The end is near

Wow. Leaving in two days. It’s kind of starting to sink in a little bit. Tonight we have a group dinner, then tomorrow we have discussions and free time in Kampala, and then on Sunday we leave for Entebbe, where we’ll see the Botanical Gardens and have our farewell dinner before boarding my flight back to Boston!

The past week has been pretty relaxing. I got to Gulu on Sunday night and spent most of the night finishing up the final touches on my paper and preparing my presentation for Monday. I stayed with some of the girls who had stayed in Gulu for the past month, in this great house with electricity, running water, and even a kitchen – definitely different from my last Gulu experience! We spent all day Monday listening to each other’s presentations. Even though it was a good way to learn about what everyone did, I’m glad they separated the people who did research in Uganda from the people who did research in Rwanda – it would have been way too much!

With my presentation done early Monday morning (gotta love alphabetical order…), I had nothing to do for the rest of our stay in Gulu, so I spent some time exploring the market and got a couple of dresses made. Somehow, after Kampala and Kigali, muzungu café didn’t seem quite as wondrous as it had before. I have to say, I’m not a huge fan of Gulu. I had thought that it would be so cool, after hearing about it all the time and because it’s got the highest concentration of NGOs anywhere, but it turned out to be a lot different from what I expected. I think part of it is that I’m a city girl, which isn’t going to change just because I go to a different continent – Gulu’s a little too small-town for me. The town also doesn’t have a lot of natural beauty the way places in Rwanda do – everything is flat and dusty/muddy. I think I also expected that the small town aspect and the high number of NGOs would make it a very strong community, but honestly, I didn’t get that feeling. I didn’t feel like I knew a large portion of the population, and the NGO workers sort of had their own clique. A lot of the people in our group loved Gulu and thought of it as home, but I really didn’t feel that way.

So it was a bit of a drag to be back in Gulu, instead of exploring Kampala, but I’m glad that I got to go back to my homestay family for dinner on Tuesday night. Of course, they were thrilled to see me again, and quizzed me on my Acholi vocabulary (I didn’t do very well in this quiz). Somehow, there were even more children and extended family members there than before – it really amazes me how big families are here. Mostly it was nice to go back to remind myself of how long this semester has been and how incredibly much I’ve done/seen/learned while I’ve been here. When I was sitting in my usual chair in the big sitting room in the pitch dark, it reminded me of the reality of living without running water and electricity, which I’ve been fortunate enough to have at least partial access to ever since I left Gulu. Living in Gulu permanently would be so different from visiting it for a month, knowing that sometime in the near future you can leave and enjoy the luxuries you’re accustomed to.

I think one of the most striking things about being back in Gulu was how very different Northern Uganda is from Rwanda, or even Western Uganda. Even little things like accent, which people had told me was really distinct in Northern Uganda, but which I hadn’t been able to pick out until I went back there… The level of underdevelopment relative to other places we’ve been is both shocking and unsurprising (given that the region has been in conflict for the past 23 years), and consequently, day-to-day life is completely different. I think there’s such a tendency for people to think of Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, especially two countries that are right next to each other, as one homogenous place, even though there are so many differences.

Anyways, my overall impression of returning to Gulu was that sooooo much has happened in this semester, and it’s going to take a long time for me to even really understand all of it.

On Wednesday, we left Gulu for Murchison falls. On Thursday we went on a mini-safari and saw giraffes (which I think are really gorgeous), elephants, lions, baboons and gazelle-like animals. One baboon actually tried to climb in the window of our bus! Then we went on a boat ride to the waterfall, which is the main tourist attraction of Uganda. We saw a lot of hippos and crocodiles on the way, which frankly was much more interesting than the waterfall…

Now we’re here in Kampala, wrapping up our trip! I’ll write more soon as I keep thinking about everything that’s happened this semester.

Back in Gulu

I finished my paper! It's 64 pages, including two maps and two sample interviews, and has 148 footnotes. I also gave my 20-minute presentation this morning, so I am officially done! yay!

We're back in Gulu, though I'd prefer to be in Kampala. On Wednesday we're going to Murchison Falls, and then in Friday we'll be back in Kampala, and I'm coming home Sunday night!

Eid (11/27)

Today was the Muslim holiday of Eid, which is kind of like the Muslim version of Christmas. Yesterday, someone had told one of the boys in our group that there would be a big prayer service in the morning and that he should come and take pictures. I thought that this would be such a cool idea, but it seemed a bit weird and intrusive to take pictures of a big religious event that I wasn’t part of – especially because the Somalis are so religious. So last night, we asked someone on our way back from dinner at our usual place whether it would be ok to take pictures. He said that he would ask the organizers and meet us there in the morning a little before the start of the prayer session. At 7:30am, I was waiting on the playing field. It looked like the guy wasn’t coming, but then I bumped into the son of a woman I had interviewed. I explained what I wanted to do, and he said he’d go ask and see what he could do.

A couple minutes later, he came back and explained that it would be fine for me to take pictures, but that since I’m a woman, my head had to be covered for the ceremony. The boy took me back to his home, and his sisters did me up in full Muslim garb. As in, a full-length black robe, a dark brown cloth tied around my forehead, covered by an elbow-length black headscarf.

It was really bizarre to be dressed like that. The hole that my face fit through was a little tight, but otherwise the whole outfit was really comfortable. I got fewer stares and more encouragement than I expected, and for a brief time I could almost pretend that people didn’t notice this outsider – I almost felt anonymous, like I blended in, for the first time since I came to Africa. But it wasn’t the depersonalizing anonymity that people sometimes ascribe to headscarves (especially the burkha, which I don’t think I could ever wear), or other uniforms. Rather it was the sort of anonymity one feels when walking down a city street in the U.S. – i.e. exactly the kind of anonymity I’ve been craving. It’s been really frustrating to me that I can’t go anywhere without everyone staring at me, yelling “muzungu! How are you!” 29 times at me, and wanting to tell me all their problems. (Of course, now that I look at the pictures of me, I’m struck by how unlike myself I look and by how much I still stick out.)

The prayer session started around 8, with a line of men in long white gowns at the front of the field and a line of women in their flowing, colorful robes at the back of the field. I awkwardly pulled out my camera and hoped that no one was glaring at me as I started to take pictures of the women. A cluster of children – adorable girls in their best clothes with painted arms – came up and clamored for me to take their pictures.

Obviously, I couldn’t really understand any of what was happening in the service, and to be honest, I don’t know much about Islam. But especially standing back with the women, I was struck by what a distant, all-powerful being their God seems to be. I guess because I believe so much in holding true to personal, internal values and finding ways to make the basic values of any religion have meaning to you, personally, it seems very strange to me to stand in a line and bow down to a line of men in front of you, and to a loudspeaker blaring a prayer in front of them. It doesn’t seem to me to be a very personal religion. But as I said, I really don’t know much about Islam, and I definitely don’t mean to be criticizing their beliefs in any way – just that I don’t understand them and need to learn more.

After about 45 minutes, the winds were picking up, blowing the light, silky fabrics in the air and lifting the dust on the football pitch. Clearly a rain storm was about to break. We all hurried off the field and into Somali town, where I got to take more photos. At this point, anyone who hadn’t noticed me during the prayer service or who had been praying in one of the mosques instead got to see this muzungu in Muslim clothes taking pictures of everything with her fancy camera. For the rest of the day, people have been coming up to me and telling me how surprised they were to see me dressed as a Muslim or how beautiful I looked, or, in the case of many of the women, smiling at me in a confidential way as though to say that I’m one of them now. I guess it’s similar to the way people appreciate it when you make an effort to learn and use at least a few phrases of their language – I was trying out a part of their culture, and they seemed glad.

Thanksgiving

It (was) Thanksgiving, which means it’s time for a list of things I’m thankful for! I don’t want this to be an I-traveled-to-a-third-world-country-and-now-I-have-so-much-more-perspective-than-you list, and I don’t want it to be a list of things I miss from home – just a list of things in my life that I appreciate right now.

I am thankful for, in no particular order:
- Family
- Friends
- Having this opportunity to travel to Uganda and Rwanda
- Electricity
- Flushing toilets
- The Internet
- Commonwealth
- The circumstances I was born into
- Warm socks
- Feel-good movies
- People who hold me to high standards
- Independence
- Having the means and opportunity to work towards my goals, whatever they may be
- Ice cream
- All other Western food (if I list everything I miss it will take forever)
- People who can see past appearances
- Intelligent humor
- The idea that all people are equal
- Late afternoon sunlight
- My camera
- Being able to help other people
- Rainboots
- Skating
- Good laughter
- Interesting classes with good professors
- Alone time
- Being able to make decisions
- Café’s
- Good literature
- Baking
- Stephen Fry
- Nerdfighters
- Art
- Honesty
- Kindness
- Washing machines
- Stars
- Being able to drink water straight from the hose on a hot summer day
- Being able to communicate in French
- The opportunity to meet and learn from many different people
- Grocery stores and libraries that are open 24/7
- Blue Pilot Precise V7 Fine-tip pens (seriously, I came with a box of fifteen, and I’ve used all but two completely up)
- Boston
- New York City
- Ideas that are so cool and brilliant that they blow your mind
- The invention of the blog


It’s a bit strange that I’m “celebrating” Thanksgiving here in Uganda. Thanksgiving has never been a big deal for our family, but it started to make a lot more sense as a holiday when I went to college – a chance to come home and eat a home-cooked meal actually did seem like something to celebrate. Plus the Commonwealth Thanksgiving assembly/reunion of recently-graduated students is always such a highlight. Last year was especially great, when Britt came home with me and we went over to the Cash’s for Thanksgiving dinner. I’m really genuinely sad to be missing Thanksgiving.

