Orom Youth Center

I think I need to preface this entry with a quick warning: the experiences I’m writing about have been by far the most uncomfortable of the trip so far, and I’m definitely going to sound really negative. That said, I knew that I was getting myself into a program that would make me very uncomfortable at times, and I really wanted that discomfort. Even though what we did today was not at all pleasant, it was still a really eye-opening experience, I’m so glad that it happened, and I’m still very happy to be here.

With that said, we’re currently in Kitgum, another district in Northern Uganda. It’s definitely nice to get away from the homestay family for a couple days (we’re staying in a hotel with electricity AND running water!) When we arrived on Wednesday, after a long, bumpy drive made particularly slow by the mud from the torrential downpour the night before, our patience with “Africa time” (i.e. everything starts an hour late and entails a lot of waiting around) had really worn thin. We were then guilt-tripped approximately 25 times about how a group of school children we didn’t know anything about had prepared a day of activities and traditional dance performances and stuff that we were supposed to have gone to that morning. Not sure how that managed to be completely omitted from the schedule our academic director had given us…

Anyways, Thursday morning we had our filling, nutritious breakfast of sandwich bread and butter, bananas, and coffee, then waited for the bus for an hour (as usual) and finally drove off to the school. When we got to the village the school was in, the children lined the side of the road clapping and singing for us and holding up pictures they’d drawn about cheery subjects like child abuse. We were like celebrity rock stars driving through throngs of fans – it was a little creepy. I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like if this was an American school or camp with foreigners visiting (particularly what it would be like if it was a school/camp full of white children and black visitors came) – not a very pleasant thought. For a horrifying minute we all thought that we were about to just drive right past these children and keep going, but then we realized we had reached the schoolyard.

The head of the school, an imposing woman who had the kids marching around like soldiers to the sound of her whistle (no joke, it looked like that scene at the beginning of the Sound of Music only with about 250 kids instead of 7), then guilt-tripped us another 7 or 8 times about how we weren’t going to spend the entire day doing the activities they’d planned for us. The children then sang for us, did a traditional dance for us, and recited a poem about how they don’t have any rights, and then all of a sudden it was time for us to go. I’m not sure which of us was more on display. Sometimes it feels like we’re this circus act that comes to the villages, draws out all the children from what they’re doing to stare at us, and then moves on. But at the same time, it was also like, “here’s a school in Africa with underprivileged children catering to you.” I guess it’s just weird that we get this special treatment—which reinforces the idea that we’re these strange, mystical beings with so much money and power and influence—and then we just drive away without getting to interact with them or really get a sense of what their life is like at all. So that felt kind of weird.

But that doesn’t even begin to approach our experience at the “youth center,” which was another couple hour’s drive away (very narrow, bumpy, swerving roads + delicious packed lunch of one hardboiled egg and piece of greasy chapatti (like naan bread) = unhappy students). The first thing we noticed about the youth center was that the “youth” weren’t really youth at all. Actually it was more like all the grown men in the village and a couple women. The second thing I noticed was that the pit latrine there was actually, hands-down, the #1 worst toilet I have ever experienced in my life—and I’ve now seen/smelt quite a variety of nasty bathrooms. Words cannot even describe.

The idea of the “youth center” trip was that we would talk to the local community in Orom (next to Karamajong, where there have been conflicts with the cattle-rustlers) about how their life has been since the start of the war and how they are trying to restore peace etc. This was the very first time they had ever had such a discussion with a group of white people. We were broken into groups of 9 students and about 50 villagers, and told to start asking questions through the staff, who translated.

It was horrible, for all of us students. Basically it turned into the villagers giving us a long description of their problems (our children do not want to go to school, we have no food because of drought, we have no jobs outside of agriculture, the government doesn’t provide us any services, the government is corrupt, we can’t keep any teachers here, the returned child soldiers have severe psychological problems, there is hatred and crime within the village, etc etc etc) and then asking us for a solution. As in, “Please tell us right this instant what we can do to improve agricultural efficiency,” “Please go to your government and tell them to give us a factory so we can have an economy outside of subsistence farming,” “Please have your government build us a health center.”

