1 Case 3: Muriel
A newborn, alcohol and a broken wheelchair
As always when I visited Muriel, we sat in the shadow of a simple shelter in their compound. Someone had replaced the shelterâs missing rooftop with old cloth rags, to provide some shade from the blazing sun. Just a week ago, Muriel had given birth to a daughter called Naomi. Aged 32, she had eight children, but Naomi was the first to come into the world in the refugee settlement. Murielâs other children had been born before her family fled their home country of Congo when the Ugandan rebel army, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), attacked the town of Kamango and forced ten thousand refugees to flee to Uganda. Muriel got separated from two of her children during this incident and had not yet found them. While we talked about the birth of her daughter and the upcoming needs for the baby to grow up safe and healthy, Muriel began expressing her dissatisfaction that, in Kyangwali, not everyone with a disability was treated as such.
Murielâs legs had been paralyzed since she was affected by polio in childhood. She moved around her home by crawling, and for longer distances someone from her family usually pushed her in a wheelchair she had received in Congo from the âFree Wheelchair Missionâ. But the tyres of this wheelchair were completely broken, and Muriel was waiting to have it replaced with a tricycle from the service providers in Kyangwali. As she had been assessed for, and promised, a tricycle by the aid organizations a long time ago, she was irritated that she had not yet received one. Muriel started to compare herself to her neighbour Jacob, who had also been disabled since childhood by polio. She complained that the aid organizations had not only supplied him with a tricycle already, but had also built a new house for him â one with bricks and a corrugated iron roof. Muriel herself, in contrast, had been allocated quite a different house by the camp authorities. Mud fell out of its lopsided walls, the grass-thatched roof leaked, and the door was broken.
My husband cannot do everything because he is busy working elsewhere, moving up and down, so that our children can have food. It is not easy for him to find time and start building. Now, why did they construct a house for Jacob [her neighbour] and yet he has a wife? And Jacob has a lot of strength, he is not like me.
I have done so many times. I have complained to them concerning a house, I have complained to them about a pit latrine, I have nagged them for support with a tricycle. I have not got a single thing. Every day, they [the service providers] hold meetings which I also attend, but I have not got anything meaningful out of them.
Muriel explained that she had reported these issues to the community social worker several times, and wondered why she had not been helped as expected. As she had not even received any response from the community social worker, she had concluded that, âthe community social workers are just filling their own stomachs, not oursâ.
Muriel expressed her desire for a decent house, but also for a pit latrine and a tricycle on many other occasions. She was not alone in raising these issues. When I visited Muriel, especially in the afternoons, I often found a bunch of other people underneath the shelter. They sat on the wooden benches and
Muriel and her husband Kenny served alcohol not only in their compound, but also at the weekly market in the nearby village, where they usually rented a shelter to sell their product. On one of the days I visited them, Muriel had sat on a small chair in front of a table, her heavily pregnant belly covered in a colourful kitenge. She constantly poured the home-brewed colourless but strong spirit out of a big plastic bottle into small glass cups which were shared among her customers, mostly young men, but also some elderly people, including women. While Muriel was busy serving, collecting money and selling individual cigarettes out of a packet, Kenny helped Muriel to pour more of the alcohol out of a jerry can into her plastic bottle, or left to find smaller change money. It was also usually under Murielâs guidance that Kenny and their oldest daughter Kansiime â who attended the fourth class in the village primary school â helped to bathe the younger children, prepare food, wash clothes in the nearby river, or carry the baby from one place to another. When Muriel talked one day about Kennyâs role of providing for her and taking care of their children, she described his importance in her life as: âHe is my strengthâ.
2 Case 4: Jacob
Mobile phones, bride wealth and school fees
Even before I met Jacob for the first time in Kyangwali, I had read about him in an online article on the UNHCRâs website. The article described how Jacob, whose legs were paralyzed by polio in childhood, had reopened his business repairing cell phones and radios in Bubukwanga transit centre at the Ugandan border just hours after his arrival. I was quite excited when a social worker from the NGO Africa Help Mission (AHM) mentioned his name during my first visit to Kyangwali in 2014.
