In the Lugandan language of Southern Uganda "Mzungu" means simply "white person." And this Mzungu is going on the trek of his life, traveling to the great nations of Uganda and Rwanda to explore and learn about their troubled pasts and (hopefully) bright futures.
I am back in Gulu and I couldn’t be happier. I spent a few nights at the Acholi Ber (Yes, it’s spelled “Ber”) Hotel but realized that my budget couldn’t support the 20,000 Shilling Per Night fee so I decided to move into the house that the group has been renting for the past few weeks. I needed to buy a mattress to actually sleep there so I paid about $15 for a thin foam mattress, more or less a glorified ground pad, and headed over. The house is great, besides bright orange color. We have running water that works most days, and electricity that also works the majority of the time. I am in the largest room of the house with three other people. There is a large chain-link fence with barbed wire and a nice big metal gate to keep us safe. It is pretty close to town as well which suits our needs very well. So the settling in process begins again…
The Gulu Corporate Marathon
A few days after I arrived, the group began seeing advertisements for a Marathon. A few of the people in our group have run marathons before so they were intrigued. After inquiring at the main offices we discovered that a marathon in Gulu apparently means a 10 Kilometer run, suddenly a lot more people were interested. The sign-up fee was $5, and since I missed that annual Thanksgiving Day Boulevard Bolt in Nashville, I felt like I had a long run to make up. My fitness regimen in East Africa has been nothing short of abysmal. I ran once in Kampala and once in Kigali. Every once in a while I will do some pushups and sit-ups but besides that I really have not done much. So the thought of a 10-kilometer run was somewhat daunting but I still felt like it was something manageable. Six of our group decided to wake up early on a Sunday morning and head to the Acholi Inn to participate. We soon discovered that not many people in Gulu come to races for fun, especially when there is a 1 million Shilling ($500) prize on the line. Our competition looked fierce, so we decided a slow and steady tactic would be best, let the fast guy run as they will and we would keep our own pace. Before the race started, thirty minutes late naturally, we were told this was the first ever “marathon” in Northern Uganda.
The starting line was marked by a plastic Coke banner and soon enough, we crossed the line and began our run. Because most of the roads here are dirt, they marked the course was with ash, which showed up very well on the reddish roads. Robbie was in it to compete, so he bolted ahead, and we didn’t see him until later in the day. The rest of us stuck together as a group for the first bit. Stephen, David and I pulled ahead about a quarter of the way in, and Hannah and Allie stayed together. We got totally smoked by 85% of the runners. They were kilometers ahead of us within twenty minutes. But we held our own against the rest of the field and we kept a tally of those we passed (24). The run dragged on and on in the day that was slowly becoming sweltering. The three of us encountered a fellow runner along the way, Patrick, who joined us in our suffering for the last half of the race.
The route itself was awesome. We ran on main roads, down little village paths and by Gulu University campus. It was a really great way to see Gulu. There were plenty of Acholi who found us supremely interesting and watched/followed/greeted us during the day.
As I mentioned the race dragged on and on for an hour and a half, our pace was considerably faster than almost twenty minute miles, so our confusion kept growing, if this was indeed a 10k race, we should have been done a long time ago. Our friend Patrick told us about an hour and fifteen minutes in that the race was 15k, but it still felt longer than that. Our main problem was that we forgot a valuable lesson. Much like “Africa Time,” “Africa distance” is also highly fluid and subject to change. Once we finished the course, we were told that it was actually a half marathon, 21k. What!!! The cross country runner in our group decided that it was actually less than that so we decided to call it an even ten miles. From not running for three months, to finishing a ten-mile jaunt in under ten-minute pace, I was pretty content with my performance. I am assuming my legs will hate me tomorrow. We finished pretty far in the rear but we were happy with what we had done and had a good time while at it.
I hope everyone’s Thanksgivings went extremely well! My time in Africa is growing short, thank you for following the blog for as long as you have!
-Muzungu currently in Gulu nursing his blisters and sore legs after a deceptively long run.
The music here in Uganda is like a wonderful combination between American Rap and Reggaeton. People love music and anywhere you go there are speakers pumping loud music into the streets. There are a number of songs you hear over and over, some incomprehensible, some comparing a woman's body to a vuvuzela (what!?), and another one by a very famous Ugandan, the president Yoweri Museveni. Yes, that's right, the President of Uganda has a rap song. And just because I want you experience this bizarre cultural phenomenon, here is the odd/entertaining/painful/helps-explain-why-Uganda-is-where-it-is-today link. Enjoy...
Also, crazy advisor update: My academic director received a text from Oliver yesterday. He read it out to me. "Dr. Komakech, I apologize for being out of contact for a long time. I have been hiding in a cave for the past three days because the spies are after me. I did not want to tell the students because I wanted as few people to know as possible." If he really is being chased by spies, I wish him the best. But I have a feeling this is a nice explanation for him to hold on to my money...
NEW ADDITION:
The girls in my group are the stars of a top 20 Ugandan music video. Mary is the "One in a Million." The artist is Simple Man. This is experiential learning at its finest
-Muzungu currently in Gulu, listening to the President's rap and contemplating the erratic actions of a Rwandan advisor.
I love Thanksgiving. I especially love being in Nashville for Thanksgiving, the weather is perfectly crisp and it’s always good to see and catch up with friends and family. So I was pretty disappointed that I would be spending Thanksgiving away from my family and in a country where most people don’t really have any idea what Thanksgiving is. But things have a way of working themselves out here (sometimes), and my turkey day turned out extremely well.
After spending the past few days in Kampala gathering info about Refugees in Uganda from the Refugee Law project and trying (and failing) to talk to government officials, Whitney and I decided that we wanted to be back among our friends here for Thanksgiving. We thought that keeping it a secret would be fun too, so that’s what we did. On Thursday morning we packed our bags and we hopped on a bus to Gulu. It was a long trek, and after about six hours we arrived in Gulu just as it was getting dark. We hurriedly grabbed our bags and scurried to a nearby hotel where we got the only available room. We tossed our bags in the room and then made a call to group. We wished them all a Happy Thanksgiving “from Kampala” and asked where they were celebrating the holiday, found out they were at the SIT office and said our goodbyes with our cover still intact. They mentioned that they were about to sit down to dinner so time was a factor. We made our way swiftly over to the office and quietly entered the compound. We made a casual entrance. The shock on everyone’s face made the long Thanksgiving Day trek absolutely worth it.