Part of what’s so strange is that I’ve totally lost track of time in terms of what I would normally be doing right now in the US. Earlier it was a lot easier to imagine those beautiful crisp fall days with clear blue skies and brilliant foliage, going for runs down Riverside Drive, the start of school, going downtown to the Halloween parade… I could imagine early fall, but I’m really having a hard time grasping the fact that it will be winter when I get back – that I’ll be plunging into the Christmas season and will need to wear winter clothes. Thanksgiving is a bit of a reminder of the fact that it is getting colder by the day back home: something I don’t miss.

Tonight they opened the new canteen on base camp, and it’s so bizarre and out of place. It reminds me of a pool-side café at a hotel, only without the pool. In honor of the canteen opening, there’s a big party tonight, with big speeches thanking the various aid organizations that contributed to building the canteen – which will be primarily used by their employees. Now they’re playing a mix of Ugandan and American music (earlier they were playing Celine Dion and slow Michael Jackson songs – a clear sign that no one had come yet. Why do people always play slow Michael Jackson songs at the start of dances and stuff when no one’s there??). Anyways, the canteen really changes the vibe of being here.

Italian Somalia

Earlier this week, I went over to the house of a Somali guy I’d seen around and who had stopped me on the way home the day before. I’ve been trying to avoid eating at the refugees’ houses—even though it’s culturally polite to serve guests food when they come over—because they need the food more than I do, and I have no way of knowing how well it’s been prepared (a lot of refugees use water from the lake, which is green and has things crawling in it – yum!). So when he invited me over for dinner, I declined, but he made me promise to call him the next day. I figured I could at least get an interview out of it, so the next morning, I gave him a call. I quickly realized, as we were walking to his house, that his English was nowhere near good enough to do an interview, and I hoped one of his family members would speak English, or that we could make a quick visit. No such luck.

As we walked to his house, he took me to the houses of all of his relatives to say hi. When we finally arrived, I found a large Somali girl of eighteen lying on a mat with green facial cream all over her face, which lit up as she shouted, “America!! My sister!” She was so sweet and welcoming, but unfortunately, that was pretty much the entirety of her English. With no one able to translate for me, I figured I would try to make some sort of conversation for a short while, and then head out. They offered me tea, which I accepted so as not to be rude. We managed to communicate enough for me to give them my contact information, which I’m beginning to regret, and to establish that the sister was going to return to her large house in Kampala with two TVs after her interviews to be resettled in the US, and that I absolutely have to call her when I get to Kampala so that she can take me around. It took a long time for them to decide whether they would find me in Canada or the US (you would think refugees, of all people, would understand the idea of being born in one country, but living in another…), but eventually they agreed that I would pick them up at the airport in Boston when they arrive.

Kate and I have both been telling people that we have fiancés back home, in a (mostly vain) attempt to ward off marriage proposals. Naturally, the topic came up within my first twenty minutes of entering the house – are you married? It was then decided that my new Somali sister would marry one of my fiancé’s friends when she joined me in the US, and that the brother would marry one of my friends.

So that was all we talked about. In very broken, heavily accented English. For three hours.

Somehow they talked me into eating lunch. Considering that they weren’t exactly struggling to make ends meet, and the water they used to wash their dishes looked very clean, I figured I would probably be ok. Unfortunately, when they talked me into it, I didn’t realize that they hadn’t started making it yet. Or maybe it was ready sooner, but they figured that the longer they kept it away from me, the longer they could yell “America!” and “my sister!” and “you call me! Kampala! You call me!” at me.

I realize I sound very ungrateful for the way they welcomed me into their home. I’m really trying to work on being more patient with other people, but it’s a struggle. I’m so used to having alone time, or being able to go for a walk by myself and just be anonymous – something that is literally impossible here. As one of only a handful of bazungu in the entire refugee camp, I stand out. It’s such a strange feeling to have so many people want to be friends with you just because you’re white, and therefore wealthy.

On top of that, I’m just not that patient with people asking the same question over and over and over again. I think with this particular family, the issue was just language barriers, but it’s still frustrating to feel like people are taking up your time because they are hoping to take advantage of the opportunities a friendship with you could entail. I’ve also noticed that repetition is part of the slower pace of life here. The Ugandans make fun of us for always rushing everywhere, and they joke about Westerners who don’t take time to greet and chat with every single person they know when they run into them, regardless of whether or not they’re running late. Everything about life is slower here – Africa time. One of the manifestations of this fact is in the way people talk. They take a very long time to say not very much, partly through repeating things multiple times. Drives me crazy.

On an entirely different note, it’s difficult for me to feel sympathy for this particular family. The Somalis are definitely at the top of the refugee food chain. Very few of them farm at all, whereas most of the other refugees can barely afford to do anything but farm. Instead they run businesses or depend on their relatives in other countries. Their clothes, even their children’s clothes, are always clean and in good condition, but when you go out to the more rural areas of the camp, other children are half-naked, or wearing tattered, filthy rags. But the main thing that separates the Somalis from everyone else is their resettlement process.

The US has made Somali refugees a priority (the government determines a quota of people they will accept from different countries), and they are doing mass processing of the Somalis throughout the region. There is a staff of six UNHCR workers (who are the only other white people here, and they don’t even live in the camp) whose job is just to interview every Somali in Nakivale to compile their refugee claim, which will allow them to begin a lengthy interview process that ends, usually, in resettlement in the U.S. Since they’re interviewing all the Somalis, you have people like this family I was visiting who live comfortably in Kampala and only come to Nakivale to pick up some free food and do their interviews to get to the US. Personally, I don’t understand why refugees who are clearly doing alright here in Uganda are given priority over refugees of other nationalities who are bathing in and cooking with unsafe water, who are afraid of being killed in their homes by other refugees, who can’t survive on the food they are given so they have to go out and work for the Ugandan nationals – who don’t pay well, and have been known to rape refugee women, and the camp police can’t do anything about it.

But anyways, I finally told the family, as we were approaching two and a half hours since I’d arrived, that I really had to leave, lunch or no lunch, and they scrambled to bring me a heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Heaven. It turns out Italy colonized part of Somalia (something I didn’t know), and passed on all of their culinary wonders. Homemade tomato sauce, garlic… the only thing they didn’t pass on is the fork. For those of you who have never eaten pasta with your fingers, I can now tell you how it is done: insert two or three fingers into the pasta like the tines of a fork, grasp a few strands of spaghetti between each finger, and rotate your entire wrist a few times, cupping your hand to twirl the spaghetti around your fingers – much like you would twirl pasta on a fork. Then stick as much of it into your mouth as possible, and if your technique is really good, lick all the tomato sauce off your fingers as you pull them out of your mouth.

Tuesday market

There’s an amazing market every Tuesday about 45 minutes away from base camp, near where we were going to live, before we got housing in the camp. Last Tuesday, Kate and I walked to the market, after escaping a drunk old man who would not leave us alone (I got in a big argument with him about whether or not there was poverty in the US – I am learning to be more patient with people, but sometimes it drives me crazy when people won’t leave us alone because we’re white/rich… anyways). The walk to the market cuts through this open savannah that’s almost eerily nondescript. Every so often, you’ll bump into a herd of cows with gigantic white horns, usually accompanied by this completely incongruous pure white bird that’s somewhere between a duck and a swan. In the distance, we could see these tremendous purple storm clouds gathering over the mountains.

When we reached the market, a fine drizzle began to fall. Most of the vendors were pulling tarps over their wares, and we weaved through second-hand clothes and vibrant Kitanga fabrics, finding the pineapples just in time to negotiate the price down to 45 cents each and grab six of them before a wall of rain washed over us, drenching us immediately. There was nothing to do but head for cover. By the time we reached it we were already soaked to the skin, so we shrugged, said what the hell, and walked all the way back to base camp.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but Uganda is a country of mud. Gloopy, slippery, get-between-your-toes mud. We slipped along the dirt/mud roads, a pineapple in each hand, dodging puddles and begging each passing van not to splatter our already-dripping clothes. When we finally made it back, the rain was still pouring, monsoon-style, so we put down our things, took out some soap, and had a rain-shower behind the house. When we came back inside, I put on my thick, warm socks (oh my god I could not be more grateful that I brought them with me); we lit some candles for a nice rustic ambiance, and listened to the rain beat down on the tin roof.

Nakivale

I’ve finally gotten on the internet!! It’s been a long three weeks without any internet access, and apologies to anyone who’s tried to reach me during that time. It turns out that refugee camps don’t have free public wifi after all… I have a bunch of blog entries that I wrote during my stay in Nakivale so that I would remember stuff, that I’ll post bit by bit so it’s not an information overload. Also the next week is going to be pretty boring as I’ll just be writing up my paper (40 pages in about 4 days – piece of cake, but still boring), so this way I can still post interesting entries.

