Sunday, July 4, 2010

And those others, they are us too.

This one’s a doozy. We’re talking real long. If you don’t want to read it all just know that things are good out here in Kampala. Real good.

The cattle in Kampala are crazy creatures. The first time I went for a jog I happened upon an especially large bull that was grazing on the side of the road. This beast had horns that could do some serious damage if it decided that it didn’t like the color of my shirt. I mean, we’re talking spear like capabilities here. So, I gave it some room, enough room that I ran on the opposite side of the road and sped up my pace considerably. Since then I’ve become used to them. There’s a dude that seems to always be walking his herd down our road around the time I’m coming home from work, so now I can even walk through the herd. Just as long as the big bull in the front with the snot hanging from his nose doesn’t give me a look.

So, I’ve been working full-time at the Uganda Debt Network and it’s…okay. I still haven’t had many tasks on a day-to-day basis, but I have had the opportunity to do some cool stuff too. A couple of weeks ago I was asked to attend a civil society dialogue about the proposed HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Bill 2009 that is currently tabled in Parliament. Hosted by UNAIDS, the dialogue was held at a nice hotel in town with lots of interested parties in attendance. This bill essentially criminalizes many people living with HIV/AIDS and is really just a piece of regressive junk that will do way more harm than good if it becomes law (if you want to know more about the dangers of this bill, check out the Human Rights Watch Report from March 2010- http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/05/13/uganda-protect-don-t-punish-people-hiv). The civil society organizations, like the international community, have reacted very strongly to this bill and this dialogue was held to organize civil society and come to a consensus on how to take action to prohibit this bill, as it is, from actually becoming law. With so many interested parties and differing opinions, a consensus was hard to come by. At one point during the afternoon discussion, one dude got so frustrated with what he perceived to be a stubborn colleague that he shouted out “Jesus Christ on a bicycle! Think about it.” That one got a few laughs from the group.

I’ve been able to work on preparing a few reports to be used during community monitor training sessions. A big part of UDN’s work is training community monitors in rural areas who are then able to evaluate government programs and point out unfulfilled promises, acts of corruption, ghost schools, etc. All this information then comes back to UDN where it takes the form of official concept papers that are often distributed publicly. Basically, they’re trying to act as a watchdog on all the big government promises of development, progress, etc in Uganda. Part of what I’d like to get out of this internship is an understanding of what impact civil society organizations actually have on policy and how much they really aid those they are trying to give a voice to. There are all these lofty goals and exciting ideas, but what actually happens when a report is submitted to the government about an uncompleted government-funded development project? If we think of Human Rights Watch as the epitome of this watchdog ideal, then it’s obvious that these organizations can make a difference. But just what that difference can be is much more blurry than the impacts of an ARV-therapy program for people living with HIV/AIDS.

I also got the opportunity to become the office delivery boy. My supervisor was organizing a dialogue about the newly introduced National Budget and needed someone to deliver about a 100 invitations/publications to all sorts of places. With the help of a driver, I visited Parliament, numerous Ministries, tons of international development organizations, etc. It was a cool time. There was one moment in particular that stands out from those two days of pizza-style delivering: We were parked outside the USAID building in a bit of a traffic jam. Leonard, the driver, knew all of the places in town after working in the development field for over ten years. Out of the blue, he points to a man walking down the street. This man was dressed in rags, with no shoes, and seemed to be living homeless. As he’s pointing to the man, Leonard says, “That man there, he has a master’s degree in development economics.”

Amidst some of this more interesting stuff, there’s been a lot of unoccupied time. Just a lot of time in which I didn’t have much work to do for UDN. At first, I looked at this time as a big bummer. I really wasn’t learning much or getting much experience, kinda the goals of an internship, right? But after awhile, I started seeing this time as an opportunity to reflect on my past semester, explore all the curious stuff I’ve always been interested in but never had the time to explore, and think about my future after Colby.

