Updates and ambiguity: Bududa landslide disaster continues

      Disasters come in and out of the news as fast as celebrity love affairs, it seems.  Have you seen or heard anything in the last week or so on the news on the Bududa landslide disaster?  Well, the disaster continues. I personally have not visited the villages that were so devastated by the torrential rains that hit in early March and the resulting landslides, and I don't plan to, with only two weeks left here in Uganda; anyway, what good could I do just standing there with my mouth agape staring at other people's misfortune?  Not much, besides write about it on this blog.  But I want to avoid that kind of voyeurism, so instead I am sharing with you a blog post written by a friend of mine, John Harrington, for the website and organization Wales for Africa, a Welsh aid organization.  You will read that of the 300 people missing, only a fraction of that number of bodies has been found.  And the ambiguity in how emergency aid is being administered is disheartening.  I encourage you to keep up with the blog as new updates come in from firsthand visits to Bududa.

http://www.walesforafrica.org/blog/2010/03/aftermaths/

Some photos from last month's trip to Zanzibar

Roadtrip to Gulu!

Last week I needed some girl time as well as a distraction - Tom had left for the US on Sunday and I was faced with an empty apartment just at a time when I didn't feel like being alone.  Just in time, my friend Kate from Lawrence, who has lived in Kampala for the last three years, invited me to accompany her on a trip up to Gulu, in Northern Uganda.  Gulu District shares a border with Sudan, and is most well known for the insurgent fighting by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which caused over 90% of the population to be displaced, leading to the establishment of scores of IDP camps where rural peoples, sometimes entire communities, have taken refuge and attempted to carry on with life.  In the last couple of years the violence has lessened, and families are beginning to leave the IDP camps to return to their villages in rural areas.  At the same time, the town of Gulu is awash in development and aid organizations that have moved in as the violence has reduced - I was a little weirded out by the quantity of white development professionals I would see just walking down the street! You have to understand, there are very few white people in Mbale, so when I see one here in Mbale I generally find myself staring at him or her as if they were an alien (and this is when I myself complain incessantly about feeling like an alien living here :) ).

Anyway...

Besides wanting to get out of town, see Gulu (now that it is safe to travel there), and spend some time with Kate, I was really excited to see the women tailor group that Kate works with through her business Awava.  Kate has been working with a group of women tailors, some of them from the IDP camps, for a couple of years now to develop and produce beautiful bags and accessories (even men's ties!) made out of African wax-print cloth.

Can you say Amazing Women! I accompanied Kate on her visits to the tailors in the market stall where they work and also sell products and cloth.  It was truly impressive to hear Lucy, the head tailor, talk about everything she has learned in the last couple of years, all of the skills she has developed in training other women how to sew, how she is able to pay school fees; things are still hard, she and everyone else are still struggling to survive, but the work she does for Awava, and the other opportunities that have come out of that work, are helping little by little.



Check out Awava's website and see the cool work that the seamstresses in Gulu are doing, as well as the cool ways that Awava is supporting their livelihoods and improving working conditions.  Help support these amazing women - the products are awesome, so go ahead and order some! (Order Awava Products!)

I actually didn't take many photos of Gulu itself, but I did take some on the drives there and back from Kampala, because really, who can resist baboons on the side of the road?

It's been a long time coming...

Yes, I am still alive. I got a message from a friend a few days ago asking me how I was, since they had not looked at my blog since I have been here in Uganda.  I realized that I myself hadn't looked at my blog in, oh, say, maybe five or six weeks.  That's just plain sad.  So what's been going on?  Why have I not written?

A lot has been going on.

Any of you who have lived in another country, especially one with a very different culture, know that there is a kind of cycle to living in places like this as a foreigner.  You arrive, find a place to live, and immediately set out getting to know the people, the land, the culture, the language.  Along the way, you identify your favorite places to eat, the best places to find the foods you like, the most friendly bar with the coldest beer, and all the other things you need to feel at home during the hours when you are not at work.  This work of settling in is fascinating, pleasurable, and relatively easy, and it lasts about a month or two.  At about that point, find yourself settling into a kind of routine where you recognize the people on the street  on your way home, and you know the guys staffing the supermarket counter by name.  You congratulate yourself silently for having made yourself so at home and for having been so adaptable to such different cultural norms and customs.

