Coming home.

Coming home can sometimes be difficult. People experience culture shock especially because of the excess of everything we have upon return. I just wanted to talk about everything I’d seen, done, and learned while I was abroad. One of the best parts of doing research is that it gives you a venue for this expression. As I analyze my data, I’ll have the opportunity to share what I learned with many different people. But writing a large report will take time, so I decided I’d reflect a little on the experience now. And so, I thought I’d try to tell a story.

Storytelling is good because it is powerful. But its hard these days because everyone’s stories seem to be fabricated into that perfect inspirational tale. I want to tell a different story from my time in Uganda.

It starts in a similar way. One of the world’s poorest countries, it suffered from a 20 year civil war that largely affected civilians, and is ruled by a corrupt and sometimes ruthless government. I knew the Northern region where I would travel had been affected much worst than the rest of the country, and that the population had been forced out of their homes and into IDP camps. I knew that many children had been abducted during the war and worse, forced to return to their own communities and commit crimes. But I didn’t know what life would be like now, five years after the end of the war and at a time when many relief NGOs were starting to pull out. I braced for what you see in World Vision advertisements.

I didn’t find people starving and didn’t meet the kids sitting on the side of the road with flies in their eyes. The poorest people still had huts and wore some clothes. There was no running water or electricity in the villages (where the vast majority of Northern Ugandans live), but that’s a reality for a large portion of the world’s population. Northern Uganda is one of the poorest regions of the world, but people still had money to get drunk.

The immediate situation has improved greatly in the last decade as an amnesty law and increased pressure from government forces helped shift the war to neighboring countries and Northern Ugandans slowly began to return home. People once again have land to farm, even if they no longer have oxen and ox-plow to farm efficiently. Its safe again for kids to go to school and limited public infrastructure is improving with renewed stability.

Despite these improvements, the population sustained now for years on World Food Program handouts, seems dependent on NGOs. Wherever we went we were asked for aid and assistance. At first, it made me a little angry - at NGOs for supporting this dependency, at the government for not providing the necessary protection during the war to allow people to stay home and continue farming, but also at the people themselves for not packing up the pieces, counting their blessings, and moving on from the war. It was terrible, but I just felt as if these people should just be thankful that they no longer had to fear death. And I thought that now that they had returned to a state of “normalcy”, they should be able to support themselves if they worked hard, even if it would be difficult for a few years.

But thinking back on everything I learned, not only in the North, but around the country, I see how this is actually the period when populations may need the most help, especially from students like myself. Yes, they are no longer dying on a daily basis from malnutrition or being targeted by both the rebel and government forces in a completely senseless war. But in a way, it was easier when they were in that state of emergency. Handing out food and medicine and building social movements out of this level of complete human suffering is, almost, simple. Instead, these people are now stuck in a tangled, misunderstood, and ignored set of structural issues with no quick fixes.

For example, there’s an entire demographic of the population that grew up in the war, either trapped in IDP camps or in rebel camps. They missed the formative years of their childhood and youth - and now lack education, marketable skills, and understanding of their culture and traditions. In countries where an effective reintegration strategy was developed, the consequences of these issues could be mediated. But in Uganda, where the government continues to be patrimonial and frankly the leadership does not care about the prospects of Northern Ugandans, the post-conflict strategy was thoroughly mismanaged. For these youth and now young adults, this has left them unemployed, disengaged with their communities, and involved in alcohol and drug abuse. In addition, many continue to suffer from trauma and (often resulting) stigmatization. Many are also angry. They saw their families uprooted from their homes and killed, and many were even forced to participate in these crimes themselves. But as they were lectured on human rights from NGOs who thought handouts should be paired up with sensitizations, they saw their rights to protection, freedom, and life, continuously abused with perpetrators unaccounted for.

As governments applauded the success of the 2000 Amnesty Law (stripping all Ugandans who fought against the government of responsibility for their crimes), communities saw war criminals return home. Not only were they free to live as they pleased with no consequences for their actions, but they even received support from the government and NGOs. Justice had not only been forgotten, but purposefully pushed to the side.

So now I can paint you a picture of what typical village life in Northern Uganda is life - at 9 am you walk around and see young men drinking vodka. You see children running around, not at school because parents can’t pay their school fees, or because they don’t have any parents. You see abandoned fields, left unplowed because farmers (peasants as they call themselves) only have inefficient hand hoes. Yes, no one will die from these problems tomorrow. But this is not the road to progress and development either. How do you fix these problems?

To some development scholars, it is a simple issue of raising people above these dismal levels of poverty. Give them some animals, they’ll be able to plow more efficiently, thus make more money, thus be able to send their kids to school and then the next generation will be able to have a better life.

But actors who’ve been on the ground for a long time know that there are the bigger individual psychological and societal structural issues that few address but that often hinder even the most insightful development projects. People are traumatized and dependent. People are angry and a large majority continue to live in the past, unable to move on and improve their current living conditions. How do you address these issues?

I hope my research will shed a little light on these issues and propose some solutions. But they will be long-term as they need to touch on capacity and infrastructure building as well as psychological issues. Uganda will also need proper, effective, respected, government involvement. Finally, more research is also important to learn how all these interrelated issues are related to each other. These are complicated issues, but they are possible to fix. And finding solutions is not only important to improve people’s livelihoods now, but also to promote a peaceful and just future for Uganda.

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Ps - thank you to everyone who provided support for me to go to Uganda. Thank you to my mom for accompanying me there at the beginning of the trip and to my dad for supporting the research and helping us out in the middle of the trip. I’ll continue posting anything we write, both about our research and the experience.