It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but I’ve once again titled a blog entry the title of a song. The song comes from a certain Broadway musical, one of my favorites, and the only one I’ve actually seen live in New York City. You can read more about it here, but I am making reference to the song for this part in particular. One of the main characters hears from a voice high above that he is going to be sent to Uganda as a missionary, and exclaims, “UGANDA!” then adds, "Where is that?” The voice replies, “Africa!” and the character squeals, “Oh, boy! Like Lion King!”
Anyway, I had been wanting to watch this musical for years and finally saw it my first semester of college. At that moment I never would have thought that two and a half years later, I’d actually find myself in the country the hapless missionaries end up wreaking havoc in. So yes, I ended up leaving Rwanda and spending around two weeks in Uganda from March 19th - April 1st with the other SIT students as part of our program!
I must admit that I used to know next to nothing about Uganda, its politics, and its history besides vague things about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, so this trip has been very enlightening. It’s hard to summarize any country’s history, but I will attempt to anyway to give some context to what I’ve been learning. Over the past few decades since Uganda became independent from the English (colonialism messed up many things and the effects of it still reverberate today), it’s gone through a series of military coups, with each new leader dissatisfying another of the country’s many ethnic groups, the north/south divide persisting up until the present. The current president, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power since 1986, which also was the start of Uganda’s 20-year-long civil war. His leadership caused unrest in northern Uganda from the beginning, where people became very dissatisfied and formed rebel groups. The one that persisted the longest was the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony. That’s the one that became infamous for abducting children and making them into child soldiers. This became such a huge problem that the government made people in many northern villages move to internally displaced person camps, where some people stayed for up to ten years in order to avoid attacks and abductions from the LRA. Eventually, the war concluded in 2006.
For a week, we were in Gulu, a town in the north which was one of the places most affected by the conflict. It’s particularly significant because that’s where children from the rural parts of the district would walk to every night in order to sleep in crowds in empty schoolhouses in order to avoid being abducted during the night in their villages. It’s also the place where the controversial Kony 2012 video was shot. I say controversial, because it came out 6 years after the conflict had concluded, and the LRA wasn’t as active in northern Uganda anymore. We also learned about some things that the video had done–we heard people who were former LRA abductees and representatives from the NGO shown in the video, Invisible Children, speak about it. They didn’t really have good things to say; one of the former abductees told us that the information was misconstruing what was actually going on in Uganda, in particular with the timing and scale of what was being shown, and then Invisible Children said that a lot of donors pulled out from funding their projects because they thought that Invisible Children was lying to get more funding, when it turns out that facts were just misrepresented. Basically, they said that the campaign was detrimental to their cause. It was interesting to see how something that seemed to be well intentioned ended up being quite ruinous in the end. And since Joseph Kony wasn’t even apprehended as the video wanted to accomplish by the end of 2012, the campaign kind of just died down, I guess. I do remember seeing it around Facebook in 2012, but I had never actually watched the video until our trip to Uganda, so it was very interesting to learn about everything that had been going on with people here and see what the video was showing at the time.