Then something strange happens.  First you start to get annoyed at the children and men shouting "mzungu" (whitey) at you every five feet as you walk to the market to buy vegetables.  Then you start snapping at the people who laugh at you and exclaim "mzungus don't cook!" after you tell them that you have a stove and, yes, you cook food for yourself.  Finally you get to the point of wishing you were invisible when you leave your apartment and every kid in the neighborhood follows you as you walk down the street.  You find yourself being perpetually angry and frustrated.  The only thing you want, the only thing you desire, is some anonymity.  Just to be able to walk around the city and blend in. It gets to the point where you start avoiding going outside except to work, but even at work you find yourself silently judging everyone.  It basically deteriorates into a kind of break-down, where the slightest thing annoys you, and everything about the place you are in is wrong.  Even as you are aware of how ridiculous this is, and how ridiculous you are being, you cannot stop it.  You just can't stop feeling like an alien from another planet.  You start to suspect that being Black, Asian, Latino, or anyone not white in many places in the US, feels just like this - white people stare at you, trying to hide it or not, and in conversations maybe they say things to you like "you people...", putting you in a box without asking you even one question.  You start to feel like some identity has been imposed on you and you must fight to impose your own, if you care about it.  But this gets exhausting.  Of course, I am white, but in both cases, mine as a white person and all people in the US, we've got the weight of history on our backs making us born with complicity, and then we learn fear as we live, and this is the hardest thing to change.  This has been my realization.

And then it just fades away (except for the realizations you have had, which stay), and everything is okay again.  Life is good, you enjoy the place you are in, and you laugh at the little cultural idiosyncrasies that even a few days before had you almost in tears.

For me, this lasted about a month.  I call it Delayed Culture Shock, because it does not hit immediately.  I know from when I lived in Nicaragua that it returns cyclically, at least for me.  Hopefully I don't get it again while I am here in Uganda... So this is the first reason I did not write in this blog for some time; I was essentially unable to communicate anything about Uganda with any fairness for some time.

After that, Tom and I took a break from Mbale and went to Zanzibar with our friend Megan (who lives in Dar) for the Sauti za Busara (Busara Music Festival), a festival of largely Swahili music, although there were also artists from other parts of Africa, and even some from Japan and a Sami artist from Norway.  Our trip to Zanzibar was absolutely awesome, and the festival was fabulous.  I have been back in Uganda for a couple of weeks now, and there is much to tell in terms of work.   But I will leave you with this post for now, and will recount stories of Zanzibar and Mbale soon with some photos!... I promise it won't be two more months.

Vanilla beans and coffee flowers

It's the end of the rainy season here, and the beginning of the hot, dry season.  At least, it is supposed to be.  All of the farmers I work with are a little worried about the local climate, as droughts have been abnormally strong in the last couple of years,   and the current rain didn't end as it was supposed to in December.  Right now it is hot with the occasional rainstorm making it over the heights of Mount Elgon - Mbale is in a sort of rain shadow in respect to the storm systems that come from that direction, but it also gets rain that sneaks around the mountain and comes from the north.  The point is that it should be hot and dry here, it seems that the weather is in limbo, and everyone who depends on agriculture is feeling a bit uncertain.
The good thing is that the coffee is flowering wonderfully, as it should this time of year.  East African coffee is unique in that it actually flowers, and thus harvests, twice per year due to the region's bimodal rainy season; Latin American coffee, by contrast, only has one flowering season, and thus harvests once per year.  Driving down the road through Namanyonyi Subcounty where I work, the air is filled with the scent of the coffee flowers, which closely resembles the perfume of honeysuckle, and the coffee trees are blushing white, full of blossoms.  It is beautiful, and should result in a great "fly" harvest, which is what the smaller second harvest in March-April is called.

At the same time, Peace Kawomera Cooperative has been collecting vanilla beans from its members for the last three weeks, and processing is in full progress.  Vanilla is an incredibly delicate and complex crop to process.  The fresh green beans must be boiled, and then put through a drying process that involves the beans laying in the sun every day and then resting folded up in wool blankets every afternoon and night, for as many days as it takes for the the beans reach the proper stage of dryness for export.

