I'm a bad blogger....

How we entertained ourselves one night in Ntenjeru

So I have been terrible at blogging (well this one anyways…the work one has been updated http://tamtam-africa.blogspot.com/ ). I think the problem is that there are actually so many cool little things to talk about it gets overwhelming. I’m going to do one longer post here then just try to post something little everyday and see if that goes any better. Clearly I will still be using bullets…

• Life there – So I never really said much about what life was like in the Ntenjeru in the South. The village we lived in was described to me as an “average poor” village for Uganda. Some people didn’t have the fees to send their children to school (as low as $15 a year) or money to take a boda (motorcycle) to the hospital about an hour away when an emergency occurred (a woman in labor needing an emergency C-section was trying to beg for money to take a boda (while in labor!!!) to the hospital...I wasn’t there but other volunteers were and that night we debated whether we’d give the money in that situation. My answer is a definite YES).

Overall though, it was not a desperate poor. Because Uganda is so fertile, people are mainly able to grow their own food and at least in Ntenjeru there is enough space for people to have land and build a house. The work is endless (I now somewhat understand the effort of maintaining a dirt floor and how clean it can actually look) but people still spend some of their day playing games and talking to neighbors. While unexpected events can definitely cause crisis, day to day life isn’t the struggle and despair you imagine when you think of people living on less than two dollars a day. It really highlights what a difference living in a rural area in a country that’s fertile can make versus living in slums in a rural area where you can’t grow and build what you need to meet your basic needs.

• Life here – I’m now in Gulu, which if you know at all you know as the town that was most affected by the LRA rebel group when the North was in war for about 20 years more or less ending about 5 years ago (Read here for a brief description…its interesting history http://www.invisiblechildren.com/about/history/). The LRA is notorious for its abduction of children, often forcing them to kill their own families, and forcing them to be child soldiers. In all the surrounding villages, the children walked miles to Gulu every afternoon to sleep in the streets of the town surrounded by soldiers or their entire family moved to refugee camps closer to the town. Children that escaped after abduction often had no family or homes to return to and the community they left that now saw them as a murderous rebel.

Today, most families are back in their original homesteads or at least in transition camps (smaller and in more rural areas than the massive refugee camps but they still cannot return to their permanent homes because their fields were destroyed and they cannot grow enough food yet). Children have been rehabilitated (I have no idea how it’s possible to overcome what some of them were forced to do but it seems to be) and while alcoholism is common it seems that the majority are now leading normal lives.

So that’s the context of the lives of the people here. My days are spent going with a VHT (a volunteer community member who is responsible for health education in their community) everyday to visit homes to conduct our survey. Walking around for 8 hours a day with a stranger you end up talking about most everything including what life was like for them during the war. Most all of them lost family members, some were abducted themselves, and some lived in refugee camps. Walking through a field with someone and having them tell you what horrors they witnessed in that particular field ten years ago is a very very surreal experience. As much as I hear about it and as many questions as they let me ask I still cannot begin to imagine what it was like to live through that time.

• The Welcome Committee – On a daily basis I’m AMAZED at how friendly and welcoming people here are. While I’ve had one or two negative experiences, across the board people have gone out of their way to help us and make us part of the communities we’re in. Yesterday I was walking home after being dropped off about three minutes from my house and in that three minutes met a Ugandan woman in her twenties who invited me to her village to have dinner with her family. She got my phone number and already called to schedule. Whenever we look lost (which is often) we’re almost instantly surrounded by people trying to help and have had many shop owners leave their shops to walk us the 15 minutes to where we’re trying to get to. I was with a VHT the other day who didn’t know the village we were in well and a village leader spent 4 hours walking us from house to house and waiting while we did the interviews. I find the interviews mind numbingly boring at times and it’s my job to do them, this man was working in his garden and thought helping us was more important. None of this is offered with any expectation of anything in return except friendliness back. Its made the experience here soooo much better because there are so many opportunities to get to know Ugandans from all different economic levels and be included in their day to day lives. Also its fun to instantly have so many friends

Ok I’m off for my day of home visits. Hope everyone’s doing well! Also if you have something you’re interested in hearing about please please let me know and I’ll write about that one day, its hard to focus when there’s so many unique things.