With Internet access, the possibility to venture in search of random knowledge has really been quite enlightening. Back at Colbs or at home, I don’t really make time to simply read about issues, countries, current events, or those random bits of knowledge that as a whole create the world in which we live. I can only think of a good friend back at Colbs, Scotty Hill, when this random knowledge curiosity comes to mind. I’ve become somewhat up to date on current events around the world after reading the Times and Al Jazeera through and through almost every day. Opinion articles in the Times? So good. Basically whatever comes to mind I look into. After living in East Africa for the better part of 5 months, I’m really trying to understand the political, economic, and regional realities of this part of the world from an academic perspective. I’ve read about Somaliland (a semiautonomous region in Somalia that’s working real hard for democratic stability) and the history of King Leopold II in the DRC. In some ways, this is all stuff that I could easily do back home. But time is of the essence back home, and a lot of this knowledge really informs and changes my time here. I can talk about stuff with Petie and Ugandan friends, and I can better understand news headlines in the local paper if I know the background history.

There’s also been time to just fulfill some curiosity.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the Tasmanian devil? Or how the microwave was invented (a candy bar was involved)? Or what’s going on with the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses? Or why we have daylight savings time in the US? Or why coltan is a necessary mineral for making mobile phones? Or what the phrase, “Let them eat cake” actually means? Well, if you want to know just check out Wikipedia or ask me about it sometime. I’m in an office, in front of a computer, with no pressing tasks and no way to leave…so my curiosity gets the better of me. And really, if you think about it, all these seemingly random bits of knowledge do influence our lives. I want to know why there’s daylight savings time because it either steals an hour from me or gives me one as a gift twice a year. And I use a microwave all the time. I don’t just want to take for granted all the ideas, things, and aspects of the world that influence my life. I want to know and understand them. The renaissance man/woman, though impossible, is a cool idea in this world that’s been specialized up the wazoo.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my time after Colby. This past spring has mixed up my ideas for next year even more than my past semester at Colby. As I move away from my medical-related interests, I’m left in a space of uncertainty. This uncertainty is both a bit alarming and hopeful. I’ve been looking at law school requirements (international, civil rights, and human rights law seems kinda cool to me right now), teaching careers, journalism/media gigs, Watson and Fulbright Scholarships, Teach for America, and whatever else stirs a sense of excitement in me. I really appreciate having this time to reflect on where I want to go and I like where I’m at with all this. I just wish I had been at this point back in my freshman year at Colby. I sort of feel unprepared to go into some of these fields after devoting so much of my time at Colby to biology/natural sciences. With law school, for example, I haven’t taken a philosophy or history course at Colbs. Uh oh. I guess it’s just taken me three years to know exactly what I’m not interested in doing and then find a new path to travel. I envy those who have a more focused direction, but I also enjoy the ability to move between directions and create new directions. That ebb and flow, though maybe a bit ADD on my part, is something that I feel so so lucky to have. When I’m speaking with a Ugandan I’ve just met and they ask me what I’m up to with my studies I just say I’m studying anthropology and a bit of biology. Then the question becomes, “What are going to do after university?” When I say that I don’t know I’m usually met with a look of surprise. To be in your fourth year of university in Kenya or Uganda and not know exactly what you want to do is very rare. It’s even rare in the US. Why do I have that opportunity? Or is that opportunity even real? Maybe I’m actually way behind with whatever I want to do. Maybe in actuality it’s way more beneficial to know what you’re going to do for the better part of every waking hour for the rest of your life as an 18-year suburban kid who doesn’t even know what exists beyond the borders of what’s been told to you.

I met an English-born Indian dude last weekend at a friend’s party who talked with me for a bit about all this life path sorta stuff. He has been a very very successful businessman working the TV service industry. When I told him that I just didn’t know what I wanted to do, he said it’s easy. Just sit in a room alone with a beer and write a list of what you like to do. Not what jobs or work-related stuff you like to do, just things you like to do. Then find something that fits in with as many of those things as possible. Sounds like a half-day’s work. Piece o’ cake.