11/23:
I’ve now been at Nakivale for almost two weeks, and I really need to write down some of what I’ve been experiencing, so that I don’t forget it all. There’s just so so so so so much to say! I haven’t even been logging my work time (we’re supposed to keep track so that we can prove we worked for at least 120 hours) because between observations, casual conversations and formal interviews, it’s pretty much a 24-7 experience. It’ll take months to write everything I have to say about the past two weeks, but I guess I have to start somewhere…

I’m living on base camp, which is where all the aid workers (who are almost all Ugandans – a sore point with the refugees, many of whom are educated and unemployed) live. This is an ideal location because it’s right in the middle of everything.

To the left of base camp is Somali town and New Congo, which are both fairly “urban” settings, as the camp goes, with many shops and restaurants. We’ve been eating at this great Somali restaurant that has amazing tea, burger-type things slathered in mayonnaise, samosas, and these latke-like sweet cakes that are dripping in grease. There’s a tiny sitting space, and a window for people to come up and buy stuff street-vendor style, both of which are usually managed by a short, stout Somali man with glasses that everyone calls “Professor.” Every day we can hear the call to prayer go out through the Somali zone. Also, I think women look so beautiful in their headscarves. I definitely have issues with the perda, where everything but the eyes is hidden – Jeremy and I were talking about whether it can be considered an acceptable part of culture, and even though I don’t think I really have the right to tell them that they can’t wear it, I don’t think I could tolerate, say, a government that forced them to wear it. I guess I wouldn’t have such a problem with it if it didn’t come (for me, at least) with this loaded connotation of inferiority.

In front of base camp is the Sudanese zone, and to the right are the main offices of UNHCR and the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), which manages everything in the camp. UNHCR is building a new office, and it looks ridiculous. There’s a huge brick wall around it, with an imposing metal door, both of which are topped off with large metal spikes and barbed wire. Sends a pretty clear message. Further down the road is Isangano, which apparently means “meeting place” in Swahili. This is the one place in the camp where all the different nationalities come together. It’s mostly a commercial area, where people sell clothes, food, and basic supplies. Walking through Isangano is like walking through a photo exhibit. Actually, the whole camp feels that way, and it’s killing me that I’m not taking photos yet. Especially because I’m here as a researcher, I really don’t want to be seen as the-muzungu-with-a-fancy-camera-and-therefore-a-lot-of-money, so I’m going to wait until my last day and then just go everywhere in the camp, say goodbye to people and take photos.

Anyways, I’m living in a house with three other women, currently. Earlier, there was another girl, Kate, who was part of the other SIT Uganda group, who was staying in the room I’m in right now. She had been here for about a month when we got here, and she left a few days ago. At first, we were sharing this room, which is really more of a closet than a room, and is covered in bat poop and mostly full of random junk. I was sleeping on the floor, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy about having a mattress now. Having Kate here was really great because not only was she sweet, friendly and wonderful, she had figured out a lot of the basic stuff about the camp, so she could answer all the stupid logistical questions, and all the refugees love her – so helpful! [Incidentally, we discovered after a few nights that her mother has been reading this blog without even realizing that I was coming to Nakivale – what a crazy coincidence, huh?]

Base camp has electricity for five hours every night, from 7pm until midnight, which is perfect. On Friday and Saturday nights, there wasn’t any electricity and it was pretty painful. Naturally, I had decided that Friday would be a good day to get caught up on typing up my interviews, and had completely used up all my computer’s battery, so without electricity there was literally nothing I could do, and everyone else in the house had gone to Mbarara, the nearest city, for the weekend. I didn’t even have a book to read, plus I’m in danger of using up all my paper and pens, so I couldn’t even write stuff the old-fashioned way. Basically, I slept a lot. When power came back on Sunday, I could have cried of happiness.

Most of my time is spent interviewing people and trying to set up more interviews. So far I’ve done 28 individual interviews, and 5 group discussions, so I’ve spoken to a total of 63 people. I really need to talk to more Congolese, though, because they make up a huge proportion of the people here and they’ve probably got the most complex inter-group relations. I’ve been asking people about their relations with other groups of refugees (both other nationalities and other groups within their own nationality). I’m still not really sure what I’m going to write.

A fair number of people say that there’s no conflict because everyone is a refugee here and they’re all equal. When I was interviewing the Burundians, they usually said in individual interviews that nothing was wrong, but the group discussions became a litany of complaints about how the Burundians are treated worse than any other nationality and how their relations with all the other groups are terrible. Talking to the Sudanese and the Congolese groups that live nearby, it seems that a lot of times the tribal conflicts that drove people out of their country in the first place are replicated here, which makes a lot of sense. Then yesterday, I went out to the farthest village of the camp, Gisura, which is a very rural area. The farther you go from base camp, the more it feels like a standard village that we would drive through in rural Uganda. The people seem to be much more poor than the people who live near base camp, and they live as subsistence farmers. In Gisura, there are Congolese and Rwandans living together completely peacefully (according to the people I talked to – I want to go back and find out more), even intermarrying. So assuming that that’s actually true, and it’s not just a coincidence of the people I happened to speak to, I want to look at why these people are living peacefully while others are having so much conflict.

The diversity here is so incredible. The most common language is Swahili, followed by Kinyarwanda, English, French and probably Lingala – though I don’t know that it’s in that order. It’s really cool to listen to people talk in several different languages in one conversation.

Culture and Ethnicity

While we were in Rwanda, we were assigned a paper on Rwandan culture and ethnicity. We were supposed to talk to our host family and other Rwandans about how they perceive their identity and what it means to be Rwandan. I had no idea how to approach this paper, especially because issues of identity are so sensitive here – it’s absolutely unacceptable to ask someone if they are Hutu or Tutsi – and my family had not been very open to discussing it. My family has always avoided answering any questions on identity, and at most repeated the official line that everyone is Rwandan now – that Hutu and Tutsi don’t matter any more. But I really have a hard time believing that people can so easily forget a classification that was once life or death, and which now, in the eyes of the outside world, separates victim from killer. Finally, after many attempts to steer the conversation in the direction of identity, we sort of stumbled on the topic unexpectedly, unintentionally, and at first jokingly. We ended up having a really amazing conversation, in which a lot of my questions about this issue were (mostly) resolved.

My host family was anticipating my return to the US, where they imagined that my friends and family would be curious about life in Africa. They were suggesting ways to describe Rwanda, and proposed, “Rwanda: the land of a thousand hills and a thousand problems.” I was so surprised that this was their immediate suggestion, because this is not at all how I see Rwanda, and all my previous conversations with my family and other Rwandans had led me to believe that the Rwandese were very proud of their development over the past fifteen years. My mother amended: “the land of a thousand hills, a thousand problems, and a thousand solutions.” But even then, my host father objected, “But those solutions are just solutions that we’re searching for, not solutions that we’ve actually implemented.” Again, I protested, and my mother began to describe what she called the “Rwandan mentality,” a will to constantly find solutions, move past old problems, and focus on the present. I asked whether Rwandans were finding solutions to their problems or trying to forget them, and she laughed as though she understood that I was hinting at the policy of creating a new Rwandese identity to replace Hutu and Tutsi identity. She told me that they’re trying to find solutions to all their problems, but some are so difficult that they have to just give up on finding a solution and try to forget about them instead. When I asked what those difficult problems are in Rwanda, she laughed so hard that I was sure she knew I suspected post-genocide recovery and identity was one of them. I believe she meant her answer to be a metaphor for the issue, but even if it wasn’t intended that way, I still think it’s an appropriate interpretation.

She told me that sometimes people don’t have enough food to eat multiple meals a day, but even if you’re hungry, you can still bathe, put on clean clothes, and go out into the world as though you’re fine. It isn’t necessary, she said, to sit around and cry about being hungry, nor is it important to tell everyone that you’re hungry. Even if you never forget that you’re hungry, you can’t allow it to keep you from moving forward in life. This seems to me to perfectly describe Rwanda’s attitude to the genocide and Hutu/Tutsi divisions: even though people will never forget the genocide, and will likely remember their identity as either Hutu or Tutsi, they are trying to keep those problems of the past from destroying their future.

In an ideal world, it would be possible to erase the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi, and to include everyone in a positive Rwandan identity. Rwanda simply can’t rebuild on the identity of Hutu and Tutsi, because those groups have become much too closely associated with genocidaires and victims, respectively. I think that my family has been so reluctant to tell me which group they belonged to because they are expecting me to judge them or make assumptions about their experience during the genocide based on that classification. One of our lecturers told us that people have positive views of what it means to be “Rwandan,” but rely on stereotypes to describe “Hutus” or “Tutsis.”

Because the “Rwandan” identity wasn’t imposed by a colonial power or the outside world, I think it’s much more likely to be accepted than assignments of Hutu and Tutsi based on nose size, height and number of cattle. Especially given Rwanda’s experience with international interventions (the UN Mission during the genocide, UNAMIR, basically couldn’t do anything because of its limited mandate; the French Operation Tourquoise did nothing to stop the killings and let all the genocidaires get safely out of the country), it’s understandable that Rwandans would opt for a solution that comes from within. As the lecturer explained, “we alone know best where we come from, and we alone know where we want to go.” In an ideal world, we wouldn’t even notice our hunger and it wouldn’t prevent us from being productive members of society.