One day when I was visiting Jacob, it threatened to rain, so we moved into his hut. Clothes and sheets hung on several lines under the roof. On one wall was a family photograph, and next to the entrance a small table and closet packed with pencils, body creams, pills in small plastic containers, nail polish, and various papers. Although built in the same style as most huts in Kyangwali, Jacobâs home was definitely one of the more prosperous I visited â not in regard to its size, but due to the belongings kept inside. For example, Jacob owned a small DVD player on which he played video clips of Muslim music. When we talked that day in Jacobâs house, he told us: âPeople with disabilities are suffering a lot. They are not getting any special support. The people from the offices are eating moneyâ. Statements like these were very common in all our conversations. Jacob was convinced it was not the case that the aid agencies lacked funds, asserting that: âThere is a lot of money, but they donât want to give it outâ. Jacob had fled Congo with an old wheelchair, so he had spent a lot of effort in acquiring a tricycle from the aid organizations. As it had taken several months until he finally received this made-to-measure device, Jacob often expressed feelings of anger towards the service providersâ careless attitude.
Like Muriel, Jacob was allocated one of the huts specifically built for âpersons with specific needsâ in the so-called PSN Street when he had arrived. That area was a long way from the settlementâs centre, so his distant relative Isaac had offered Jacob an empty hut in his compound when the previous owners decided to return to Congo. At one point, however, a conflict had affected the relationship between Jacob and Isaac. As village chairman, Isaac used his authority to allocate Jacobâs initial â but by then vacant â plot of land to other refugees. I learnt about this incident when I visited Jacob some months later in
When I visited Jacob again several months later on in my fieldwork, I was not surprised to find his old hut replaced by a new brick house with a corrugated iron roof, since Muriel had already told me that the aid agencies had built him a new house. Jacob sat on a bench and played with his small, paralyzed legs while he talked about his current situation. He was worrying about paying his childrenâs school fees before they started their exams. They attended a boarding school outside the settlement, and Jacob usually managed to cover their school fees with the money he earned through his entrepreneurial skills. Although he did not have the full amount at hand, he nevertheless wanted to go to the Mobile Money centre in the nearby village to send at least part of the money to the school. Rehema placed the tricycle at a right angle so that Jacob could climb into it from the wheelchair, which he normally used to manoeuvre around the house. I followed Jacob on my bicycle, admiring the new green and white adornment of the Muslim moon and star symbol on the back of his tricycle seat.
âµ
Once people arrived in Kyangwali, the aid agencies gave them tools and materials to build their own homesteads on the land allocated to them. They received a machete to clear bushes off the land if necessary, they were given poles to form the structure of their future huts, a shovel to dig holes in which to insert the poles, as well as a tarpaulin to act as an instant roof. With the help of these items, refugees built their huts from walls out of reeds and mud, and replaced the tarpaulin with a grass-thatched roof, or even with corrugated iron sheets. People who were identified as vulnerable in terms of shelter construction received assistance upon arrival, as had been the case for Muriel and Jacob. They were both given a shelter in a place that had a number of already-built huts. Yet, their stories raise questions around access to shelter, as well as other forms of assistance. Like Muriel, the reader might wonder why the aid agencies had built a new house for Jacob, but did not give Muriel the same support.
First, I will look at the interdependent relations among the aid agencies and their donors by focusing on donations and the dynamics they entailed in shaping â or often, rather, blurring â the criteria of the seemingly clear-cut categories. This situation left disabled people perplexed, as they personally observed how entitlement to benefits varied â often quite ambiguously in their view. Yet, this situation also allowed for comparisons to be made, which provided crucial grounds for peopleâs sense of entitlement and the way they made claims.
Muriel and Jacobâs stories also revealed their disappointment in the services provided. They felt disappointed, not only in comparison to what others received or to what they themselves had been given at different points in time, but also because they had constantly shared their concerns and given information in their interactions with the aid agencies. They were assessed for services and items like a tricycle but were forced to wait for them for a long time, or had not yet been given one. The omnipresent paperwork â registration forms, needs assessments, reports â implied recognition, thereby raising peopleâs hopes and expectations. However, they were then frequently let down, when the anticipated support was not forthcoming due to limited budgets and donor preferences.