A couple of weeks ago, I bused it up to a town in the north called Gulu for the weekend. It’s the largest city in the north (about a 6 hour bus ride from Kampala) and home to many a humanitarian relief organization. The past 2 decades have been witness to a civil war between the national government and a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. The north became an ungovernable land and the center of violence during this time. Internally displaced persons camps became a norm and human rights abuses perpetuated by both the government and the LRA wrecked the communities living in the north. The Juba Peace Agreement in 2005 greatly reduced the violence and the LRA has generally been dispersed or sought hiding in neighboring DRC or the southern Sudan.

Thus Gulu became a hub for humanitarian relief agencies working with victims of the conflict and efforts to rebuild the war-torn north. I met up with one of Petie’s friends from her program and two girls who were on an SIT conflict studies program. I visited one of the girl’s homestay families, walked around a strangely calm and organized market, and ate a cinnamon roll. Yup, with all the wazungu (plural of mzungu) in town as a result of the humanitarian relief efforts, you can eat all the foreigner food you want. I enjoyed the cinnamon roll and the trip, but I think a weekend was plenty of time for me to spend up there. There’s a strange inequality dynamic up in Gulu with all the wazungu-influenced businesses and amenities. It seemed to me that there are two general lives you could lead in Gulu. Either you’re a foreigner and could, with the resources available to you, lead a life full of wazungu food, wazungu fun, and work at one of the humanitarian relief organizations. Then if you’re a local, you lead another life. You probably can’t go to the café down the street every morning to eat a cinnamon roll, and maybe you don’t even know what the signs about a cinnamon roll joint even mean because no one has ever shown you a cinnamon roll. It’s just weird to have these two parallel lines of society, at once very separated and connected. It’s a dynamic I don’t really want to be a part of for long, though I do see the allure of living there as a mzungu.

On the way back from Gulu, I sat next to an older gentleman who has been working as a psychiatrist in Gulu for the past 30 years. After explaining that there were only 26 psychiatrists in all of Uganda, this man talked a bit about what some of the problems were in the north after the conflict. I guess most of his patients are suffering from PTSD, depression, or worse. And there are lots of kids who have grown up during the war and are now dealing with the realities of its impact. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to do what this man does in this part of the country. And he looked tired. It really stood out to me because for most of my time in Uganda I’ve been around spirited young Ugandans and wazungus with tons of energy. His face just looked tired, like he had seen and heard about a lot and maybe it was taking a toll on him.

This past weekend, Petie and I got the opportunity to trek it south to Rwanda for a long weekend. The bus ride was quite long (13 hours) and we crossed the border around 4am. It was probably the chilliest I’ve been in East Africa, by far. Rwanda is quite mountainous and thus gets a bit colder than the rest of the region. Anyway, at the border, the customs officials went through most everyone’s bag looking for illegal goods-the most common being plastic bags. They don’t allow them in Rwanda and any that were found were thrown away before we got back on the bus. We arrived in Kigali (the capital city) early in the morning, checked into a hostel, and proceeded to take some boda bodas into the city centre. Everyone riding a boda boda has to wear a helmet-aka very different from Kampala. We got off at a closer spot than we had talked about with the drivers, and my boda driver wouldn’t let me pay him because we hadn’t gone all the way to the place we had agreed upon. Wow.