But just like it’s impossible to fully forget that your stomach’s empty, this idea of patching up Hutu and Tutsi tensions with an inclusive Rwandan identity isn’t going to be easy. One of the main problems, as I see it, is that it’s only being implemented in Rwanda itself, not among the Rwandan diaspora, including the many refugee camps in the region. Hutu and Tutsi identities are still relevant in other countries, such as Burundi and if Rwanda succeeds in convincing refugees other countries (such as Uganda) to return, it will have to find a way to integrate people who are in those camps because they fear persecution as a Hutu. Maybe the fact that all Rwandans speak Kinyarwanda will help the country create a unitary identity of Rwandans-as-Kinyarwanda-speakers. But then that identity would exclude those who have lived abroad and learned Kiswahili or other foreign languages.

Not to mention the fact that many people within Rwanda are still struggling to move on from the genocide. Just as you never forget your hunger, so have Rwandans not yet found a way to forget that they are Hutu or Tutsi. My friend’s sister, who is Tutsi, told my friend that her boyfriend is “different” from her – which was clearly a euphemism for Hutu. It’s so strange to me that she was not even able to say it outright, but then people can turn around and say that Hutu/Tutsi distinctions don’t matter. She also said that if her parents knew she was dating him, they would disown her. I hope that this speaks more to a generational gap than a deep-rooted inability to overcome prejudices. The fact that she is able to date him means that she at least is able to see beyond Hutu and Tutsi, even though she is definitely old enough to have lived through the genocide.

In the end, I think it’s still important to implement these policies, and to be patient – just as the hungry person should still live his or her life, not sit at home and cry. It took many people a long time to make Hutu and Tutsi identities meaningful, and to manipulate them to the point that one group would attempt to completely eliminate the other. Of course it’s going to take a long time to undo that work. One of the contradictions of constructivist theory is that it assumes that identities are fluid and subject to change, that we can “construct” identity - but then that these identities become solidified and cannot be changed. If colonial authorities could construct the Hutu and Tutsi identities, this binary can be deconstructed by Rwandans.

When I see Rwandan art and dance, I’m most confident that Rwandans can be united. The Rwandans are so proud of their traditional dances – as one of our lecturers, told us, Rwanda often wins international prizes for their dance. As I mentioned before, dance would be such a great tool for recovery because it can be a really inclusive activity. Dance is a really essential part of what it means to be Rwandan. Art and dance existed long before the colonial era – before Hutu and Tutsi meant more than an economic distinction – and art actually apparently had a hard time during the colonial period. Art is a common, shared experience, that has the potential to unite people despite all obstacles. In the end, even though I think that Rwanda hasn’t fully accomplished its goals, and that there are many challenges ahead (such as including refugees), I agree with the idea of diminishing the importance of Hutu and Tutsi, and I think it’s possible.

Rwandan development policy, Jeffrey Sachs and the Millenium Village Project

For one of our lectures, an advisor to President Kagame came to speak to us. It was actually one of the most interesting lectures, because he did feed us exactly the government line for the whole thing – but it was interesting to hear that line, straight from the horse’s mouth (more or less) and to know that we were hearing that line.

He was also good because there were some times where he made it clear that he didn’t really agree with the official line – for instance, when someone asked about the massive human rights abuses (some people suggest it may even have been genocide) conducted by government forces against Hutu interahamwe, FDLR rebels and civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He said, “Well… I don’t know. The official line is that the refugees were told to come back. Some didn’t want to, so the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front, i.e. government forces] pursued them there. In the jungles of Congo, there was collateral damage, but many died of hunger and disease, not bullets. No one can say for sure who was killed by RPF.”

Naturally, he painted a glorious picture of Kagame’s government, as do most Rwandans I’ve spoken to. Personally, I’m still not really sure where I stand on the issue. On the one hand, I have so much respect and awe for the amazing recovery that Rwanda has made – Rwanda was a failed state after the genocide, everyone thought it would turn into another Somalia or something, because there was no law and order, no judiciary, no education system, no hospitals, and all the professionals had been killed or had fled. How do you even begin to think about recovering from that? And yet, fifteen years later, Kigali is immaculately clean, modern, and the country as a whole has been peaceful for I think about 6 years. So I have huge amounts of respect for that progress.

On the other hand, the evidence implicating the RPF in repression of freedom of speech and political opposition is very strong, and the Rwandan government doesn’t make much of an effort to hide it, instead excusing it as “necessary” to avoid ethnic divisionism and another genocide. I guess this gets to the heart of Plato’s Republic: is it better to have an authoritarian regime that does good for the people (as I genuinely believe the Rwandan government does) or a democratic regime elected by people who don’t know what’s best for them? But then who’s to say that the Rwandese people don’t know what’s best for them, and that we outsiders know any better? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that any argument that freedom of speech and political pluralism must be restricted for the good of the people hinges on the assumption that Rwandans are easily manipulated, obedient and docile people – who are either only supporting the RPF because they have been brainwashed, or who would quickly be led to support positions they do not believe in. I absolutely do not believe this to be the case, and in fact I think that restrictions on freedom of speech belittle the intelligence of the Rwandan people.

Plus, Kagame’s policies have generally been terrible for DRC, where most of Rwanda’s military problems have been exported to, exacerbating conflict in the region. That’s a whole separate issue.

Anyways, back to the presidential advisor. He talked a lot about development policy, to the point that the whole section on the government’s current and future goals was about development issues. Development has been very visible in Rwanda, and has contributed a lot to post-genocide recovery. Throughout the country, there’s a major emphasis on development – on TV, in public discourse, etc. I wonder in Rwanda is trying to focus on the problem of poverty to avoid thinking about other problems. Poverty is a “useful” issue in that it’s shared by both Hutu and Tutsi, creating a cross-cutting cleavage.

The policy that the lecturer described as Rwanda’s goals seemed to be taken directly from Jeffrey Sachs – I felt like I was taking notes for his class, “Challenges of Sustainable Development” again. The basic principle of Sachs’ argument (Daniel, you can check me on this) is that we need to give more aid to Africa to get it out of its current poverty trap, which is perpetuated by very high population growth (people have a lot of babies because they are a source of labor and there’s a high infant mortality rate, but then they can’t afford to feed and educate all of their children – something I saw a lot of in Gulu), and low levels of technology and human capital. The idea is that if Africans can spur economic growth through a sort of “Green Revolution,” improve access to healthcare and education, and decrease population growth, the third world will develop. Rwanda’s goals include increasing GDP and per capita income, decreasing population growth and density, and moving half the country’s subsistence farmers to paying jobs through mechanization and greater education.

Given that Sachs’ view of the world is currently informing the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and is backed by several big name Western donors, articulating these particular policy goals seems like an ideal way to attract Western donors. Currently,
40% of Rwandan national budget is foreign aid, though the government is trying to reduce that amount. I wonder if governments/donors give Rwanda so much because of their guilt over doing absolutely nothing during the genocide? Is this also what allows the RF to get away with political repression, as scholars and NGOs like HRW argue? Or, do donors give a lot because Rwandan government is relatively responsible, if repressive?

These development theories also form the basis of the Millenium Village Project, which I learned about in Sachs’ class. (Actually here’s a cool link to a simulation of a village, in which you try to keep villagers alive and healthy, and avoid environmental degradation by allocating time and resources: link) So when our program director told us that we were going to go see the Millennium Village in Rwanda, I assumed that it would be sort of like the simulation – we would see the effects of upgrading technology, and learn about the challenges the village faces in terms of being sustainable. My understanding of the MV was that it acts as a test case to see if these policies can work, and that the UN hopes to see a ripple-effect to other villages in the area.

Then we got there, and discovered that it was just a tourist attraction. There was absolutely no information about the UN project or its goals/effects/etc. We met a farmer, who showed us how he farmed cassava and gave us a taste – but no sense of how his farming techniques have changed. We met women who did basketweaving and they let us do some, which was so cool (I love the basketweaving here!) but they were only there because we were there, and as soon as we left, they did too. It felt so staged, like it was just an opportunity for them to encourage us to buy their products. Finally we saw a “reconciliation village” – where genocidaires and genocide survivors were living together. There was a bunch of traditional dance, and then two people stood up to give speeches, but they felt so rehearsed [also I don’t like the way the genocidaire was a man and the victim was a woman]. The only really startling thing was that the “genocidaire” told us that when he and others like him came to the village, they assumed they would live with the victims for a short while and then finish the job they had started. Over time, however, they’ve apparently come to a mutual coexistence, and the killers no longer plan on murdering their neighbors.

At first, I was so turned off by the village, because it was so completely different from what I was expecting to see. But I began to wonder if it was maybe ok as a tourist attraction. On the upside, tourism does bring money to the villages, and the tourist cooperative that operates in the village was started by villagers on their own initiative, from what I understand. I was at first indignant that tourism is not “sustainable” – but then neither is development aid usually… Maybe an internal solution is better than an externally-imposed one.

However, I still object to the tourist aspect of the village because that is not the point of the project. This cannot be a model for other villages, because it isn’t widely replicable. The market for underdeveloped village attractions is not big enough to support every single village becoming one – and even if it was, we would still have Africa supported by rich Western tourists coming to look at the primitive beings. Somehow this does not seem to be the best solution. I’m also not entirely clear on why the UN should be pouring money into a tourist attraction…

Ultimately, I was just struck by the absurdity of us telling them how to live.

