To Kyangwali refugee settlement

Tomorrow I head off to Kyangwali refugee camp in western Uganda, near the town of Hoima. I’ll be there for two weeks, helping to provide legal services and surveying conditions in the camp. Most of the refugees come from the Congo, and so I will also serve as unofficial French interpreter, though any hint of a Quebecois accent seems to confuse them.

I suppose I haven’t even mentioned where I work yet: a local NGO called the Refugee Law Project. I work in the Legal Aid Clinic, where I mostly pretend to be a lawyer, helping our clients either gain refugee status or deal with other problems, like medical, employment or security issues.

Every person who walks in our doors carries a long history of harrowing, gut-wrenching tales. I have been conflicted about whether to write about some of them here, due to confidentiality issues. In any case, I imagine I will have much to report from my own eyes when I return. Until then.

Murchison Falls

I headed up to Murchison Falls National Park this past weekend. My first safari. It was beautiful, and I finally got to see the legendary African animals in the wild (not to mention the legendary Nile River), but the whole experience was a tad too sterile for my liking. Everything was guided and organized, you can’t step out of the car, and you can’t get away from all the other safari cars with armies of tourists poking their cameras out the window, gratuitously snapping away. The animals even seem to have become accustomed to the vehicles. I suppose I’m more into wandering around on one’s own, interacting personally with nature or people.

That said, it was worth it. My favourite was seeing a giraffe run – so graceful and deliberate, it actually looks like you are watching it in slow-motion. Second was hearing a hippo outside my tent in the middle of the night munching grass and flapping his ears. They trek far from the water to find soft, short grass, and are frequent visitors at the campground. But their rotund, jolly appearance belies the fact that they are vicious and territorial, known to charge tourists (and can run faster than any man). So I had to desperately hold it in until the hippo lumbered away.

Wildlife roll-call: baboons, guinea fowl, colobus monkeys, water bucks, buffalo (and their ubiquitous bird-on-the-shoulder sidekicks), all manner of antelopes (obiri, kop, etc. and a tiny, dog-sized one that is apparently the rarest animal in the park), a pride of lions with 9 cubs play-wrestling, giraffes, elephants, hippos, crocodiles, birds galore, warthogs, and a couple insane Australian girls who talked about drinking the whole trip up, drank the whole time, and complained about their hangover the whole way back.

Photos (though not of the Aussies – also very territorial):

“OBAMA VICTORY EXCITES UGANDA”

The bold, capitalized headline taking up half of the front page of today’s New Vision.

Last week I was at a bar and ran into a World Bank employee. We got into some deep stuff – the kind of world-shattering discussion that tends to happen after a few beers amongst idealists. “How do we stop all this war and suffering, man?”

Anyway, for someone reason I mentioned the phrase “Since colonialism in Africa ended...” Ronny, the off-duty club DJ, overheard me and leapt into the conversation, a little irritated.

“But what about neo-colonialism? That’s still here. You know, all this money you give us is great, but you tie us down. You still control us.”

“So how come you can’t deal with your problems on your own?” said World Bank.

“Well, we are so poor, we are suffering. What can we do?”

“So you need the money. But if we give it to you, you’ll accuse us of controlling you, of being colonialists. How can we win? How can we fix this?”

Ronny, only 10% joking: “Elect Obama, man!”

The Jam

Above: the “taxi park” in Kampala where the matatu minivan-taxi-buses congregate to pick up passengers before dispersing in all directions, following some incomprehensible (to me) series of unmarked routes, stopping at unmarked places.

Roughly speaking, I live in the northeastern part of the center of Kampala and work in the southwestern part. It’s about a 45 minute walk. By moped, it’s about 10 minutes. But by matatu during rush hour, it takes at least an hour.

Kampala traffic is unbearable (the locals just call it “the jam”). Why is anybody’s guess. Some local friends tell me it’s simply plain old bad urban planning from the 1950s. The lack of traffic lights can’t help – there are only 2 functioning ones in the entire city.

All that idling of diesel engines and old cars means that on a hot, still day you can chew the air. When you blow your nose, sometimes it comes out with specks of black. Yum.

Democracy shmocracy (cont'd)

Just after I painted a slightly rosy picture of press freedom in Uganda, news comes out that the government is setting up a special “Media crackdown” taskforce. And insiders from the Independent and the Daily Monitor have told me that despite their critical tone, much is often left unsaid.