Despite these bureaucratic procedures, disabled people experienced their access to aid as a very personal issue. They were in contact with the community social workers or other aid workers that administered the categories, conducted interviews or carried out assessments. Together with the fact that aid
3 Dynamics of Donations
When Muriel and Jacob arrived in Kyangwali, they had both benefited from the large budget for shelter construction which the aid organizations had available at that time. With the start of heavy fighting in North Kivu between the Congolese governmental army and the M23 rebel group (movement du 23 mars) in 2012, and especially with the recurrence of the ADFâs activities, the UNHCR and the Ugandan government had launched an emergency response in 2013. At that time, an average of 2,400 refugees were entering Uganda each month. Most of them were relocated from the Bubukwanga transit centre to the Kyangwali refugee settlement, and the appeal for emergency funds covered these two locations (UNHCR 2013). The Nordic Refugee Relief (NRR) and Africa Help Mission (AHM) had built 123 huts for people deemed vulnerable in the budgetary year of 2013. However, the situation in Kyangwali during my fieldwork was no longer deemed an emergency, so the budget had been drastically reduced to cover hut building for between 10 to 30 people who were categorized as PSN per year (by 2016 only AHM was responsible for shelter construction).
Due to a scarcity of resources (in the form of food, non-food items, cash or in-kind assistance) the institutional response has been to further and further reduce the numbers of those who are provided with any form of additional assistance based on their vulnerability. What was originally a focus on vulnerable groups or groups with special needs so as to ensure programmes are accessible and inclusive, and thus to design programmes which meet the needs of all refugees, has frequently been subverted during budget crunches. Instead, the keeping of lists of âvulnerablesâ becomes the basis for various types of âhair-splittingâ machinations, to identify Extremely Vulnerable Individuals (EVIs) or the really, really very vulnerable.
UNHCR 2003, 33â34
When we receive donations, for example clothes, the donor states precisely which group of people they are for. So even if there is a distribution
for EVIs, it still depends if you will get something or not. The donors sometimes want their donations to be distributed to specific groups of people; maybe children with disabilities, but not all EVIs. So they decide on their donations, and people will complain: âWhy not me?â But we cannot go around the donorsâ stipulation.
While people in Kyangwali were informed that the ones identified as âextremely vulnerable individualsâ (EVIs) should always be given priority, support apart from food assistance was often channelled along specific PSN categories. It targeted certain groups of people, as instructed by the donors, or as part of the UNHCRâs strategy to deal with the limited funds available.
In such a manner, the eligibility criteria for hut construction had to be redefined as a result of budgetary constraints the service providers experienced after the emergency situation in 2013. I learnt about this when I had the opportunity to accompany an assessment for hut construction exercise. I joined a team of representatives from the UNHCR, the OPM and the AHM who drove from village to village in order to visit potential beneficiaries. The community social workers from the respective villages had identified the potential beneficiaries beforehand, according to the current yearâs criteria for hut construction, which targeted people who were either elderly or had disabilities. While we went from hut to hut, the officers not only inspected the condition of the dwellings, but also verified whether the candidates actually fulfilled the criteria. The eligibility criteria did not seem to be very clear to some of the community social workers: one of the aid workers went through the prepared lists of potential beneficiaries and crossed out all the people designated as âsingle motherâ or âunaccompanied minorâ. Although they were categorized as vulnerable under the PSN category and, in principle, could be considered eligible for hut construction, a number of people were not able to benefit from this specific support due to the limited funds and the modified criteria. This situation left community social workers and people with disabilities alike confused.