Overview

Ok, a substantial update about Rwanda is so ridiculously overdue that it would take me the next two weeks to write everything about my last couple of weeks in the country. A quick overview: after Kibuye, we had a week of classes and writing papers. The following weekend consisted of a “cultural exchange” with our host brothers and sisters (they showed us traditional dance, we gave a presentation on our states of origin, sang “Take me out to the ballgame” and some girls did a dance to Beyonce’s “single ladies” and then two girls showed off their hula-hooping skills), a party put on by the host brothers and sisters, a Halloween party at which my phone and $10 were stolen and after which I won $60 at the casino, and a trip to the gacaca courts. The last week was spent scrambling to finish papers on time and get everything together for the independent research project.

We were officially set free on Saturday, after a homestay party at which Beni ran around like the crazy child he was and was SO CUTE and I miss him SO MUCH!!! I had too much to do before I could go, and it’s impossible to get to or from the refugee camp on weekends anyways, so I stayed an extra two nights in Kigali with a few of the girls who are staying there for their ISPs (independent study project). It was absolutely lovely, and I’m definitely going to miss Rwanda! That said, I am sooooo excited for the refugee camp! We went back for the first time today, and I’ll write more about it later, but the point is, it’s going to be so amazing.

With that (very brief) overview out of the way, I figured I’d write a bit more about what I learned in Rwanda and sort of generally what I’m taking away from Rwanda. I was so fortunate here to have a family that I could really communicate with (in some ways it was much easier to communicate in French here than in English in Uganda, where even though we spoke the same language, there were so many barriers to understanding each other). My family in Rwanda was genuinely interested in life in the US, my opinion of Rwanda, and learning more about me. In Gulu, a lot of the time my homestay dad liked to tell me stuff about the US, with no interest in hearing a somewhat more informed opinion. My family here was so much more interested in learning about my real family and issues in the US – we would talk about some of the major problems and debates in Rwanda right now, and in exchange I could tell them a bit about race problems, or the self-perpetuating cycle of the wealth gap in the US. I really appreciated the fact that they were open to a dialogue, and I could share with them some of my experience.

The next couple of entries are going to be about major issues in Rwanda right now, to sort of wrap up what I got out of staying there. Sorry they’re going to be pretty boring and educational…

Rwanda pictures!

This is the center of town in Kigali:


This is a market near my neighborhood in Kigali:


They are really into American pop culture here:


Scenery at the Murambi genocide memorial:


Rwanda is also full of gory reminders of the genocide. Skulls at Murambi:

More pictures!

Here are a bunch of old pictures from Uganda

This is Gulu:


This was at the IDP camp in Northern Uganda:


Typical road condition in Northern Uganda:


One of the classiest institutions of Gulu:


Muzungu café!

Wisdom teeth

Whoever said getting their wisdom teeth out was easy is either way more tough than I will ever be, or had a much more effective anesthesia than I did. The area around my upper left wisdom tooth had been hurting since about Friday, so on Monday, I went to get it checked out. I went to King Faisal’s hospital, which is supposedly one of the best hospitals in Kigali – not that I have much to judge by. The building was a bit old, but otherwise it seemed to be modern, well-equipped, clean, etc (in my obviously expert opinion). The dentist there told me that the reason my mouth had been hurting was that the gum was coming in between my two wisdom teeth so I was basically chewing on it all the time, and the best solution would be to get one of them taken out. So they took an x-ray, again told me how lucky I was that my wisdom teeth weren’t impacted, and recommended a different doctor in a different hospital.

Wednesday morning, I went off, slightly apprehensive but generally thinking that this would not be a big deal. I waited in a less modern, more crowded hospital while the dentist saw the other patients. Finally it was my turn, and the very friendly Indian woman took one look at my xray and said, “well, all your teeth are impacted – which one did you want to get out?” She gave me two shots of local anesthetic, which I was fairly convinced weren’t doing anything because I could still feel everything… It was the most incredibly painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and that includes falling off a cliff, and… well, every other painful experience ever. She used a pick-like thing to try to wiggle the tooth out, which was so painful, and every time I told her it hurt, she’d stop and then have to start all over again. After an eternity, I asked if we were at all close, got a look, asked if we were really far, got another look, and then she just said, “I haven’t even started yet.”

I felt so bad, because I was such a wimp about the whole thing, and definitely drove the dentist crazy – at one point she asked if I wanted to be sedated… I think she was hoping I would say yes. Finally they switched to a clamp-thing to pull the tooth out, which was much faster, if just as painful. They stitched it up (at which point we discovered that the local anesthetic actually didn’t do anything because I wasn’t supposed to be able to feel them putting the needle in, but I definitely did) and now it’s totally fine. It hasn’t hurt at all since I got it out, so that’s good. I am so grateful for the program assistant, who held my hand (or rather, I almost crushed his…) and took me out to ice cream before going back to class.

So now I’m ¼ less wise.

Finally, a substantial update!

Ok, long time no update! I’m settling into life here in Rwanda. Last week we went to a ton of memorials. After the Murambi genocide site, we stayed in Butare for some classes and went to the National University of Rwanda. The library there is tiny (like, the size of the library in Sherborn, or maybe, maybe one floor of the Barnard library). I mean, I knew it was kind of a bad sign when the academic director told us that SIT had worked out a deal where we were supplying them with books, given that our “library” consists of about fifteen books… It was still so nice to be in a real library – we were all geeking out about all the books. They were mostly in French, and I found a bunch of the books we read in the French literature class I took last semester – and the geekiness continued…

We spent the weekend back in Kigali. On Saturday I spent most of the day in town doing homework. There’s a really great café here called Bourbon café, which feels kind of like a nicer version of Starbucks. It’s supposed to have internet, but I can never get it to work. Oh! Question for my tech-savvy friends: whenever I try to connect to a wireless network (or this morning, an Ethernet cord) my computer says that it’s getting a full signal, but then it won’t load any web pages. The “Network” part of System Preferences tells me “AirPort does not have an IP address and cannot connect to the Internet,” or that it has a “self-assigned IP address and may not connect to the Internet.” How do I fix this??? Anyways, we spend a lot of time at Bourbon, and I try not to spend absurd amounts of money on familiar muzungu food (what I wouldn’t give for a burger…)

On Monday we went to Gisozi memorial, which is the memorial for all victims from the Kigali area. The outside has a really beautiful garden and fifteen mass graves, and the inside is like a museum. This is the only memorial in Rwanda that has information the way most Western memorials would. There’s a large exhibit explaining the history of the genocide, including a few videos of survivors’ stories, and a smaller exhibit that tells the stories of other genocides around the world. There’s a room full of photographs of those who died, and the most moving genocide memorial I’ve seen yet: a tribute to some of the children who died. The people who designed the memorial (including our program assistant!) chose a handful of children and displayed their photos, along with their age, their favorite food, their usual behavior, their favorite toy, and how they died (usually “hacked to death with a machete”). If Murambi felt too depersonalized, Gisozi was a conscious effort to put faces and personalities into the bodies, and therefore was much easier for me to relate to.

On Tuesday, we saw a few mass graves at an organization whose role is to help genocide survivors and orphans, and other post-genocide recovery initiatives. Then we went to a church where Tutsis had sought shelter shortly after the genocide began. There had been two survivors, children who hid under the bodies of others. Inside the church, all of the clothes of the dead had been piled up on the benches, which really gave a sense of scale. I kept imagining how small my clothes would be piled up – and then imagining that small pile multiplied so many times to fill the whole church. Behind the church were two mass graves, whose dark, steep corridors we could walk through and see the many coffins, skulls and bones heaped up. Religion is one of the things I cannot understand about Rwanda. People were very religious before the genocide, and many Tutsi fled to churches as a place of refuge, not realizing that the fear of God did not restrain their Hutu killers in the least, and that the very church leaders to whom they went for guidance and protection were actually often collaborating with the genocidaires. The church has been deeply implicated in the Rwandan genocide since the colonial era, a fact which, you would think, would instill in the Rwandans a great sense of betrayal and mistrust in the church or God. On the contrary, the Rwandans are just as religious as ever – my “parents” go to mass every morning. Seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary over the heaps of dead people’s clothes just made me wonder how Rwandans could go back to an institution that was so complicit in their suffering.

Some other tidbits of Rwandan life:

TV: My family has their TV on all the time. Most of the time, it’s playing the news, which it gives in Kinyarwanda, then French, then English. What’s interesting is that the news is slightly different in each language. Even though I don’t understand the Kinyarwanda, it’s still clear that they emphasize different things in the different languages. The vast majority of the news is centered on the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, and government events/policies. There is a bit of international news, but usually the only American news is that which relates to Rwanda or the region. It’s so different from Uganda, where the majority of what we heard on the radio was either very local or related to Obama. Museveni was rarely mentioned, except during the riots in Kampala.