To return to something I referred to earlier that we learned about Uganda, Ugandan society is pretty divided–not only between the north and south, but also between the 60+ ethnic groups. Basically, colonialism tried to lump these groups together to make one country, which caused problems between different groups each vying for positions of power over the entire country. As it usually is when there is some kind of diversity and when people consider themselves as part of an in-group, the groups have stereotypes about one another and often don’t really associate with one another. They also each have their own distinct languages and cultures, which makes the situation in Uganda more complicated. For our last lecture, we had somebody who works in peacebuilding and security in the government visit us and we had a Q&A session with her. I asked her a question that had been on my mind ever since I learned about the situation between ethnic groups in Uganda, thinking to what I had also learned about Rwanda so far. In Rwanda, they have this campaign called “I am Rwandan” which was implemented by the government to try and instill a sense of national identity and pride in being Rwandan as part of the country's post-conflict restoration. I asked if there had ever been similar initiatives in Uganda that aimed to instill a sense of “Ugandan-ness” alongside a sense of appreciation for the diversity of the country and its ethnic groups. The woman replied, “But what does it even mean to be Rwandan or Ugandan?” and then went on to explain that in Rwanda, they all spoke one language even if they had different “ethnic” groups, and so could understand each other. In Uganda, many people wouldn’t be able to even understand each other, so how could you ask them to all identify with one another? Then she went on to say, how can you try and build this campaign when you first need to build more health facilities and schools, construct roads, and try to make sure resources are distributed evenly? As somebody who once wholly believed in the idea that all human beings should try and appreciate one another and the diversity that this world contains and not fear those who are different from them, her answer provided a new perspective to this idea to me. It was one of those things that made me continue to realize more and more that most people are never going to leave their own countries or even think about the diversity this world contains. Driving across Uganda, we noticed a lot of modest mud huts with grass thatched roofs that sometimes had clothes laid out on them to dry, scattered across the countryside. At one point I was having a conversation with a friend, and she brought up how some of the people who live in those places are probably never going to even see Kampala, Uganda’s capital, yet there we were driving all these distances to visit it like it was so easy for us. So yeah, how can you preach appreciation for “humanity" when you’re never going to even see people from the other side of your country and you have much more pressing concerns that day to day life entails? People like me can try and spread that message by being an example of it, but that’s because I have had the incredible privilege of traveling and meeting people from all over. To bring it back to the musical, for example, the people that the missionaries were trying to convert had way more problems to tackle than thinking about changing their religion, such as civil conflict and HIV/AIDS, so why should they be thinking about some foreign set of beliefs that had no relevance to their daily lives? Incidentally, our guest speaker mentioned an exchange program between the north and south, which seemed like a good place to start in trying to foster a sense of unity among the Ugandan people. Either way, this experience has made me think seriously of what it means to advocate for an appreciation of human beings around the world when it’s already difficult enough within one small country. It’s on this trip where I’ve begun to truly understand why it makes sense sometimes to have a regional focus if you work in international development or those kinds of things, and you can’t just be simultaneously interested in all parts of the world at once like I’ve been if you hope to actually change things positively. I suppose I’ve come to figure out that there’s a difference between general curiosity about a place and desire to work somewhere over the longterm.
On a separate note, I’ve been hearing a lot about the International Criminal Court (ICC). I keep thinking back to when I visited it last summer in The Hague and how I was able to attend part of a hearing. Here in Africa I’ve been hearing a lot about its involvements in conflicts in this area while also hearing about local strategies of giving justice and working towards reconciliation. One of my favorite required readings from the semester so far was an article written by an anthropologist about transitional and local justice in the context of the Acholi culture in northern Uganda, and how local beliefs and practices conflict with universal human rights discourse but also with the circumstances of the conflict which occurred. It also discussed the intervention of international actors and how they worked in these contexts. It was so interesting that when I began reading it in a physically ill state, I actually felt myself feeling slightly better because of how excited I was to read it. Other than that, there’s also currently a big case that the ICC is working on involving one of the LRA’s main leaders, Dominic Ongwen. Apparently the ICC released a warrant for arrest in 2005 against top members of the LRA, though it wasn’t until January 2015 that Ongwen surrendered. (I can’t help but wonder though, how did he go about surrendering? I always wonder the logistics of these kinds of things.) It’s so cool to actually think about the facilities at the ICC in The Hague I was able to see and the glimpse into the courtroom that I got and think about them working on this case that’s very relevant to what I’m studying now. However, two of the other most wanted of the LRA are still at large, Vincent Otti and Joseph Kony. The prime minister of Gulu district spoke to us about the conflict and also about the current status of the LRA, and he told us that the LRA’s numbers have dwindled to very few compared to what it was before, and Kony and his cronies are basically trying to survive in the Bush and are kind of impossible to track because they don’t use any electronics. Seems like a really hard life, but it seems like they prefer it to surrendering. Through this program I’ve been exposed to a lot of the inner workings of the international realm, and that’s one of the things I appreciate the most about it. It’s definitely a field I see myself working in in the future, though not on long missions on the field (since this trip has proven to me just how much I need my creature comforts for day to day life). To continue with the ICC example, I remember reading about something called the victims’ trust fund in one of their exhibits. In Gulu, we visited an NGO called Gulu Women for Economic Development and Globalization (GWED-G) that benefited from this fund.
