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.