Development workers do not
necessarily have to come from the West. A mining expert from Zimbabwe is
helping to improve the lives of small-scale miners in Mongolia reported  www.dw.de.

On a small-scale mining site in the
vast grasslands of Western Mongolia, around a hundred people are digging for
gold. They take the ochre-colored earth and sieve it for tiny particles of the
precious metal.

As in other developing,
resource-rich, nations many poor people in this Central Asian country have
turned to small-scale mining, because they lack alternative means of
income. 

The work is tough and often
dangerous as well. Many mine shafts are not well secured and severe accidents
can occur.

Patience Singo knows this situation
from his own country Zimbabwe. The 40-year-old is a mining engineer who has
worked in various development projects across Africa aimed at improving the
living and working conditions of artisanal miners.

In Mongolia he works for the Swiss
Development Council (SDC). It has set up a project for small-scale miners in
cooperation with the Mongolian government. Patience greets visitors to his
office in the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator with a cup of coffee and a big
smile.

“How can an African guy
possibly help us?”

When he first came to the country,
three years ago, his first assignment was to set up a mercury-free processing
plant for the miners, because the Mongolian government had just banned the use
of mercury, which is a toxic substance, in small-scale mining.

“This had affected the lives of
about 15,000 people, who up until then had depended on the use of mercury to
extract gold,” he said.

Within three months Patience and his
colleagues had the plant up and running and it became a model for other
mercury-free processing plants which were to follow.

Patience likes Mongolia and is now
well acclimatized to the country, but it was all a bit challenging at first.
Some of the local people he had to deal with while working on the project eyed
him with scepticism. They didn”t see how someone who himself came from a
developing country would be able to help them.

“How can an African guy
possibly help us?” some had asked.

The idea that foreign aid workers
can only come from highly developed countries is  widespread, not only in
Mongolia, but also elsewhere across the developing world.

Winning over the skeptics

With his positive attitude, Patience
was quickly able to overcome their reservations. He feels like he has a lot to
offer because he comes from a developing country: “I think the
development challenges that Mongolia has identify with the challenges that
exist in Africa,” he said.

Patience believes someone from the
West, someone who has never experienced such challenges himself, may not be
able to pass on solutions in an inclusive manner.

He also said he had noticed
something he found rather funny. In the development sector, it often happens
that Western experts are sent for training in one developing country so they
can gain experience in such a context and then pass it on to people in another
developing country.

Patience chuckles and shakes his
head in disbelief: “Why not bring a guy from a developing country and we
do a south-to-south knowledge transfer? Isn”t it cheaper and better and more
effective?” he asked.

His colleague Munkhtuya Buyanjargal
agrees. She is the project”s communications manager and has been working with
Patience for about a year.

“Africans have a lot of
experience in the mining sector,” Munkhtuya said. “We have lots of
things to learn from African people especially for the artisanal small scale
mining.”

She especially admires how well he
gets on with the Mongolian artisanal miners.

“They love him, he is always
surrounded by the miners. He tries to speak Mongolian, it”s very funny for
them,” she said smiling.

Patience explains their appreciation
by the fact that he tries to speak to them as equals. He even goes down the
mine shafts which earns him a lot of respect.

“I was able to demonstrate to
them that I”m not like a book engineer coming from an office to point a finger
and say do this, do that.  When they see you identifying with them and
their problems they start to trust you, he said.“

Ubuntu and Swiss formality

In addition to deploying his
professional skills, Patience also tries to introduce something of the 
African way of doing things.

“Mongolians are used to being
nomadic, to living in an individualistic culture, but as Africans we are
community-based people, there is a unique African value we call Ubuntu. And I
always try to bring that community culture into the team, because of my African
background,” he said.

The project”s accountant Otgonsuren
Gombosuren appreciates that. She said his way of working and communicating is
quite different from the Swiss people she meets from the SDC.

“They are very formal,”she
explained.”They only say “Guten Tag” and “Auf Wiedersehen” and give me
some papers to sign. But Patience, all day long he is always friendly and easy
going.” She also likes the fact that she has learned a lot while working
with him:

“We are doing all the planning
and finance together. I learned a lot of English vocabulary from him,” she
said. A few years ago she didn”t speak any English at all.