I have never in my life felt a) so overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems that I think should be fixed or b) so disgusted with the perception of Americans and of Africans’ dependence on outsiders.

This village was so tiny, but it alone needed such a complex set of solutions that I could hardly wrap my head around the idea. Just helping this one community could be one’s life work, and it would still probably fail (I say this both because the implementation of the solution would be so complex and prone to failure and because I strongly believe that it would take the investment of the local community to truly be sustainable). And then multiply that by all of the villages like this in Uganda, and all of the countries in Africa, and all of the similar villages in countries in other third-world countries—and bear in mind that these villages all have different problems and would need different solutions… I thought I was going to faint (granted, the heat and car-sickness probably contributed to this feeling).

It’s so easy in the classroom to critique the “cookie-cutter” solutions that aid organizations try to implement without consideration for the local context, but sitting there imagining how incredibly vast the scope of development challenges is, I began to have a lot of sympathy. It seemed like the only way to make any progress whatsoever would be to try to find a slightly imperfect solution that would be widely applicable and would improve life a bit in a lot of places, and then to hope that the local community could tweak this solution to suit their needs better. This is what my doer-brain was arguing – and then my thinker-brain would argue back just as fiercely that these solutions would never really work and would ultimately be a huge waste of time, effort and money because they weren’t catered to the local situation. So I was left feeling utterly helpless.

One of the main things that drew me to this kind of work was the sense that I would be accomplishing something, making a difference. For the first time, I began to worry that I’d only ever feel inadequate for all the things I hadn’t been able to do. Very discouraging.

Just as uncomfortable was this perception that, because we were white/Westerners/Americans, we held the solutions to everything. We’ve already heard this sentiment in weaker form – Santo thinking that the world’s human rights problems could be solved if the US would ratify all the international treaties and norms; our lecturers literally not believing that there was such a thing as poor people in the United States. But this was the most blatant expression we’ve ever heard. We had to try to explain to these people that we wanted to help, but we simply couldn’t provide the advice they wanted; that we could try to give them tools and support, but the solution would ultimately have to come from themselves.

Even though my thinker-brain knew that the solution had to come from them, my doer-brain was so skeptical. These people have no education, and no starting point, it seemed. Our normal framework of thinking about the problems is so different from the reality there. Our tendency was to invoke the state’s responsibility to its citizens: we kept wondering, why can’t they pressure the government to provide public schools and pay the teachers competitive wages? But they have literally no political power. Even if they could voice their opinions to the bureaucracy, they do not control enough of the votes to be able to threaten the government with anything other than an armed rebellion – and looking at these people who had suffered over 20 years of violence, the idea of them causing more conflict seemed to fall somewhere between impossible and cruel. They cannot organize with other villages facing the same problems because they have no communication or transportation infrastructure. The government therefore has no political motivation to help these people. And even if they did, corruption is so rampant that services would never get there.

And what about corruption? What makes a government official who has to feed his own family all that different from an American who says, “well, we have to feed our poor before we can donate any more to the third world”? (I mean, other than the idea that the government holds a legal obligation to its citizens and the US doesn’t really have the same obligation to the third world). But the point is, I don’t want to just point accusatory fingers at corruption because it’s just as much a symptom as a cause.

Half of me was left with this feeling that I had been idealized to this god-like position to which the American can never live up, and frankly should never live up. The other half felt like until I (or the international community in general) became that god, I’d perpetually feel overwhelmed by the extent of the challenge.

I feel like I should try to at least end this entry on a more positive note, so here are some good things: 1. The stars! Are incredible here! The first time I saw them, I was walking outside with my host sister and mother, and they thought I was so funny because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the sky. They both had to guide me along the path to our neighbor’s house and kept calling me a “baby” because I couldn’t keep my footing. But seriously – wow. You can even see the Milky Way. It’s so beautiful. And almost every night you can see lightning in the distance, which is really cool. 2. I’m really loving the messages and updates from people back home! Keep writing! I love hearing about what’s going on at home/school; it’s a really nice break from things here sometimes. 3. I’m finally starting to make some progress on my research project! A “brother” of one of the guys in the program works for Oxfam and was able to answer my questions and give us some really great, concrete information about refugees in Uganda; hopefully he’ll also have some useful contacts for us.