The fact that certain categories of people were deemed deserving at different times, and that sub-categories of âvulnerableâ people were targeted selectively, contributed considerably to disabled peopleâs incomprehension of how aid was distributed. The new standards for constructing huts for âvulnerableâ people even added to the resentment of the many people who were not able to gain access to one of the new brick houses. I approach these experiences as being historically contingent, since the categories, their criteria, and the aid that was channelled through them was not completely rigid, but was shaped by donations and thus by dynamics which could not be influenced by personal connections (Whyte and Siu 2015). Yet, despite the dependencies on donations
4 Comparative Benefits: Sense of Entitlement and Claim-Making
Women in the camp were not expected to take on responsibility for constructing a hut in the same way that men were. Jacob and Muriel were both considered physically vulnerable but Jacob, who had a wife, was eligible for institutional support for this, whereas Murielâs husband was supposed to take on the construction work. One of the aid workers explained the organizationâs expectations from men with regard to construction: âIt is because it is not considered a womanâs role. Women have never learnt to build, so it is the man who has to construct the houseâ. In this sense, the criteria for hut construction were highly gendered, as they assumed women to be dependent on their husbands. Through these gendered logics and practices of distribution, specific kinds of vulnerabilities were again recognized, while others were not (see Chapter 2). It is worth noting that, in the cases discussed here, conventional gender roles were only enforced through the categorizations when funding was cut and the criteria had to be amended. It was therefore not surprising that Muriel questioned these gendered logics of distribution, as she had observed how the aid agencies had formerly built a home for her and other women with husbands.
She explained that, in Congo, aid agencies had previously built her a hut because of her disability. To be categorized as vulnerable and therefore eligible for specific support was thus nothing new for Muriel. Her expectations were again confirmed when the aid agencies had allocated her a hut upon arriving in Kyangwali. Considering these previous services, Muriel was understandably puzzled when she abruptly stopped receiving this support, even though she still needed it. Her claims for support were anchored in her past experiences, but also in what she recounted had been more comprehensive assistance in Eastern Congo: âIn Congo I was well, because there I would receive everything. They [referring to aid organizations] would announce the days on which they would distribute clothes or wheelchairs, and you would receive them. All the disabled people would receive them. But all this, I have not seen it here [in Kyangwali]â.
Ramah McKay observed similar situations among former Mozambican refugees who had returned to their homeland. She demonstrated how âhumanitarian pastsâ created new possibilities for claim-making, since they were
How do they really expect me to build, me, a vulnerable person? At the office they gave me poles, but they thought those poles would be enough without a roof on that house. They just said: âGet the poles, your husband is strong and will build for youâ. I answered: âYes, my husband is strong, but what can one hand [one person] do alone? Can you not support me and help me the way you help others? You always help other women who have children [referring to single mothers]. These women have both hands and legs, but me, I am just alone with my husbandâ.
Here, the woman compared herself with âsingle mothersâ, another administrative category among âpeople with special needsâ, who were able-bodied but perceived as vulnerable in relation to shelter construction, based on the gendered criteria. By explaining that, âthese women have both hands and legs, but me, I am just alone with my husbandâ, she was arguing that having a husband
Murielâs complaint about her own housing situation compared to her neighbourâs, that ânot all people with disabilities are treated as suchâ, could refer both to a belief that they were not being treated equally the way they should be, or that they were not being treated the way they rightfully deserved. Stone portrays the notion that disability is a state of being that deserves special aid (1986, 26) as a historically-evolved assumption of the welfare state. Yet the omnipresent comparisons with the benefits of other people, times and places which my interlocutors complained about and which they based their claims on pointed to a different trajectory of how people with disabilities in Kyangwali came to perceive themselves as being entitled to special aid within the refugee regime. Eckert approaches citizenship as something fundamentally social that develops in interaction and in comparison with others, as she argues: â[t]he understanding of rights and the perception of oneself as a rights-bearing subject emerge in social relations, collectively with others or by comparison to others, and by recognizing the similarities in forms of subjection and in the needs of lifeâ (2011, 313). The way that disabled people in Kyangwali made claims showed how their senses of entitlement had developed through what they experienced over time and in everyday encounters in Kyangwali.
