This Story's Pages: Sweeping Dust

July 28th, 2007

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are well. Thank you for the kind responses and interesting updates from your parts of the world. As usual, I have a few administrative notes. I now have a phone and if you need to get in touch with me you can call +256 774906653. Pictures are the end of this update. I am now in Gulu, Northern Uganda, which will be home-base for the next long while, so this update is the first of many from this new home.

When I wake up each morning in the small room that Betty has kindly set up for me in her house, I stay in bed for a few minutes and listen to the morning music. From under my mosquito net, I can hear the chickens twittering outside, people talking as they do their morning chores, water running from the tap filling in yellow Jeri cans for bathing, washing, and morning tea, and the occasional boda-boda driving down our dirt road. I get up and look out the window, and the sun is coming up between the two large trees outside my window and it paints everything with a pink glow that reminds me of hope and new beginnings. The man that comes to take the cows to the grazing field is gathering them together. The road is already busy, small children walking to school in colorful uniform, men on bicycle, and women carrying water. Before starting to get ready for work, I spend a few minutes helping with the morning chores. All the children have something to do. The younger boys are by the water tap washing the dishes from yesterday’s dinner. The girls are preparing water for bathing, heating water and then putting it in basins which they carry to the latrines behind the house, and making tea for breakfast. I do my small part by sweeping the living room and entrance to the house. We sweep with a bundle of straw that is neatly arranged and tied with a cloth at one end. As I bend down and start to swing my hand back and forth, and the swish-swish sound of straw on concrete begins to make a rhythm, I am always amazed and how much dust we find each morning. We sweep in the morning, and often once more during the day, and yet the next morning everything is sprinkled with red dust. It is as if nature continuously struggles to reclaim her land, covering our additions with her red earth. People struggle back, shining shoes every morning, sweeping the dust back, washing the floors – a constant struggle for cleanliness and dignity.

My walk to work is very pleasant. We stay slightly outside of town and work is on the other side of town, so I cross all of Gulu each morning, which takes about 40 minutes. The walk into town is along a dirt road, and often a group of curious children walking to school accompany me. There are some fields next to small groups of tukuls, small round structures with grass-thatched roofs where many local people stay. Women are setting up small coal stoves to roast maize, which has become my favorite snack. The working class is impeccably dressed in business attire or colorful African fabrics and is riding boda-bodas to their offices. Some white NGO vehicles are driving around collecting staff. I walk into town through the second hand clothes market, where men and women are hanging clothes on their wooden stools, setting up for the day. As I reach town, the dirt turns to tarmac, and the streets are busy. Gulu town center is a grid of 5 horizontal streets and 5 vertical streets. There are small shops all along the street, though the goods they offer are fairly basic. I found one supermarket, and its most exciting offer was Pringles and some chocolate. There is also a big market with many small wooden stalls, piles of plastic shoes, a very organized fruits and vegetable section, and a rather chaotic fish and meat section. There are many schools, as many of the rural schools have been displaced by the war and have shifted to the town, and so there is always an ocean of children dressed in the same color moving towards or from a school. When you cross the street, you weave between bicycles and motor cycles, as there are so many in this lively little town. Everything is colorful, from the plastic basins sold for washing, to the fabrics people wear, and the buildings cell-phone companies paint for advertising in either blue, red, or yellow.

At work things have been very busy; this for me is a good start. A quick reminder, I work with Windle Trust Uganda, an NGO that is implementing the Acholi Bursary Scheme, which provides vulnerable youth in Northern Uganda with bursaries, scholastic materials, and medical care to go back to secondary school or vocation training. We sponsor 3500 youth, including formerly abducted children, child-mothers, and orphans, as part of a larger re-integration strategy that values the restorative power of education. For the first few months of my time here, I will be acting as a project officer, since we are under-staffed. As a project officer I have different responsibilities, including distribution of materials at schools, verification that our students are attending and doing well, meeting students to address their problems, and attending NGO and government meetings about education. The work is busy, involves a lot of administration and logistics (stock requests, distributions lists, working with the database), but for me it is a great chance to do some hands-on work and get to know the project, the schools, and the students, before I shift gears and begin my more strategic work on psychosocial support, human rights, and protection issues.