When the tv isn’t playing news, it shows traditional dance. It feels very strange to be in a place that doesn’t have famous works of art or amazing architecture, or any of the sort of “culture” we expect to find when we visit a Western capital. That’s not because the Rwandans aren’t interested in art, it’s just that they channel their artistic capacity into their dances. It makes sense, too, given that our conception of art is so individualistic, whereas dance can be a really inclusive, communal activity. Dance is a really essential part of what it means to be Rwandan, and the Rwandese are masters. There’s a Rwandan pop group, Alpha, that recently won a competition, and the clip of the lead’s dance plays on the tv at least once a day. My three-year-old brother is learning their moves, and I am positive that he is a better dancer now than I ever have been or will be.

Food: The meals they serve here are really different from how we eat in the US, and food here is really different from Uganda. Breakfast is tiny, a few pieces of bread with butter or honey, and this liquid porridge stuff (which I really like). However, my family doesn’t eat lunch on the weekends until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, by which point I am starving! When we’re on “excursions” with SIT, they sometimes give us “packed lunches,” which usually consist of bread, a boiled egg, and a samosa – which is never enough. For dinner, we get this carb buffet of rice, pasta, potatoes or French fries (Sarah, you would love it here; I eat fries at least once a day), beans, mushed spinach-greens, and chunks of meat floating in a soup. I eat a huge plate (it all tastes pretty good if you mix it all together), and my family gets so offended when I don’t take seconds or thirds. My “mother” eats almost a whole plate of each of those things. I’ve tried so many times to explain to them that even one of these plates is more than I would eat for a normal meal in the US, but they still don’t get it. Now I’m the last person to care about nutritional value, but the amount of carbs I’m eating here is really starting to get to me…

All of that memorial visiting, plus a bit of homesickness, was really draining, and it was with much relief that I packed to go to Kibuye, which I had heard was beautiful. Oh my god. I wanted to stay forever. Lake Kivu is a stunningly turquoise color, there are brilliant flowers everywhere and the hotel we were staying at was like this Mediterranean resort nestled in the mountains. I went swimming every day, and the rest of the time was spent doing homework, going to class, or reading for pleasure. On Thursday, our second day there, we met another muzungu who was touring the region and who gave us a copy of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’d read most of the book once, but never really got into it, and I figured that given it’s status as Sarah’s favorite book of all time, I should give it another try. Sitting out on the patio overlooking the lake with the sun shining down and a warm breeze blowing through, reading a good novel just for fun was one of the most exquisitely wonderful pleasures. I never wanted it to end.

So, on Friday when the program assistant told us that if we wanted to stay through the weekend, it would be $24 for a four-person room, I didn’t hesitate for a second. Fifteen out of the 28-person group stayed at least one night, and people left bit by bit until only three of us were left. We left on the last bus out on Sunday, and even that parting was painful. I got so much work done, had so much fun, got to know people so much better – it was worth every penny.

Hope this picture makes you all jealous:

Quick update:

On Wednesday we went to Kibuye, which is one of the most beautiful places ever. It's like paradise. I don't even remember the last time I was as happy as I've been here, so a bunch of us decided to extend our stay through the weekend. It will be a bit longer than I thought until I have good internet, but I promise updates and hopefully a picture early next week!

Kigali picture

There's been a request for more pictures, and right now the internet connection is pretty fast, so:


This is a pretty standard view in Kigali. This particular spot was at the Gisozi genocide memorial, which we visited on Monday. Almost everywhere in the city looks like this.

Well, that's all I have time for, but hopefully more will come later, maybe next week, as I'm not going to have much internet access for the rest of the week.

Retraction

So I got a lot of emails about the last blog entry, and I was so confused, because the last post that I wrote was about the genocide site. The post about beerfest was my friend Kim's, which was accidentally posted to my blog when she borrowed my computer. My weekend was nowhere near that eventful - sorry for those who were expcting "the full story"!

Murambi Genocide Memorial (warning: could be gruesome)

Yesterday we went to Murambi genocide memorial in Butare district near Burundi. On April 21st, 1994, 50,000 Tutsis who had been hiding in a school for two weeks were killed over the course of 48 hours. The memorial is really unique because some of the survivors came back to the site after the genocide and dug bodies out of one of the mass graves, identified them and laid them out in the classrooms, using lime to preserve them.

We walked through 24 classrooms, each one filled with distorted white figures that were somewhere between bodies and skeletons, and a terrible stench of decay that lingered in my nose for the rest of the day. I had expected that this memorial would bring the reality of the genocide home for me, like it would stop seeming like this distant, horrible thing that scholars have been analyzing for the past fifteen years, and start seeming like, well, a “real genocide,” whatever that is. I wanted to take some time to step out of the analysis of the genocide and appreciate the tragedy of what really happened. But it turned out that the bodies were so surreal and unhuman-looking that it’s still impossible for me to wrap my head around the violence that happened there. Some of the people still had bits of hair or clothes, and often you could make out some sort of facial expression – usually screaming. Some of the most poignant bodies were the ones where you could start to form a story of what happened, like the mother who was trying to shield her screaming baby. But for the most part, they just looked molten and ghastly.

I was more struck by the room that was filled just with skulls lined up, and a big pile of bones. Somehow the scale seemed greater, or maybe more manageable. I don’t know.

The school itself is in the most beautiful place. We were on top of a mountain, surrounded by other mountains, where inhabitants could hear the screaming fifteen years ago. The world was so still up there, silent except for some children on another mountain. When we got to the site, it was sunny and beautiful out, but soon the clouds moved in, and the breeze that felt like rain just made the site all the more calm. There was a tree there that looked almost like a bonsai tree the way the branches were completely flat and reaching out like a carpet of moss, poised on a little trunk. After I went through the memorial I sat under the tree, and there were all these birds that were flying around me, swooping in and out around my face. The world always seems more beautiful after witnessing the macabre and terrible.

I had so much difficulty wrapping my head around what I was seeing there, and I wanted to really understand it and feel all of the sadness and frustration of what happened there, instead of just filing the experience away to try to process slowly, later. I felt like I wasn’t really there, or like I just wasn’t making some crucial connection. I guess because these bodies which hardly even looked like bodies anymore were just faceless representations of people whose stories I can never know. Why is it so hard to feel empathy for people we don’t know? The only way I could really feel like I was relating to what had happened at this site, in the genocide as a whole, was by trying to imagine what it would be like to wait in this cramped classroom, weak and exhausted after two weeks of undernourishment and dehydration, terrified, and then to watch people, maybe people I knew, come and kill the people I loved and know that I was going to be killed and not be able to do anything about it. I had to place the people that I know and care about, the people who bring me joy, into that imagined/real scenario, in order to feel like I was even beginning to understand it.

But then I was really troubled by how challenging I found it to relate to these people, the people whose bodies were right in front of me, the people that actually died. Of course it’s harder to empathize with people you don’t know, but isn’t that part of the tragedy, that you don’t know them and no one else will ever know them? How could it be so easy to retreat into my own concerns and needs so soon after seeing this atrocity? I started to wonder if maybe I’m too selfish to really do humanitarian work or “make a difference.”

And then I started to think about why I was having a hard time empathizing, and I’m not trying to pass on the blame in any way or anything like that, but I do think that part of the problem is that I have spent so much time reading horrible stories and trying to look at conflict so analytically. Not to say that we shouldn’t be analyzing the causes and effects of conflict, because we absolutely should. But after reading so many explanations for how the genocide happened, all the different factors and all the different actors that are “to blame” – it has made the unthinkable thinkable, and I have to wonder if that’s always a good thing. So as I was thinking about the depersonalizing effect of scholarship and academia, I had the “why am I doing this/what is the point of academia?” revelation that I have been expecting this entire trip.

Only a couple of days ago, I was thinking about how strange it was that I hadn’t really had that revelation yet, especially given that it was only a year ago that I felt so frustrated by the Ivory Tower and so much like we should just be focusing our incredible privilege on actually helping people instead of just criticizing other people’s attempts at helping. I was half expecting to come out of this trip not wanting to go back to school and wanting to just stay here and work for an NGO or do something that would feel concrete. So I had been pleasantly surprised to find myself still looking forward to classes and scholarly articles and all that, until now. Not that I’m about to drop out of school, just that I need to think really hard and honestly about why I want to research refugees (and whatever else I do later in life) and what the effect of that research/work could be. Am I interested in refugees just because it’s interesting, or can I actually help them?

Recently I’ve been taking for granted that doing academic research naturally helps the subjects of that research because it raises awareness of their problems and directs attention towards them that otherwise wouldn’t be there. But now I’m questioning that assumption a little more. Especially because I know that NGOs and even more so big organizations like UNHCR are so resistant to change – as one of our guest lecturers in “Aid, Politics and Violence in Africa” said, they do self-analysis, come up with this report and recommendations for how they can do better, and then never look at it again – I have to wonder whether it makes sense to just read/publish reports on the failures of NGOs. Right now, I definitely think I want to do some sort of “concrete” work after graduation.

So that was my (very self-centered) conclusion/series of thoughts following my observation of how self-centered I am. At least I’m consistent.

Family in Kigali

Family in Kigali!

My homestay family in Kigali is so wonderful!! I have a “mom,” a “dad,” a 17-year-old brother who has been showing me around but had to go back to school today, a 16-year-old brother who is in Butare studying to become a priest, a 3-year-old brother who is actually insane, a 20-year-old sister who was adopted, a “grandmother” who doesn’t speak any English or French, and a few other people who are sort of in and out – uncles and aunts and household “help.” The father and the 17-yr-old and one of the uncles all speak various degrees of English, but most of the time we all speak in French because that’s the language we can all understand the most of. They have electricity and indoor plumbing, though they don’t get enough running water, so they have big basins of water in the bathroom and outside (it’s still sooooo much better than the pit latrine!!)