A true retreat

Tom and I had planned our three-night trip to Hairy Lemon Island, on the Nile River about an hour and a half from Jinja (or about three and a half hours from Mbale) with the idea that we needed to get away from work, and from the madness that Mbale was during Christmas. We wanted to truly get away from everything, but we packed our laptops so that we could catch up on our own little projects.
After arriving to the bank of the river in a taxi, we banged on the old tire rim hanging from a tree to summon the boat to bring us across to the island. Stepping out of the long wooden canoe onto the island, we saw a small island complete with an outdoor shaded common area, and a few small bandas, or cabins, set around a grassy hill in the middle of the island, dotted with tents and a small veranda where campers could hang out.  We settled into our banda and were quite pleased with the prospect of the next few days.  Our banda was set on the far edge of the island, off the path, and facing the water.  A large veranda with two wicker chairs held the promise of mornings spent reading in the shade, observing the large prehistoric-looking birds, the lizards, and the three-foot monitor lizards that would occasionally stop to feast or rest in the trees or the river's edge three feet from our veranda.  
That first afternoon we discovered that neither our phones nor our modems got service on the island.  So we put them all away, and did not pull the them out again until we left.  I realized two days into our stay at Hairy Lemon that I had not gone more than half a day without checking my email or Facebook for a very long time.  I reflected on my usual habits and realized that the first thing I do every morning - before even making coffee - is open my laptop and open my email accounts.  I remembered, vaguely, a time when I didn't do that.  I think it must have been a year or two ago when I began opening my laptop with the same regularity as visiting the toilet in the morning.  I remembered even when I wouldn't check my email for days on end, when I didn't depend on email, chat, or social networking sites to keep up on every detail of everything going on.  
So Tom and I embraced the absence of those tools wholeheartedly.  We spent the entire three days pretty much doing nothing.  We walked around the island, watched the myriad varieties of birds that were constantly on the water and in the trees, hunted for more monitor lizards, moved the extra cot outside to the veranda and slept or read the day away.  While using the outdoor shower on our last afternoon there, we heard rustling above us and looked up in the trees, only to see half a dozen red-tailed lemurs jumping from branch to branch, munching on leaves, and carousing in general.  We stood there for a good fifteen minutes with our heads tilted up watching, laughing, and snapping photos, until we realized that we were both naked and should probably shower and get out before someone else walked in looking to bathe.  The beauty of the place is not only in its natural spaces, but also in the level of privacy - the staff do not visit your banda or do anything to interact with you besides serve you meals at the standard group mealtimes.  Since we were pretty much the only non-kayakers on the entire island, out of around fifteen people who were staying there, we were the outsiders of the group since we couldn't participate in the kayaking conversations.  So besides not having communication tools, we were also physically isolated for the most part from the other humans on the island, resulting in a true retreat.  Neither of us felt to any serious extent the absence or lack of any of that; instead we felt profoundly the need, or necessity, to be without those things periodically, and to focus on ourselves and what is physically in front of and around us, real, not virtual.  I can't wait to do it again.

Time to reflect

It’s been exactly two months since I boarded a plane in London for Entebbe, a good moment to reflect on how I am spending my time here, and how the experience is taking shape so far.  I have transitioned from the phase of getting to know the people and organization I am working with, and the place in general, to living, functioning with some modicum of familiarity.  I feel less like an alien being constantly staring with mouth open at the strangeness - and strange sameness - around me, and more like a participant, albeit a temporary one.  It definitely helps that Tom has come to stay with me until I leave; he has brought a kind of comfortable domesticity that is a kind of relief, a kind of retreat at the end of each day when I return home from work and meetings out at the cooperative.

My work in the cooperative has come out of the needs that have arisen since I have been here.  One characteristic of Peace Kawomera, at least right now as the coffee harvest ends and the vanilla-buying season begins, is that the staff and Board are all overwhelmed, and putting effort into long-term planning and projects is difficult.  This is not helped by the fact that the cooperative as an organization is very young, and its management and staff are gaining experience running an organization that has a different vision than other cooperative organizations in the area, one that requires more resources.  Promoting interfaith relations, peace, and rural development requires much more than just commercializing coffee; and even the task of producing and delivering quality coffee requires a set of very developed skills.  Peace Kawomera is a learning organization in both these respects. 

