In which I talk a lot about Erin and everyday terror (though they are not related)

Erin is in Uganda! It is good that she came 3 weeks after I arrived instead of with me, because I probably would have latched myself on to her and never let go if we had come together. This is not only good for my independence, but also due to the fact that about 8000 people have told me over the last 3 weeks that Erin is their mentor and that they hoped to spend as much time as possible when she is here. Get in line! This is what happens when you are close personal friends and sole research assistant to the patron saint of northern Uganda, St. Erin Baines of UBC.

Back in KM

Since Erin is here, we had a team meeting in Kitgum Matidi for two days to talk about our current research projects and some other things. By the end of both days I was exhausted and had a headache from all the smoke, flies, open sewers, and staring children. Erin informed me that Kitgum Matidi is rated as a 3-fly camp (like Michelin rankings!) – the 5-fly camps have places to stay in, whereas we stayed in Kitgum Town for three nights. And oh God, the latrine! It sounded like there was a bee-hive in it, there were so many flies, and the funny thing is that it was locked, too? Maybe because it’s a biohazard? I don’t mean this by way of complaint, but rather as a description.

On the first day in the camp, during a break in the morning Erin and I went for a wander around the camp (kids in tow, of course) and came upon lots of drunk men (it was about 10:30am). Erin is good at picking out drunk people like nobody’s business, whereas I tend to think people are very friendly (Erin had to repeatedly tell me to keep walking). I’ve always been bad at that. The night before, Erin and I went for a walk in the dark, electricity-free Kitgum Town, and we also stumbled upon drunken-men alley: it seems to be the only thing to do these days. (We also walked along all the verandahs on the main road, which a couple years ago was filled at night with the chattering of all the night commuters – the kids that came into Gulu and Kitgum in droves every night in order to avoid abduction.)

But I digress. We also stopped by an old mego (mother/old woman) mingling sorghum and maize flour in order to make kwete (home brew) (yum!). She and her cohort chattered away at us, and I felt bad because I had no idea what they were saying, but they clearly wanted something. All I could do was stand there stupidly smiling and taking pictures like some idiot tourist (they howled with laughter when I showed them the pictures – they found it very entertaining). A younger man showed up and said that they were asking for money for salt. (Money for salt!) So we promised to bring some back at lunchtime. We did end up buying a whole bunch of sugar and salt (all for about 2,500 shillings – a whopping $1.50) and dropped it off with what we hope was a relative (no one was there when we went back). We also hoped that we hadn’t started a fight over salt. Ah, the complications of giving.

The Everyday

On Tuesday morning, Ketty (fellow JRP researcher), Erin and I were eating breakfast together and Ketty told us that when she was in Senior 1 (I think that’s about grade 8), she and the other girls in her dorm used to sleep with their shoes on because they never knew when the LRA would attack – the rebels kept coming back for them and they would like in bed at night listening to the exchange of fire between the LRA and the UPDF guards just outside of the school. They could hear the insults being shouted back and forth, and in the morning they would wake up and there would be shell casings all over the ground outside. It’s crazy to me that someone as relatively-privileged as Ketty (from a northern Uganda sense) endured that as part of her daily life, and she told us this story nonchalantly over breakfast as if we were talking about the weather. She said that everyone was constantly worried at school, planning where they would run to every time they went to bed for the night, not knowing what was coming. Eventually, her parents pulled her out of the school and sent her south to Jinja, but there were certainly other girls who weren’t quite as lucky and ended up being abducted. This was around ’95, ’96, but Ketty said that a few years before her elder sister was abducted from the same school. Luckily, she was ‘just’ made to carry some luggage and then was almost immediately released.

When we had our ‘reflective’ time in Kitgum Matidi, more of these stories and observations came out when we prodded – stories that our colleagues find everyday and not worth mentioning. It really makes me wonder what other stories they have bottled up. I think this is also an issue of hierarchy – I noticed this in Vancouver before when people would come visit from Uganda, and it’s even more pronounced here – people really clam up if their superiors or anyone in a position of authority is in the same space as them. I think there is a very different philosophy to education as well, one that is much older than what we have in Canada. Thinking critically is not necessarily encouraged in Ugandan children, and the end result is a fairly subservient society. This makes research here pretty difficult – not only because people are scared out of their wits that whatever they say will come back to haunt them, but because people tell you a lot of things that they think you want to hear.

But some stories came out anyway – all on themes of death and fear, and most too harrowing to include here. Erin remarked on the coping skills of Acholi people in the face of death. She was here once when there was an ambush one night, and a friend was killed. In less than 24 hours the funeral was held, and everyone rallied – someone brought the food, someone bought the coffin, someone brought a tent and chairs, etc. Emon said, “Yes, sometimes we bury people on the same day – the same hour, even.” I said that I’d only ever been to one funeral of a person I knew in my whole life (my 85-year-old grandfather’s, so nothing earth-shatteringly tragic). Erin echoed this and said she had only been to two. This was shocking to everyone else – Emon said he’d already been to four funerals just this year.

When we had a party for Erin on Saturday at our friend Jessica’s house (Jessica is a lovely New Yorker who works for Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the biggest NGOs here), people got to talking about their old war stories (I felt like a grandchild) and I just listened. Someone said that every morning in Gulu, you basically went out to see who had been killed during the night; which friends’ bodies were rotting on the road or in the ditch. Erin told me about one day when she was standing in front of Mike (JRP Project Coordinator)’s house with Mike, Mike’s cousin-sister (yes, the genealogical categories here are different from Canada), and one other friend, just chatting about their mornings. Mike said that his neighbour was rapidly dying of Hepatitis because he couldn’t afford any medication. His cousin-sister said that her sister had stopped talking and moving due to war trauma, and apparently had done so before. Then their friend said that her sister was killed in a road accident the night before. This was their casual morning conversation; another day at the water cooler, as though they were talking about last night’s hockey game. Absolutely insane. Totally common.

Landmines

After our meeting yesterday, Jackie (FP) took us for a walk past the camp dumping ground to some big rocky hills on the outskirts – apparently where Kitgum was originally settled, but everyone left because of cen (haunting). Swarms of bees kept coming and attacking every once in a while, so they decided to move the settlement.

I was taking my time, wandering on the rocks, when Sheila (Focal Point from Pajule) shouted at me from the next hill over:

“Watch out for the landmines!”

“What?!” screamed I.

It turns out she was referring to the large piles of human feces everywhere. Wow – so pretty. I did see a lot of crap, it turned out, and even people lying next to the open sewers, coughing with God-knows-what preventable or treatable diseases. If it wasn’t for, you know, the endless amount of human suffering, Kitgum Matidi would be a pretty nice place. The views of the mountains (towards Karamoja in the East and Sudan in the North) were pretty spectacular.

There was a music group that was going to perform for us, but they ended up backing out because they were missing some people. Their t-shirt uniform was bright turquoise with “No thanks, Cholera!” written on it and a drawing of a man with giant teeth and a body made out of water. It was awesome and rad.