In contrast to what has been yielded from many discussions of biomedical or therapeutic citizenship (e.g. Biehl 2004, 2007; Nguyen 2010), my interlocutorsâ claims and complaints did not seem to be connected to an international rights framework. âComparative benefitsâ, which entail both peopleâs senses of entitlement and ways of claim-making, qualify the relevance of a reference to universal human rights, but highlight experience and practice on a very personal level. Thinking about what they had received before or what benefits their neighbours were given was more readily available and meaningful for my interlocutors than thinking or talking about abstract human rights. In fact, peopleâs senses of entitlement derived from experiencing and comparing
Whyte et al. developed the concept of clientship as distinguished from citizenship, as it emphasizes the personal and social in relations of interdependence, which can specifically be investigated in terms of exchange (2014, 62). Rather than focusing on more abstract entitlements given through rights and recognition, the concept of clientship examines what is actually traded in the relationships between programmes and people (58). In the next section, I will analyze what was exchanged in Kyangwali between beneficiaries, aid agencies and their donors through paperwork â a domain where the entanglement of relations of patronage and bureaucratic procedures became especially apparent.
5 Disappointed Recognition: âJust Writing, Nothing Elseâ
Anette held the youngest of her six children in her lap while she cooked beans in a pot over a small open fire in the middle of a shelter in their compound. We talked about her relations with aid workers, and she explained: âThey just come and register us, they are writing reports, but there is no value for a disabled person in thisâ. While Amani translated these words to me, Anette mumbled in the background: âJust writing, nothing elseâ. Decrying the relief agenciesâ work as âjust writing, nothing elseâ entailed a critique that pointed to a larger issue than merely one of individual concern to receive aid. Paperwork was an integral part of the aid organizationsâ working procedures in Kyangwali: assessments, reports and project descriptions were all necessary documents for receiving funds, for aid to be distributed and for accounting to donors. It was thus a crucial component in the interdependent relations between disabled people, the service providers and their donors, but one which led to undesirable effects on âthe ones being written aboutâ (Whyte 2011, 29), especially as their sense of a morality of exchange was not being fulfilled.
I always go there [to the next bigger village, where assessments were often made], they record and take information. We are always in meetings, those concerned with the disabled. I always take part in our programmes, but nothing, there is no response. They register me, but things fail. They register me and take my name so that I will get things, but nothing!
Mansangaâs son Benjamin added: âEven the social worker comes every day and asks for her ration card, he also writes. But nothing, they just keep on only writingâ. The fact that Mansanga had been registered, that her name was taken, that she gave information and showed her documents, implied that her concerns were being taken into account and would be met. This expectation was dashed by the lack of subsequent activity. While people were constantly being assessed, but ultimately not supported in the ways they had expected or hoped for, these acts of writing had become more about disappointment than acknowledgement.
Especially keeping records of people over time, as Whyte et al. observed within antiretroviral treatment programmes in Uganda, signifies a long-term commitment (2014, 56â59). Similarly, the UNHCRâs paperwork in the refugee camp seemed to suggest an obligation to protect people and provide specific services in the long run. From the day someone crossed the border into the country, the UNHCR and its partner organizations collected and stored their data. People had usually already been registered in the transit camps at the border, where âfiles are opened which move with them to where they are settledâ, as an aid worker explained. People were biometrically registered, their fingerprints and pictures taken. This information was, on the one hand, included in the various databases (the UNHCRâs ProGres and the OPMâs RIMS) while, on the other hand, it was printed on the refugee attestation cards that included names, pictures, ages and date of arrival of members of a household. Many people I interacted with in Kyangwali wondered why they were being neglected, yet they knew they were supported by the UNHCR â a relationship that had been initiated by this very formal act of registration.
