T.I.A., Part 1

I'm not really sure where to start with this one.

The last two weeks have flown by at the speed of light, with barely a pause to take a breath, let alone take time to reflect. Finding Internet access long enough to write a blog entry has also been difficult. But now I'm gonna go ahead and give it a shot. This could take a while.

Thursday, 22 March

It started at 3.45 on a Thursday morning in Manchester, in the cold and dark, with our group of staff and students meeting outside the Arthur Lewis building to head to the airport together, prepared for a long day of travel. Nearly 20 hours or so, in fact. Flights from Manchester to Brussels, then Brussels to Kigali, then Kigali to Entebbe, and then one final hour on the bus to Kampala. Kigali in the darkness of 9 PM was the most I got to see of Rwanda (which means, basically nothing) but the fact that all I could see were lights across rolling hill after rolling hill makes me determined to return someday and see if it's as beautiful as I think it might be.

Friday, 23 March

With the British women from my pathway on lunch break

Our first Friday in Kampala was a little intense, but not in the way one might think. It was just incredibly academic, with a lot of sessions thrown at us without any chance to process what was happening. Sadly, the Fairway Hotel was pretty much the only part of Kampala that most of the Manchester University crew got to experience. We did get a couple of hours before dinner to walk down the road to Garden City Shopping Centre, which is the biggest in Kampala, so that we could exchange money and buy Uganda sim cards if we needed them. Some people were especially freaked out by the rush hour traffic on the roundabouts of the Kampala central business district, so perhaps it was for the best that it was the most exposure they got to the big city.

Saturday, 24 March

The town of Masindi

Saturday morning we woke up bright and early to head to Masindi in western Uganda, which was where we spent the entire week doing our fieldwork. The bus ride was 4 hours, on what is apparently the nicest road in Uganda. It wouldn't be long before we realised just how lucky we were. Thank god for asphalt. We did see a tractor trailer tipped completely over on its side at one point though, which just drove home how dangerous the roads can be. Traffic and driving in this country is chaotic to say the least. After arriving, we wandered around Masindi a bit (very tiny) and bought some snacks and food before settling into our hotels. Our group was split between 3 hotels, and I think it's safe to say that my Development Management pathway (the DM group) pulled the worst of the lot. To start with, David and I were welcomed to our room by the sight of a naked woman bathing directly outside our window. So that was an interesting start LOL :) But in all seriousness, I had been warned and warned about the lack of consistent electricity and hot water in Uganda, so what I never expected was the exact opposite problem: our hotel's hot water worked perfectly, and the cold water knob in my shower was jammed so that every one of my showers was scalding hot. It was horrible. It took me a couple of days to master the art of turning the water on just long enough to wet my hair, turn it off and shampoo, turn it back on and rinse, turn it back off and soap up, turn it back on and rinse, all the while hoping I could finish before the water turned from lukewarm to boiling. Gaah. In addition to the water issue, our hotel basically had no power the entire week and was running off of a generator (which isn't really that unusual to be honest) but the staff didn't like to leave the generator on even when we were around in the evenings. One guy tried to extort a bribe from one of the Japanese students to get him to turn the power back on. The university staff put an end to that sort of crap pretty damn quickly. Despite the issues, I think the majority of us put up with it all pretty well. It was a good experience because as we all kept reminding ourselves, if we want to work in development, we'll have to deal with this kind of stuff on a regular basis, and more to boot. It served as a proper introduction to the popular mantra T.I.A. (this is Africa). Sometimes you just have to shrug stuff off and remind yourself... T.I.A.

Sunday, 25 March

The elephant herd

Sunday was set to be our one 'free' day and people were given the choice of going bird-watching, chimp-tracking, or on a safari at Murchison Falls National Park. I'm sure you can guess which one I picked :)  The ride to and through Murchison Falls was hours long over bumpy dirt roads and our first indication that rural Uganda does not have the best transportation infrastructure. But it was definitely worth every bump and jolt. Murchison Falls was absolutely stunning and powerful and the game drive through the park was absolutely freaking unbelievable. I still just can't believe how lucky we were to see the sheer volume of animals that we saw on the savanna that day. It was insane. There were animals everywhere. And birthing season must have just finished because they all had babies with them! Warthogs with babies, hippos with babies, baboons with babies, antelope with babies, elephants with babies. In fact, we actually saw an entire elephant herd, the whole freaking family, the second we got off the ferry across the Nile River and entered the wildlife side of the park. Our guide told us repeatedly how lucky we were to see things like an entire herd traveling together, as that isn't terribly common. Just based on my own 