They had prepared a downright feast! Some of the crew had slaughtered two or three chickens that served as our African Turkey. There was stuffing, mashed potatoes, peas, coleslaw, pasta with sauce, garlic bread, vegetable soup and delightful amounts of wine. Whitney and I made it just in time to sit down and join them for dinner. The food was fantastic and it was great to hear about what everyone had been doing in Gulu and it sounds like people have some really cool ISPs. Mary is looking at Traditional Dance and modern dance (specifically break dancing), Hannah is looking at the IDP camps, Stephen is examining the opportunities for education in the North, etc. Cool things are being done.
We did serious work on the food but in true Thanksgiving fashion, there were a good amount of leftovers.
After the meal it was time to head to BJ’z a local bar to end our celebrations with something we all love to do: quiz night. Thursday night is quiz night here in Gulu. Historically we always place third, it happened in Kigali and it happens in Gulu. We can’t seem to break out of our third place rut but every Thursday we try our best to attain the lofty position that is first place. This evening we came in with the most passion and drive yet because for us Americans on Thanksgiving it was time to prove ourselves. There were 40 questions, four sections, and no discernable theme. Over the next two hours we attentively listened to the questions and put our knowledge of the obscure and useless to the test. Then the time came to turn in our answers and hear the scores. They read off the scores from lowest to highest, the lowest score was 7 out of 40, the highest was 37 our of 40. And on Thanksgiving Day, 2010, The Americans in Gulu made our country proud as we claimed the highest score of 37 out of 40. We won by a margin of seven and a half points and proudly claimed our crate of Nile Gold, a local brew.
My Thanksgiving started on a bus with one traveling companion and ended at a Quiz night with eighteen friends. I might have missed a traditional celebration at home but I certainly had a Thanksgiving to remember.
-Muzungu currently in Gulu, incredibly thankful for his family back home in the States and for all the support they have given him over the past 21 years of his life, thankful for old friends from Nashville, Bowdoin and all over the world, thankful for new friends in Uganda and Rwanda, and thankful for Thanksgiving in Uganda.
As I was talking my anti-malarial pills today I realized that I only have seven mefloquine pills left. Three for my time here, and four for the first month I am home. It’s amazing how quickly my time here has gone, I started out with 20 tablets, to be taken once a week, Monday for me, starting one week before entering the malarious area and taken four weeks afterwards. Three weeks left, the end is fast approaching.
One final reflection on the Nakivale Refugee Settlement, for most of the time we have been in Africa we have been living with and around societies and people who have experienced great amounts of trauma and personal loss from the Genocide in Rwanda and the LRA war in Northern Uganda. But surprisingly, we haven’t seen very many manifestations of this trauma. In Gulu there were a sizeable number of people who were obviously mentally affected by the conflict and who might grab you on the street or yell at passers by. In Rwanda, a large majority of the population is traumatized but there seems to be a “cleaning up” of those who really show signs being affected. The streets were free of beggars and I did not once see anyone who showed outward signs of trauma. I mention all of this because in our last night at Nakivale we were sitting in the canteen and watching TV. The man in charge of the remote was switching back and forth between the Manchester City/ Fulham match and the second Transformers movie. We had been watching the movie for a considerable amount of time, fighting and loud noises being pretty frequent, and nothing seemed amiss. But all of a sudden a woman sitting at the edge of the porch screamed and started sobbing hysterically. They immediately turned off the TV but no one did anything for the woman. She covered her face with her jacket and just sobbed for about ten minutes. Whitney and I really wanted to do something, anything really, but we felt our efforts might be misconstrued because of the language barrier. The men turned the TV back on to the soccer match. The woman eventually calmed down and they moved her inside and switched right back to the movie. It was handled in a way that suggests that this is a pretty common occurrence.
I was taken aback by what happened, but I am honestly surprised that it took three months before we really saw anything like it. It’s incredibly understandable that loud noises and violence would bring people back to an intensely horrible and visceral time in their life. I can’t even imagine what happened to this woman. I don’t even know who she was or where she is from. With so many nationalities at the settlement anything might have happened. Somalia has been seeped in war and conflict for decades, most Somalis I talked to had fled in the early 1990’s. The Ethiopians mostly fled from severe food instability and land conflict. The Rwandans fear killings and jailings from an increasingly oppressive Kagame regime. The Congolese are under constant threat of rape and murder from the roaming Interahamwe militia, a left over from the Rwanda Genocide, as well as a number of other rebel groups and the government. The Burundi people exist in a similar situation as Rwandans but their ethnic-ish struggle is not widely recognized. The Sudanese are suffering from the North/ South Divide and the conflict in Darfur. So much strife in this region and so many reasons for this woman to be severely traumatized.
We are now in Kampala for a while to take advantage of the Refugee Law Project and to talk with representatives from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Refugee Desk Office. Hopefully our time here can shed further light on our experiences at Nakivale.
-Muzungu currently in Kampala reflecting on his time in Nakivale and looking to discover more about refugee life and law.
This entry is a conglomeration of a few days blogging, hence the length. I had a hugely eye opening and interesting experience at the Settlement. I hope you enjoy the posts! I have split them up into days so take them day by day, or all together if you have the time! Thanks again for reading, I really do appreciate it!
First Dispatch
Mbarara and Nakivale (11/15/2010)
Mbarara
My last post ended on a frustrated note. Bureaucracy was eating away at the little time we had to get going on our ISP but as always, things started to fall into place. I was able to interview five Rwandese in Mbarara who were all refugees. Most of them had come to Uganda in the 2000’s fleeing oppression under Paul Kagame and the RPF. They were my first interviews for my ISP and therefore they also helped me learn which questions needed to be dropped, which ones needed to be revised and which ones needed to be added. My focus is more on the Rwandese refugees in Nakivale Refugee Settlement so it was nice to have a somewhat dry run.
On Saturday, Whitney returned from Kampala, with permissions in hand from the Office of the Prime Minister granting us access to the settlement. We weren’t allowed to go until Monday so we had some time to kill on Sunday. We explored Mbarara a little bit, which we found to be a pretty nice town, and started reading up on some articles that pertained to our papers. We also watched Inception.
