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.