I’m back in Uganda for now. I decided to leave some things in Gulu during my travels to the South and Rwanda and to come back and work at Health Alert for one last week of work. The program coordinator at HAU had identified some needs that I could address during this week, so everything worked out for the best. Currently, HAU is applying for a WFP (world food programme) project that they hope to spearhead. It deals directly with agricultural and nutritional needs in the Acholi region and how those needs relate to health. I’m part of a five person team that will be trying to get everything put together by the end of the week to turn into the WFP country office. Its interesting that this opportunity landed in my lap because this week I have also had a run in with ten recent graduates of Cambridge University’s development studies program who had come to Gulu under the auspices of the UN and WFP. While they are all incredibly intelligent, I was mildly turned off by several of the member’s arrogance and belief that in a mere three days they could accurately survey the area as part of their research. It was almost entertaining the degree to which they bickered among themselves and the intractable opinions each took in simple and in the end fruitless discussions. Perhaps what frightens me most is to know that these may be the future leaders of the IMF, UN, World Bank and countless other institutions which have and continue to dictate the establishment of programs and the allocation of funds to places all over the world like Gulu who are in need of in depth analysis of regional and national issues if any effective change can hoped to be obtained. Similarly, in a vein that I’ve touched on repetitively in my blogging, the lack of discretion used in the distribution of candy and footballs by the group further qualifies their approach to “aid” and “development.” Having seen the effectiveness time and very limited funds can have when properly managed by an organization that knows the population well, like the staff of HAU do, it shames me to see the waste of intellect and potential that this group throws away sitting on their ox-bridge scholarly stools. Not to mention that in the three days they have here, they are eating at the most expensive restaurants, are scared to walk around at dusk and won’t brush their teeth with the tap water, the latter two of which are both sufficiently safe and reflect the western view that nothing here could possibly be safe.
Terribly sorry for the tirade, although I must warn you, another will follow concerning Rwanda in the next few paragraphs.
After I left Gulu with the GlobeMed group, we proceeded to Jinja to raft the source of the Nile. The river boasts four class five rapids and is considered one of the world’s finest rapids. The four of us went accompanied by one of the students from Concordia’s CVAP programme and met students from the WashU chapter of GlobeMed. We spent the night prior to rafting at river “base camp.” There are these huge buses that take teens and twenty somethings across the continent for these MEGA-adventure trips. Anyways, in talking to them we found out that a few of the groups [the ones dressed in tutus and leopard print spandex (men and women)] that they were competing amongst each other to see who could have sex with the most number of people during their two month trip across Africa. Kind of gross, and they were utterly obnoxious, but since they were all plastered, most passed out pretty early. Still, I wound up not getting any sleep that night; I just stayed up talking with everyone. The day on the river was incredible although filled with a fair share of danger and bruises. My boat alone suffered a black eye, a bruised back and a severely bruised arm. Where sleep failed me, adrenaline took over and the whole way down was incredibly exhilarating. After leaving Jinja, we returned to Kampala where Aurelien and I said goodbye to our friends from UNC and the ones we’d made from Concordia. We proceeded by bus down to the southwestern region of Uganda where we stayed at this neat place on the beautiful Lake Bunyoni. For anyone traveling in or near Uganda it is the perfect place to relax, catch up on sleep swim and eat delicious food, all at incredibly reasonable prices. We met three more students from Concordia that we had made plans to travel into Rwanda with and we spent a few days swimming, canoeing, sleeping, eating and indulging in locally grown herbs. The place is completely solar powered and complete with compost toilets. All the proceeds go to the local community on the island that run the place and use the profits in their community development.
After recharging the batteries that had been drained by our hard work in Gulu and the Nile river, we left for Rwanda arriving in Kigali by mid-day and finding a little inexpensive place at the bottom of one of the cities many big hills. The country is nicknamed the country of a thousand hills making it beautiful, but often strenuous to get around. Kigali is remarkably clean, not only for Africa, but for any sizable city anywhere in the world. The guilt money that has poured into the city is a true testament to the power that development can have in truly transforming a city or a country. With clean roads, organized traffic and orderly proceedings the city is a beacon of a new post-genocide era. However, the city is teeming with western influence and it shameful that the genocide had to occur as a result of colonial ethnic divisions in order for money for development to come in and make the difference that it has made. Regardless, our time in Kigali was great, we walked around the city a lot, up and down the hills. We visited the genocide museum, which was incredibly informative not only on the Rwandan genocide but also the numerous other genocides ranging from the Armenian to the Yugoslavian. The outside memorial pays tribute to the 300,000 buried in the mass graves in the compound. Walking around the graves was utterly heart wrenching, as were the stories from surviving family members of children killed in the genocide, by every means imaginable, five year olds being tortured and two month olds thrown against brick walls. Let us pray that the museum serves its purpose in educating the world about the atrocities that Rwandans endured so that no other group should ever face the same fate again.
We took a two day trip to the Parc National de Volcan in the northern part of the country where we climbed the 3711m Mount Bisoke, a volcano complete with crater Lake at its peak. We had originally sought to peak Mount Karisimbi at 4506m, but because of price and time constraints it proved unfeasible. The north was very rural and nowhere near as developed as Kigali, but Rwanda thrives on its tea and rice exports and even the most deprived families get a fair share and seem to live, if only slightly, outside of extreme poverty.
Aurelien and I left our friends in Kigali, returning to Kampala for Aurelien’s last night in Uganda. We splurged and saw the new Transformers movie and ate at a restaurant that actually had tax, which was a first for our time here. We had been traveling with another guy and two girls, so the three guys had always bunked in the same room and to save costs I had slept on the floor since I had a sleeping bag. For this reason and after a bumpy ten hour ride from Kigali to Kampala I nearly immediately fell asleep once we arrived at our hostel in Kampala. The next morning Aurelien and I shared goodbyes and I boarded another bus back up to my beloved Gulu. The hotel staff were ecstatic to see me upon arrival and have spent the last few nights just enjoying their company, playing pool, dancing and as the say here “swimming in the Nile,” Nile being one of the delicious Ugandan beers. I will leave Gulu on Friday and fly out to Delhi on Saturday. Once I get there I’ll be in greater communication on an individual basis as opposed to simple updates on my blog although I will keep those up as well. Until then…
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Perhaps My Last Post From Uganda
Things are coming to a close this week at the Health Alert office. We are writing our final reports and starting to say goodbye to people we think we might not see again. There is a lot of work still to do; mostly dealing with debriefing, planning for next year, and making sure follow-ups are conducted for our projects by the HAU staff. We have worked on our memorandum of understanding and among the interns been talking a great deal about our plans for GlobeMed for the upcoming year. As the GROW team head next year, I’ve been talking a lot to Francis and December to see what their opinions have been, where there is room for improvement, and how to best make the partnership long-lasting, sustainable and efficient for both organizations. I think that simply now having five people including Bianca who came last year, that can share their experiences will in itself make a huge impact on the university community.
Last week I finished with the goat project and distributed all of the goats that we had purchased to the two caretakers groups in Alero and Pece. Both groups were very enthusiastic and appreciative of the loan. Because of the fewer goats that we were able to obtain, we restructured some of the loans to be for a series of four. Nevertheless, because we were able to obtain some pregnant goats, the loan cycle will hopefully not exceed the desired three years. Unfortunately, this week we have already had one of the caretakers come searching for a vet because one of the goats has some inflammation in her utter and an eye infection. We required each group to group themselves according to location and then had them draw numbers to pick their order in the group and which goat they would be receiving. This system proved very effective in both Alero and Pece and handing the goats over to the caretakers of the first household in each subgroup went down without a hitch. There were many handshakes, shrill cries (a sign of appreciation) and sayings of “afoyo matek” (meaning, thank you very much).
Last Tuesday was the Day of the African Child and it was quite an enjoyable day for everyone. We spent the day marching around town and ended up in Kaunda grounds where there was a great deal of dancing and general enjoyment. At one point Save the Children was distributing biscuits and they ran out and there was several children who began fighting over the few that remained. It was sad to see such debauchery at an event that was meant to mark the very children who were fighting. The next day there was a meeting between HAU staff and Save the Children. The staff came back with mixed expressions and there was talk of HAU needing to begin to find its own funding. Regardless HAU did receive a new computer and a pair of motorcycles and there was much excitement over those acquisitions. That evening we gathered for an “informal meeting” which wound up being a sort of on-the-lawn cocktail party for the staff. It was extremely enjoyable to spend some informal time with the staff and talk to them about their plans, our lack of desire to be married at twenty and our impressions of Gulu/plans to come back.
In some ways its inevitable that you fall into the expatriate NGO crowd when working in a place like Gulu. For the first few weeks we prided ourselves in eating almost exclusively at local restaurants and not frequenting the highly NGO populated hotspots on weekends. However, I think because the tendency to feel insulated in a group of four we’ve found ourselves increasingly frequenting places where there are more NGO workers. Another cause is that as the summer goes on there are simply a greater number of people coming in just to do short-term volunteer work, mostly in the form of mission trips and Gulu is simply more populated with westerners than when we arrived. Nevertheless, we’ve sought out some company and made a few great friends. Thursday nights are trivia nights at a bar owned by an old British guy and the night always proves entertaining. I’ve made good friends with a young guy who works at Visions in Action and have come to really enjoy the company of the Concordia students. The past few weekends we have been going to a place called Havana Pub and Green Valley for late night dancing and drinking.