We started walking around the city centre and quickly realized that we were walking in a ghost town. We were in the center of the largest city in the country at 11am on a Saturday and all the shops were closed and there was absolutely on one in the streets. It was very eerie, but also a bit peaceful after getting so used to the constant activity in Kampala or Nairobi. We soon found out that the last Saturday of every month is a mandatory community cleanup day across the whole country. So everyone was either hiding out in their homes or cleaning up their neighborhoods. Since the genocide in 1994, the national government in Rwanda (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) has led Rwanda into peace, stability, and economic prosperity. Kigali is so clean, so Western, and so orderly. But the flipside of this scenario is that it’s a sort of totalitarian rule in some respects. A number of personal liberties are restricted in Rwanda, and democratic rule is in its infancy here as compared to neighboring Uganda (though there are plenty of issues with democracy in Uganda too). In some ways, you could say Rwanda is a police state being run by a benevolent dictator. One justification for this type of government is that there is a need to prevent ethnic conflict from arising again and thus it’s crucial to develop a sense of national identity through peace and unity (the community cleanup days are also designed to be a community building and unity time). But it’s strange. There haven’t been true multiparty elections here yet, and opposition leaders and journalists are often arrested for speaking their voice. I don’t really understand what’s going on in Rwanda, I just don’t know enough. But it’s so different than Uganda or Kenya because of this political situation. With all this rule of law and order, one could say that Kigali also becomes bland and boring. Are people repressed because of these personal liberty restrictions?

I don’t know what to think. Because we were only there for a few days, we kind lived a bit of tourist lifestyle. Nakumatt kinda became a home base (I brushed my teeth there one morning), and we both realized how hard it is to travel in East Africa without following the tourist track. Petie pointed out that she really appreciated studying abroad in Uganda because she was able to break from that tourist style and get to know Ugandans and experience a lot that she just couldn’t if she was on her own. We really just got a surface level view of this place.

In Kigali, we walked around quite a bit. We visited the Hotel des Mille Collines-the hotel featured in the movie Hotel Rwanda. Then I went to the Kigali Memorial Center, the main genocide memorial site in Kigali. Petie chilled in town because she had already been there and wasn’t too keen on a second visit. It wasn’t fun experience, but I’m glad I went. Some mass graves at the center held about 250,000 victims of the genocide in 1994. I’ve learned some things about the genocide but this made it a bit more real. While I was there, a few groups of people were visiting to pay their respects at the graves. I guess purple is the color of mourning in Rwanda. As I was walking through the actual museum part of the center, I walked past a few people from one of these groups who were crying. I felt like I had no place being there amongst mourning that had persisted for almost 25 years. How deep must that hurt be for it to surface so strongly after so long? There is a permanent scar on this place, a scar that will never heal all the way but will always affect everyday movement.

In one large room of the memorial center, there were about 2000 photographs of victims pinned up onto lines. Family members of victims had donated them to the center for this exhibit. Like clothes drying outside on the clothesline, these photos kinda hit me. Here were photographs of so many different people. Photographs of so many people smiling, crying, giving faces, going for a jog, sitting with friends, drinking beer, getting in the car, jump roping, eating at a family reunion. It’s so easy to see a common thread in us humans when you look at these photographs. How could you not? They are us and we are them. In fact, there is no them, there is just us. All I could do was sit there in front of these photographs. There were so many. When I look at a photograph I try to fit a story to it, imaging what was going on that was worthy of a photograph and what the people in the picture must have been thinking or feeling at that moment. Well, there were just too many. I couldn’t focus on one before another caught my eye and grabbed my thoughts.

We also traveled to Gisenyi, a town in the Northwest situated on a huge lake and bordering the DRC. The bus ride was amazing. Up and down mountains, winding through this valley and along that ridge on a perfectly paved road, we listened to some sweet French hip-hop and just enjoyed looking out the window. Mad cool country out there, that’s fo sho. We chilled on the beach, walked to the DRC-Rwanda border, ate some potatoes and bruschetta (rather than be the little pieces of bread with tomatoes on it, in Rwanda bruschetta refers to a stick with roasted meat and beef on it, just so ya know.), and found ourselves at a local state fair. At least it felt like a state fair. Music, booths, kids running around, lots of food and drink. Ya know, the whole kit and caboodle. The next day it was another epic bus ride (probably my favorite part of the trip) back to Kigali. We tried to meet up with the brother of a friend from Rwanda (Jean-Jacques) who goes to Colbs. Without mobile phones it was kinda tough. We were all set to meet at a hotel coffeshop but the dude was running a bit late and we had to catch a bus back to Kampala so it didn’t work out. When we got to the bus station we found out that our bus was stuck in Burundi. Apparently there were presidential elections that day and the authorities weren’t letting any vehicles cross the border. But they got us on another bus and we were off. East African elections-when will the words “rigged” and “opposition” cease to become a part of that process?