You don’t rent movies in Uganda. You buy them, but I have yet to encounter what us in the United States might so close mindedly call “legitimate” DVD’s. The video stores are little holes in the wall where you can flip through a vast amount of plastic sleeves, completed with printed out copies of the original DVD cover, that contain burned copies of DVD’s. They have almost any movie your heart desires and for only one dollar a pop. The quality varies but overall you get a solid movie, in extremely watchable quality, for a buck. I’m not complaining!
Nakivale
On Monday, our patience finally paid off. After a short (two hour) delay in the morning while waiting for Oliver to show up, we headed towards Nakivale. We used a private hire taxi for the trek that set us back a mere 12 dollars for a 72km ride. The roads to the settlement were surprisingly well maintained. Whitney made the astute observation that it was probably due to the high number of Western NGO’s that made their way back and forth to the settlement that had influenced somewhat the creation of this road.
We made it about halfway before we pulled over to a little town to add some coolant to our cars engine. The driver opened the trunk to get some jerry cans for the water, and he left the key in the trunk lock. When he returned, the keys were gone. Apparently it is quite common in little towns like this for people to steal keys in similar situations, then offer to “go look for the person who stole them” for a fee. After about 30 minutes of heated argument with the locals, our driver called for a mechanic who dismantled the entire steering column of the car. He removed the ignition and rigged up a keyless ignition, basically a glorified hot-wiring of the car. The car started right up and two hours after we stopped we were on the road again. If I have learned one thing during my time in Africa, it has been that patience is the supreme and all-powerful virtue. I have gained the ability to sit in one position for two hours and let my mind wander and at the end of those two hours feel no anger or frustration, just a sense of acceptance and pride at having killed two hours in the middle of nowhere with literally nothing to do.
The countryside in southwestern Uganda is spectacular. Rolling, green hills, great vistas, trees fresh out of “the Lion King,” and scenic lakes. Nakivale Refugee Settlement is perched right in the midst of all this beauty. After months in cities and medium sized towns, Nakivale is a breath of fresh air. The settlement is spread out over a vast number of kilometers of pristine land with interspersed villages and houses. The settlement is arranged in to sectors by nationality of the refugees; they want to keep people from the same countries together in order to reinforce their community and to help them adapt better to life away from home. The “Command” is in the center of the settlement; here is where most of the NGO’s have their head quarters, where the Refugee Desk Office is located, where the World Food Program is based and where the UN High Commission for Refugees is located.
We were first taken to a sitting room before we met the people we would be staying with. We sat for thirty or so minutes but we were kept entertained by a little boy in a camouflage get-up holding a way-too-big water bottle. He made it his job to mimic everything we did, from our facial expressions to our body positions. I found this out because after he first came into the room he sat and stared for a while. I found it only fitting that I make a face at him to break his gaze. He returned the face and so our mimicry began. Even when people were coming in for what appeared to be serious meetings Whitney and I made faces and absurd motions across the room to the child. We even attracted an audience of another small child who was holding a baby. We first noticed her when we say the head then face of a baby slowly rise up outside the window followed by the hushed whisper of “Muzungu.” It was like a little baby periscope. The shenanigans continued until our new hosts arrived. This is starting to feel like a third Homestay!
I am living in the home of a man who works in the Command office. It’s a quaint two-room building (entryway/ kitchen/ sitting room + bedroom/closet/office) right next to the two canteens for the staff here. It looks like I have the place to myself but who knows what the future may hold. It sounds like last year he had four people crash here. Whitney is living in a considerably nicer establishment of comparable size about a three-minute walk from me.
As the day came to a close, Whitney and I took a walk around a small section of camp. We passed by some kids playing soccer, a group of men playing volleyball, and a group of kids just being kids. We were greeted left and right by everyone we passed. Everyone was eager to wish us a good evening and wave to us. We rounded a corner just in time to catch the sunset over the rolling hills and the nearby lake. The fading pink aura of the sun lit up the clouds and reflected off the lake, making for a majestic way to end our day. Our time at Nakivale has begun. Time to get to work!
-Muzungu currently getting settled in Nakivale Refugee Settlement
Second Section
Dispatch from Nakivale: The Beginning of the End (11/16/2010)
It turns out that the first day of our stay in Nakivale is a large Muslim holiday. Which means lots of calling in Arabic through loudspeakers… at 6 o’clock in the morning onwards. Combined with the fact that my neighbor knocked on my door at four o’clock in the morning looking for the regular resident of the house, I did not get much sleep the first night here. I finally greeted the day around seven when John came back from wherever he spent the night to shower and get breakfast. I am back to good old bucket showers again which I really do love.
We fortunately live right next to the canteen for the settlement staff. So breakfast was matooke, cooked bananas, which is like regular bananas minus the flavor and the soft consistency. It’s the one food item here I have legitimately come to despise. I chocked down a few pieces and headed out to meet Whitney and Oliver. I stopped at base-camp and waited for Whitney. The little kid who we played with yesterday was there, in the same camo outfit, and up to the same shenanigans. He is always really excited to see us and I have to admit, we love seeing him. He certainly brightens our day, especially a day started with matooke.
Whitney showed up and we walked down town to meet Oliver. It was interview time! I though that we would be doing three to four interviews a day to space things out and allow time to sort through what information we had gathered. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We were led to a small out of the way house as we were discussing somewhat taboo things in the camp. Whitney and I plus six Rwandese men all squeezed into a room and Oliver encouraged us to start talking. We quickly realized how not beneficial that was going to be so we split up, Whitney took the outside and I stayed inside. We did one-on-one interviews but we were never really one-on-one. There was always a peanut gallery of at least four men who didn’t hesitate to add their own personal thoughts that made for an interesting interview environment. Every time I finished interviewing one person, he would hop right out of his chair and would be replaced by someone previously in the bullpen who I would start interviewing right away. It was a seven people, three-hour interview marathon. And I got amazing information. It has made me realize that I might not spend as much time here as I originally thought. Whitney and I are going to try to make it back to Gulu by Thanksgiving so we can celebrate with our fellow trip mates. I could probably write my paper based solely on the information that I got today, but I am lining up interviews with NGO’s, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and with the Commander of the Refugees here in Nakivale.
For lunch we went back to the canteen, for beans and matooke! Argh. We then wandered around camp and found a horde of brightly garbed people. We went to examine what was going on and it turns out that it was a group of Burundi refugees interviewing with the Settlement to attain refugee status. According to the woman Whitney is staying with, Margaret, not many of them would qualify for refugee status. I can only hope that our little camouflage friend is one of the few who did qualify.