On Friday, we went to the Acholi Inn for a pool party followed by a night out at Havana. I left my swimsuit at the hotel and also made the mistake of leaving my key as well. When we arrived at our hotel significantly later that night, we realized we had lost our key, and wound up sleeping on the floor of the girl’s rooms. To top it all off, I made the very poor choice of taking my malaria medication without water and in exchange have been blessed with an agonizing ulcer in my esophagus that makes everything from eating to breathing rather painful. Perhaps the most aggravating part of it all is that I haven’t gotten sick from the water or any of the food I’ve been eating and then I make a stupid mistake in taking the pill improperly. The doctor at HAU recommended that I take a magnesium trisilicate solution which doesn’t seem to have helped much at all, but will hopefully clear things up quick. Regardless its by no means a life threatening affliction and it should be healed soon I guess.
On Saturday, Aurelien and I were put in charge of the bead-making event. We varnished all the beads we had made the previous weekend and enjoyed the time with all the kids that came to participate. We spent the early afternoon with the children playing football and taking penalty kicks on one another as we waited for the beads to dry. All the kids that came were so energetic and really made the afternoon (despite the lack of sleep and burning esophagus) very entertaining. Unfortunately there were some hiccups the next day in obtaining locks and the project still is unfinished with three days to go. Hopefully with some creativity the project can get done one evening this week.
This weekend I went to Murchison Falls with the Concordia students, whose program finished last Friday. We travelled to the park on Sunday and stayed until yesterday evening. The park was spectacular; we went on a game drive and a river cruise up to the falls. Murchison falls are the most powerful in the world and sends water through a six-meter gap that plummets maybe a hundred meters into a misty abyss. We later went to the base of the falls by boat and saw its awesome power from beneath. There was also a great deal of wildlife in the park and I got as close as ten meters from giraffes and fifty meters from elephants. We saw hippos along the bank of the Nile as well as crocodiles. We also saw water buffalo, Jacksons, antelope, warthogs and a plethora of species of birds. Watching all of the animals and the grace of their existence as they elegantly wandered around the park was a refreshing break from the dusty and loud life in Gulu. The Jacksons were particularly beautiful, almost horse like with horns, with long narrow face and strong agile bodies.
Over the last week I had become close friends with quite a few of the Concordia students and it was great to spend more time with them. The night before leaving, and their last night in Gulu, we stayed up until four only to wake up at six to depart for the park. While I was definitely lacking sleep, I had made close friends with one of the girls, and against better judgment didn’t sleep on the trip to Murchison, but instead just chatted with her. We arrived at the park in the early afternoon and made our way across the Nile via ferry to see the top of the falls on the southern side of the park. At night on Sunday I stayed up late watching the stars on top of a water tower at the small place where we were staying. After the generators went off at ten there was only one light on the horizon, a campsite more than 50km away. With no lights to obscure the sky, the stars shone with such brilliance and magnificence. It was truly mesmerizing and I stayed up there until late into the night, again against my better judgment, but fully enjoying the conversation and company with Ana and Gavin. The sounds at night in the park were also unforgettable, with insects, bullfrogs and mammals singing in chorus. It was one of the most unforgettable nights of my time in Uganda and I realized that there is very little that trumps serenity, pristine nature, and company willing to share the experience with you.
The next day we woke up at five thirty to embark on our game drive. The previous day we had seen a lot of wildlife as we entered the park, but during the game drive we were able to get closer to the animals and really get to see a great deal more of them. Then after lunch, we embarked on the cruise up the river. One of the most fascinating things that I saw on the cruise was the carcass of a dead hippo, which had apparently been killed in a fight with another hippo. Seeing a three-ton carcass might not seem particularly enjoyable, but it was very interesting to see death in the wild and how nature runs its course in such an event.
This week is going to be bittersweet; we will be finished with our projects and say goodbyes, but we also have a great deal to look forward to since we will be traveling to southern Uganda and to Rwanda. I fear this may be my last blog from Uganda since I might leave my computer at a hotel in Kampala while I travel around in Rwanda.
Last week I finished with the goat project and distributed all of the goats that we had purchased to the two caretakers groups in Alero and Pece. Both groups were very enthusiastic and appreciative of the loan. Because of the fewer goats that we were able to obtain, we restructured some of the loans to be for a series of four. Nevertheless, because we were able to obtain some pregnant goats, the loan cycle will hopefully not exceed the desired three years. Unfortunately, this week we have already had one of the caretakers come searching for a vet because one of the goats has some inflammation in her utter and an eye infection. We required each group to group themselves according to location and then had them draw numbers to pick their order in the group and which goat they would be receiving. This system proved very effective in both Alero and Pece and handing the goats over to the caretakers of the first household in each subgroup went down without a hitch. There were many handshakes, shrill cries (a sign of appreciation) and sayings of “afoyo matek” (meaning, thank you very much).
Last Tuesday was the Day of the African Child and it was quite an enjoyable day for everyone. We spent the day marching around town and ended up in Kaunda grounds where there was a great deal of dancing and general enjoyment. At one point Save the Children was distributing biscuits and they ran out and there was several children who began fighting over the few that remained. It was sad to see such debauchery at an event that was meant to mark the very children who were fighting. The next day there was a meeting between HAU staff and Save the Children. The staff came back with mixed expressions and there was talk of HAU needing to begin to find its own funding. Regardless HAU did receive a new computer and a pair of motorcycles and there was much excitement over those acquisitions. That evening we gathered for an “informal meeting” which wound up being a sort of on-the-lawn cocktail party for the staff. It was extremely enjoyable to spend some informal time with the staff and talk to them about their plans, our lack of desire to be married at twenty and our impressions of Gulu/plans to come back.
In some ways its inevitable that you fall into the expatriate NGO crowd when working in a place like Gulu. For the first few weeks we prided ourselves in eating almost exclusively at local restaurants and not frequenting the highly NGO populated hotspots on weekends. However, I think because the tendency to feel insulated in a group of four we’ve found ourselves increasingly frequenting places where there are more NGO workers. Another cause is that as the summer goes on there are simply a greater number of people coming in just to do short-term volunteer work, mostly in the form of mission trips and Gulu is simply more populated with westerners than when we arrived. Nevertheless, we’ve sought out some company and made a few great friends. Thursday nights are trivia nights at a bar owned by an old British guy and the night always proves entertaining. I’ve made good friends with a young guy who works at Visions in Action and have come to really enjoy the company of the Concordia students. The past few weekends we have been going to a place called Havana Pub and Green Valley for late night dancing and drinking.
On Friday, we went to the Acholi Inn for a pool party followed by a night out at Havana. I left my swimsuit at the hotel and also made the mistake of leaving my key as well. When we arrived at our hotel significantly later that night, we realized we had lost our key, and wound up sleeping on the floor of the girl’s rooms. To top it all off, I made the very poor choice of taking my malaria medication without water and in exchange have been blessed with an agonizing ulcer in my esophagus that makes everything from eating to breathing rather painful. Perhaps the most aggravating part of it all is that I haven’t gotten sick from the water or any of the food I’ve been eating and then I make a stupid mistake in taking the pill improperly. The doctor at HAU recommended that I take a magnesium trisilicate solution which doesn’t seem to have helped much at all, but will hopefully clear things up quick. Regardless its by no means a life threatening affliction and it should be healed soon I guess.
On Saturday, Aurelien and I were put in charge of the bead-making event. We varnished all the beads we had made the previous weekend and enjoyed the time with all the kids that came to participate. We spent the early afternoon with the children playing football and taking penalty kicks on one another as we waited for the beads to dry. All the kids that came were so energetic and really made the afternoon (despite the lack of sleep and burning esophagus) very entertaining. Unfortunately there were some hiccups the next day in obtaining locks and the project still is unfinished with three days to go. Hopefully with some creativity the project can get done one evening this week.
This weekend I went to Murchison Falls with the Concordia students, whose program finished last Friday. We travelled to the park on Sunday and stayed until yesterday evening. The park was spectacular; we went on a game drive and a river cruise up to the falls. Murchison falls are the most powerful in the world and sends water through a six-meter gap that plummets maybe a hundred meters into a misty abyss. We later went to the base of the falls by boat and saw its awesome power from beneath. There was also a great deal of wildlife in the park and I got as close as ten meters from giraffes and fifty meters from elephants. We saw hippos along the bank of the Nile as well as crocodiles. We also saw water buffalo, Jacksons, antelope, warthogs and a plethora of species of birds. Watching all of the animals and the grace of their existence as they elegantly wandered around the park was a refreshing break from the dusty and loud life in Gulu. The Jacksons were particularly beautiful, almost horse like with horns, with long narrow face and strong agile bodies.
Over the last week I had become close friends with quite a few of the Concordia students and it was great to spend more time with them. The night before leaving, and their last night in Gulu, we stayed up until four only to wake up at six to depart for the park. While I was definitely lacking sleep, I had made close friends with one of the girls, and against better judgment didn’t sleep on the trip to Murchison, but instead just chatted with her. We arrived at the park in the early afternoon and made our way across the Nile via ferry to see the top of the falls on the southern side of the park. At night on Sunday I stayed up late watching the stars on top of a water tower at the small place where we were staying. After the generators went off at ten there was only one light on the horizon, a campsite more than 50km away. With no lights to obscure the sky, the stars shone with such brilliance and magnificence. It was truly mesmerizing and I stayed up there until late into the night, again against my better judgment, but fully enjoying the conversation and company with Ana and Gavin. The sounds at night in the park were also unforgettable, with insects, bullfrogs and mammals singing in chorus. It was one of the most unforgettable nights of my time in Uganda and I realized that there is very little that trumps serenity, pristine nature, and company willing to share the experience with you.
