen property and go out of your way to try to get it returned to its rightful owner while attempting to learn something about people's livelihoods at the same time, don't expect the police to see any value in your approach.

Here's how it happened. I called Toronto Police Service politely explaining the situation, and waited around the entire evening for a cruiser to show up at our townhouse. When they finally arrived, they grilled me. Understandably so, I suppose, given that I had purchased a stolen bike, but apperantly the fact that I had done for the reason that I had in the way that I had was not enough to prevent the police from acting confrontational (when I originally wrote this, 'confrontational' was definitely not the word I chose. This post has been edited for content). After finally convincing them that I hadn't done anything wrong, one of the officers made sure to mention twice that if they couldn't find a serial number then they weren't going to haul away my trash for me because it was my problem, not theirs.

I suppose I'm judging, which of course I shouldn't because they were just doing their jobs. I guess my contempt is not for the officers but more for the system that doesn't allow for people to act on their own values if they can justify them, and a system that unequivocally sees the best course of action in that situation as the reporting and arrest of the theif rather than the return of the property to the owner. It's not that I don't agree with that conclusion necessarily, I just don't like how it is made without questioning the big assumptions behind it.

Anyway, that's my story, which I suppose turned into a bit of a rant. Sorry about that. I hope you enjoyed it!

Questions for thought and comment:

-I did a quick values balancing calculation in my head when I bought the bike: Do I purchase it, learn something, and hopefully get it back to it's owner, or do I refrain from purchasing it so as not to encourage theft as a livelihood? I chose the former as being more in line with my values. What would you choose and why? In your opinion, did I do the right thing?

-This experience exposed for me some massive knowledge gaps about Canadian livelihoods that exist outside of the traditional employment framework. What is your understanding of the livelihoods of people who panhandle, live on the street, or are chronically on social assistance? What is your understanding of their stories and Canada from their perspective?

Thanks for reading!
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Attack of the ants.

Hello all,

Today, Thursday, November 13, was my 4th day in Malawi. Months ago, when I was preparing for this placement, I made a promise to myself and others that I would not neglect recording and sharing my experiences with the people in my life. I have unfortunately had to break that promise, but the fault is not really my own. Let me explain.

I had been working on a post about an extremely interesting experience I had during my training in Toronto involving talking to people around the city about certain aspects of the Canadian financial system. The goal was to get some practice and understand some challenges surrounding the solicitation of information from people conducting their everyday lives. Learning how to ask the right questions, get multiple perspectives to form hypothesis, and plenty of other skills were the main themes of that excercise.

I was getting quite near finishing that post and working on several others, all of which were meant to be shared in the near future, when a strange thing happened. I was been checking my email in my tent here at the Mabuya Camp, where we are temporarily staying in Lilongwe, when my computer totally froze up on me. I turned it off, and when I tried to restart it did not cooperate. Alarmed, I took a look a closer look at the machine to see if anything was up, and sure enough, there were hundreds of ants crawling inside it. They were everywhere: going into and out of the USB port, into the ethernet port, all over the printer port. Everywhere. Hundreds of them. I took the machine apart to take a look at the motherboard, and, yes, an army of ants had set up shop.

So, while I can't be totally certain, I am pretty sure the ants destroyed my computer. This is why I haven't been able to post much recently and why there hasn't been any email from me. The internet here, where available, is slow and expensive if you don't have your own laptop, so there you have it. I will try to be in contact as much as possible in the coming weeks, but I can't make any promises. If you'd like to give me a call, please feel free anytime:

My phone number here: 011 265 9034067

Bye!

¬Mike