In the afternoon, I interviewed two more Rwandese while Whitney talked to some people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A common narrative is starting to emerge from my conversation with people from Rwanda so I might broaden the scope of my interviews to get a sense from other nationalities how their camp experience is developing.
We finished just in time for dinner. We started out watching a soccer match on the big playing fields near the camp center. After a while we decided that we didn’t want to face any more matooke at the canteen so we went to the local stores to piece together a meal. We went to the Somali part of camp and bought some bananas, some great bread, sugarcane and chocolate. There is a lake nearby so we set out in search of it. The path we took wound through the Somali section and we were able to observe the set of up the settlement. It is broken up into plots of land that allow for each resident to build a house and allows enough room for planting small crops. The paths are lined with natural shrubbery fences that create beautiful green corridors to walk through. Our chosen path led us to a section of camp that provided absolutely no access to the lake or even a view of the lake. Instead we were greeted with green as far as the eye could see which to us looked like a perfect picnic location. We trekked down a hill to find a place to settle down.
Halfway down we were greeted warmly by a man leaving a nearby house. As a Muzungu we I get greeted quite frequently, I say “I” because it takes people longer to realize that Whitney is actually a Muzungu too. The man joined us on our walk and started up a lively conversation with us. It had been a long day but he was a very charismatic guy and he ended up joining us for dinner. His name escapes me for it was rather hard to pronounce, but he is a Somali refugee who left a long time ago and has spent time in the UK (two years), Tanzania (Sixteen years), and Uganda. We talked for a solid hour about his life, what we were doing in Nakivale and his experience in the settlement. It was really nice to make a friend in the settlement. As it is hard to find work around here he asked us if there was any work the he might be able to help us with. He bagged the right Muzungus because we need all the translating help we can get, he is going to help out Whitney on Friday in her conversations with the Somali contingent of town. As it grew dark we headed back. He took us to his abode because it was seven and he had to pray. We waited for him to finish then he very kindly walked us back to the center of camp. We walked and talked under the bright moon and the incredibly clear sky with the sunset fading into light yellow tones in the distance. It was the ideal end to a hectic and rewarding day.
More interviews await and I can only hope they go as well as today’s did. My paper is coming into it’s own, life is good.
-Muzungu currently living the nomadic life in Nakivale Refugee Settlement
Third Section
Dispatch from Nakivale (11/18/2010)
I turned 21 to the sound of Shakira blasting through the calm African night. Unlike many 21st birthdays, this one will most likely end with me sober as a rock, in my one room abode at an African Refugee Settlement. And I couldn’t be happier. I have immensely enjoyed my time in Nakivale and am glad I get to spend my birthday in such a beautiful and fascinating place. It looks like most of my birthday will be spent interviewing Somali refugees, yet another wonderfully unique life experience that this trip has afforded me.
The past few days have been incredible. Over two days I have interviewed twenty-eight people about their lives and time in the settlement. They have mostly been Rwandese and Congolese. Mothers, daughters, fathers, brothers, children, all have been affected by violence in their countries. Women attacked in the middle of the night by men who looking for her husband. Men hunted to this day by the Rwandan government who is seeking to silence all opposition voices there and abroad.
They all experience extreme trials in their everyday life. Their monthly rations are not nearly enough, they have very poor access to healthcare, and they live in constant fear of forced repatriation. But through all of this many of them maintain cheerful demeanor, I think might be the only way they can get through the pain and just shows how legitimately happy they are to be alive and at peace.
Dispatch from Nakivale (11/19/2010)
I slept through my alarm for the first time on this trip, a little unintentional birthday present to myself. I then took my fastest bucket shower yet and met Whitney near Somalia to interview some Somali refugees. We were able to interview our Somali friend from earlier, Shirwa, and three other people, one of whom was the chairman for all Somali refugees in Nakivale. The interviews were very interesting and hopeful. The Somalis are some of the most frequently resettled refugees, meaning that the United States and other western countries tend to allow them to relocate in the US and the West much more often than other nationalities. There is currently a resettlement process going on now and it seemed to provide hope to those we talked too. The Somalis were also notably self-sufficient and were the first nationality I talked to that didn’t demand of me a solution to their problems.
After our interviews we stopped by a Congolese teahouse to visit a friend Whitney had made. They served us a great Congolese lunch and made sure that we took lots of pictures of them. The next few hours were spent relaxing/ attempting to find interview with NGOs, a task that is surprisingly hard to perform. You would think that information about NGOs was top secret. And the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) headquarters looks like a high security prison. After four or five attempts we have yet to talk to anyone besides a security guard there.
Around five we headed back to the Somali district to find Shirwa who took us to the nearby lake. It is absolutely stunning. Blue water surrounded by thick vegetation on all sides with copious amounts of beautiful birds soaring over the tranquil surface. We sat and talked for about an hour and he told us his full life story. He has been a refugee since he was around fifteen, and he is now thirty-one. He has been fleeing his entire adult life. He had a woman he loved but he had to leave her in Tanzania. He is alone with great ambitions to be resettled in the United States. He told us he wants his life to be so great that it is enshrined in a movie, with him as the director. I can only hope his dream one day comes about.
After our visit to the lake, Whitney and I parted ways with Shirwa and headed to the Ethiopian section of town for a meal, which was delicious, then we went to a Somali restaurant, which just happened to have fresh cake, a wonderful coincidence. After a few great meals we returned to my abode and watch “The Dark Knight.” And my fantastic Ugandan birthday came to a close. I interviewed Somalis and Congolese, had a conversation with a Rwandese, ate Ethiopian, Congolese, and Somali food, greeted some people from Burundi, and watched an American movie, all while in Uganda. I certainly had a birthday worthy of an International Relations major. I am sad I couldn’t have celebrated with my friends at home, but I think I had a pretty special birthday regardless.
-Muzungu currently being 21 in a far away land.
Dispatch from Nakivale (11/20/2010)
My first full day of being twenty-one was glorious. I was woken up at 6:30 a.m. with a knock on my door. I opened it up to see a little girl standing there with three jugs of something, I never found out what. She stared up at me. I figured she was looking for the regular resident of the house, but he wasn’t here. She stared up at me, looked to the right, stared up at me, looked to the right. This continued for quite literally three minutes until she looked up one last time, grabbed her jugs and scampered off. It felt like strange dream. I went back to sleep and awoke feeling lethargic and a little queasy, I guess like a regular night after your twenty-first birthday, but minus the actual previous night’s consumption of alcohol.
