This week, my major accomplishment was to get the executive committee of the CBO elected. I also made several steps towards registering the group, although it will be next week before that is complete.
On Monday, the CBO held its elections in two stages. We started by electing only the chair, secretary, treasurer, organizing secretary, and trustee. Once we had tabulated the votes, we discovered that each person elected had come from Mashimoni – due largely, I suspect, to the effort of Mashimoni people to bring out all of their friends for the election, including people that haven’t been involved with the CBO before or since. The group has already had some tensions along the Mashimoni/Lindi divide, with Mashimoni people wanting to write into the constitution that at least 60% of group members be from Mashimoni, claiming that they have more right to the project since the first phase is being constructed on the Mashimoni side of the river. Meanwhile, Lindi people wanted to require the group to have exactly equal representation from both sides. Because of these issues, we wanted to make sure that both sides were represented by the officers. Thus, we moved into the second stage – electing the vice-chair, vice-secretary, and vice-organizing secretary, nominating only people from Lindi for these positions. In the end, we had a board with 5 from Mashimoni and 3 from Lindi, and I think more people were satisfied than dissatisfied.
Our week was interrupted by another election in Kenya – the constitutional referendum, which took place on Wednesday. Because of the violence that followed the 2007 general election, we took the precaution of staying home on Wednesday until we were sure that the proceedings had been peaceful. Basically, this meant sleeping in late and laying around all day, watching election updates on CNN. Incidentally, this was the first time I had turned on the tv since arriving in Kenya. At our apartment, we get the following channels: a couple of Kenyan news channels, a couple of channels of music videos, CNN international, Al-Jazeera, a Christian channel, and Chinese and Iranian state-owned English language news. The Iranian channel, Press TV, is quite intriguing.
The election itself was uneventful, with the constitution being approved by a resounding margin. This was definitely a good moment for Kenya – the new constitution does a great deal to decentralize the government, hopefully reducing corruption by the executive, which has been a huge problem since Kenya gained independence. I am very proud to be able to say that I was here at this time – I think the new constitution will help Kenya become a more stable, prosperous country in the long run.
After Wednesday, my main task was to try and get the group registered. We haven’t succeeded yet – my first trip with Wycliffe, the group’s secretary, to get the signatures we need, resulted in being told that all of our paperwork was filled out incorrectly. But we’re trying again, and hopefully the registration will be done by Tuesday. For the rest of the time I’m here, I’ll mostly be focusing on getting the group going so they’re ready to run it on their own when I go, as well as helping the women get some of their businesses running. It’s getting to a point where we really need to focus, since I have basically only until the end of August to finish my work. At that point, although I’ll still have another week in Kenya, the other interns are leaving so I’ll probably end my work then as well in order to take a few days to travel.
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