The next day we woke up at five thirty to embark on our game drive. The previous day we had seen a lot of wildlife as we entered the park, but during the game drive we were able to get closer to the animals and really get to see a great deal more of them. Then after lunch, we embarked on the cruise up the river. One of the most fascinating things that I saw on the cruise was the carcass of a dead hippo, which had apparently been killed in a fight with another hippo. Seeing a three-ton carcass might not seem particularly enjoyable, but it was very interesting to see death in the wild and how nature runs its course in such an event.
This week is going to be bittersweet; we will be finished with our projects and say goodbyes, but we also have a great deal to look forward to since we will be traveling to southern Uganda and to Rwanda. I fear this may be my last blog from Uganda since I might leave my computer at a hotel in Kampala while I travel around in Rwanda.
Monday, June 15, 2009
As We Complete Our Projects
This week has been the busiest yet, which is why I am a little late in getting this blog out. Over last weekend we went to Kampala to relax and recuperate from all the hard work we’ve been doing in Gulu. We walked around in the big markets in the city, although it took us a great deal of time to find the infamous Owino market. We spoiled ourselves with good food and enjoyed some of the top nightclub spots; all-in-all we really enjoyed ourselves. Kampala, for its relatively small size compared to the populations of other major African capitals is overcrowded yet is at all times seemed safe. We read somewhere that the reason why theft and public disturbances are low is that if a thief or crook is caught, they are forced to strip down in public and be humiliated.
This week we have shifted into first gear on all the projects that we are implementing with the money raised through GlobeMed. On Thursday and Friday I met with the two groups that will be receiving the goat loans to orientate them on the loan structure and select the individuals within the groups who will receive the loan. With the funds that we have we are not able to give a loan to each member of both groups so we have developed a structure that maximizes the number of individuals who will benefit form the loan. The loan will operate as a cycle where three families will receive the mother goat in rotation over three years, after which the goat will be returned to Health Alert. The orientations went very well, each group expressed a great deal of gratitude and thanks. We selected on rural group and one “urban” group, from Alero and Pece respectively. Today we went to Kafo, which is 150km south of Gulu towards Kampala to purchase goats for the project. The prices were slightly higher than expected, apparently because there is a government-breeding program in the area and a great deal of corruption associated with the program so that prices are falsely inflated. We were forced to only purchase nine full-grown female goats and one baby goat for a higher price than budgeted. However, six of the goats are pregnant so restructuring the loan will not be difficult and the loan cycle should not extend past the expected length of three years. After traveling the 150km back from Kafo we unloaded the goats and a vet came to de-worm them and treat a few who had gotten eye infections.
Last Monday we purchased over 150 handmade paper-bead necklaces from some of the caretakers of children HAU works with. The necklaces are beautiful and unless carefully inspected appear to be glass beads. However, they are in fact only paper, reused from posters. Over this weekend we learned how to make them, delicately rolling the paper into the beads. It took a while to get the hang of rolling them, but once I did I started experimenting with different shapes and eventually making some very beautiful beads. Now I need only to varnish them and string them together.. As I get ready to go to India I’m thinking of what I’d like to do for my internship. As I was making the beads I couldn’t help but feel that I should scrap the notion of ding an environmental or health focused internship and instead do an apprenticeship or something of that nature with an artisan in Delhi. I guess we will see how things go.
I have also been thinking a lot in general, which is a nice reprieve from the hectic nature of school where most of my thoughts are confined to my classes and the grueling hours put into labs, essays and test preparation. Gulu has instilled a strong desire to study development economics and peace studies. The aid that comes into the area, as I have mentioned before oftentimes seems to be extremely ineffectively distributed and allocated. The creation of the society on handouts from the west seems to be the incorrect approach to the issues that the people of Northern Uganda are faced with. As I see these things first hand I am also reading “Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein that talks a lot about foreign meddling and the use of catastrophe to further free trade doctrine internationally. The book discusses the negative impact that USAID has had in regions where they pour money and even makes a few comments about Save the Children, the organization that funds Health Alert. While Klein’s writing must be taken with a grain of salt, her overall message I find many parallels to what I see in Gulu and the foreign impact here.
This past Saturday we organized and hosted a TB and HIV testing event in the adjacent district to Gulu, Amuru in a town called Anaka at the hospital there. We tested over 300 children and mothers for HIV, a huge number given our limited resources and funding, as well as a few dozen for TB (we only tested individuals who had “suspicious” coughs). The event was a great success and we had groups come in and perform and a travelling sound system that mobilized the community to come to the event. Aurelien and I had a chance to enter the laboratory where they were doing the actual blood work and learn about the different tests done for HIV and how to read positive and negative results. The data hasn’t returned, but from our observations and the time we spent in the lab, it seemed as if twenty to thirty tested positive, which seems accurate given the estimated 12.9% infected population.
This week we also purchased the mama kits, which include essentials for mothers to have a safe birth, providing razor blades, a washbasin, towels, a plastic sheet, soap and a few other things. This year at GlobeMed our focus had been on the Health Alert PMTCT (preventing mother to child transmission) program, largely emphasizing the role of formula milk in this process. However, there is some debate at the WHO about sanitation and the true effectiveness of formula milk.
With all four of these projects nearly complete, our internships are coming to a close. We still have two weeks in Gulu, but a majority of this will be spent doing follow-ups and documenting testimonials of children and caretakers who we have worked with directly. We continue to enjoy ourselves in town and have made good friends with the students from Concordia University who are all interesting and are themselves doing really cool stuff on their program. They are each required to personally raise $500, which is used to fund their own programs. There are 16 currently here, with another 16 arriving the week that we leave. Some are working at orphanages, others at clinics, one with micro-finance and another with a solar powered cooker program with some women in the area. Having spent a solid four weeks mostly interacting only with the three others with me from UNC working at Health Alert, some new friends and new stories are much welcomed. They are also a remarkably diverse group and their program is very competitive so they are all intelegent driven and offer great opinions. Also, Aurelien and I enjoy talking to fellow Canadians, since we both are not used to hearing those perspectives, but tend to frequently agree ideologically with them. After talking to them I am very interested in looking into Concordia for graduate studies, because it seems to have a similar approach to education like UNC, particularly for internationally focused programs. We spent Saturday night hanging out at Havana pub with some of the Concordia students, dancing late into the night. Earlier that day they hosted their own testing event in the city and the soccer stadium in town. They similarly had a huge turnout with a NGO v NGO match. Aurelien and I had hoped to play, but unfortunately our event lasted loner than expected and we showed up to late to play.
Tomorrow is the Day of the African Child and there is going to be a lot going on around town. Both testing events were focused around the day, which unfortunately is on a Tuesday this year and on Friday we painted (manually) four crosswalks at critical points on busy streets in town where many children are forced to cross to go to school. The work was grueling, but fulfilling, minus an ambulance that blatantly and disrespectfully plowed through fresh paint. On Wednesday we will be distributing the ten goats that we purchased and then on the weekend we will be traveling to Murchison Falls and doing some wildlife sightseeing along the upper White Nile. I expect that I’ll get one more update out before leave Gulu; I am thinking at this point that I will be traveling south to Rwanda and spending some time hiking in a volcano range in the North and then proceeding to Kigali to spend a few days there.
This week we have shifted into first gear on all the projects that we are implementing with the money raised through GlobeMed. On Thursday and Friday I met with the two groups that will be receiving the goat loans to orientate them on the loan structure and select the individuals within the groups who will receive the loan. With the funds that we have we are not able to give a loan to each member of both groups so we have developed a structure that maximizes the number of individuals who will benefit form the loan. The loan will operate as a cycle where three families will receive the mother goat in rotation over three years, after which the goat will be returned to Health Alert. The orientations went very well, each group expressed a great deal of gratitude and thanks. We selected on rural group and one “urban” group, from Alero and Pece respectively. Today we went to Kafo, which is 150km south of Gulu towards Kampala to purchase goats for the project. The prices were slightly higher than expected, apparently because there is a government-breeding program in the area and a great deal of corruption associated with the program so that prices are falsely inflated. We were forced to only purchase nine full-grown female goats and one baby goat for a higher price than budgeted. However, six of the goats are pregnant so restructuring the loan will not be difficult and the loan cycle should not extend past the expected length of three years. After traveling the 150km back from Kafo we unloaded the goats and a vet came to de-worm them and treat a few who had gotten eye infections.
Last Monday we purchased over 150 handmade paper-bead necklaces from some of the caretakers of children HAU works with. The necklaces are beautiful and unless carefully inspected appear to be glass beads. However, they are in fact only paper, reused from posters. Over this weekend we learned how to make them, delicately rolling the paper into the beads. It took a while to get the hang of rolling them, but once I did I started experimenting with different shapes and eventually making some very beautiful beads. Now I need only to varnish them and string them together.. As I get ready to go to India I’m thinking of what I’d like to do for my internship. As I was making the beads I couldn’t help but feel that I should scrap the notion of ding an environmental or health focused internship and instead do an apprenticeship or something of that nature with an artisan in Delhi. I guess we will see how things go.