Today was set aside for exploring. It is looking more and more certain that we are indeed leaving Nakivale on Monday so we decided to get a better understanding of our surroundings. Whitney and I grabbed chapatti, bananas and water and set out on a walk. Nakivale is bordered on one side by a lake, and on the other large hills. Our goal was to get to the top of the hills to get a panoramic view of the lake and the settlement. We started off through the Sudanese section of town and soon his great green plains. There were large birds and sizeable herds of goat, the latter driven by young shepherds. After a lengthy jaunt through the bush, we reached a little town of Ugandans. We garnered a sizeable following of young children fascinated by the Muzungus in their midst. They followed us up to the base of the hills, until Whitney and I hid around a corner and scared them. They ran away but kept following, albeit at a distance now.
The ascent was relatively gentle and very rocky and we were passed on the way up by young boys carrying large bundles of sticks, presumably for firewood, on their heads. The cheerfully greeted us and went on their way. Upon reaching the summit, we were greeted with a simply magnificent view. We could see the entire valley, with the blue lake stretching out both left and right into the distance. The settlement was a scattered collection of tents and buildings that looked like it certainly did not contain 50,000 people. We enjoyed our quaint lunch in majestic settings. It made me miss hiking, while at the same time making me realize how out of shape I am. Many people think one would lose weight while spending time in Africa, I have certainly gained it.
Our day ended with a nice Ethiopian meal.
Oliver
My advisor in Nakivale is a man named Oliver. He is very secretive and paranoid and changes his phone number every two months so people (the Rwandan Government) can’t track him. He knows a lot of people in Nakivale so his help was invaluable in the first few days but once we got settled and talked to residents, we had countless contacts and people wanting and waiting to get interviewed. Good thing too, because Oliver has become a ghost the past few days, claiming that he has seen Rwandan officials at the settlement that even the Nakivale authorities don’t know about and that “something is going to happen while you are here.”
This is all made shadier by the fact that Whitney and I are more than certain that Oliver has scammed us quite a bit regarding our housing fees. He told us that for my housing, it was 250,000 shillings and for Whitney, who is in the nicer quarters, 300,000 shillings. We obliged and paid Oliver who was going to pass the money on to our hosts before we met them. Mistake. After a few days, John asked my home much I had paid Oliver because he, John, had only received 100,000 shillings as had Margret, Whitney’s hostess. When confronted, Oliver claimed he would talk to the right people and see what he could do about the money. So as of right now Oliver might just have scammed us of 350,000 Shillings, about 175 USD. We are, to put it lightly, livid.
To end on a more cheerful note… Walking around the settlement, Whitney and I get more than our fair share of attention. The most vocal and active attention givers are the children. They yell and follow us and always stop to greet us with a “Hi, how are you!?” One child stands out above the rest though for the pure hilarity he creates with his greetings. I would say the child is around two or three and he lives right on the edge of “New Congo.” I think he has a deep fear of me. But this brave little lad isn’t one to shy away from his fear, in fact, he embraces it, quite literally. With a look of absolute terror and pure unadulterated fear, he opens his arms wide, looks away from me and runs as fast as he can towards me. He collides, wraps, does a quick squeeze around my calves, as he only comes up to my knees, and then turns around and bolts back to the safety of his house or mother, whichever is closer. He then turns around and from his safe distance, waves energetically with the same look of terror on his face. Every time I see the little guy he does the same thing, even when I passed him on a street far away from his regular haunts. It makes any depressing day here a little bit lighter and certainly entertains.
-Muzungu currently scaring small children but at the same time garnering their affection while trying to get his money back from sneaky, shifty advisors as he come to the end of his time in Nakivale Refugee Settlement
I was supposed to be situated at the Nakivale Settlement yesterday, key phrase “supposed to be.” Whitney, Oliver (our advisor) and I went to the Refugee Desk Office in Mbarara to get our final permissions to enter the settlement. They welcomed us in and asked for our introduction letters, which we happily provided. The man in charge looked them over and then asked for the letters from the headquarters in Kampala… wait what?
A few weeks ago we were in Mbarara with our entire group, we were unable to enter the Nakivale Settlement because we hadn’t applied for permission early enough. We left with the impression that if we did want to go back towards the end of the trip during ISP time, then the permission would be ready by then. We thought wrong. After a number of frantic phone calls to program higher ups, as well as the head of Refugees in Western Uganda, it was determined that the only thing we could do was return to Kampala and go to the office there. Why the office in Mbarara couldn’t issue the permission letters in beyond me. We did everything in our power to try and convince them to have the permission faxed or something of the sort, but to no avail.
So we did the only thing we could do, a mere twelve hours after hopping off the bus from Kampala to Mbarara, we hopped on one going the other direction. This time our bus company of choice was “Swift Safari,” aptly titled indeed as we soared to Kampala. The suspension on the bus was down right terrible and we were bouncing the entire way their, which made sleeping and reading nearly impossible. For most of the ride I gazed out at the Western Ugandan landscape, very Lion King-esque, and did a lot of thinking about the absurdity of this kind of bureaucracy, what the heck we were going to do for the next few days, and about life back home. A lot of thinking got done on that five-hour bus ride.
We showed up in Kampala around 3 p.m. and made our way quickly to the Somali district of Kampala, which has a huge refugee population. Since Oliver, our advisor, is at this point in time at odds with the Refugee Office, he had us go with Victor, a fellow Rwandan refugee. We went in to the Office, were promptly searched by an armed guard, who asked if I was a Manchester United footballer (Paul Scholes), and if Whitney was my wife. When I responded to the negative about Whitney, he told me that I should certainly marry her to have an African bride.
We were directed to Miss. Stella after that to obtain our permission. She told us we couldn’t get it until Monday. We whined a bit and she said that we could get it by Friday but we had to be there in person to receive the letters. Again, faxing and phone calls would be valuable asset here and I saw both a phone and a fax machine. We had left all of our things in Mbarara as the office there told us that we would receive the permission the day of, no problem. That certainly wasn’t the case. So we grudgingly accepted the fact that there was nothing we could go, and in doing so learned the number one thing you need to have to survive with your sanity intact in the complex land of African Bureaucracy, flexibility.