One school I went to is Atiak Secondary School. Atiak is a larger village about two hours from Gulu along the road to Juba, Sudan. We drive towards this school with a pickup truck full of exercise books, pens, pencils, rulers, black shoes, materials without which many of these students would be forced to drop out. We zoom through tiny villages. A few minutes before we reach a small village, I start to see women with small babies on their back carrying water or heavy piles of firewood on their head and men on bicycles transporting crops or walking with a herd of cows. Then we reach a small collection of tukuls, a few small shops, and a market, and in 30 seconds we are back on the open road. In 30 seconds I get a snapshot of a life, an entire village that to the people there is the centre of the world. I think of a conversation with Nicole about how fragmented our society has become for the young cosmopolitan generation, with social network across the entire globe but lonely evenings in front of the cold computer. I laugh to myself as we pass these villages at how maybe we got it all wrong. We’ve mad life so easy that we get bored with luxury. Communication has become so easy for us with phones and the internet that trendy coffee shops in Harvard Square force people to turn off their cell phones so we remember to talk to those right in front of us. Yet at the same time, as we drive onwards and pass a few internal displacement camps, huge areas with hundreds of tukuls only meters apart from each other, I wonder at the irony that sometimes poverty looks beautiful. These internal displacement camps were formed by the government in an attempt to protect people from attacks by the rebels. The camps have been so underserved and crowded, that at times it was reported more people died from disease and lack of basic needs in the camps than in the war. Yet when you drive through the camps, from the road they seem beautiful – small tukuls to the background of green trees, red earth, and the bluest sky. Beautiful children and women idle around as men play cards. Perhaps it is this romanticism we attach to simplicity that allows those of us who have been more fortunate in life to turn a blind eye to the hardships of those in poverty. If you stop, beyond the initial beauty, there are real challenges: the children with bloated stomachs should be in school, the women yearn for land to grow food, and the men are disgruntled by how this war has disabled them from the male dignity of providing for your family. At Atiak we distribute materials, and working with youth who have been affected by 20 years of war reminds me of working with refugees in Lugufu. I am overwhelmed by their needs, both materials and emotional. We could never give them everything they need, nor provide all 3500 of them with the type of support and kindness they yearn for, yet they expect it, and deep inside I feel they have the right to the same high standard education I was so fortunate to receive. I understand the bigger picture that in this resource-poor, war-ravaged area, we have resources and that creates conflict, but on a personal level it is frustrating that after you spend the entire day in the sun handing out materials, you are chased by complaints for more on the way out. I am frustrated by the constant asking for more, but I am also deeply saddened by the fact these youth have suffered so much, the extra notebook really is worth the argument for them. I continuously have to remind myself of the power differential, of the vulnerability these youth feel, as their dreams of education and a better future depend on our administration of the bursaries. I remember a young girl in pink uniform that came to our office because we had not yet paid her school fee. There was a small mix up with her name and I had to tell her she was not on our list of students, as I explained this to her I could see her entire life falling apart in her eyes. A few minutes later, the mix-up was cleared up and I got to apologize for the mistake and inform her she can continue attending school. With those few words, the brightness came back to her eyes. I remind myself of this power all the time, not because I like it, but the opposite, I am scared of it, it terrifies me the impact we have on these students, and the responsibility that comes along with this duty. I remind myself continuously so that despite this power differential, I respect their rights as human beings, as young people who have endured more hardship that I will ever know, and who I truly admire for having the energy and will to go back to school and move on with their life.

