So last Thursday, we had our last big family dinner with members of the family coming from every student.  It was a big buffet with traditional Acholi cultural dances, including the amazing “courtship” dance, which consists of a lot of shaking of body parts and then little Acholi girls coming up to Jacob and Paul (our visiting professor from the US) and courting them as they both get on their knees and rub each other’s faces.

It was an amazing night as our parents gave speeches wishing us off.  Several of us, including myself, cried after my father’s speech, which involved him telling us all to share Gulu and what we have learned and seen with our families and friends.  He quoted the Pedagogy of the Oppressed book that I gave him and described how we liberate each other when we listen to the stories and problems of others and that the study-abroad program that we are on is an amazing educational experience where instead of just hearing about “war-torn people in Northern Uganda” we live with a family and work with the people rather than for them.  He also mentioned that whenever he sees a white person walking around Gulu he will look for my face in theirs and feel compassion for them rather than seeing them as just another white person.  He also emphasized the importance of tearing down artificial barriers, such as race and where one is from, which he has brought up with me throughout this trip.

Also, last weekend, we went to Rwanda where we saw three different genocide memorials and went volcano trekking.  Rwanda is one of the most beautiful countries I have seen in my life with its 1,000 hills and volcanoes that are filled with fields that stay green all year, and according to our Ugandan friends, some of the most beautiful women.  Yet, odds are that every Rwandan you see has been affected by a genocide that cost hundreds of thousands of peoples’ lives and left 30% of children as orphans.  It reminded me of Northern Uganda, where odds are every person we saw has been affected by the twenty-plus year war where 90% of the people in the area we live in have been displaced. 

Two of the genocide memorials we visited were in churches that people went to for sanctuary, but the churches were attacked by Hutus who killed the Tutsis that were hiding inside.  Upon walking into the first church, I did not notice anything different other than the holes in the roof, which I guessed were bullet holes, but I was not sure.  A guide for the church who is also a survivor of the attack showed us the front gate and windows which had been bent open, the blood stains on the altar where the priest says mass, the bullet holes of the roof, the room with the broken door where they now keep everyone’s clothes who was in the massacre, and the basement of the church and area behind the church where there are rows upon rows of skulls, bones, and caskets with more.  She survived because she was by the door during the initial grenade which through her down, and she was left covered by other dead bodies for three days.  I do not know how someone could relive the worst day of their life every day by taking people around that church or the families and friends of the 2,000 victims who have to go see all the bones.

5,000 people died in the other church where all the clothes, jewelry, letters, everything of the survivors was kept and is now displayed.  It is just too much for the human mind to comprehend and too much for people to tell Rwandans to simply get over it.  If I have learned anything from hearing genocide survivors speak at Northwestern, it is that something like genocide is cross-generational and is not something that someone can “get over” and “move on from”. 

The final memorial we went to was in the capital Kigali and was a beautiful museum that looked like the Jewish Holocaust Memorial.  The saddest part for me was not the images and videos of murder and the blood stained clothes, but the stories of people saving others and the stories from kids about the last time they saw their parents.  One kid describes how his mother and he (who, as he is telling this story, is about my age) were in hiding for days before they ran out of all their food except beans.  His mother knew that he did not like beans so she risked her life by going out and finding him vegetables and passion fruit.  She died soon after.  Stories of life and love in all this violence is just too much for me.

To unwind from all of this, we went volcano trekking on a soaking wet and muddy day, and our tour guides laughed at us as most of us were wearing sandals, shorts and t-shirts.  We did not even get close to the crater at the top, but it was a lot of fun as we slipped up and down and we got to see two gorillas.  Our guides said the gorillas were the closest that they have ever been to the path and that we cannot tell anyone that we saw them because they are not supposed to point them out to us since we did not pay the $1000 to see them (I am sure they will not read our blog, so we’re fine).

Now zoom forward to a couple days ago: as we are leaving Gulu, our agricultural training project has been “successful” as the seeds are growing, and our computer project has a shot at being sustainable as we have left the teachers and a potential outsider to continue our work with a work plan for a peer education program where the two teachers would have students help them teach their classes, which can contain 80 students at a time!

According to our Professor Paul, it has been a success story, and we are providing means for them to continue this.  He reminded us this past week that “when working with community, the ultimate goal is not sustainability, that’s for institutions that hire people and have a maintenance fund to worry about.  With communities, you give them some things and learn with them, but ultimately it is up to them if they want to do it.  He reminded us that the strength of the community is flexibility.  The importance is on building capacity of organization we are working with to address issues, not sustainability.  Overall, our group found that we did not have much to contribute to the agriculture project, other than funds, and we were flexible and were able to work at Alliance Secondary School and to provide the computer teachers with some skills, knowledge, materials (and further donated resources), and a work plan to truly be “Your Computer School”, as Alliance calls itself on their sign and the students’ shirts.

Our host families were amazing.  Gulu is amazing, even if the Lonely Planet says you have no reason to go there.  I want to go back next summer. Our organization turned out not to be everything we expected, but we learned a lot about NGOs, development, Uganda and ourselves and that’s as cheesy as I will get in a blog.