I have also been thinking a lot in general, which is a nice reprieve from the hectic nature of school where most of my thoughts are confined to my classes and the grueling hours put into labs, essays and test preparation. Gulu has instilled a strong desire to study development economics and peace studies. The aid that comes into the area, as I have mentioned before oftentimes seems to be extremely ineffectively distributed and allocated. The creation of the society on handouts from the west seems to be the incorrect approach to the issues that the people of Northern Uganda are faced with. As I see these things first hand I am also reading “Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein that talks a lot about foreign meddling and the use of catastrophe to further free trade doctrine internationally. The book discusses the negative impact that USAID has had in regions where they pour money and even makes a few comments about Save the Children, the organization that funds Health Alert. While Klein’s writing must be taken with a grain of salt, her overall message I find many parallels to what I see in Gulu and the foreign impact here.
This past Saturday we organized and hosted a TB and HIV testing event in the adjacent district to Gulu, Amuru in a town called Anaka at the hospital there. We tested over 300 children and mothers for HIV, a huge number given our limited resources and funding, as well as a few dozen for TB (we only tested individuals who had “suspicious” coughs). The event was a great success and we had groups come in and perform and a travelling sound system that mobilized the community to come to the event. Aurelien and I had a chance to enter the laboratory where they were doing the actual blood work and learn about the different tests done for HIV and how to read positive and negative results. The data hasn’t returned, but from our observations and the time we spent in the lab, it seemed as if twenty to thirty tested positive, which seems accurate given the estimated 12.9% infected population.
This week we also purchased the mama kits, which include essentials for mothers to have a safe birth, providing razor blades, a washbasin, towels, a plastic sheet, soap and a few other things. This year at GlobeMed our focus had been on the Health Alert PMTCT (preventing mother to child transmission) program, largely emphasizing the role of formula milk in this process. However, there is some debate at the WHO about sanitation and the true effectiveness of formula milk.
With all four of these projects nearly complete, our internships are coming to a close. We still have two weeks in Gulu, but a majority of this will be spent doing follow-ups and documenting testimonials of children and caretakers who we have worked with directly. We continue to enjoy ourselves in town and have made good friends with the students from Concordia University who are all interesting and are themselves doing really cool stuff on their program. They are each required to personally raise $500, which is used to fund their own programs. There are 16 currently here, with another 16 arriving the week that we leave. Some are working at orphanages, others at clinics, one with micro-finance and another with a solar powered cooker program with some women in the area. Having spent a solid four weeks mostly interacting only with the three others with me from UNC working at Health Alert, some new friends and new stories are much welcomed. They are also a remarkably diverse group and their program is very competitive so they are all intelegent driven and offer great opinions. Also, Aurelien and I enjoy talking to fellow Canadians, since we both are not used to hearing those perspectives, but tend to frequently agree ideologically with them. After talking to them I am very interested in looking into Concordia for graduate studies, because it seems to have a similar approach to education like UNC, particularly for internationally focused programs. We spent Saturday night hanging out at Havana pub with some of the Concordia students, dancing late into the night. Earlier that day they hosted their own testing event in the city and the soccer stadium in town. They similarly had a huge turnout with a NGO v NGO match. Aurelien and I had hoped to play, but unfortunately our event lasted loner than expected and we showed up to late to play.
Tomorrow is the Day of the African Child and there is going to be a lot going on around town. Both testing events were focused around the day, which unfortunately is on a Tuesday this year and on Friday we painted (manually) four crosswalks at critical points on busy streets in town where many children are forced to cross to go to school. The work was grueling, but fulfilling, minus an ambulance that blatantly and disrespectfully plowed through fresh paint. On Wednesday we will be distributing the ten goats that we purchased and then on the weekend we will be traveling to Murchison Falls and doing some wildlife sightseeing along the upper White Nile. I expect that I’ll get one more update out before leave Gulu; I am thinking at this point that I will be traveling south to Rwanda and spending some time hiking in a volcano range in the North and then proceeding to Kigali to spend a few days there.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Reality Strikes
Our time in Gulu had been a peaceful affair thus far, everyone goes around their daily business with little worry or regard to the war that ravaged the north for so many years. As we’ve moved about town, we’ve seen the occasional man or young boy missing a limb, but these realities hadn’t really struck home as if the causes were shrouded by the dust that swirls around the streets on a windy day. However, last night we decided to go to a bar where some students from Concordia University had recommended we go to. As we were traveling up the road towards the bar, a road that I’ve walked tens of times, a man runs up frantically beside us yelling, “Stop, stop, landmine up ahead.” Sure enough not 50 meters ahead of us, the road was taped off and there were warning notices of landmines. We veered of the road onto a side path up to the bar with a sick feeling in our stomachs as reality struck that, indeed, Gulu remains a war torn area.
When we arrived at the bar several others were buzzing about the landmine news, which was shocking in itself that few landmines have ever been detected in the city. It seems that the heavy rain had worked its way down in the earth revealing the mine. One of the guys at the bar was an Irish guy actually working as a de-miner, who was quite excited at the prospect of working on the mine.
On every other Sunday HAU has close to 200 children come for a big program filled with education and fun. We spent the day playing soccer, talking with kids, taking pictures and eating with the kids. There was also a dance troupe from Awach composed of 30 boys and girls, only a few years younger than us, performing skits and doing local Acholi dances. It was great to see so many lively children playing, and while each was HIV positive, their status made no impact on their joy and ability to enjoy the activities put on by Health Alert. I worked to write down the names of all the children who arrived. It proved a very difficult task because so many of the kids, and even the adults speak extremely softly, not out of timidity, simply as a general practice in the community. I learned how to ask all of the questions in Luo, but figuring out the names was the hardest. Each person has an Acholi and English name. So you might hear, “Brian” at the end, but there is also a difficult Acholi name that precedes it. One of the kids I bonded with most was a young guy, about 12 who helped me at first in picking out the names and spelling them. He was incredible at soccer and in talking to him later found out that he played on a U12 team in town.
The week otherwise has been low-key in ways only Africa can be. Wednesday was Martyr’s Day, a national Christian holiday, and we were therefore given the day off. With a whole day of uncalculated rest, we decided to go to the only pool in Gulu, at the Acholi Inn and enjoy the afternoon there. We finally met one of the guys working with CVAP (Concordia Volunteer Abroad Program) and befriended him quickly. We had originally been planning on staying with the Concordia students, but those arrangements had fallen through due to their limited space at their accommodations. We had up until this week remained fairly isolated in our area of town and had not ventured to the locations where many of the whites in Gulu hang out. Nevertheless, meeting some interesting students and young professionals who are working in the multitude of NGOs in Gulu was enjoyable and exchanging stories was a taste of social interaction that we had been lacking since we’d arrived.
At Health Alert this week there has been a workshop going on in partnership with Save the Children Uganda, so many of the staff have been busy working with the people at HAU for the workshop. I’ve been working on my goat project steadily and adapting it to fit the needs of the community as I continue to learn about the challenges faced by individuals enrolled in HAU’s programs. I have also been doing some grantwriting, which is by no means glamorous, but educational and interesting nonetheless. We are applying to a grant from the independent Development Fund that will hopefully be used to expand Health Alert’s projects and give the initial input for a wide reaching IGA (income generating activity) program for 100 families with children enrolled at HAU. The grant focuses on providing children’s rights so I have been learning a lot about the UN Convention on Human Rights and how it relates to HIV/AIDS and the advocacy work that HAU does.
I’ve also been working hard on the projects that others from GlobeMed are trying to get started. We will be bringing back locally made beads, which are made from paper and rolled into some of the most beautiful beads I’ve seen before. The necklaces, despite being made of paper are simply beautiful and look as if they were made of glass or stones. The beads are going to be used for future fundraising for GlobeMed and the proceeds will be brought back to HAU with future interns. We are also getting some of the women who create the beads to come to Health Alert on one of the Children’s Sundays and teach some of the interested kids how to make the beads.
One of the key challenges that we’ve seen at HAU has been the amount of time required to visit field sites and the intense requirements of community volunteer counselors to collect info and bring it back to Health Alert monthly. Oftentimes these volunteers are required to walk or bike as much as 70km just to drop off their forms. We had been in contact with two organizations that work to alleviate such issues commonly faced in the community based volunteer structure of medical treatment and counseling. The first is FrontlineSMS that provides a centralized hub for information to be sent to via custom designed templates where data is entered and then texted from phones to the central location for compilation. Each CVC and peer educator working with HAU will be receiving a phone from Hope Phones and each phone will be equipped with the openware software that FrontlineSMS provides (hopephones.com and frontlinesms.com) If anyone has old cellphones it would be great if you could send them to Hope Phones so that they can continue to supply projects like the one we’re trying to get off the ground. Looking at costs, even though HAU will have to pay for airtime for its CVCs, it currently provides a travel stipend for all the CVCs working with HAU and therefore the costs will be cut to a quarter of what it currently is. In the same vein, we are looking to partner with BOSCO, which is a Gulu based NGO that provides some of the IDP camps with internet. They believe that the flow of information in and out of Gulu is essential to the development of the area, as stories of the war and a life in Gulu get out into the world, and all the information on the internet is able to be accessed by individuals in the community. However, with central hubs in several areas of Gulu, CVCs can similarly use the computers to transmit information collected in the field back to HAU where it can be filed digitally while relieving the time and cost of transport. BOSCO however, only operates in a limited area and therefore the project will be useful, but no to the same extent that the FrontlineSMS initiative will be.