The act of writing not only raised expectations but, through paperwork, certain information was eventually exchanged for money and resources (see also Whyte 2014, 45). For any kind of aid to be delivered, people had to get involved in paperwork â they had to show their identification papers, and also had to give their signature or thumbprint. These acts were part of the reporting and accounting machinery of humanitarian aid, one that predominantly represented a one-directional flow of paperwork, and thus accountability, towards donors. When I observed a clothes distribution session in one of the
When I inquired about this process of distributing clothes, an aid worker explained: âThis is just for accountability purposes, nothing more. Because how does an aid worker account for the items he has requested from the office? The last beneficiary has to append a signature or a thumbprint that he or she received it. Itâs simply for accountability purposesâ. Signatures were needed for the organizationsâ reporting to their donors: counting how many people they had given aid to meant accounting for the organizationâs success. A 2014 report from the organization Africa Help Mission (AHM) listed the following account of specific services they had provided to people with disabilities:
- â5 PWDs [people with disabilities] supported to establish functional gardens measuring 40 Ã 50 metres; seeds procured, i.e. maize and beans, supported in planting and harvesting. This intervention has enhanced their dietary diversity.
- â40 (M26, F14) PWDs assessed and supported with mobility appliances, which has improved their mobility and thus improved self-reliance.
- â293 home visits to 183 (M96, F87) PWDs conducted and psychosocial support ensured.
- â50 (M25, F25) PWDs identified for training in making handicrafts.6
Organizations must provide evidence that they are doing their jobs well, meaning they have to collect a vast amount of paperwork (Whyte et al. 2014, 64). NGOs and UN organizations rely on formal records that document their activities for accountability purposes â and numbers in particular are aggregated into reports.7
6 Mistrust and the âGoodâ Beneficiary
Mistrust towards service providers was a common attitude in Ugandan refugee camps, and in East Africa more widely. Accounts that aid representatives were âthievesâ who were âeating moneyâ and then âcooking storiesâ in order to obscure their misuse of money were prevalent around many institutions that provided access to resources. Muriel expressed her mistrust towards the service providers when she talked about how many times she had raised her complaints to them, and yet nothing had resulted from it. Elaborating more on this issue, she explained: âI think that sometimes those who come to register us, maybe they donât take all our complaints to the office. They come and tell you to sign, and when you sign, they go the next day [to the office] to show that the support was delivered. Yet, we did not receive the support!â The mistrust that arose through this practice of signing was also because Muriel did not know how to read and write, as she said: âHe asks me my name, I tell him, and he writes. Then he saysâ âbring your hand, sign hereâ, but maybe you have no reason to signâ.
Certainly, my interlocutorsâ relations with people at different levels of service provision were diverse. While some aid workers and community social workers were perceived as being helpful and caring, others were described as rude and indifferent. But often when my interlocutors did not receive what they believed they were entitled to, they were quick to conclude that the
The way Muriel doubted the working ethics of the community social worker shows that suspicion was geared more towards specific people than any institution as a whole (see also Whyte and Siu 2015). Yet, despite mistrust being personalized, there were patterns in how some groups of people channelling access to resources were considered to be more trustworthy than others. For instance, there was much more mistrust towards Ugandan aid workers than towards foreign aid workers.8 Muriel explained this in comparison to aid she had received in Congo: âThere [in Congo], why it was possible for us [to receive support], was because the foreigners themselves would come. They would be the ones to deliver the support and distribute it to the disabled. But here, if they give support and sayâ âgo and give it to the disabledâ, we cannot get itâ.
He came to register me in the book for all the disabled. They took them [the names] there, where they always take them, to the whites. By the time my name appeared, he plucked it out, he put it aside so that my name did not appear. All the others, their names came out well, there is no one that was missing on the list. So I wondered, which type of parent is this? He is the one who ate [deleted] my name, he has eaten my name.
In their role, community social workers in Kyangwali were often accused of favouritism. During the hut assessments that I followed, an aid worker wondered why they were only visiting people who were in the centre of villages. He argued that there were huts in much worse conditions in other places and he thus suspected the community social worker of channelling resources towards the people she wanted to serve. There were also many complaints that the community social workers would not do their jobs properly unless the applicants gave them money or sex. Conversely, community social workers recounted that people tried to bribe them in order to receive certain services, stating that, while they followed protocol and procedures and stuck to the tedious bureaucratic processes, disabled people perceived them as being corrupt.