Besides the ICC, I got the chance to see something that was started by the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. I had been curious about this organization for a while, and I even have a keychain with their logo on my wallet that I got from some career fair, so I appreciated the chance to visit a refugee settlement called Nakivale near the town of Mbarara. The main difference between a camp and a settlement is a settlement is supposedly one that is more permanent. This one was like a little town–it had a population of around 124,000 with refugees from around 12 different countries (including as far as Pakistan), schools, health facilities, and little businesses set up by people. There, we met some Rwandan refugees who had been living there for years. It was very interesting because when they spoke to us, they were downright denying that a genocide against Tutsis happened, and expressed no interest in returning to Rwanda because they found the government somewhat tyrannical and persecuting Hutu behind the scenes. After everything we had been hearing in Rwanda, we appreciated this perspective, though we were baffled by it. After that visit, we had a guest speaker come and talk to us about refugees in Uganda and about his work with refugees. He mentioned towards the end that things that the UN wrote down in its convention for refugees in like 1951 haven’t been working, and the international community needs to rethink the refugee solution. According to him, he thinks it’s best that refugees return home eventually. But I couldn’t help but think, what if they just don’t want to go “home" and are fine with being refugees for life, like we heard? What about the children born as refugees who live in the settlements and don’t know anything else? I thought of today’s refugee crisis and what kind of “solution” could possibly exist. I suppose that’s an issue that my generation will end up tackling not too far in the future.
Given all these NGO visits and readings about the work that international actors have done here, I’ve thought a lot about where in all of this I see myself far in the future. My thinking about where I see myself in the future is especially justified because after this semester, I’ll only have a year at Harvard left and will have to decide where to go after that, and I want to be able to make as well thought-out of a decision as possible when choosing what to do next. Anyway, I used to think that I wanted to work at some kind of NGO, but I’ve come to realize that I don’t want the work that I do to be dependent on donor funding and to always have to justify it with applying for grants. As much as I believe in the good work that NGOs do (well, when it’s good, because I’ve also learned about their negative sides), I just want to have a reliable salary that will allow me to live comfortably. Maybe it’s coming from a lower socioeconomic background in the USA, but I want to see if I can use my education to go as far as I can in terms of earning potential. So yes, as horrible as it is to say, I do want to earn a decent amount of money. I’m going to have to fund my swanky inner city apartment somehow, as well as my travels for pleasure (because I also realize that I soon want to be able to travel just because, without having to justify it with grants either). At the same time, I have also been hearing about how multilateral organizations like the UN can sometimes be too bureaucratic or only work for their own interests rather than advancing the agendas that they advocate, and prevent any real work from being done. Despite this, as much as I sometimes feel disillusioned by the bureaucracy, I think structure and organization will do me well in my future job because I have come to realize how much I love extreme organization and rules and things running on time. And being in fancy, modern buildings such as those of the UN headquarters and the ICC. Besides, as naively ambitious as it is to say, maybe they could use more people with a background like mine to be able to change the system little by little. That being said, I think my dream job would entail working at some international organization, earning a great salary with other benefits, and being sent to other countries on short visits to check up on projects and interact with people from there while also having international colleagues at my regular workplace. That’s it. Perhaps if I earn enough money, I’ll be able to start my own NGO with some people I’ll have met along the way and be able to help support it; that’d be really cool. These past few years I’ve loved really getting to immerse myself in a new place, and have done that so many times and gotten exposed to so many ways of life, that I think I want to see what kind of life and home I can make for myself based on what I want, rather than spending more of a significant chunk of my life always trying to learn about others. So yes anthropology, I love you and everything that you’ve brought me in terms of learning about the people of the world, and I’m extremely excited to do field work and write a thesis (more on that coming up soon!!), but I think after my last year at Harvard I’ll be ready to move forward and see what else I can do to eventually land the career (and life) of my dreams.