I also somewhat misguidedly mentioned that Museveni had brought “stability” to Uganda. Relatively speaking – compared to the pre-Museveni era – this is undoubtedly true (as it is with all dictators). But I forgot, of course, to mention the conflict in the North. Technically there is still an ongoing “war” in Uganda, although it has calmed significantly in the past few years. But strangely, if you talk to locals in Kampala, the troubles in the North are rarely even mentioned. It’s as if it isn’t even part of the country. News about the momentous ongoing peacetalks – which have recently stalled, perhaps permanently – make page 4 and beyond of the local newspapers, while the same story might be featured on the BBC homepage. More on the North later, particularly after I visit in a month or so.

From the glass-half-full department, however, comes a report that the Constitutional Court has boldly struck down a law requiring that public protests be pre-authorized by the government. The language of the judgment seems awfully, well, Canadian. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Ssese Islands

I set out on Friday for the secluded Ssese islands in Lake Victoria for a little R&R. I took a 3-hour ferry ride from Entebbe, sitting by the rails, with the spray tempering the equator sun.

By Saturday night, I was dancing to traditional German music with an elderly German lady. “Mama,” I only knew her as. I was the only guest at the Hornbill Camp, sleeping in a leaky tent on a private beach. The owners were a crazy middle-aged German couple who took beer with breakfast. Mama had come to visit her son and the owners threw a 30-person pig roast in her honour, attended by an assortment of locals from this tiny island, including a rather sharply dressed reverend. The food was delicious – cassava, plantains, bean salad, fried beans, beans-beans, assorted local vegetables, and of course the pig, whose squealing slaughter I had woken up to that morning. But there wasn’t enough pork, as Mama had broken into tears at the thought of killing the second pig. She had named him “Fritz.” The owner privately assured me Fritz would meet his maker after Mama left.

I had made the mistake of telling Mama I spoke a little German, having taken a couple years of long-forgotten classes in high school. Mama didn’t speak English, and I suppose was feeling a bit lonely, so throughout Saturday she sought me out on the beach for long conversations of which I didn’t understand a bloody word. The only things I really understood were when she approached me at the pig-roast and complained that there was too much African music on the stereo. Out came the German folk tunes. And Mama insisted I have the second dance with her (the reverend was first). A giggling crowd of Ugandans cheered us on. The next thing I understood was Mama telling me that the reverend had been a better dancer.

The night before I had sat on the beach to watch a quiet sunset, as the local fishermen (none of whom, I was told, can swim) paddled home in their rickety boats. And then the noisy Ugandan night came alive. Croaking bullfrogs, chirping grasshoppers, a cicada-like buzzing, angry ducks roused from their slumber, and mostly an assortment of very loud unidentifiable sounds, including a high-pitched, reverberating plinking that sounded a bit like a steel-drum band. Overhead was an unfamiliar sky, only recognizing an upside-down Big Dipper emptying into the horizon. Across the lake a lightning storm fizzled, dark clouds slowly rolling across the water towards me. A stray dog (there are no other kind in Uganda – as my friend put it, Africans find it very strange that we North Americans take “beasts” into our home and sometimes even sleep with them) came by to keep me company. Screw the fleas, I gave him a good rub down, glad to have a new friend. But this meager show of affection meant that he followed me around all weekend (all the way to when I boarded the ferry back), and even attacked my tent at 3am, bolting me awake with andrenaline pumping to see the outline of a jaw through the tent wall (I suppose he thought the tent had eaten me). When the inverted Big Dipper slowly disappeared behind the coming storm, I decided to turn in.

Other wildlife encounters included some mischievous monkeys eyeing my plantain chips and, especially, all manner of birds: the African Screaming Fish Eagle; brownish hawks circling above; the Grey East African Plantain Eater (apparently); a huge toucan-esque bird whose enormous wingflaps could be heard from far away and whose un-aerodynamic, grotesque beak made the air buzz as it passed (I thought I’d heard a small plane, at first), fleets of little yellow chirpers, and small fisher birds who hovered over the lake and then plunged in like missiles. A bird-watcher’s paradise.

Also – a 8-yearoldish local girl named Tina who spoke only Luganda. She found me on the beach. Tina squealed with delight when I showed her how to skip rocks. And then later she brought her friends to chase around the “mzungu” (‘white man’) and climbed all over me as I tried to read. At least I took the opportunity to get Tina to pose for a picture with The Fate of Africa, an enormous tome I finally polished off this weekend:



So while I didn’t get the absolute peace and quiet I was looking for, I will miss all my new friends. Auf wiedersehen, Mama!