Murchison Falls

experience from the one safari I did in Kruger National Park in South Africa back in 2004, I never in a million years expected to see as many animals as we did that day. It was mind-boggling to look out the window of the bus and see an antelope, an elephant, and a giraffe all at once, in what could really be one incredible photography shot. And after the game drive, we got to take a 3-hour river cruise up and down the Nile to see the water-dwelling animals like hippos and crocodiles and see Murchison Falls from the bottom end rather than the top, creating a perfect bookend to the entire day. It was just a stunningly awesome day that I am so glad I got to experience.

I suppose it was good that we got to spend one day soaking up the natural wonder side of Uganda since we were about to spend a solid week trying to wrap our minds around the human side of Uganda, and the challenges to development that are presented when you are working in a country that is wracked with poverty but doesn't have nearly enough financial resources to go around or to work with. It was a challenging week that made everyone, I think, really assess their chosen field and debate whether development is the type of thing in which they could possibly work as a long-term career. We faced some days where problems simply seemed intractable and others that actually gave us hope for Uganda's future. What was probably the most difficult thing to try and process is the fact that fully 50% of Uganda's population is under the age of 16. Seriously! Half the population of a country of over 32 million people is 0-15 years of age!!! If the government here doesn't start making serious plans as to how society can absorb such a huge cohort of people entering adulthood (and thus the job market), Uganda is probably going to face some dire problems in a decade's time, let alone two decades. In the meantime, it remained a quiet fact that few people seemed to discuss during our week here but which literally stared us in the face at every turn, in the form of throngs of children everywhere we went.

Monday, 26 March

On Monday, we spent the entire day at the headquarters of the Masindi District Local Council. Uganda has a somewhat unique political system that employs a decentralised structure, whereby each of the 111 districts has a local council (LC 5) that reports directly to the central government in Kampala. Each of these districts is broken up into several counties which have their own local councils (LC 4) that report to LC 5, the counties are divided into sub-counties which have local councils (LC 3) that report to LC 4, and so on. Parishes (LC 2) report to LC 3, and villages (LC 1) are the most basic unit which report to LC 2. Theoretically, this enables people at the most local level to make decisions that will be of the most benefit to their communities, but it seems in practice to spread resources so thin that few agenda items are able to be enacted. I think Museveni and the NRM in Kampala have managed to maintain hold of most of the power in the country anyway. The local councils are essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place, expected to fulfill demands of their constituencies without any way to bring in tax revenue or obtain funds from the central government that aren't tied to a number of conditions.

Masindi LC 5 Headquarters (complete with handicapped-
accessible entrance!)

Anyway, the Masindi LC 5 were essentially our hosts for the week and gave us permission to visit with and speak to many of the individuals and groups that we got to meet over the course of our stay. It was interesting to see the etiquette amidst the bureaucratic hierarchy here. Our welcome session was chaired by the Senior Inspector of Schools, Margaret Ekwang (who is a truly awesome woman) and she had to ask every single individual in the Council Chambers (including all of us students!) to introduce themselves before she could properly start the meeting. Then, to see how she deferred to the District Education Officer, who in turn deferred to the Secretary of Education, who in turn deferred to the head honcho, the District Chairman, was a fascinating (if sometimes slightly boring) peek into cultural and governmental structure. After the session, all the staff and students broke up into our 4 pathways and the DM group listened to a representative from the local NGO Forum talk about the involvement of local NGOs in the district planning process. Monday night was the first of several looong nights which consisted of 60-90 minute long meetings within our pathways to discuss the day's events (as if the day weren't packed enough already), followed by our various attempts to order and eat dinner, which was consistently frustrating since, you know, T.I.A. I'd say that in one week, I ate at least 5 meals which only appeared 90 minutes to 2 hours after ordering. Anyone who knows me knows that a hungry Jason is a cranky Jason. Getting food at 10 PM after ordering at 8, I'm sure you can imagine where my mood was at. This is still the aspect of Uganda that I am most trying to get used to, because the interminable waits just destroy me.