I suppose like the missionaries in my favorite musical, I ended up somewhat unexpectedly in Uganda. And just like it did for them, things that I thought would continue to be true for me ended up changing ever so slightly, thanks to the different voices I was able to hear speak about many experiences I could never imagine myself living. But I’m grateful for the experience and will certainly think of these past two weeks spent crossing Uganda on a bus and learning about the country for years to come.
Anyway, I had been wanting to watch this musical for years and finally saw it my first semester of college. At that moment I never would have thought that two and a half years later, I’d actually find myself in the country the hapless missionaries end up wreaking havoc in. So yes, I ended up leaving Rwanda and spending around two weeks in Uganda from March 19th - April 1st with the other SIT students as part of our program!
I must admit that I used to know next to nothing about Uganda, its politics, and its history besides vague things about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, so this trip has been very enlightening. It’s hard to summarize any country’s history, but I will attempt to anyway to give some context to what I’ve been learning. Over the past few decades since Uganda became independent from the English (colonialism messed up many things and the effects of it still reverberate today), it’s gone through a series of military coups, with each new leader dissatisfying another of the country’s many ethnic groups, the north/south divide persisting up until the present. The current president, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power since 1986, which also was the start of Uganda’s 20-year-long civil war. His leadership caused unrest in northern Uganda from the beginning, where people became very dissatisfied and formed rebel groups. The one that persisted the longest was the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony. That’s the one that became infamous for abducting children and making them into child soldiers. This became such a huge problem that the government made people in many northern villages move to internally displaced person camps, where some people stayed for up to ten years in order to avoid attacks and abductions from the LRA. Eventually, the war concluded in 2006.
For a week, we were in Gulu, a town in the north which was one of the places most affected by the conflict. It’s particularly significant because that’s where children from the rural parts of the district would walk to every night in order to sleep in crowds in empty schoolhouses in order to avoid being abducted during the night in their villages. It’s also the place where the controversial Kony 2012 video was shot. I say controversial, because it came out 6 years after the conflict had concluded, and the LRA wasn’t as active in northern Uganda anymore. We also learned about some things that the video had done–we heard people who were former LRA abductees and representatives from the NGO shown in the video, Invisible Children, speak about it. They didn’t really have good things to say; one of the former abductees told us that the information was misconstruing what was actually going on in Uganda, in particular with the timing and scale of what was being shown, and then Invisible Children said that a lot of donors pulled out from funding their projects because they thought that Invisible Children was lying to get more funding, when it turns out that facts were just misrepresented. Basically, they said that the campaign was detrimental to their cause. It was interesting to see how something that seemed to be well intentioned ended up being quite ruinous in the end. And since Joseph Kony wasn’t even apprehended as the video wanted to accomplish by the end of 2012, the campaign kind of just died down, I guess. I do remember seeing it around Facebook in 2012, but I had never actually watched the video until our trip to Uganda, so it was very interesting to learn about everything that had been going on with people here and see what the video was showing at the time.
To return to something I referred to earlier that we learned about Uganda, Ugandan society is pretty divided–not only between the north and south, but also between the 60+ ethnic groups. Basically, colonialism tried to lump these groups together to make one country, which caused problems between different groups each vying for positions of power over the entire country. As it usually is when there is some kind of diversity and when people consider themselves as part of an in-group, the groups have stereotypes about one another and often don’t really associate with one another. They also each have their own distinct languages and cultures, which makes the situation in Uganda more complicated. For our last lecture, we had somebody who works in peacebuilding and security in the government visit us and we had a Q&A session with her. I asked her a question that had been on my mind ever since I learned about the situation between ethnic groups in Uganda, thinking to what I had also learned about Rwanda so far. In Rwanda, they have this campaign called “I am Rwandan” which was implemented by the government to try and instill a sense of national identity and pride in being Rwandan as part of the country's post-conflict restoration. I asked if there had ever been similar initiatives in Uganda that aimed to instill a sense of “Ugandan-ness” alongside a sense of appreciation for the diversity of the country and its ethnic groups. The woman replied, “But what does it even mean to be Rwandan or Ugandan?” and then went on to explain that