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.