One of the most interesting encounters we had this week was with a middle-aged man at a random electronics shop in the heart of town. He had one of the biggest and warmest smiles I’ve ever seen; pausing with every smile to ensure that we all soaked up its warmth. He chatted with us for nearly half an hour, telling us about the importance of animal husbandry, discussing an upcoming event at HAU that he had coincidentally been asked to provide a sound system for, and culminating the conversation with a prayer circle. He was very impressed and grateful for us coming to Gulu to help at Health Alert (as I’m writing this he surprisingly and ironically walks through the door) and was particularly fascinated by Hanna’s Psychology degree. At the end he grabbed my hand and held it, telling me there was something special about me and that he saw me returning to Africa and getting “a promotion.” It was a heartfelt interchange and definitely made my night.
This weekend we are traveling to Kampala to restock and recharge, no pun intended. We have all read the books we brought with us and my camera battery is dying and I forgot my charger. It is also about halfway through our time at HAU, although Aurelien and I will be traveling in Uganda and Rwanda, unless the FrontlineSMS program doesn’t get off the ground. I don’t know if I included my number in previous emails or posts, but I have a reliable local number +256 777564781 if anyone needs to really get a hold of me for any reason.
When we arrived at the bar several others were buzzing about the landmine news, which was shocking in itself that few landmines have ever been detected in the city. It seems that the heavy rain had worked its way down in the earth revealing the mine. One of the guys at the bar was an Irish guy actually working as a de-miner, who was quite excited at the prospect of working on the mine.
On every other Sunday HAU has close to 200 children come for a big program filled with education and fun. We spent the day playing soccer, talking with kids, taking pictures and eating with the kids. There was also a dance troupe from Awach composed of 30 boys and girls, only a few years younger than us, performing skits and doing local Acholi dances. It was great to see so many lively children playing, and while each was HIV positive, their status made no impact on their joy and ability to enjoy the activities put on by Health Alert. I worked to write down the names of all the children who arrived. It proved a very difficult task because so many of the kids, and even the adults speak extremely softly, not out of timidity, simply as a general practice in the community. I learned how to ask all of the questions in Luo, but figuring out the names was the hardest. Each person has an Acholi and English name. So you might hear, “Brian” at the end, but there is also a difficult Acholi name that precedes it. One of the kids I bonded with most was a young guy, about 12 who helped me at first in picking out the names and spelling them. He was incredible at soccer and in talking to him later found out that he played on a U12 team in town.
The week otherwise has been low-key in ways only Africa can be. Wednesday was Martyr’s Day, a national Christian holiday, and we were therefore given the day off. With a whole day of uncalculated rest, we decided to go to the only pool in Gulu, at the Acholi Inn and enjoy the afternoon there. We finally met one of the guys working with CVAP (Concordia Volunteer Abroad Program) and befriended him quickly. We had originally been planning on staying with the Concordia students, but those arrangements had fallen through due to their limited space at their accommodations. We had up until this week remained fairly isolated in our area of town and had not ventured to the locations where many of the whites in Gulu hang out. Nevertheless, meeting some interesting students and young professionals who are working in the multitude of NGOs in Gulu was enjoyable and exchanging stories was a taste of social interaction that we had been lacking since we’d arrived.
At Health Alert this week there has been a workshop going on in partnership with Save the Children Uganda, so many of the staff have been busy working with the people at HAU for the workshop. I’ve been working on my goat project steadily and adapting it to fit the needs of the community as I continue to learn about the challenges faced by individuals enrolled in HAU’s programs. I have also been doing some grantwriting, which is by no means glamorous, but educational and interesting nonetheless. We are applying to a grant from the independent Development Fund that will hopefully be used to expand Health Alert’s projects and give the initial input for a wide reaching IGA (income generating activity) program for 100 families with children enrolled at HAU. The grant focuses on providing children’s rights so I have been learning a lot about the UN Convention on Human Rights and how it relates to HIV/AIDS and the advocacy work that HAU does.
I’ve also been working hard on the projects that others from GlobeMed are trying to get started. We will be bringing back locally made beads, which are made from paper and rolled into some of the most beautiful beads I’ve seen before. The necklaces, despite being made of paper are simply beautiful and look as if they were made of glass or stones. The beads are going to be used for future fundraising for GlobeMed and the proceeds will be brought back to HAU with future interns. We are also getting some of the women who create the beads to come to Health Alert on one of the Children’s Sundays and teach some of the interested kids how to make the beads.
One of the key challenges that we’ve seen at HAU has been the amount of time required to visit field sites and the intense requirements of community volunteer counselors to collect info and bring it back to Health Alert monthly. Oftentimes these volunteers are required to walk or bike as much as 70km just to drop off their forms. We had been in contact with two organizations that work to alleviate such issues commonly faced in the community based volunteer structure of medical treatment and counseling. The first is FrontlineSMS that provides a centralized hub for information to be sent to via custom designed templates where data is entered and then texted from phones to the central location for compilation. Each CVC and peer educator working with HAU will be receiving a phone from Hope Phones and each phone will be equipped with the openware software that FrontlineSMS provides (hopephones.com and frontlinesms.com) If anyone has old cellphones it would be great if you could send them to Hope Phones so that they can continue to supply projects like the one we’re trying to get off the ground. Looking at costs, even though HAU will have to pay for airtime for its CVCs, it currently provides a travel stipend for all the CVCs working with HAU and therefore the costs will be cut to a quarter of what it currently is. In the same vein, we are looking to partner with BOSCO, which is a Gulu based NGO that provides some of the IDP camps with internet. They believe that the flow of information in and out of Gulu is essential to the development of the area, as stories of the war and a life in Gulu get out into the world, and all the information on the internet is able to be accessed by individuals in the community. However, with central hubs in several areas of Gulu, CVCs can similarly use the computers to transmit information collected in the field back to HAU where it can be filed digitally while relieving the time and cost of transport. BOSCO however, only operates in a limited area and therefore the project will be useful, but no to the same extent that the FrontlineSMS initiative will be.
One of the most interesting encounters we had this week was with a middle-aged man at a random electronics shop in the heart of town. He had one of the biggest and warmest smiles I’ve ever seen; pausing with every smile to ensure that we all soaked up its warmth. He chatted with us for nearly half an hour, telling us about the importance of animal husbandry, discussing an upcoming event at HAU that he had coincidentally been asked to provide a sound system for, and culminating the conversation with a prayer circle. He was very impressed and grateful for us coming to Gulu to help at Health Alert (as I’m writing this he surprisingly and ironically walks through the door) and was particularly fascinated by Hanna’s Psychology degree. At the end he grabbed my hand and held it, telling me there was something special about me and that he saw me returning to Africa and getting “a promotion.” It was a heartfelt interchange and definitely made my night.
This weekend we are traveling to Kampala to restock and recharge, no pun intended. We have all read the books we brought with us and my camera battery is dying and I forgot my charger. It is also about halfway through our time at HAU, although Aurelien and I will be traveling in Uganda and Rwanda, unless the FrontlineSMS program doesn’t get off the ground. I don’t know if I included my number in previous emails or posts, but I have a reliable local number +256 777564781 if anyone needs to really get a hold of me for any reason.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Lots and Lots of Rain
Our lives in Gulu are beginning to become daily routines; we wake early to arrive at Health Alert by 8:30am. This week work has been rather slow because almost everyday there has been rain. And when it rains, it pours. On one day it was just sprinkling as we left our hotel off to get dinner in the city, but as we neared halfway the sky opened up and it began to storm.
Over the weekend we stuck mostly to hanging around the hotel, washing clothes reading and recapping on the week. Aurelien and I also toured some of our new friends homes around town. I had never been in one of the grass thatch huts, but upon entering I found that they were surprisingly spacious. We received an invitation to stay with our friend Francis in his home. I think we are planning on doing so towards the end of our time here. The hospitality shown by both families was incredible. The friends we’ve made are peer educators who work at HAU and in some ways have been very difficult because they have been pulling each of us aside and asking for things like school fees, uniforms, bikes, transportation money and money for meals. While the standard of living of these peer educators is inherently not great, they represent a small minority of fairly prosperous individuals. HAU goes to great lengths to ensure that they are well taken care of, providing all their school supplies, soap, sugar and sanitary pads for the girls. Their aim is to decrease the dependence, particularly of the girls, on older men who often request sexual favors in exchange for payment for the same supplies. After getting used to the peer educators requesting that we buy them things and help them out, the hospitality in their homes with water, soda and fruit was a perplexing surprise. The deep tradition of providing for guests, even given the poor economic situation that they live in and the nature to ask for things, was surprising but honest and warm.