in Rwanda, they all spoke one language even if they had different “ethnic” groups, and so could understand each other. In Uganda, many people wouldn’t be able to even understand each other, so how could you ask them to all identify with one another? Then she went on to say, how can you try and build this campaign when you first need to build more health facilities and schools, construct roads, and try to make sure resources are distributed evenly? As somebody who once wholly believed in the idea that all human beings should try and appreciate one another and the diversity that this world contains and not fear those who are different from them, her answer provided a new perspective to this idea to me. It was one of those things that made me continue to realize more and more that most people are never going to leave their own countries or even think about the diversity this world contains. Driving across Uganda, we noticed a lot of modest mud huts with grass thatched roofs that sometimes had clothes laid out on them to dry, scattered across the countryside. At one point I was having a conversation with a friend, and she brought up how some of the people who live in those places are probably never going to even see Kampala, Uganda’s capital, yet there we were driving all these distances to visit it like it was so easy for us. So yeah, how can you preach appreciation for “humanity" when you’re never going to even see people from the other side of your country and you have much more pressing concerns that day to day life entails? People like me can try and spread that message by being an example of it, but that’s because I have had the incredible privilege of traveling and meeting people from all over. To bring it back to the musical, for example, the people that the missionaries were trying to convert had way more problems to tackle than thinking about changing their religion, such as civil conflict and HIV/AIDS, so why should they be thinking about some foreign set of beliefs that had no relevance to their daily lives? Incidentally, our guest speaker mentioned an exchange program between the north and south, which seemed like a good place to start in trying to foster a sense of unity among the Ugandan people. Either way, this experience has made me think seriously of what it means to advocate for an appreciation of human beings around the world when it’s already difficult enough within one small country. It’s on this trip where I’ve begun to truly understand why it makes sense sometimes to have a regional focus if you work in international development or those kinds of things, and you can’t just be simultaneously interested in all parts of the world at once like I’ve been if you hope to actually change things positively. I suppose I’ve come to figure out that there’s a difference between general curiosity about a place and desire to work somewhere over the longterm.
On a separate note, I’ve been hearing a lot about the International Criminal Court (ICC). I keep thinking back to when I visited it last summer in The Hague and how I was able to attend part of a hearing. Here in Africa I’ve been hearing a lot about its involvements in conflicts in this area while also hearing about local strategies of giving justice and working towards reconciliation. One of my favorite required readings from the semester so far was an article written by an anthropologist about transitional and local justice in the context of the Acholi culture in northern Uganda, and how local beliefs and practices conflict with universal human rights discourse but also with the circumstances of the conflict which occurred. It also discussed the intervention of international actors and how they worked in these contexts. It was so interesting that when I began reading it in a physically ill state, I actually felt myself feeling slightly better because of how excited I was to read it. Other than that, there’s also currently a big case that the ICC is working on involving one of the LRA’s main leaders, Dominic Ongwen. Apparently the ICC released a warrant for arrest in 2005 against top members of the LRA, though it wasn’t until January 2015 that Ongwen surrendered. (I can’t help but wonder though, how did he go about surrendering? I always wonder the logistics of these kinds of things.) It’s so cool to actually think about the facilities at the ICC in The Hague I was able to see and the glimpse into the courtroom that I got and think about them working on this case that’s very relevant to what I’m studying now. However, two of the other most wanted of the LRA are still at large, Vincent Otti and Joseph Kony. The prime minister of Gulu district spoke to us about the conflict and also about the current status of the LRA, and he told us that the LRA’s numbers have dwindled to very few compared to what it was before, and Kony and his cronies are basically trying to survive in the Bush and are kind of impossible to track because they don’t use any electronics. Seems like a really hard life, but it seems like they prefer it to surrendering. Through this program I’ve been exposed to a lot of the inner workings of the international realm, and that’s one of the things I appreciate the most about it. It’s definitely a field I see myself working in in the future, though not on long missions on the field (since this trip has proven to me just how much I need my creature comforts for day to day life). To continue with the ICC example, I remember reading about something called the victims’ trust fund in one of their exhibits. In Gulu, we visited an NGO called Gulu Women for Economic Development and Globalization (GWED-G) that benefited from this fund.