The first night I got there, we were hanging out in their sitting room talking about Rwanda, the US, why I decided to come here, etc. I had a cold, which was really draining for me… I was struggling to keep my eyes open. All of a sudden, all of the women came out of the kitchen with this big birthday cake that said “Happy Birthday Danielle B. 20 yrs” with 20 candles around the edge, singing happy birthday in three different languages! It was the sweetest thing ever!

On Saturday evening, the 17-yr-old asked me to show him how to use my computer. I quickly figured out that he was really just interested in watching music videos, and was very disappointed that I didn’t have any on my computer. He settled on listening to my (very limited) collection of R&B/rap songs, which prompted Beni, the crazy three-year-old, to start dancing around like crazy, jumping on the bed, throwing pillows and making gangster faces. It was actually one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. A picture is worth a hundred words, so hopefully this completely candid photo will capture some of the ridiculousness:



So not only was Beni running around like a chipmunk on hallucinogenics, but shortly after exhausting my R&B collection, my “brother” found the Michael Jackson songs. Before I knew it, my skinny-ass 17-year-old homestay brother named, of all things, Chaste, starts doing a Michael Jackson impression to Billie Jean. It was actually pretty good… definitely had the crotch-grabbing and hip jerking motions down. Awkward.

Beni is the funniest thing ever. He likes to jump around on the couches, stand on chairs and reach across the dinner table, spit out chewed up pieces of meat, play with my hair, pull my arm hair, run away from me, climb all over people, refuse to eat, etc etc. I don’t know how the family members put up with it – he would drive me crazy if he was my real brother, but since it’s all new to me, I think it’s hilarious. I know I’m such a bad influence and that my laughing at him just encourages him, but I can’t help it. He’s started running around yelling, “My seestah. Nevah fohget you.” So cute!

So that’s basically the family. They haven’t told me the story about what happened to them in the genocide, though I know they’ve been living in that house since 1990. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to ask or not. I know that they love Kagame, their president. When they heard that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, they were like, “Oh, Kagame’s probably going to get it next.” Overall, it’s great so far, and their invitation to stay with them during the research period is pretty appealing. Actually, speaking of research, I’m supposed to be meeting with someone from UNHCR soon, so I should go!

Nakivale refugee camp

Getting back to the refugee camp visit that I mentioned in my last post: On Monday we went to the Nakivale (NAH-chee-VAH-lee) refugee settlement camp, and it was such a better experience than when we went to Orom. Part of that was because they reacted to us differently, part because we were more prepared for the whole experience and actually knew what was going to happen. We had a briefing beforehand and talked about what kind of questions we wanted to ask and stuff, which helped so much.

We were visiting the camp to see the Rwandan (primarily Hutu) refugees who had fled after the genocide and are afraid of reprisals from Tutsis and potentially unfair trials, because there’s such a big bias against Hutus in Rwanda now. (Of course, it’s likely that many of them have a legitimate reason to fear a fair trial as well.) The camp also had refugees from Congo, Somalia, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and a couple of other countries. Each nationality has its own zone within the camp. We ended up splitting into two different groups, with half going to see the Rwandans, and half going to see the Congolese. I was in the group that saw the Congolese, which I’m really glad about because the conflict in the Congo is definitely something I’m interested in and relatively informed about and this program doesn’t really deal with it all that much, and because we ended up talking a lot more about issues in the refugee camp and among the refugees than the other group, which mostly heard about how the refugees wanted their names cleared in Rwanda.

Again, we were asked a lot how we could tangibly help the people we were talking too, and a large portion of the time we spent talking to them ended up being about how we were there to learn and that we would be helping less directly. The people here were a lot more confrontational than the people in Orom – it was like the difference between frustration and desperation. One of the refugees compared our visit to watching a drowning man and asking him, “How are you sinking? Tell me about how you’re sinking” instead of pulling him out of the water. There were two really great moments: one when the program director from Gulu said that his people had been suffering a lot too and he felt their condition and if they shut themselves off from people coming to ask them what is happening, they would ultimately lose. At this point one of the leaders among the refugees asked a bit snarkily, “Well have you ever been a refugee?” To which the director was able to say, “Yes, actually, and my mother and brother and family and people have been in the IDP camps.” The other came after the sinking metaphor, when one of the girls in our group spoke very passionately about how we can’t save everyone, and how can we choose to save one person when hundreds of others are also drowning? This seemed to really hit home with them, and afterwards we weren’t really asked that question.

It’s frustrating that we have to spend so much time dealing with that issue, and it’s something that I’m concerned about with doing research, but at the same time, I completely understand how frustrating it must be to tell these comparatively rich and powerful people about your problems and then hear them say that you won’t really see a tangible improvement.

Before we reached the camp, this guy who was in charge of the camp came and spoke to us about the refugees. [Side note: right now it’s about 6am in the hotel in Kigali and these birds are singing outside our window (for once not roosters!) and I just heard this one bird call that was so strange and beautiful.] We asked him about whether there were tensions in the camps and whether all of the different groups received the same aid. He said that everything was peaceful in the camp because everyone identified as a refugee and there is a sense that everyone was in the same condition and that everyone got the same aid. All of which turned out to be total BS. One of the first things the Congolese said was that they are terrified because of killings within the camps. Because so many different people of different ethnic groups and political loyalties have fled Congo and are all mixed up in “New Congo,” as they call it, people are living with the very enemies they fled. Since June, three of the Congolese refugees have been killed in their homes, and they basically have no idea who is responsible. Plus, they mentioned that some have threatened to start massacring people in the camp once they know they are going to be repatriated.

That’s one of the “cool” (i.e. interesting to study) things about refugee camps – that you have such a mix of people of different nationalities who are there for completely different reasons so the camp becomes this meeting point for all sorts of different conflicts in the region. I think it would be so cool to look at how ideas are exchanged in refugee camps and how the different conflicts interact with each other.

The other major issue they talked about was the special treatment given to the Somali refugees in the camp. They felt that UNHCR (the UN body responsible for refugees) only ever brought enough aid to help the Somalis and focused their resources far too much on the Somalis, increasing tensions in the refugee camps. The U.S. has also been accepting a ton of Somali refugees, and almost no Congolese refugees, in large part because of the War on Terror agenda. This policy was something the refugees kept asking us about and wanting us to help them with.

One of the other really startling things they talked about was water. Of course, I had expected that they would tell us about lack of water or lack of clean water. What was surprising, and if true, disgusting, was the accusation they leveled against one of the NGOs supposedly supplying them with water. They accused this NGO of reporting (to headquarters, to UNHCR, to donors, etc) that it has been supplying the camps with clean water, but when they showed us a jug of the water they were supposed to be drinking and bathing with, it was literally green with little things crawling in it. Gross. I think that’s maybe one of the places where the whole refugee camp structure breaks down. You have this pseudo-state formation with UNHCR and the NGOs acting sort of like a government (imposing order, providing services, etc) but it gets to be such a problem when the “government” is not accountable to the people, but rather to its own headquarters or to its donors, who can’t see conditions in the camps.

By the way: new phone number is +250-078-537-0788 hopefully it will work better than the Ugandan number.

Really fast:

Quick update, since I don't know when the next time I'll be on internet will be. I'm in Kigale, the capital of Rwanda, and it is so different from Kampala or Gulu! The city is so modern and beautiful. The whole area is incredibly hilly, so getting anywhere requires walking up and down really steep hills, and you can look out from these beautiful viewpoints all over and see the city just sprawl out seemingly forever.

We've done a lot of travelling the past few days, so I'm looking forward to settling into the next homestay family tomorrow. The refugee camp was fascinating and I definitely want to write about my experiences there, and more about Kigale, but unfortunately I don't have time right now.

Hope everything is going well back home, I'll update more substantially soon!

Birthday Weekend

Happy Birthday to me! Thanks SO MUCH to everyone for the many birthday wishes!!!!! My birthday was kind of weird because we spent the entire day on a bus from Kampala to Mbarara – oh, and because I’m in UGANDA. Details. Saturday was the birthday of another guy in the group, so I feel like birthday celebrations have lasted since Friday night, when we went to a casino in Kampala. I didn’t really do so well at the casino, but it was super fun and at least I didn’t lose a whole lot of money… Mostly it was just fun to get out and do something! Staying at the homestay got to feel a little claustrophobic because I’m used to being so independent, and I couldn’t ever be out past about 7pm, and then the first couple of days in Kampala we mostly stayed at the hotel.

I was really happy about going back to Kampala. The first time we were there, we barely got to explore, but this time I did get to walk around a fair bit. It really reaffirmed for me how much of a city person I was. Everyone in the group keeps saying how much they adored Gulu and how they wish they could just stay there, but I was so glad to get back to Kampala. I’m sure some of that was just regaining independence, but I was also really jealous of the other SIT group in Uganda, which mostly stays in Kampala for the whole time. I think it would be so great to actually know Kampala, and it’s looking a lot more likely that I’ll go back there in November for my research.