We grabbed lunch at a Somali restaurant, with huge portions and stellar service, to talk over what we were going to do next. We formed a perfect plan. We had to head back to Mbarara that night because we had none of our things. The next day, Whitney was going to hop back on a bus to Kampala as she had some interviews she wanted to do there. She would stay the night Thursday, grab the letters on Friday, and head back on Friday night. I would stay in Mbarara and hold down the fort here while doing interviews with Refugees not in the settlement as well as with Refugee Settlement Officials. With this plan in mind we can hopefully make the best of a bad situation and still be productive. Unfortunately, it almost certainly means that we will miss Thanksgiving with the rest of the group in Gulu.
After lunch, we made our way back to the bus park and got on another bus to Mbarara for the five-hour trek back. It was 5 p.m. For two hours in Kampala we would have traveled a combined total of ten hours. Ick. But on the plus side, it meant that within twenty-four hours we had crossed the equator a total of three times. You don’t get to say that very often.
As bumpy as the ride was I fell asleep for the last thirty minutes, it had been a mentally and physically exhausting day. Whitney and I got back to our room and passed out. We woke up at 7, got ready, snagged breakfast, and then I walked Whitney to the bus park and saw her off. Time to start figuring our what I am going to do with my next few days.
-Muzungu currently in the Royal Price Hotel in Mbarara working through frustration on a number of fronts and trying to figure out my life for the next few days.
The Nile River. One of the great rivers of the world, the river that every schoolchild in America learns about as being sacred to the Egyptians. There is a certain mystique to this great stretch of water and I didn’t think the day would come when I would lay my eyes on this great river. But times are good in Uganda and the other day my group and I went to Jinja, a two-hour drive from Kampala, where the Nile begins it’s epic journey.
The Source of the Nile is an obvious tourist trap. The walkway down to the river is lined with stalls selling wonderfully overpriced souvenirs and tacky t-shirts. The whole site is sponsored by Bell, a brewing company, which has placed billboards and posters all over the place. Once we got past all of the shops and banners, we hopped on a boat that took us out into the Nile and upstream towards Lake Victoria. Along the way we were shown some wildlife in the form of Kingfishers (awesome) and Monitor Lizards (even awesomer). We landed on an island in the middle of the river that touched Lake Victoria and jutted out into the nascent Nile.
A little bit about the Nile. The first white man to “discover” the source was John Speke, a British Explorer. The Nile runs through three different countries: it starts in Uganda, makes its way through the Sudan, and then finishes it journey in Egypt. It winds for about 4,000 miles north, one of the few rivers in the world to flow in such a direction. It takes the water flowing out of Lake Victoria three months to reach the Nile Delta in Egypt.
A sign marked the “Official beginning of the River Nile” and a huge concrete block marked kilometer 0 of the Nile. Naturally we climbed all over the block and took copious amounts of pictures to prove our claims of having been at the source of the Nile. A considerable life goal achieved.
Bujugali Falls
After visiting the source of the Nile we went to lunch at a fine Indian establishment. We then headed to Bujugali Falls, a series of waterfalls on the Nile. There is a dam being build down stream of the falls that will be completed next year, upon completion the falls will be submerged below the reservoir and will be lost.
We were lucky enough to catch the view. The most amazing part of the section of the river is the pure volume of water that passes by at any given moment. The waters are roiling and you can watch the current take bits of vegetation and shoot them along the surface at an incredible rate, one can only imagine how powerful it is under the surface. While we sat in awe of the power of the river, a local man came up in a pair of shorts, holding a Jerry can. For 10,000 shillings, or about five dollars, he was willing to descend the Falls using only a jerry can for buoyancy. I personally didn’t want his blood on my hands if he failed in his suicidal quest, but others in my group were certainly ready to pay to see this feat. So pay they did, and swim he did. The current slowly grabbed him and then yanked him down the falls. He disappeared for a good four or five seconds in a huge white wave, but he popped right up and floated to safety. He emerged smiling and 10,000 shillings richer. We later found out that 1 out of 5 of the men who do this die while performing this insane stunt. If they lose their grip on the jerry can, the water pushes them to the bottom and pins them. It blows my mind what people will do for a little money.
We had an hour to wander the falls but after 20 minutes we had seen all there was to see. So my friend Dani and I decided that the best course of action would be to go for a little swim. I mean when was the last time you got to swim in the Nile? We didn’t have swimming gear so we went in our skivvies, the locals just looked confused. We found a nice eddy away from the roaring river and immersed ourselves; we emerged really wet and really happy. Another life goal, down.
When we returned to the bus, our program coordinator looked at us and asked why we were wet. We told her why and she mentioned that we probably had just risked getting Bilharzias, a pleasant little parasite that attacks your liver and copulates eternally in your bowels. Our joy turned to out right fear. Robbie, always willing to cheer a fellow group member up, proceeded to read off the high-risk spots for the parasite: 1. Slow moving water, 2. Down stream from people washing clothes, 3. Where snails are visible, 4. Shallow water. Each one was like a stab to the heart; they all applied to where we had chosen to swim. Yikes. Two months in Africa and I had been fine but now I had to worry about contracting a parasite.
Kampala
So naturally I went on a hunt for anti-Bilharzias medication. Two pharmacies didn’t have it and they had been out of stock for two months, apparently its not very common in Kampala, only silly Muzungus contract the worm from swimming in the Nile a few hours away. But I finally found a place that had it, and for less than 75¢ I was cured of a possible parasite, wonderful.
A note about Ugandan Pharmacies: They are awesome. You walk in, tell them what is wrong with you, and they happily supply the needed medication, no prescription needed. And the drugs are incredibly cheap, and the most I have ever paid was three dollars for some cold medication.
On our last day in Kampala we had a 10-page paper due so most of the day was spent on that. But at night we went out to dinner as a group and came together as one for the last time for at least a month. The next day, our ISP started.
ISP
Tuesday was set aside as a travel day to our respective ISP locations. Most people headed back to Gulu for their projects while Dani headed down to Kigali (she will be missed), Robbie stayed in Kampala, and Whitney and I headed over to Mbarara.
Whitney will be my travel companion for the next few weeks and I couldn’t be happier to have her by my side. Whitney and I get along incredibly well.
