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.
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