Anyways, on Saturday I met with a guy from the Refugee Law Project about my research, and it was simultaneously disappointing and really exciting. Disappointing because I had been hoping that I could work under the Refugee Law Project and they’d take care of all of my logistics and stuff, and he pretty much said that that was not going to happen. Exciting because he thought my research idea (of how NGOs interact with refugees) would be a good topic and he suggested exactly the methods that I had been planning on using, and talked about literally every single thing that I want to look at/write about/hope to find.

After that I walked about an hour across the city to go grocery shopping. OH! I should say one other really great thing about Kampala: plenty of Western food!! On Friday I had a BURGER!!!! Back to grocery shopping: wandered around trying to find stuff because the layout was so confusing, but eventually got everything I needed to make a chocolate cake with mocha frosting! One of the rooms in the hotel randomly had a kitchen, so I baked a cake. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the oven was in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit… oops. Still came out great – yay! Went out to pizza dinner, and then came back to the hotel for cake celebration!

The program directors had given the group money to get cake for the other guy and I, so there was a cake for him Saturday night, and this morning we had pastry stuff for me for this morning because we couldn’t really take a cake on the bus. Everyone was super nice saying happy birthday and singing to me and stuff, which was great. Otherwise it was a pretty low-key day. We left Kampala around 10am (after much difficulty loading the bus and van because the Rwanda director had bought some shelves and a giant chair in Kampala, which didn’t really fit with all of our stuff…) and stayed on the bus almost nonstop until 5pm. Talk about square-butt.

The drive was so beautiful, though. I’ve always heard that this part of Africa is supposed to be stunningly beautiful, like the jungles of Congo and the mountains of Kenya and all that, but honestly I was a little underwhelmed by the parts of Northern Uganda that I saw. It definitely grew on me as we stayed there, and it was so cool that it looked exactly like so many of the pictures I’d seen of Africa, but it wasn’t until today that I really saw the sort of beauty I was expecting. A short way out of Kampala, the sparse shrubs became dense, tall trees and brilliant flowering plants. It was so lush and green! And suddenly there were hills, instead of just flat land. Later on we were just driving through these hills and valleys and it looked like parts of the US, only emptier.

We stopped at the equator! There’s a little landmark, and we all got our pictures taken like the supreme tourists we are ;)

The road to Mbarara was considerably better than the one to Gulu in that it was actually paved – sometimes even freshly paved. However, there were a number of “diversions” as they call them, or places where we would have to drive way off the road because they were doing some sort of road work or something. And sometimes there’d even be an extra lane off the paved part of the road, which we drove on when the potholes were too intense.

One other thing about Kampala was this horrible lecture we had on the policy of amnesty, or the pardon that’s been extended to all rebels to try to lure them out of the bush. This lawyer came who works for the Ugandan Amnesty Commission, along with two (female) assistant lawyers and a former abductee. The lecture started with the lawyer telling the woman who had fought with the rebels for several years to tell us her story, though he warned us repeatedly that her English wasn’t very good and that he would have to interpret for us. We realized how incredibly patronizing and insulting he was being when she started speaking in quite clear English that we could all understand – though he kept interrupting her to restate what she said. About a minute into her story, when she was telling us about how the rebels had killed a boy who refused to give them all of his money and the wares he was selling, she was clearly struggling. She was crying, and having a lot of difficulty continuing to tell her story, but the lawyer kept impatiently prompting her to continue. It was SO DISGUSTING to see how much he looked down on her and it felt like he was displaying her retraumatization (he kept saying, “oh don’t worry, she’s just traumatized. See, this is what trauma is.”) Finally, one of the program directors told him to let her stop.

The rest of the lecture was interesting, though definitely our opinion of him was very much affected by what we had just seen (one of the girls asked what his ethics were as a lawyer, and then when he couldn’t answer the question she asked more specifically about the treatment of victims and it was like she was speaking Greek). Regardless, it was really interesting because we certainly disagreed with some of the things he was saying, even though most of us do feel that amnesty has been a good policy (both because so many of the perpetrators were forced to commit the atrocities and are themselves victims, and because it’s been so effective at drawing fighters out of the bush). For instance, we were questioning how a society that is so willing to accept mass murderers could stigmatize the children born in the bush, and suggesting that maybe this double-standard suggests that the forgiveness of the former rebels wasn’t as complete as everyone claims it is (an opinion that a lot of returnees voiced). What was particularly interesting was that he seemed to personally agree with us, and kept saying stuff like “yes, it’s not perfect, and as a Western-educated lawyer I believe more in justice.” There was a sense that he just felt this desperation, like “what else can we do?”

Anyways, tomorrow we’re visiting Nakivale refugee settlement camp, which I’m both super excited for and dreading slightly. Mostly excited, because I might be able to set up something for my research there, or at least get some other information and ideas, but I’m worried it’s going to be a bit like the visit to the Orom youth center… Guess we’ll see!

Pictures!

Here are some pictures! It took a super long time to upload them, but hopefully I'll be able to add some more later.



This is (some of) my Acholi host family.



This is the market in Gulu.



This is a busier part of Kampala.

Experiences of Racism in Gulu

Most of the racism we’ve experienced here has been really disturbing because it’s been pro-white racism perpetuated by the African people against themselves. Many people talk about how great the US is, and how advanced the Western world is and all that. And I guess the whole thing in Orom, where everyone expected that we would solve all of their problems because we were white, was part of the same phenomenon.

Last night, when my homestay dad was talking about alcohol, was probably the most blatant example. He had made it very clear earlier that alcohol was not permitted in his family, and that he didn’t think any students should be drinking. Plus, I know that alcoholism is a problem here, especially after life in the IDP camps, when people were getting drunk all the time simply because they had nothing else to do, but I was still surprised by what he said. He seemed to equate seeing a person drinking a beer once with an extreme alcohol addiction, and went on a long rant about the troubles of alcohol and immorality etc– all of which were more or less true, if you’re talking about severe addiction. When one of the other people in the program was trying to explain that they thought it was possible to have a drink without becoming an alcoholic, he dismissed this as impossible in Uganda, saying, “Well, maybe that’s possible in America because you have first-class white people there, but not here.” I didn’t really know how to react to this assumption that we were less likely to abuse alcohol because we were better because we were white…

But today we had a lecturer who was so blatantly racist against white people that it was really difficult to take him seriously (ok, so his whole system of religious beliefs and the fact that he was preaching to us also contributed to how ridiculous it was). His basic argument was that Acholi traditional culture and beliefs held all the world’s answers, and the source of conflict in Africa is that people are following other world religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam instead of sticking to traditional beliefs. He said stuff like, “what is fact is that the Acholi are known for their superior selflessness and honesty” and “Acholi justice cannot compare with any other because it is the pinnacle of divine justice.” The main problem was that a lot of what he was saying would have caused riots if the words “Acholi” or “black” were exchanged for “white.”

I understand that there’s a big difference between a privileged, white person standing up in front of a group of historically disadvantaged black people and proclaiming the superiority of the white race over all others and a historically disadvantaged African standing up in front of a group of privileged white people proclaiming the virtues of his race, but still. Obviously I can’t pretend that the history of colonialism isn’t affecting his opinion, but I don’t really think that racism of any form can be justified. I mean I guess it’s “better” (or at least less awkward) than the weird inferiority complex we’ve been experiencing from everyone else, but why should anti-white racism be considered “another point of view” while any other form causes an uproar (as it should, imho)?

Anyways, I’ve gotten a Katanga (traditional Acholi dress) made! The fabric is so beautiful. All the fabric here is incredible – I want to bring all of it home with me and use it for wall hangings and stuff. The dress is a yellowy-cream color with dark purple curly lines in the background and big blue and green flower things. It’s hard to describe. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that my homestay family was planning on getting it for me, so they were all upset that I paid for it. But it doesn’t make any sense for them to buy this stuff for me when I know that they need the money – my “sister” still hasn’t been able to go to school because they don’t have the money to pay for her school fees and transportation. Last night she asked me to try to find someone to sponsor all of her education (like, through university) and I didn’t really know what to say… I don’t even know how to find a sponsor for her.

So then today I bumped into her in town when I was on my way to muzungu café to do some work and she dragged me back to the tailor’s to get another dress made, which was not really necessary, that the family could pay for. I couldn’t say no, because it was clearly a matter of pride that they get me this gift. But now I feel so awkward because I still don’t know what kind of gift to give them… I really wish there was some polite way to ask how much is missing from the school fees, so my “sister” could just go to school now (she talks about how much she wants to go to school every day) and write her exams. But I think that even if I gave them this money, I can’t guarantee that it actually goes to her education, and I’m worried that if I ask they’ll tell me they need the full $150, and they’ll expect me to pay it… Blegh. Guess I’ll have to think of something else.

Last night I played soccer with a bunch of the small children living on the compound (I was pretty evenly matched with the 7-year-olds), which was really fun. I’ll probably give them a real soccer ball, though, since they’ve been playing with a ball of cloth scraps.

Next Wednesday we’re heading to Kampala, and then off to Rwanda! As much as I’m enjoying Gulu, I’m excited to move onto the next thing! Plus I think I’ll get to practice my French a lot with the homestay family in Rwanda, which will be great.