Tuesday, 27 March

The Bunyoro-Kitara palace. The term is used loosely.

Tuesday was by far the weirdest day of the whole trip. Absolutely nothing went according to plan. Nothing. Every pathway had some bizarre experiences that day. My DM group in particular were meant to drive over (on those bumpy dirt roads) to Hoima, the district next door, in order to meet the king of the Bunyoro kingdom. Uganda is made up of many different tribes and ethnic groups, and one of the most historically important but presently marginalised is the Bunyoro people. The Bunyoro kingdom is considered to be made up of four districts in the west of the country. (For reference, the majority people are from the Buganda kingdom, which is comprised of dozens of districts in the center of the country and from which the country gets its name.) When we arrived at the king's 'palace', however, we were told by his private secretary that the king was feeling unwell and would not be able to meet with us. We were later informed on pretty decent authority that it was actually the fact that the women in our group were wearing pants and knee-length skirts which resulted in him not showing up, as apparently he will only meet women who are in ankle-length skirts. Only. So that was annoying. And as a special bonus to not getting to meet the Bunyoro king, his private secretary then took us to the shrine room where the traditional throne is kept and held up artifact after artifact, guiding us through an hour-long dissertation on the history of metallurgy in the Bunyoro kingdom. I was ready to shoot myself.

The private secretary in the shrine room

After finally escaping the grip of the king's private secretary, we ate lunch, followed by a visit to a local PHA (People living with HIV/AIDS) support group. It was an extremely awkward visit, as it became clear that the group was obviously told something different than we were about our reason for meeting with them. Whereas we wanted to hear their stories and ask them questions for our research, the group's leaders continued to ask us repeatedly, "How can we end discrimination against PHA in Uganda?" We kept trying to explain that we are just students and that, in fact, stigma still exists in our own countries as well. But the group clearly thought we were there to help them in some way, making it a difficult meeting to say the least. Our terrible tour guide then took us to the Royal Burial Grounds and pretty much forced the group to enter King Kabalega's tomb, complete with resident bats, basically so that we would leave a donation with the groundskeeper. By this 

point, we were running so behind and it was raining so hard that we had to cancel our final visit with a group of farmers who had already been waiting for us for an entire hour. And then. Thirty minutes into our 2-hour drive home, our bus slid into a ditch. What a mess. Narrow muddy dirt roads do not lend themselves to buses full of students. We had to stand by the side of the road for about an hour while we waited for our bus driver to take a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) into town and fetch a farmer with a tractor who could tow us out of the ditch. At least it wasn't raining. Or dark. And at least I got a great video of the bus being towed out. A somewhat crappy day managed to end with a bit of adventure!

Wednesday, 28 March

Wednesday was our day set aside to learn about microfinance, which is essentially small loans given allegedly to poor people who can then use the capital to build micro-enterprises which can provide a living for them and their families. We spent the day meeting with groups from BRAC, which is a Bangladeshi NGO that is probably the most famous and successful microfinance organisation in the world. It was again obvious, however, that the groups we met with were told something different about why we were meeting with them than simply our being students who wanted to interview and learn. The women's savings groups, who meet weekly in order to pool their savings to make payments on their loans, believed we were ourselves BRAC staff members and wanted us to approve loans for them to pursue new projects. They didn't seem too thrilled with the idea that we were simply "development tourists". It also became clear pretty quickly that, despite BRAC's trumpeting that it raises people out of poverty, the women who participate in these savings and loan schemes are not the poorest people in society. While microfinance undoubtedly works very well for them, leading some to become very successful, they were very likely the most well-off women in their villages to start with. The people living in the worst poverty do not have the same kind of access to microfinance that these women do.