Sometimes when I am busy with work or walk around lively and colorful Gulu Town it is easy to forget that this area has been affected by twenty years of war, by a history of child abductions, atrocities, and painful memories. With the Juba peace talks between the government and the rebels progressing well and the cessation of hostilities for the past 8 months, people are moving on with life. Like the dust we continuously sweep, people clean their mind everyday and attempt to move forward from a difficult past. They sweep those memories out and aim for a clean future. However, much like the dust, the memories come back, and from time to time, the reality of this place hits you like a gush of wind bringing dust and tears to your eyes. I did a series of interviews of some of our beneficiaries. I talked to 19 students in two days to learn about their lives and how school is helping them. The students walked into my small office, courteous, looking sharp in their neat uniform, smiling and excited to meet me. As we talk the stories come out, some were abducted by the rebels and were forced to kill people and beaten severely. Some of the abducted girls were given to commander as ‘wives.’ Many still suffer health problems from bullet wounds and mortar fragments. Others were not abducted but their parents were killed by the rebels and as orphans they have been moved around the extended family to whoever can afford to care for them. One young girl who is an orphan has a child already. She is a parent, yet as I talk to her she expresses that she feels so alone. Some families are so poor as a result of the war, children have worked for months, laying bricks and planting maize, to pay one term of school fees. They all have difficult stories that so painfully mismatch their young beautiful faces. On another occasion, we went with the Netherlands’ ambassador to visit a girls’ school where we are constructing a dormitory. The girls welcomed us warmly, singing songs about love and happiness. Among this joy, the head-teacher who welcomed us, mentioned that the school has overcome difficult times, including 3 attacks by the rebels during which many girls were abducted. I look around this nice school and beautiful girls in pink and red uniform and realize this is where this long war took place, among these kind people, and these beautiful places. Everything I have read for the past year preparing for this experience really took place here, and although it is swept under the rug, it comes out when you least expect it. People here are remarkably strong and resilient, and they are good sweepers. Before you can dwell too much, the memory is swept away, and in our case we move to another school, a girls tailoring school, where we are opening a daycare centre so children of child-mothers can learn alongside them. There is an elaborate ceremony with singing and dancing and long speeches. As the speeches discuss the value of education and the children play on the brightly colored playground, the hope for the future is stronger than memories of the past.

As I continue working and living here, I realize that I am only beginning to understand the complexities of this place. So much has been swept away and the dynamics create an intricate web of conflict, peace, justice and politics. People here are so sick of war; they want peace, even at the price of justice. The international criminal court indictments for some rebels are controversial here. I wonder sometimes if peace without justice is sustainable, and how we define justice anyways. Relationships between the national government, the local government, and the international community are complicated. It has been an Acholi conflict, and the suffering has been inflicted on people by their own people, which they despise, yet there is some sense of admiration towards the resistance to the national government, which people here feel has marginalized the Acholi people for decades. In the mix of these complexities, the NGO world is a chaotic scene of good intentions; too many brooms sweeping in all directions. I attended an interesting meeting about psychosocial support and care. After hours of discussing trauma, mental health, and services provided by different NGOs, a bright man stood up and reminds us to include the local culture. There is no word is Acholi Lou for trauma; people are either mad, or they suffer from Chien, an evil spirit, often of a person killed or harmed that possess others. Dealing with the consequences of war in a way that is culturally sensitive, psychology appropriate, rights-based, politically acceptable and economically feasible is not an easy struggle, and I reluctantly add my broom to the effort.

Gulu these days has been relatively cool since it is rainy season. Every once in a while it rains, and I mean, really rains, an absolute opening of the sky and a down pour of fresh water. When these heavy rains come, all the dust is washed away, and everything is absolutely clean for a few hours. Similarly, there are moments of absolute joy that wash away all the memories and difficulties. At night, back in Betty’s house, we sit around in the tukul next to the home, where we eat our meal. We are about 11 young people, (we are usually 21, but Betty and some of the older children are in Kampala during the week), and we enjoy a good meal of posho (which is made from maize flour) with a good sauce of beef, or fish, or groundnuts. We sit around and talk, laugh, and listen to music. They have all been so kind to me and accepted me in their family. On weekends, Betty is around, usually with a few women members of parliament, and they arrive dressed in Gomes dresses (large brightly colored dresses that are tied in the front with a large silk bow that reminds me of a Japanese Kimono), and they bring an aura of respect, dignity, and responsibility to the room, as they discuss politics, their children, while drinking tea and fixing each other’s hair.

I hope that gives you a good impression of my first impressions as I begin to feel settled.
My thoughts are with you, and I wish you health and happiness.

Thank you for being in my life.
Inbal

Filda in the kitchen at Betty's home