Finally, to borrow from Liz's post (read below), I will miss Naked Man ("he has a name, it is Komakech (which means unfortunate)", the markets, having 14 brothers and sisters, big momma (my mom), bigger momma or big momma squared (her sister), the clouds, the stars, the trees, my dad's village, having chicken potatoes and rice with every meal, three bottles of Fanta Citrus a day (find it in the US), the Acholi languages/dances/people, seven stones and the other games my siblings played, and just life in Gulu.

I will not miss the war, the Internally Displaced Persons Camps, the way women are treated, being called a muzungo/mono by everyone (everyone asks "how are you? i am fine" but they don't care how I really feel ha), the way too many briefcase NGOs (NGOs that exist simply to exist and go from donor to donor), Ugandan food (sorry, but it isn't that great), the bus ride from Gulu to Kampala (horrible roads and Kenny Rogers and Ugandan music and Nigerian films), and the fact that if I like Gulu now, I am told I should have seen it before this war where "everything was different".

Thanks for reading so far and I’ll keep posting until someone cuts me off.

Adong maber (take care),

Nikolai "Anywar (stubborn) Komakech (unfortunate) The Last/Lost Born

       We have officially hit the home stretch of our stay in Uganda. On
Saturday, I sadly moved out of my wonderful home stay and our project
came to a close with our end-of-program tournament. Despite the
heaviest rain that I've witnessed all summer forcing us to cancel the
second half of tournament games, the kids had fun, and it was a good
way to wrap up and celebrate the accomplishments of the summer.
       In our last full week in Uganda, two of our professors from
Northwestern made the trip out here to give us a little formal
education, and make us work for the credits we're receiving. I spent
Sunday, my first legitimately free day in two months, writing a paper
assigned for one of the classes. However depressing it is to return to
the academic world of critical reading and writing, the paper was to
be a reflection of one of the assigned readings in junction with how
it applied to our work in the field.
       The article I wrote about was on HIV/AIDS. It hypothesized reasons
why Africa is plagued by the disease so much more than the rest of the
world. Briefly mentioned was the difference in relationships between
Africans and Westerners, let's say, Americans. While on average
Americans have sex with more people in their lives than Africans do,
they are for the most part, serially monogamous, thus the rate of
transmission is lower. Africans, especially African men, the article
said, tend to be more likely to have sex with multiple people at once,
thus transmit the disease to unknowing partners.
       One reason the article gave for this infidelity was women in
"transactional relationships." Because African women often have little
power in relationships, and are dependent on their boyfriends or
husbands for money or support, they have no power to keep their
partners faithful. Without men, these women are ostracized.
Furthermore, these disempowered women probably don't feel able to
demand the use of condoms or other contraception.
       So…my genius solution to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS, which surely
has been proposed by many before me, is to launch a massive women's
rights campaign. The results of a women's empowerment movement could
be immense; if the power balance between men and women in
relationships was leveled, men would be more faithful, and  women
could demand HIV testing and the use of contraception.
       Of course, this is highly idealistic and much, much easier said than
done, but it's an idea that I got excited about. I think it is time
that we start looking for new solutions to the problem of HIV
transmission, as abstinence and other campaigns have failed to
eradicate the problem in the past twenty years.

--Ann

I said goodbye to my host brother, Eric, yesterday.  He left for Kampala to start his first year of university.  Today at breakfast, my host mom (I call her “Nyabo”) told me that her sister lost a child, and that she will not spend the night at home tonight.  Since I leave Jinja tomorrow morning at 10 am to spend my final days in Kampala, I won’t see her again!  I’m surprised at how often death happens here – it seems someone is always attending some burial – and how quickly my family broke apart.  Now it’s me, Joy, Diana, and a visiting sister, Angela, and her young son, Jerry.

I’ve been taking photos of the things I missed – my bucket bath arena, latrine, sewing machine – and getting a little sentimental.  I’m not great with goodbyes.

Here are some funny things I’ll miss:

strange breakfasts – today I had popcorn and eggs, yesterday I had French fries and pink bananas, the day before I had a few bites of fruit…

music – you walk by a store, and… wait… is that Dolly Parton??  Yep, she’s huge here.  Ugandans dig old country music, gospel, and their perky native beats.  One of the songs on the music DVD I’m bringing home – Kiwaani by Bobi Wine – is huge right now.  Kiwaani means “fake,” and (from my understanding) the video is about a guy who fakes his own death and then coughs in the coffin.  Yesterday one of my work associates called the gold band on my ring finger “kiwaani.”  She saw right through me.

Fooooood – blackened maize, homemade popcorn (cocoporn), cheap pineapple, jackfruit, ripe tomatoes, millet, sautéed cabbage, groundnut sauce, avocado

Bargaining – fixed prices are such a bore!  I’ll miss whipping out a few Lusoga words to slash prices in half… I’ll miss the hunt

Pirated everything – at the Internet café I usually frequent, the walls are covered with American films you can have copied here -- Ring Around the Rosie, Prison Break, Half Past Dead 2, Wild Hogs, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shanghai Knights, Mr. and Mrs. Smith...  You can also find hilarious compilation DVDs like Bruce Lee vs. Van Damme or Justin Timberlake vs. Akon. 