One of the villages in which BRAC works

I did get the chance to meet and speak with Christine, a truly amazing lady who chatted with Niamh and me for a solid 20 minutes or so. She had been a member of her savings group for three years and had used the money from her loan to build her enterprise of selling school uniforms. She was quite vocally proud of her company's success and told us that she had managed to send all five of her children to private secondary schools (which definitely indicated she was doing better financially than the average Ugandan). Her eldest child had actually just finished university and was working for a South African engineering company. She also owned her own land, unlike many women, served as a councillor on her village's LC 1, and spoke excellent English despite not having a formal education beyond primary school. This was clearly one empowered woman and talking to her made me feel like a person's ambition and dedication can make anything possible. At one point, in response to Niamh's question as to whether her now-deceased husband would have supported her taking a role in local politics, Christine responded that she was a strong woman and he knew that, so of course he would have stepped back and let her do what she wants. Without really thinking, I piped up and said, "A smart man loves a strong woman." Christine and her group members visibly loved that one. What can I say, I'm a feminist :)

Thursday, 29 March

Thursday was my absolute favourite day of the entire trip. It was just brilliant. My group travelled to the Masindi Centre for the Handicapped (MCH) for classroom observation, which felt tailored to my exact interests since my particular research topic was the integration of people with disabilities (PWD) into development. I'd already learned just how progressive Uganda is in so many ways with regards to PWD, with a law in place to ensure that there is at least one male and one female councillor with a disability on every local council and laws to guarantee that all new buildings are constructed to be handicapped-accessible, but I wasn't sure what to expect from the MCH since special needs education is still woefully but unsurprisingly inadequate throughout the country. To call me pleasantly surprised would be the understatement of the year. I was freaking thrilled to see a place like the MCH in a district as rural and out-of-the-way as Masindi and in a country as poor as Uganda. There were 109 students living there boarding-school style, ranging from deaf students to those with intellectual disabilities to those who have physical handicaps. The education they were receiving was clearly top-notch, even by international standards, and the older students were learning vocational skills, like farming and sewing and leather-making, so that they are able to employ themselves when they eventually graduate and return home. It was seriously just so amazing, and many other people in my group have also stated that it was their favourite visit of the week despite their not having any particular interest in PWD. I wish I could express how happy it made me to see a place like that. 

The only thing that kind of depressed me after we left was the realisation that the school was assisted by large funding grants from the Ford Foundation and that the government couldn't possibly provide the resources to establish more schools like the MCH on its own. 109 students is just the teeny-tiniest sliver of children with disabilities in a country of 32 million and I couldn't help but think of all the potential students out there who weren't receiving any education because of discrimination against PWD or simply a lack of resources or accessibility at their local public schools. Not every parent could afford to send their child to a school like MCH. It made me sad and frustrated but, at the same time, I couldn't help but feel hopeful leaving the MCH for our next visit. The fact that a place like MCH exists at all in Uganda speaks volumes as to the changes that can take place in a developing country.

After lunch, during which I got to speak at length with the chairman of the Masindi Disabled Persons' Union (yes, there is actually a local, and national, disabled persons' union!!), our group split up and went to four different primary and secondary schools in the area. I and four other coursemates went to Ikoba Girls' Primary School, which was obviously one of the nicer public schools in the region, and it was so much fun. I got to sit and observe a P4 class (equivalent to fourth grade) and seeing the way the teacher, Elijah, taught long division using just a chalkboard and some sticks was amazing. The kids were so enthusiastic and so engaged, despite 

P4 class

having very little to actually use in the classroom, and it really highlighted just how spoiled we are at home. Money and resources mean nothing without a good teacher and students who actively want to learn. My coursemate Jackie, who is a former teacher in her late forties, mother of two teenage girls, and one of my new favourite people on earth, told Elijah that any school in the UK would be lucky to have him as a teacher and she really meant it. After classes ended, we got to go outside and watch the students play games like relay and sack races, and when the older girls got a game of jump rope started, Ivy and I couldn't help but join in with them. It was definitely a highlight of my trip :)

Friday, 30 March

Me, Jackie, and David presenting for DM

The last day of our fieldwork finally arrived on Friday. My group spent the morning meeting with councillors from a nearby LC 3 and one of its constituent LC 1s before joining back up with the rest of our fellow students and lecturers to present our findings from the week to the LC 5 District Chairman. I was one of the three presenters from the DM group and I managed to get through it without speaking too quickly or falling over from my rapidly onsetting sickness, which proceeded to prevent me from partaking in any of the final night's festivities. Sad night that was. More to come soon about my extra week in Kampala.....