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!