Whyte observes that, because so much is dependent on peopleâs relations with health workers, patients do not feel able to openly challenge them, instead criticizing them behind their backs (2011, 46; see also Whyte and Siu 2015, 28). The situation of Daniel and his community social worker was different in this regard, as Daniel overtly expressed his criticism in his presence. I only observed a few instances where people were openly criticized, but disabled people regularly mentioned that they âwent to complainâ. Moreover, aid workers described many situations when refugees had directly raised their complaints with them. This points towards a different âethos of contingencyâ (Whyte and Siu 2015, 27) existing in a refugee settlement than in other settings. Rather than grinning and bearing it when dissatisfied with the aid provision, people in this unusual situation acted quite forthrightly.
We know that the support is not enough, because our budget is limited. But the little support we give is not appreciated at all, this is why you always hear from people that they have not received any support. If I tell them I do not have support, they feel that they are being mistreated. For me, who always visits people and interacts with them, I get hurt that people do not appreciate it at all.
Aid workers found it enormously difficult that the bureaucratic procedures required them to make assessments and identify vulnerable individuals, even though the budget for additional assistance was extremely limited. As a way to counter peopleâs mistrust they often brought up paperwork, as Danielâs community social worker did, in order to emphasize the accountability and transparency of their working procedures. But clientship is also about the expectations that service providers have towards their clients, and the disabled peopleâs possibility of receiving aid was dependent on their relations with the service providers, in the way that they were expected to be âgoodâ beneficiaries.
It is a common phenomenon for aid organizations to try to shape peopleâs behaviour on the ground (e.g. Swidler 2009, 198; Whyte et al. 2014, 63). As mentioned before, people in Kyangwali were obliged to be present at certain places at specific times, bring their documents, give information, line up the right way and follow the given procedures in order to receive aid. Being a âgoodâ beneficiary, however, was more than that. Differing from the more concrete exchange of things, some of the perceptions of refugees involved a rather abstract reciprocity in the form of general expectations about their commitment and
Generally, people in Kyangwali were not supposed to abuse the service providersâ trust. Giving false information, or any kind of cheating was problematic for the aid workers. Yet, they felt it was very common behaviour, as one of the aid workers explained: âYou know, refugees are very stubborn people, they always try to find ways to beat the systemâ. Against such widely held assumptions that cheating was a prevalent characteristic of âthe refugeeâ (see also Daniel and Knudsen 1995; Zetter 1991), I only came across very few instances when people were somewhat proud of how they had, for example, managed to acquire the food ration cards and identification papers of people who had illegally returned to Congo, allowing them to access a considerable amount of food, or when they did not travel where their movement permit allowed them to. It was rather that they âdid not want to do anything that could be perceived as manipulativeâ, as Thomson observed among Congolese refugees in a Rwandan refugee camp (2012, 186).
During the hut assessment I observed how people were immediately deleted from the list of potential beneficiaries when the aid workers suspected them of giving misinformation. The aid workers asked what they called âsimpleâ questions about family, lengths of stay in a specific place or number of people living in a house. When the people did not give immediate answers or gave unclear or contradictory information, the aid workers left annoyed, shaking their heads, without any further explanation. These were the very severe consequences that ensued when aid workers felt they had been lied to.
In 2013 on arrival, we supported them with a hut, but the same family wants another hut in 2015 and yet there are many people with disabilities. Despite her husband being able-bodied, we then gave them a hut and a latrine, because they were going as a combination. But now you are saying I again need another hut, after throwing that one down when you shifted to another village?
While several recipients had told the community social workers that the huts did not last for long, the aid workers felt that people were not taking enough care of these shelters. It was not just Murielâs able-bodied husband, but also the fact that they had left their emergency hut in the âPSN Streetâ behind, which had minimized her familyâs chance of receiving a new hut. Taking care of the
7 Conclusion
This chapter has revealed that access to aid was not simply guided by an applicantâs categorization, for instance as an EVI, but that the interdependent relations between various aid agencies, as well as the interactions between aid workers and beneficiaries, played a considerable role in deciding how aid was distributed. Whereas categorizations and their criteria for aid distribution should have resulted in the most fair and transparent distribution possible, in reality, the different working procedures used to assign categorizations raised suspicion among the refugees. The availability of funds and donorsâ priority setting made the allocation of aid a matter of constant change, which at times did not make much sense to my interlocutors, and led to different interpretations of the guidelines by aid agency staff and community social workers.