I started the week traveling with my advisor at HAU, Jackie, around Pece which is one of the four districts in Gulu, meeting with from the caretakers group who use loans from a revolving fund set up by HAU to foster microfinance initiatives. The first woman I met embroidered small tea towels, made simsim (sweet sesame seed balls) and braided hair with her loan. This particular woman has been on of the kindest to me, giving me some of her simsim and inviting me back to her hut whenever I desire Her daughter, named Abe is one of the cutest and kindest little girls I have met. She is already on ARV treatment because she had a false negative when she was first tested and had not taken the Septerin from a young age. When I first met her she was very quiet, but after playing with her and allowing her to play with my camera she warmed up to me and when I visited her mom on my micro-finance tour she recognized me immediately and hugged me around my leg. Most of the other women we met engage in some sort of produce selling, obtaining millet, sorghum, corn flour, groundnuts and other local crops from distant villages and reselling them in town for an inflated rate. While the first woman’s endeavors demonstrate a great deal of entrepreneurship, the reselling initiatives do not have a large profit margin and do not seem to make great strides towards alleviating poverty.
I have been working on developing a pilot program for goat rearing in the community. With limited funds we’ve decided to pilot the program with ten goats and see how the distribution of these goats will be received in the community. We are designing the program to serve not as a handout from HAU, but instead as a loan that will be repaid with interest after a period in which the goat will grow and gain value. This project falls in line with several initiatives already in place at HAU, which work as income generating projects for the community members that HAU hopes to assist. HAU has been researching effective ways to develop long-term programs that help its patients rebuild their lives after the devastation incurred during the harsh years of war.
Life in Gulu hasn’t entirely been filled with work though. We’ve been walking around the city a lot, finding different nooks across the city filled with good food, tailors making beautiful clothing and pungent fish markets. On Sunday we were invited to one of the local churches, Watoto, for the early morning children’s mass. The experience was challenging in that the church is filled with state of the art sound and lighting equipment while its congregation is as impoverished as any other in Gulu. The thousands of dollars poured into the church from its Canadian evangelical founders are obvious and all of us could not help but think that the money could have better spent. The budget we are working with is likely half the cost of the professional video camera or top-line drum set used during the service and knowing what even such a small amount of money can do for the community it seems counter-intuitive that the money be but to such fruitless use. Nevertheless, the message of the church was for the most part a positive one, encouraging families to look after their children and ensure fathers stick by their families. The pastor even went so far as to encourage parents to talk to their children about sex. Unfortunately, I felt the overall message was tainted by a staunchly confrontational view of communism, homosexuality, Catholicism and Islam. The pastor went so far as to say, “Protect your children from the homosexuals who are recruiting your children in their schools.” He used similarly militaristic terms towards the other groups quoting Marx, “give me a child and I will make him a communist for life,” encouraging the congregation to adopt a similarly forceful view of pounding Protestantism into their children’s heads.
As I’ve already discussed, the drastic implications of colonialism in Northern Uganda as well as the more recent international missionary, aid and relief work run deep. Whether it be the religious fervor or the economic dependency in the region, the problems derived from the old British legacy are readily apparent and something that the other interns and I discuss regularly. In a similar vein, but much more light hearted, on Wednesday Aurelien and I watched the Champions League finals between Manchester United and Barcelona FC. The vast majority of the Gulu people are MU fans and all the rest favor another British team like Chelsea or Arsenal. The hype leading up to the game was fantastic and we watched the match amidst a full room of locals at one of the local restaurants. The fans were buzzing throughout the match and were left awestruck by the final results. Yet even the next day many fans proudly wore their Manchester jerseys or Ronaldo t-shirts standing steadfast next to their favorite team.
I’ve continued to sample the local cuisine, but most places prepare the same dishes. I balance all of my meals with a green, a starch and a protein and while at first I approached the meats with a certain bravado, last night I had the unfortunate pleasure of being served cow knee, which is rather lacking in meat and bountiful in skin, tendon and fat. This dish was definitely the exception to the generally hearty meals, but does reflect the local approach of wasting no part of any animal. Luckily while the eating experience was traumatizing the waitress took a liking to me, asking for my number surprisingly quickly. Its difficult to discern anyone’s intent when seeking a phone number, many of the peer educators have asked for our numbers only to text us asking for money for food or a ride to school and even several older men and women in the village have asked us for our numbers seemingly only wanting to have a white man’s number in their phone. On the other hand, this is not to discount anyone in the community, because except for the rare exception, typically a drunken man or an elderly woman, I am well received, particularly by the children. Typically when someone has gotten aggravated with me it is not directed towards me individually, but someone requesting, in one case, medication for diabetes, and another being persistent in her desire for me to publish my pictures in the UK to expose the tough labour that she was doing.
I feel like I’m slowly seeing more and more of the area. With all of the rain this week, field visits have been fewer, but I’ve visited a quarry where hundreds of families work side by side to make heaps of stones for sale. A full heap, which takes a month to break up, sells for 230,000ush or about $115usd. While this is relatively good money, the work is unbelievably arduous. I’ve also travelled to NUMAT (Northern Ugandan Malaria, AIDS and Tuberculosis) and the Ministry of Health to develop a worksheet and organize a workshop on TB for HAU and the people the organization looks after. I’ve seen the prison and the World Food Program’s warehouses as well as the Acholi Inn, which is the ritzy hotel in the area, and local millet mills and breweries.
I’m feeling increasingly at home in Gulu, and already scheming ways to visit again in the future. While in the first week I made some significant strides in the language, I hit a brick wall this week with the complexities of its grammar. Hopefully, I’ll get over the hump because there are so many interesting people with stories that are as undoubtedly similarly interesting. Yet, while I’ve gotten used to life on this side of the world, I think a lot about home and everyone who is there and also traveling the world. I feel that this trip will have a lot to do with the direction of my future endeavors and will serve as a test for how well I’m suited for work in the international setting. So many questions arise over the ethics of aid work, my thoughts on how I wish to personally contribute, the sustainability of it all, and how it can or cannot be incorporated into a lifestyle with a family. I’m sure I’ll have lots more to share next week and I’ll try to find somewhere with fast enough Internet to load pictures.
Over the weekend we stuck mostly to hanging around the hotel, washing clothes reading and recapping on the week. Aurelien and I also toured some of our new friends homes around town. I had never been in one of the grass thatch huts, but upon entering I found that they were surprisingly spacious. We received an invitation to stay with our friend Francis in his home. I think we are planning on doing so towards the end of our time here. The hospitality shown by both families was incredible. The friends we’ve made are peer educators who work at HAU and in some ways have been very difficult because they have been pulling each of us aside and asking for things like school fees, uniforms, bikes, transportation money and money for meals. While the standard of living of these peer educators is inherently not great, they represent a small minority of fairly prosperous individuals. HAU goes to great lengths to ensure that they are well taken care of, providing all their school supplies, soap, sugar and sanitary pads for the girls. Their aim is to decrease the dependence, particularly of the girls, on older men who often request sexual favors in exchange for payment for the same supplies. After getting used to the peer educators requesting that we buy them things and help them out, the hospitality in their homes with water, soda and fruit was a perplexing surprise. The deep tradition of providing for guests, even given the poor economic situation that they live in and the nature to ask for things, was surprising but honest and warm.
I started the week traveling with my advisor at HAU, Jackie, around Pece which is one of the four districts in Gulu, meeting with from the caretakers group who use loans from a revolving fund set up by HAU to foster microfinance initiatives. The first woman I met embroidered small tea towels, made simsim (sweet sesame seed balls) and braided hair with her loan. This particular woman has been on of the kindest to me, giving me some of her simsim and inviting me back to her hut whenever I desire Her daughter, named Abe is one of the cutest and kindest little girls I have met. She is already on ARV treatment because she had a false negative when she was first tested and had not taken the Septerin from a young age. When I first met her she was very quiet, but after playing with her and allowing her to play with my camera she warmed up to me and when I visited her mom on my micro-finance tour she recognized me immediately and hugged me around my leg. Most of the other women we met engage in some sort of produce selling, obtaining millet, sorghum, corn flour, groundnuts and other local crops from distant villages and reselling them in town for an inflated rate. While the first woman’s endeavors demonstrate a great deal of entrepreneurship, the reselling initiatives do not have a large profit margin and do not seem to make great strides towards alleviating poverty.
I have been working on developing a pilot program for goat rearing in the community. With limited funds we’ve decided to pilot the program with ten goats and see how the distribution of these goats will be received in the community. We are designing the program to serve not as a handout from HAU, but instead as a loan that will be repaid with interest after a period in which the goat will grow and gain value. This project falls in line with several initiatives already in place at HAU, which work as income generating projects for the community members that HAU hopes to assist. HAU has been researching effective ways to develop long-term programs that help its patients rebuild their lives after the devastation incurred during the harsh years of war.
Life in Gulu hasn’t entirely been filled with work though. We’ve been walking around the city a lot, finding different nooks across the city filled with good food, tailors making beautiful clothing and pungent fish markets. On Sunday we were invited to one of the local churches, Watoto, for the early morning children’s mass. The experience was challenging in that the church is filled with state of the art sound and lighting equipment while its congregation is as impoverished as any other in Gulu. The thousands of dollars poured into the church from its Canadian evangelical founders are obvious and all of us could not help but think that the money could have better spent. The budget we are working with is likely half the cost of the professional video camera or top-line drum set used during the service and knowing what even such a small amount of money can do for the community it seems counter-intuitive that the money be but to such fruitless use. Nevertheless, the message of the church was for the most part a positive one, encouraging families to look after their children and ensure fathers stick by their families. The pastor even went so far as to encourage parents to talk to their children about sex. Unfortunately, I felt the overall message was tainted by a staunchly confrontational view of communism, homosexuality, Catholicism and Islam. The pastor went so far as to say, “Protect your children from the homosexuals who are recruiting your children in their schools.” He used similarly militaristic terms towards the other groups quoting Marx, “give me a child and I will make him a communist for life,” encouraging the congregation to adopt a similarly forceful view of pounding Protestantism into their children’s heads.