Besides the ICC, I got the chance to see something that was started by the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. I had been curious about this organization for a while, and I even have a keychain with their logo on my wallet that I got from some career fair, so I appreciated the chance to visit a refugee settlement called Nakivale near the town of Mbarara. The main difference between a camp and a settlement is a settlement is supposedly one that is more permanent. This one was like a little town–it had a population of around 124,000 with refugees from around 12 different countries (including as far as Pakistan), schools, health facilities, and little businesses set up by people. There, we met some Rwandan refugees who had been living there for years. It was very interesting because when they spoke to us, they were downright denying that a genocide against Tutsis happened, and expressed no interest in returning to Rwanda because they found the government somewhat tyrannical and persecuting Hutu behind the scenes. After everything we had been hearing in Rwanda, we appreciated this perspective, though we were baffled by it. After that visit, we had a guest speaker come and talk to us about refugees in Uganda and about his work with refugees. He mentioned towards the end that things that the UN wrote down in its convention for refugees in like 1951 haven’t been working, and the international community needs to rethink the refugee solution. According to him, he thinks it’s best that refugees return home eventually. But I couldn’t help but think, what if they just don’t want to go “home" and are fine with being refugees for life, like we heard? What about the children born as refugees who live in the settlements and don’t know anything else? I thought of today’s refugee crisis and what kind of “solution” could possibly exist. I suppose that’s an issue that my generation will end up tackling not too far in the future.
Given all these NGO visits and readings about the work that international actors have done here, I’ve thought a lot about where in all of this I see myself far in the future. My thinking about where I see myself in the future is especially justified because after this semester, I’ll only have a year at Harvard left and will have to decide where to go after that, and I want to be able to make as well thought-out of a decision as possible when choosing what to do next. Anyway, I used to think that I wanted to work at some kind of NGO, but I’ve come to realize that I don’t want the work that I do to be dependent on donor funding and to always have to justify it with applying for grants. As much as I believe in the good work that NGOs do (well, when it’s good, because I’ve also learned about their negative sides), I just want to have a reliable salary that will allow me to live comfortably. Maybe it’s coming from a lower socioeconomic background in the USA, but I want to see if I can use my education to go as far as I can in terms of earning potential. So yes, as horrible as it is to say, I do want to earn a decent amount of money. I’m going to have to fund my swanky inner city apartment somehow, as well as my travels for pleasure (because I also realize that I soon want to be able to travel just because, without having to justify it with grants either). At the same time, I have also been hearing about how multilateral organizations like the UN can sometimes be too bureaucratic or only work for their own interests rather than advancing the agendas that they advocate, and prevent any real work from being done. Despite this, as much as I sometimes feel disillusioned by the bureaucracy, I think structure and organization will do me well in my future job because I have come to realize how much I love extreme organization and rules and things running on time. And being in fancy, modern buildings such as those of the UN headquarters and the ICC. Besides, as naively ambitious as it is to say, maybe they could use more people with a background like mine to be able to change the system little by little. That being said, I think my dream job would entail working at some international organization, earning a great salary with other benefits, and being sent to other countries on short visits to check up on projects and interact with people from there while also having international colleagues at my regular workplace. That’s it. Perhaps if I earn enough money, I’ll be able to start my own NGO with some people I’ll have met along the way and be able to help support it; that’d be really cool. These past few years I’ve loved really getting to immerse myself in a new place, and have done that so many times and gotten exposed to so many ways of life, that I think I want to see what kind of life and home I can make for myself based on what I want, rather than spending more of a significant chunk of my life always trying to learn about others. So yes anthropology, I love you and everything that you’ve brought me in terms of learning about the people of the world, and I’m extremely excited to do field work and write a thesis (more on that coming up soon!!), but I think after my last year at Harvard I’ll be ready to move forward and see what else I can do to eventually land the career (and life) of my dreams.
I suppose like the missionaries in my favorite musical, I ended up somewhat unexpectedly in Uganda. And just like it did for them, things that I thought would continue to be true for me ended up changing ever so slightly, thanks to the different voices I was able to hear speak about many experiences I could never imagine myself living. But I’m grateful for the experience and will certainly think of these past two weeks spent crossing Uganda on a bus and learning about the country for years to come.
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