We arrived at the bus park at 9:30 a.m. to catch the 10 o’clock bus to Mbarara. We were so happy to be on time, but Africa time was in full effect and the bus didn’t pull out of Kampala until 12:15 p.m. We just chatted and observed the crowd for the two and a half hours of down time. At one point, the Toto song “Africa” came on the radio, Whitney and I broke into a little rendition of the song, but luckily for the greater Uganda population, the bus was quite empty.
Once we finally set out, the going was good. It’s incredible to see the differences in roads between the regions. In Gulu, the roads and general infrastructure are terrible, but in Kampala and Mbarara (where President Museveni hails from) the roads are all being worked on and are smooth and unbroken. As nice as it was to drive on the roads, it was still frustrating to think about how everyone in Gulu suffers because of the favoritism shown by the president for the South.
Every time we pulled into a village or town the bus would be swarmed by people hawking their goods: water bottles, cokes, ground nuts, meat on a stick, biscuits, and in some cases, grasshoppers. The meat on a stick is incredibly tempting, bountiful bouquets of blackened beef. But in the selling process, the vendors attempt to reach up to the high windows of the bus and smear the meat all over the side; anything sanitary about the cooking process goes right out the window and renders it inedible to my weak western stomach. But they sure as hell look good.
The ride was incredibly pleasant until we were about an hour out and children started crying and it started to rain. The buses certainly aren’t airtight and the window I was next to started pouring water right into my lap, even though the window was closed. Luckily I had my rain jacket handy, the other bus patrons weren’t so fortunate.
Mbarara
After a very long travel day we reached Mbarara around 5:30 p.m. We decided not to get off at the bus park and wait until the bus reached the center of town. We made a bad decision. The bus passed right on through the center of town and out of Mbarara. We made a desperate attempt to stop the bus and the pulled over to the side of the road and dumped us out. We called our contact in Mbarara, Oliver, and he became very nervous about our location. He jumped on a motorcycle and buzzed over to our side of town. For the next hour he proceeded to tell us how worries about us he was. He took us to dinner and we noshed on meat on a stick (sanitary this time) and then set us up in the “Royal Prince Hotel.” For less than $7 a night Whitney and I both have self-contained rooms of much better quality than our rooms in Kampala. We are content.
We were hoping to stay in the Refugee Settlement tonight but it seems our accommodations are in limbo right now. After a recent forced repatriation of Rwandanese in July, Oliver, an advocate for Rwandan Refugees, has been at odds with the Settlement staff. So it looks like his role as my advisor got a little bit more complicated as he won’t be able to spend as much time at the camp as was originally planned. It looks like things will proceed normally though and we should have housing at the Settlement tomorrow night.
It’s been a hectic week but the ISP is finally upon us! I can’t wait to get to Nakivale tomorrow and get going! I hope all is well with you wherever you may be.
-Muzungu currently in Mbarara eagerly awaiting his first visit to Nakivale Refugee Settlement
So begins my stretch in Uganda. In a month and twelve days I will be on a flight to Terminal 5 in London. It’s amazing to think that I have so little time left! I don’t want it to end.
Leaving Gulu was sad, but at least I know I will certainly be back to see Jackie, my Homestay mother, and be able to walk the roads of Gulutown. Jackie was a wonderful person to stay with. She has seen a lot in her life; she grew up in Gulu, studied in Kampala, then in Holland, and has worked in Kenya, Uganda, and spent time in Southern Sudan for her work with War Child Holland and now ALIN. She is also an amazing cook. My last meal was French toast and bacon (awesome, right) and that was par for the course with Jackie. I can’t wait to get back to Gulu and visit her again!
My last night in Gulu was spent packing up my bags for the month ahead of me. A lot of people in my group are headed right back up to Gulu for their ISPs so they just needed a few things for our brief four or five day stay in Kampala. But I had to pack for the next month as I am heading right from Kampala down to Mbarara and Nakivale. It took a lot of shifting around but I was finally able to wedge all of my souvenirs, unneeded clothes, books and gifts into one big duffel and a small backpack. I fit my gear for a month on the road into one school backpack and one travel backpack. I have never, ever, packed so efficiently.
I was picked up by a cab from my house and dropped at “Gulu’s only Far Star hotel,” Elephant Graceland (and no, that is not a typo). We were supposed to leave at 10 a.m. but Africa time kicked in and we didn’t leave until 11:30ish. We all hopped into our choice of two matatus and set out on the supposedly five-hour drive to Kampala. The first leg of the drive went well, we made it over the Nile River with hardly any problems. I say hardly any but we passed a traffic officer less than an hour into our trip that cited us for “driving too close to the other taxi.” Sounds legitimate, right? After a 80,000 Shilling (40 USD) bribe, we made continued on our way.
But a few miles later, the matatu I was in started making seriously unhealthy noises. We pulled over, in prime baboon territory, and checked out the damage. The engine was hardly turning over but after a while we got up and running and pulled over in a small village where we met the other bus. For some reason, the agreed upon best course of action from our directors, was to merge the two buses and leave the hurting one behind. So, in a bus built for fourteen, we packed in eighteen full sized human beings and strapped all of our luggage on the top of the van. This van was “Lucy” from one of my earlier posts. Lucy has an unfortunate history of breaking down at extremely inopportune times, even when supremely under-loaded. But she performed admirable, and her driver, “Tycoon the Man” got us safely to Kampala.
After stints in Kigali and Gulu, Kampala is overwhelming. In any city there is the expected smoke and smog that comes from the cars and factories and such, but Kampala takes it to the next level. You know you have arrived when your every breath tastes slightly of taxi exhaust. You adjust after a while, but it is not a pleasant experience. The pace of life is quicker here as well. The streets are packed with cars and boda-bodas and simply being a pedestrian is no cakewalk. The boda-bodas often use the sidewalks as their own personal taxi stands and/ or shortcuts. You have to be on your toes at all times.
The morning of our first day was spent in class but then we had free time to wander the city. We headed to the most Muzungu part of town, Garden City, with the hopes of finding Internet, banks, and Forex Bureaus. I came to Uganda and Rwanda with all of my US currency in $20 bills. To my dismay, $20 bills get a considerably lower exchange rate than bills of a large denomination. For the past few months I have had to suck it up and take the lower rate because I was unable to find a place to fix my predicament. And then I discovered the wonderland that is Standard Chartered Bank. In Gulu and in Kampala they have performed the simple miracle of allowing me to hand them five twenties converting them nicely into two $50 bills. It makes my life a heck of a lot easier, not to mention cheaper.