Back in Kampala, the FIFA World Cup has been THE center of attention for many (including myself a bit). It’s so sweet to be here during the tournament. Everyone and their brother is into the game and there’s just some genuine support for the spirit of futbol out here, as opposed to back home where as a whole Americans just don’t appreciate the game. Futbol is an integral part of life out here. Petie invited me to visit her homestay family the other weekend and we watched one of the matches. I discussed the merits of the Argentinean players with her hostmother, who knew much more about the stardom of Messi than I did. On my way from work each day, I can tell when there’s a match being played because there’s a slight drone of the vuvuzelas from every TV on the block that permeates into the general city noise. And you can see crowds of people crowded around the restaurants and shops hoping to catch a glimpse of the match. Its wonderful and I think I’ve caught the bug, watching most of the big games at bars surrounded by Ugandans cheering their hearts out. Sai-back at Colbs this fall I’m totally down to watch English Premier League games with you at 2am.

The journey of the Ghana national team (the only African team to make it to the quarterfinals) was an especially exciting part of the tournament for everyone. When we were in Kigali, after Ghana beat the USA we could hear hooting and hollering from all over town. And back in Kampala, the bar we were at was crammed full of people cheering for the West African team during the Ghana-Uruguary match. Watching that match was one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had in Kampala, even though it was also very heartbreaking. For those of you who don’t know, Ghana had a penalty kick at the end of overtime to win it all, but missed. Then they lost during the subsequent shootout. And they really played their hearts out. There were just so many people at this bar, and everyone was cheering for Ghana. And there were a bunch of friends I’ve met through Petie, and Petie was there. One of these dudes who I’ve gotten to know a little bit kept talking about how he couldn’t watch anymore because he was going to die of stress and anxiety. There were vuvuzelas adding some slightly annoying but nevertheless energizing vibes to the bar. No matter how frustrated I get when we talk about all of Africa as if it is one country, there is (or was, seeing as all the African teams have been ousted) definitely some pan-African pride surrounding the tournament. It’s really cool actually.

Alrighty then, this deal is getting too long. So, a few other quick random bits of reality from Kampala.

I’m so thankful to Petie for letting me become friends with her friends. They add a lot to my time here and she’s gotten to know a bunch of cool people, real quality people. I’ve had dinner at one of friend’s homestays, twice. So good. And these two dudes from Kenya are so genuine and just really enjoy life. We went to a Kenya vs Uganda rugby match yesterday. After Kenya dominated the Cranes all the Kenyan fans ran out on to the field and proceeded to dance around the field in unison singing and bragging about their team. I happened to be right in the middle of it all. At one point everyone dropped onto their backs and started shaking their legs in the air. There’s some good old fashion ridiculousness if you ask me.

There’s a joint about 10 minutes away from our hostel called Obama’s Takeaway. All they do is make chapati but boy do they make chapati. With an assembly line style production model, this place employs about 10 people all pumping out chapos like it’s their job (which it is). These chapos have some secret ingredients, I don’t know for sure but it’s gotta be crack. There’s also a huge poster of President Obama hanging in the back to top off the epicness that is Obama chapos.

I kinda like some of the Uganda music out here. At times it gets a bit repetitive and stuff sounds the same, but the music scene is vibrant out here. Way more lively than in Kenya at least.

Three more weeks left in the internship, then it's off to Nairobi, Addis-Ababa, and Mombasa for some travel time.

Wherever you are, just be there.

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