I have come here to investigate the role of institutional and local culture, social and political networks, and the environment in cooperatives’ access to coffee certifications, governance of certifications, and in the impacts that certifications have on those they are meant to benefit – in this case, smallholder coffee farmers.  Peace Kawomera is my third case study, after CECOCAFEN/UCA San Ramón in Nicaragua, and Cooxupé in Brazil.  My approach to my relationships with all of the cooperatives I work with is to make sure that the work I do benefits the cooperative and its members, as well as my own research.  In this way, I essentially came here available to work with PK on projects that they needed assistance on, because I have the time to do so, because they don’t have the time to do so, because I can actually improve my own skills in project development and writing, and because doing so also inserts me into the structure of the cooperative itself, allowing me to know it infinitely better than if I had simply arrived and performed thirty farm surveys and a set of staff interviews over a packed six-week period. 

I had met and conversed with JJ Keki, PK’s Director a few years ago at the USFT Convergence in Boston, and was impressed by the story and vision of the cooperative.  I knew it would make an interesting and unique case study in my research.  After conversations last year with Ben at Thanksgiving Coffee, and some email exchanges with JJ, it seemed that my experience managing a community agroecotourism project in Nicaragua could be useful to PK.  The initial idea is that I would work with PK to do a diagnostic study on the development of such a project with their members, as well as do farm surveys and interviews for my dissertation research.   Neither has actually been started yet in any real material fashion.   They have not been forgotten, simply put on a more realistic timeline, making room for my participation in other projects. 

My time currently is split between various projects.  First, I am working with Johnbosco, the PK Agronomist, Ben from Thanksgiving, Ben from TransfairUSA, and others to write a proposal for a small grant from the ILO for training and capacity-building.  We have succeeded in narrowing down the focus of the grant from every problem PK has, to strengthening management and administration systems and strengthening farmer groups, member participation and extension services.  I am currently spending my mornings revising the second version of this grant, and we hope to submit it to the ILO early next year.  In the afternoons, I have been working with the six PK Field Facilitators (themselves farmers who are hired and trained essentially to be extension agents using the Farmer Field School method) to do research on what kinds of trees farmers prefer in their coffee gardens and on other parts of their farms, and why.  We essentially are having focus groups with about twelve of the forty farmer groups, which each contain 25 farmers, and discussing that question.  The result is that I am developing a spreadsheet of trees with names in Luganda, Lugisu, Lugwele, and some English, and all of their advantages as cited by the farmers in the focus groups.  When we are done with this stage, we will hopefully apply all of this knowledge to the development of a project that will include the establishment of tree nurseries in each of the farmer groups, to facilitate increased tree planting and reforestation on their farms.  The idea here is to mitigate the long-term impacts of climate change, which here include increased drought as well as irregular and more forceful rains, through reforestation.  Trees are what will protect the coffee, and protect the farmers’ livelihoods.

I am spending my spare time mostly on working with all of the staff and Board members to compile information and text for the future Peace Kawomera website.  We have gotten as far as designing the structure of it, and now are working on information.  It is moving along, but I think it will be an ongoing project for the next few months.  A bigger priority that I am not yet working on, but suspect that I soon will be, is the development of an Internal Control System for PK.  This would involve some fieldwork to do risk assessments (probably by farmer group, but possibly by parish), outlining the roles of staff in certification systems and methods of working, and all policies and protocol for production, monitoring and documentation of practices at farm and cooperative levels, and evaluations protocols, and then a lot of office work to write it up into a sort of guidebook for the cooperative’s coffee chain. 

Given how fast time is passing, I am planning to perform the tourism diagnostic with the PK staff next month, so that I can actually do my own farm surveys and interviews in February and March.  I am really looking forward to working on the tourism diagnostic, as it will allow me to really get into analyzing different villages’ infrastructure, cultural activities, and accessibility, as well as potential markets, marketing plans, etc., the kind of work I really enjoy.  The challenge I am having so far in getting this process started is simply getting a conversation started within the cooperative about which parishes, which villages, should benefit from tourism – where should visitors go?  I am starting to get my own ideas as to this question based on my visits to the different farm groups, but I feel it is super important that we actually systematically address this question, so that we can have answers that are fair and logical.  There is already a bit of tension within the cooperative as to who benefits from tourism visits, because generally speaking the Jewish members benefit more than the Christian or Muslim members from the tourists and delegations that do already come.  So I am trying to get that conversation started about which villages will actually receive visitors, and how the entire cooperative and community will benefit materially from those visits.  I will let you know how that goes.  

Until then, Happy Holidays!