The application of the concept of clientship in this chapter has not only helped to illuminate the hierarchical chains of support between the different service providers, but has also proved useful for examining the relationship between disabled people and service providers, especially as it focuses on what is being exchanged within these relations â both the tangible and the tacit aspects. This shows that humanitarian aid entails more than just receiving something once. It is, in fact, an act of exchange over time, in which the aid agencies continually rely on the beneficiariesâ cooperation â to follow the given procedures of aid distribution, to provide information and signatures and to be physically present â in order to keep the donor money flowing. When aid was distributed, one of the determining factors was also how âdeservingâ
The omnipresent processes of paperwork which these exchange relations were based on, however, often kept the applicants in a void. My interlocutors experienced some kind of acknowledgement in the way that this paperwork made their concerns constantly recognized by and visible to powerful organizations that were obviously connected to a world of wealthy donors. Yet, they were often disappointed when the services they were offered did not match their expectations. Peopleâs senses of entitlement and the ways they made claims derived from these interactions with aid workers, as well as through comparisons with what other people received, or what they had previously been given at other times and in other places. This suggests that there was a limited relevance of universal rights for their ways of claim-making and senses of entitlement. This was also evident when disabled people insisted on a certain morality of exchange, expressing their mistrust towards the aid workers as a way of reminding them to fulfil their obligations. This was grounded in a certain logic of distribution in which they perceived the aid agencies as their patrons. Their feelings of disappointment and mistrust therefore resulted from a mismatch between what they expected and what they experienced within these relationships.
Approximately 385 US dollars.
In a summit in Kampala in June 2017, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and the UN secretary general António Guterres announced that Ugandaâs refugee response would require 674 million US dollars. In August that same year, only 20 percent of that money had been raised, which brought about a critical situation for the South Sudanese refugee response in and around the camps in Northern Uganda (Okiror 2017).
The current refugee policy is thus not unfavourable for the Ugandan government, not only because they receive a lot of external support (in 2002, Harrell-Bond revealed that the salaries of staff in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) had been topped up with contributions from the UNHCR, for example (Harrell-Bond 2002, 24)) but also as, according to the ReHope strategy, 30 percent of humanitarian support should go to the host community.
During a visit to the city of Goma, the capital of the Eastern Congolese region North Kivu, I got a glimpse of this border trade with Rwanda at the so-called âpetite barrièreâ in the northern part of the city. With broad tyres and steering wheels, the tricycles used for this border trade were specifically designed to carry heavy loads.
During my fieldwork, people living with HIV/AIDS were automatically considered in the highest category of âvulnerableâ people. Therefore, they were handled differently to disabled people, for whom family constellation and support structures could be excluding factors for food aid, for example. Aid workers explained that people living with HIV/AIDS were automatically considered in the EVI category because of the medication they were supposed to take with food.
Africa Help Mission (AHM), PWD Report, document received in Kyangwali in April 2014.
Evaluations of these reporting formats have pointed out the limitations of measuring aid organizationsâ performance in terms of what assistance they have given to how many individuals, which does not count the people whose needs were not met (Bakewell 2003, 13â15; UNHCR 2003, 27).
The fact that foreign aid workers were more trusted was also observed, for example, among Congolese refugees in Tanzania (Thomson 2012, 187).
The way Daniel had called the community social worker a âparentâ implied that he saw him as being responsible for his well-being, an expected role that he was not, however, fulfilling in his eyes. Calling someone a âparentâ was a widespread way of asking them for help. As demands made on family are usually more coercive than those made on other people (Durham 1995, 123), invoking kin relations seemed to be a way to consolidate the service providersâ assumed responsibilities.