As I’ve already discussed, the drastic implications of colonialism in Northern Uganda as well as the more recent international missionary, aid and relief work run deep. Whether it be the religious fervor or the economic dependency in the region, the problems derived from the old British legacy are readily apparent and something that the other interns and I discuss regularly. In a similar vein, but much more light hearted, on Wednesday Aurelien and I watched the Champions League finals between Manchester United and Barcelona FC. The vast majority of the Gulu people are MU fans and all the rest favor another British team like Chelsea or Arsenal. The hype leading up to the game was fantastic and we watched the match amidst a full room of locals at one of the local restaurants. The fans were buzzing throughout the match and were left awestruck by the final results. Yet even the next day many fans proudly wore their Manchester jerseys or Ronaldo t-shirts standing steadfast next to their favorite team.
I’ve continued to sample the local cuisine, but most places prepare the same dishes. I balance all of my meals with a green, a starch and a protein and while at first I approached the meats with a certain bravado, last night I had the unfortunate pleasure of being served cow knee, which is rather lacking in meat and bountiful in skin, tendon and fat. This dish was definitely the exception to the generally hearty meals, but does reflect the local approach of wasting no part of any animal. Luckily while the eating experience was traumatizing the waitress took a liking to me, asking for my number surprisingly quickly. Its difficult to discern anyone’s intent when seeking a phone number, many of the peer educators have asked for our numbers only to text us asking for money for food or a ride to school and even several older men and women in the village have asked us for our numbers seemingly only wanting to have a white man’s number in their phone. On the other hand, this is not to discount anyone in the community, because except for the rare exception, typically a drunken man or an elderly woman, I am well received, particularly by the children. Typically when someone has gotten aggravated with me it is not directed towards me individually, but someone requesting, in one case, medication for diabetes, and another being persistent in her desire for me to publish my pictures in the UK to expose the tough labour that she was doing.
I feel like I’m slowly seeing more and more of the area. With all of the rain this week, field visits have been fewer, but I’ve visited a quarry where hundreds of families work side by side to make heaps of stones for sale. A full heap, which takes a month to break up, sells for 230,000ush or about $115usd. While this is relatively good money, the work is unbelievably arduous. I’ve also travelled to NUMAT (Northern Ugandan Malaria, AIDS and Tuberculosis) and the Ministry of Health to develop a worksheet and organize a workshop on TB for HAU and the people the organization looks after. I’ve seen the prison and the World Food Program’s warehouses as well as the Acholi Inn, which is the ritzy hotel in the area, and local millet mills and breweries.
I’m feeling increasingly at home in Gulu, and already scheming ways to visit again in the future. While in the first week I made some significant strides in the language, I hit a brick wall this week with the complexities of its grammar. Hopefully, I’ll get over the hump because there are so many interesting people with stories that are as undoubtedly similarly interesting. Yet, while I’ve gotten used to life on this side of the world, I think a lot about home and everyone who is there and also traveling the world. I feel that this trip will have a lot to do with the direction of my future endeavors and will serve as a test for how well I’m suited for work in the international setting. So many questions arise over the ethics of aid work, my thoughts on how I wish to personally contribute, the sustainability of it all, and how it can or cannot be incorporated into a lifestyle with a family. I’m sure I’ll have lots more to share next week and I’ll try to find somewhere with fast enough Internet to load pictures.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Getting Used to Things
A whole week has already passed by since I arrived in Uganda. I suffered from numerous delays and cancellations and I arrived in Kampala after a grueling fifty-three hours of traveling. In Brussels, where my flight was cancelled I met a great group of Belgians going to work in the southwest of Uganda and stayed with them as I navigated the numerous airports we were rerouted through.
I arrived in Kampala in the middle of the day and made my way by taxi from Entebbe where the airport is located to Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. From the airplane door the strong UN presence in Uganda was noticeable, and just outside of the airport was a large UN headquarters. Also in Entebbe was the new Presidential manor built overlooking Lake Victoria. As we drove down the dusty road towards the city, the white edifice eclipsed its impoverished surroundings. After stopping for some petrol and mango juice I asked my newfound taxi-driving friend Richard to detour through the city so I could see what it was like. Ugandan driving is the scariest I’ve ever encountered as pedestrians, bicyclists, motorbikes, cars and transports weave along the pothole ridden roads at breakneck speeds, but I arrived safely at the hostel where I had reserved a room for the two nights I would be in transit.
Hanna and her father who lives in Sudan had already arrived at the hostel and we spent the evening enjoying some local dishes and brushing up on some Arabic. We also met Moses a friend of friend who had been contacted to meet us and help us move around the city. The next day after learning our two final friends had also had bad flight delays and would arrive late we went to town and ate some Lebanese food and orientated ourselves. Later that night after our friends arrived we went out with Moses to the National Theater and a shopping mall to get breakfast supplies and a few things we had forgotten to pack. Aurelien and I played some pool and met a German guy who was doing his social year working just outside of Kampala.
On Sunday we made the journey up to Gulu, bringing Moses with us, arriving after six hours in a tight bus. I tried some labolo (Luo for banana) and grilled liver both of which were surprisingly quite delicious. I caught my first glimpse of the Nile as it rushed unforgiving from its source in Jinja. We are hoping to meet up with a fellow GlobeMed group from WashU and doing some white water rafting at the source. As we arrived in Gulu, the stark contrast even between Kampala and Gulu was very evident. The streets of Gulu are all very rough and trash laden, the dust lay thick everywhere and spaced between buildings are many thatched huts. We were greeted somewhat harshly as issues arose about the amount we would be charged for the transportation of our luggage. Once resolved, we proceeded to meet the Health Alert Uganda (abbreviated HAU from here out) staff briefly before continuing on to the hotel where we set up for the next six weeks.
That night was international HIV/AIDS awareness day and Health Alert was celebrating by co-hosting a candlelight march through the streets of Gulu. It was raining fairly heavily and our candles were extinguished often but this forced us to find friends and work together to keep our candles alight. We arrived at a big field where a bonfire had been lit and gathered around to listen to the words of several HAU staff and other community members. It was a fantastic way to jump into the experience of working with HAU. One of the most noticeable differences in Gulu to anywhere else I’ve been except in the Galapagos Islands is the darkness of the area as night falls.
Our first full day at HAU was filled with general orientation and meeting staff and peer educators. However in the afternoon I travelled with one of the project coordinators, Robert, to Layibi, one of the four districts in town, for two follow up visits. The first home we went to visit was the home of a girl who had been paralyzed by her antiretroviral drug (ARV) treatment. Unfortunately, she was not there as her family had travelled out to a village to spend time with grandparents. The second visit was to the home of a boy who refused to take his medication. With him was his caretaker who works as a community volunteer for HAU and two other children living with HIV. All three were very shy and found it difficult to fully engage me. The varying responses received from the local kids vary from sheer shock to utter fright. Almost all react by exclaiming “munu” which literally translates to white man or European. Some shout “munu” and give a big wave and others peer curiously from behind trees and whisper the words to friends and when you turn to luck they scatter and giggle. This first experience of working in the field was fantastic and offered the chance to learn a few more phrases in Luo as well as make a connection with the boy who hadn’t been taking his Sephrin (another drug used before ARV regiments). I promised to meet with him again and fully explain to him the importance of taking his medication since he claimed he was unaware of the reason for taking it. One of the other children asked for a book and pen and Robert said that it is believed that if the wise white man gives a student supplies he is more likely to succeed. We frequently run into these ideas that as whites we can provide so much. On Thursday for example I was asked to marry a man’s daughter so that I could provide for her. It makes for very awkward scenarios.
On the second day I went with my direct micro-finance liaison at HAU, Jackie, to her main district of focus Pece where we met with a group of twelve women all of who are care takers of children living with HIV. Jackie, discussed the importance of hygiene, regularity of taking meds, and other issues related to the kids. I’ve been struggling to get her to engage and involve me in her conversations with the clients to the same degree as other project coordinators have included me and the other GlobeMed interns. That afternoon I travelled to Cope, my first visit to an internally displaced people’s camp (IDP). Its amazing how much more impoverished the area is compared to the districts in town.
The food in Gulu is quite good and where the cuisine lacks variety it makes up in heartiness. Most meals include a meat goat, fish, chicken, liver, beef, pork, a vegetable most of which are greens, boiled bananas, groundnuts, beans and a grain typically millet, rice, potatoes, chips, cassava, or sorghum. People eat with there hands, which is a public health nightmare, but highly enjoyable. I’ve taken a particular liking to Akeyo, which is a bitter boiled green, and kal, which is a 1kg hunk of hot millet. I’ve perfected the art of eating the millet, which entails grabbing a handful rolling it into a ball, indenting the center into a bowl like shape and scooping up stew in it. While its fairly straightforward, its filling and hearty.