With my ISP coming up I decided that I need reliable access to Internet during the next month. If I learned anything from Gulu, it was that power is a fickle mistress and it often goes out and takes the Internet with it. The same rang true in Kampala as nowhere we went had working Internet, or if it did, Internet that allowed quick access to anything. So I bit the bullet and bought a modem from Orange™. It works all over Uganda and it is wireless and really fast. I can use it to Skype no problem, which can’t be said for the other connections I have been using.
Our time in Kampala signals the end of our academic program and our time together as a group. On Tuesday we all head our separate ways to conduct our ISPs. We had our last lecture today, a fiery affair, and head to Jinja tomorrow to check out the source of the Nile.
Before I bid you adieu, I want to tell you about the incredible edible that is sugarcane. On all of the roadsides in Uganda, there are people with huge stalks of sugarcane. You can buy a whole stalk for 600≠ or about 25 cents. They all have machetes to get the peeling process started for you. The sugarcane itself is sold in sections about five to six feet in length. It has s very hard external casing that can be peeled off with a knife, or in some special cases, your teeth. The core of the stalk is white and when you bite in it is incredibly juicy and, of course, sugary. Once you chew the section for a while, you simply spit it out and take another chomp. It a delicious snack, even if it probably does a number on your teeth.
My next post probably won’t come until ISP period when I am situated in Nakivale!
-Muzungu currently in Kampala eagerly awaiting his trip and stay in Western Uganda
This experience has afforded us many opportunities to visit places that have been the source of much suffering and pain, and to talk to people that have seen a lot of hardship in their lives. In Rwanda, we saw genocide sites where up to 50,000 people were killed. We talked to survivors who watched their friends, parents, girlfriends, sisters, neighbors, and children beaten to death in front of them. And amazingly, sixteen years after the genocide, these people and communities have made huge strides towards reconciliation and rebuilding. Victims and perpetrators live side by side in what appears, at least on the outside, to be cohesive and functioning communities. As a visiting Muzungu, I was hardly ever asked by a Rwandan citizen to help them solve their problems for them. They were confident in their own abilities to make the best of their situation.
The other day we visited the Lalogi Internally Displaced Persons Camp. During the LRA War, almost 95% of Northern Ugandans were moved to IDP camps under the auspices of protecting them from the Rebels. The camps themselves were overcrowded which served to create a large number of sanitary problems: lack of access to water, inability to farm sustainably, and outbreaks of disease (HIV/ AIDS rates were at twice the national average in the camps). Social problems arose as well out of the change in environment that served to disrupt the traditional culture. The inability of men to provide for their families led to increased alcoholism. The inability to find a place to teach traditional methods of hunting and farming, among many other tasks, caused even more distress for the men. Women stepped in to complete the tasks that men used to perform and this led to increased gender based-violence, as the men were uncomfortable with the women performing their traditional roles. On top of all of this, Aid organizations were providing all of the food to the camp because no one was able to feed him or herself.
Out of all the frustration and uncertainty in the camps, coupled with the Aid organizations provisions of food and water, the people in the camps became dependent on outside aid. For twenty years many people were unable to provide for themselves and either were not taught or simply forgot how to be self-sufficient.
Today, of the thousands of people that occupied the camp, only a mere three hundred or so remain. The rest have returned to their original homes to figure out land disputes and the start their lives over again. Those who remain fear conflict when they return or simply don’t know how to provide for themselves.
The food aid to the camp was cut off in June of this year. The inhabitants of the camp were furious. Why? Because they felt they were not given enough warning by the powers that be. I asked if the Aid organizations had instituted any programs to teach the camp residents how to farm and support themselves before they left them on their own. They said yes, but their access to land in the camp was still limited.
After a few questions back and forth we came towards the end of our conversation. But before we left, the man who gave us a brief tour around the camp asked us what we had brought for them. He looked at all of us, and with in authoritative equally expectant manner basically told us that we were now expected to give them something. I mustered up a quick “we can be ambassadors for you to people in the U.S.” but that obviously did not satisfy him. We all left feeling, it sounds petty, but angry. Angry at him for telling us we needed to give them something, angry at the LRA for forcing them into such a situation as the camp, and angry at the aid organizations who created the culture of dependency here.
We are here to study the situation in Rwanda and Uganda. The stated goal of this trip has no service related aspect and at no point during any of our visits do we create the impression that we are an aid organization/ mission group/ volunteer group. But because of past experience and expectations built up over years and years of relying out outsiders, largely Westerners, whenever this man, and others in the same situation, sees a Muzungu they automatically think that they will get something from them. It is a crippling reliance. For twenty years they have relied on outside support, and it has stunted their work ethic and ability to support themselves in the absence of aid organizations.
It goes to show what is so wrong with the way aid is distributed in the world today. In so many instances large amounts of money are funneled in to projects that simply give goods to people. If a project like that continues for a long enough period of time, with out any attempts by them or the providers to change the situation they are in, then the recipients grow entirely dependent on outside aid. As the adage goes “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
As we left Robbie mentioned that “Everyone thinks about themselves more often than the rest of the world combined” and that “nobody cares more about your wellbeing than you do.” As cynical as they both sound, its true. The people we encountered at the camp are caught up in the mindset that everyone else in the world knows about them and is scrambling to help them. Unfortunately for them, that’s just not the case.
Ugandan Hamburger
So I love Ugandan food. The beef, chicken, rice, beans, malaquang (don’t ask), dodo, (see previous parenthetical remark), and potatoes. BUT I can’t say that I don’t miss American food. So the other day I went to Zoe’s Foodland, a semi-fast-food restaurant in Gulu. They have hamburgers. So, in an attempt to satisfy my American food craving I ordered the hamburger. The burger came and it looked delicious, complete with a sesame seeded bun, a valiant attempt at ketchup, and a side of fries. I took a huge bite, but what I tasted was certainly not hamburger, but not altogether unpleasant. After a few exploratory bites, I finally settled on it, it tasted almost exactly like a taco. I have also been missing Mexican food, so the little taste switch up was not totally unappreciated, in fact, I went back today because I was craving some Mexican food. But I now have a mission when I return back to the states… finding a legitimate hamburger.
-Muzungu about to leave Gulu for Kampala... and who is really missing hamburgers.