I have also visited Lakwatomer where I made good friends with a man by the name of Atudu who showed me through his fields of various crops and the local school before asking me for a vocational school and a lawn mower. It’s hard to perceive general interest and camaraderie from the strong desire to be given something. The man was also quite fixated on camera and insisted that I leave it with him. After talking to him for some time I came to believe that he had likely fought with the LRA during the war because he referenced several times serving and his profound duty to the Acholi people at one point lifting an imaginary gun into the air to support his claim that he would undoubtedly fight to preserve Acholiland. Jackie addressed a group of over thirty boys and girls on adolescent sexual reproductive health and while she did little to include me, my new found “friend” eloquently translated pretty a great deal of things, juvenilely enjoying the opportunity to use words related to sex.
Most recently I have been working on budgeting for the projects that the GlobeMed group hopes to fund. We are thinking of funding a goat lending project, a jewelry making activity for HAU children that would function doubly as a potential fundraising opportunity for next year at UNC, mama kits that serve to help HIV positive mothers deliver there children safely at home and a TB education and testing project. The group of four ran into our first real problem as we differed in our approaches and desired applications of the resources we have at our disposal.
Perhaps more than I have ever experienced, the state of Gulu and the way by which western relief efforts operate here keep me thinking constantly. Similarly, never have I felt so “out of place” so to speak. Seeing another westerner is something that happens two to three times a day. Yet things like being called “white man” are not by any means degrading and only show the curious nature of the kids that yell it. Gulu is very safe and everyone is appreciative of the work we are doing with HAU. There remains a deep reliance on handouts from western relief agencies that is the most frustrating thing imaginable. Being asked as a nineteen year old to build a school or marry a daughter strictly because of my color and perceived status is at times embarrassing and difficult to confront. Yet I’ve definitely been enjoying my work and the place because it is extremely challenging and forces me to confront a number of theoretical issues that classes and discussions can only scratch the surface of.
In the next few days we will be finalizing our project proposals and approving projects and getting to work more intimately with individuals in the community. So far we have only just begun and I am definitely looking forward to everything that is to come.
I arrived in Kampala in the middle of the day and made my way by taxi from Entebbe where the airport is located to Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. From the airplane door the strong UN presence in Uganda was noticeable, and just outside of the airport was a large UN headquarters. Also in Entebbe was the new Presidential manor built overlooking Lake Victoria. As we drove down the dusty road towards the city, the white edifice eclipsed its impoverished surroundings. After stopping for some petrol and mango juice I asked my newfound taxi-driving friend Richard to detour through the city so I could see what it was like. Ugandan driving is the scariest I’ve ever encountered as pedestrians, bicyclists, motorbikes, cars and transports weave along the pothole ridden roads at breakneck speeds, but I arrived safely at the hostel where I had reserved a room for the two nights I would be in transit.
Hanna and her father who lives in Sudan had already arrived at the hostel and we spent the evening enjoying some local dishes and brushing up on some Arabic. We also met Moses a friend of friend who had been contacted to meet us and help us move around the city. The next day after learning our two final friends had also had bad flight delays and would arrive late we went to town and ate some Lebanese food and orientated ourselves. Later that night after our friends arrived we went out with Moses to the National Theater and a shopping mall to get breakfast supplies and a few things we had forgotten to pack. Aurelien and I played some pool and met a German guy who was doing his social year working just outside of Kampala.
On Sunday we made the journey up to Gulu, bringing Moses with us, arriving after six hours in a tight bus. I tried some labolo (Luo for banana) and grilled liver both of which were surprisingly quite delicious. I caught my first glimpse of the Nile as it rushed unforgiving from its source in Jinja. We are hoping to meet up with a fellow GlobeMed group from WashU and doing some white water rafting at the source. As we arrived in Gulu, the stark contrast even between Kampala and Gulu was very evident. The streets of Gulu are all very rough and trash laden, the dust lay thick everywhere and spaced between buildings are many thatched huts. We were greeted somewhat harshly as issues arose about the amount we would be charged for the transportation of our luggage. Once resolved, we proceeded to meet the Health Alert Uganda (abbreviated HAU from here out) staff briefly before continuing on to the hotel where we set up for the next six weeks.
That night was international HIV/AIDS awareness day and Health Alert was celebrating by co-hosting a candlelight march through the streets of Gulu. It was raining fairly heavily and our candles were extinguished often but this forced us to find friends and work together to keep our candles alight. We arrived at a big field where a bonfire had been lit and gathered around to listen to the words of several HAU staff and other community members. It was a fantastic way to jump into the experience of working with HAU. One of the most noticeable differences in Gulu to anywhere else I’ve been except in the Galapagos Islands is the darkness of the area as night falls.
Our first full day at HAU was filled with general orientation and meeting staff and peer educators. However in the afternoon I travelled with one of the project coordinators, Robert, to Layibi, one of the four districts in town, for two follow up visits. The first home we went to visit was the home of a girl who had been paralyzed by her antiretroviral drug (ARV) treatment. Unfortunately, she was not there as her family had travelled out to a village to spend time with grandparents. The second visit was to the home of a boy who refused to take his medication. With him was his caretaker who works as a community volunteer for HAU and two other children living with HIV. All three were very shy and found it difficult to fully engage me. The varying responses received from the local kids vary from sheer shock to utter fright. Almost all react by exclaiming “munu” which literally translates to white man or European. Some shout “munu” and give a big wave and others peer curiously from behind trees and whisper the words to friends and when you turn to luck they scatter and giggle. This first experience of working in the field was fantastic and offered the chance to learn a few more phrases in Luo as well as make a connection with the boy who hadn’t been taking his Sephrin (another drug used before ARV regiments). I promised to meet with him again and fully explain to him the importance of taking his medication since he claimed he was unaware of the reason for taking it. One of the other children asked for a book and pen and Robert said that it is believed that if the wise white man gives a student supplies he is more likely to succeed. We frequently run into these ideas that as whites we can provide so much. On Thursday for example I was asked to marry a man’s daughter so that I could provide for her. It makes for very awkward scenarios.
On the second day I went with my direct micro-finance liaison at HAU, Jackie, to her main district of focus Pece where we met with a group of twelve women all of who are care takers of children living with HIV. Jackie, discussed the importance of hygiene, regularity of taking meds, and other issues related to the kids. I’ve been struggling to get her to engage and involve me in her conversations with the clients to the same degree as other project coordinators have included me and the other GlobeMed interns. That afternoon I travelled to Cope, my first visit to an internally displaced people’s camp (IDP). Its amazing how much more impoverished the area is compared to the districts in town.
The food in Gulu is quite good and where the cuisine lacks variety it makes up in heartiness. Most meals include a meat goat, fish, chicken, liver, beef, pork, a vegetable most of which are greens, boiled bananas, groundnuts, beans and a grain typically millet, rice, potatoes, chips, cassava, or sorghum. People eat with there hands, which is a public health nightmare, but highly enjoyable. I’ve taken a particular liking to Akeyo, which is a bitter boiled green, and kal, which is a 1kg hunk of hot millet. I’ve perfected the art of eating the millet, which entails grabbing a handful rolling it into a ball, indenting the center into a bowl like shape and scooping up stew in it. While its fairly straightforward, its filling and hearty.
I have also visited Lakwatomer where I made good friends with a man by the name of Atudu who showed me through his fields of various crops and the local school before asking me for a vocational school and a lawn mower. It’s hard to perceive general interest and camaraderie from the strong desire to be given something. The man was also quite fixated on camera and insisted that I leave it with him. After talking to him for some time I came to believe that he had likely fought with the LRA during the war because he referenced several times serving and his profound duty to the Acholi people at one point lifting an imaginary gun into the air to support his claim that he would undoubtedly fight to preserve Acholiland. Jackie addressed a group of over thirty boys and girls on adolescent sexual reproductive health and while she did little to include me, my new found “friend” eloquently translated pretty a great deal of things, juvenilely enjoying the opportunity to use words related to sex.
Most recently I have been working on budgeting for the projects that the GlobeMed group hopes to fund. We are thinking of funding a goat lending project, a jewelry making activity for HAU children that would function doubly as a potential fundraising opportunity for next year at UNC, mama kits that serve to help HIV positive mothers deliver there children safely at home and a TB education and testing project. The group of four ran into our first real problem as we differed in our approaches and desired applications of the resources we have at our disposal.
Perhaps more than I have ever experienced, the state of Gulu and the way by which western relief efforts operate here keep me thinking constantly. Similarly, never have I felt so “out of place” so to speak. Seeing another westerner is something that happens two to three times a day. Yet things like being called “white man” are not by any means degrading and only show the curious nature of the kids that yell it. Gulu is very safe and everyone is appreciative of the work we are doing with HAU. There remains a deep reliance on handouts from western relief agencies that is the most frustrating thing imaginable. Being asked as a nineteen year old to build a school or marry a daughter strictly because of my color and perceived status is at times embarrassing and difficult to confront. Yet I’ve definitely been enjoying my work and the place because it is extremely challenging and forces me to confront a number of theoretical issues that classes and discussions can only scratch the surface of.
In the next few days we will be finalizing our project proposals and approving projects and getting to work more intimately with individuals in the community. So far we have only just begun and I am definitely looking forward to everything that is to come.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Before I set out
Just as a preface to this blog: I'll be spending the next seven months abroad. The first two months will be spent in Uganda, where I will predominantly work with Health Alert Uganda as an intern on their micro-lending projects. The rest of my time will be spent in Delhi, India where I will study Hindi among other things with IES at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I'll try to keep things updated at the very least weekly, especially in Gulu where emails and this blog will likely be my only interaction with everyone in the US and Canada.
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