I’ll miss saying hello to the person next to me on the bus, and seeing women breastfeeding everywhere, children everywhere, men working sewing machines on the street, coming home to my family, tea time, being outdoors so much, motorcycle rides, living with goats chickens and cows, nice weather, and the calm Ugandan walking pace.

I will not miss being called muzungu, being proposed to, getting ripped off, taking loads of foreign medicines, worrying about buying fake water, worrying about having water at all, having no trashcan, intolerance of (lack of exposure to?) homosexuality, dangerous boda drivers, and the way many women are treated here.

--Liz

We passed the weekend in Rwanda, and on the way there, I spent Thursday night with Megha’s family in Kampala.  So generous for opening their home to me, they let me eat their delicious food, use plenty of expensive hot water, watch DSTV, and play “bowling” with their 3-year-old daughter.  They were nothing but nice.  Still, the experience didn’t fill me with warmth.  For some reason, I found myself defensive… skeptical of their home and lifestyle.  Why?

First of all, let me explain a few things.  My Ugandan family lives comfortably.  They have the luxury of plenty of time to spend together; wear nice, clean clothes; have a DVD player and TV; and eat a variety of good foods (including meat fairly often).  They have an extra room to offer me!  They are well-off…

But when I went to Megha’s house, my family seemed poor.  Megha’s family lives in a new suburb of Kampala, where many politicians and “big men” also live.  Her house includes a garage because her family owns two cars.  The interior features white walls and spotless white tile floors (no small feat in dusty/muddy Africa); a kitchen with a stocked pantry and oven; fancy cable TV; a big refrigerator; and a bathroom with a sink, bathtub, handheld sprayer, porcelain toilet, and large mirror.  They have a house girl.  They wear gold jewelry and vacation in the United States and Europe.  Both parents are very educated (post-grad).  Their electricity and water are reliable.

My family has/does none of those things.  But like I said, we have more than we need.  Compared to the villagers I’ve met -- people who often can’t afford sugar or school fees or transportation into town -- my family is rich.

But compared to Megha’s homestay in Uganda’s capital city, my family still lives backwoods: no indoor running water, no expensive metal front gate (we use barbed wire covered with some straw-like material), no cars, few condiments, no alcohol.

At first I couldn’t deduce why walking into Megha’s house angered me.  What a lovely home!  It’s great that two people who work very hard can achieve such wonderful things.  How lucky they are to own so many pairs of shoes!

Was it outright jealousy at Megha’s comfort?  She can take warm showers, and rely on electrical hair tools, and brush her teeth with chilled water.  Jealousy alone can’t explain my sentiment, though.  She is one of my best friends in Africa, one of the people I get along with best.  She was assigned her homestay just like me, and what’s more, I’m happy she enjoys it so much, because that’s what matters.

When I stayed there, part of me wanted to defend my family, to tell her Kampala crew that, you know, I actually PREFER not using hot water… and that, you know, growing up in a home with lots of TV means that you spend less time talking to your family… and that even though my Jinja family SEEMS less comfortable in a material sense, we spend lots and lots of time together… and I can help my mom cook and bond because we don’t have any house girl doing that for us.  But why would I say those things?  Megha’s family didn’t insult mine.  I was their guest, anyway… and I’m sure my Ugandan lifestyle was far from their minds.

Another part of me wanted to scold Megha’s family.  What do you do for the community?  How do you give back?  If you don’t, how could you live like this, when so many of your neighbors’ children’s bellies grow fat with hunger?  Spending money on education is a good investment, but why must you wear flashy gold watches?  Do you really need to dig your own well to avoid using the city’s water (which, in their defense, the New Vision Paper reported recently turned green and was discovered to contain feces).

But in America, I come from Megha’s family.  My American family pays for my private university, orders take-out, vacations abroad, wears jewelry, and swims in our backyard pool.  By the standard with which I judge Megha’s family, those are all wastes of money, save education.  Who am I to claim such a thing?!  Nothing but a bloated hypocrite.

What’s more, one of my greatest delights in Rwanda was dining at New Cactus, a pricey French restaurant with brilliant views of Kigali’s nighttime city lights.  I spent $18 USD on my meal – vin blanc, mineral water, veggie potage, salade nicoise, and crepes – and felt nothing but joy doing so.  I justified it (I think we all did) by saying that I deserve such an indulgence after eating mostly starch for a month, by saying that my meals had been so cheap all along (a couple USD), I could afford this meal.  Needless to say, the concentration of non-natives in New Cactus proved significantly higher than almost anywhere else I’ve been in Uganda or Rwanda.

Maybe I reacted to Megha’s family the way I did because I didn’t feel a part of it.  In the U.S. I know I belong to a tiny, elite group.  I feel guilty about my consumerism, and believe in balancing opportunities between the rich and poor.  I believe in the Democratic Party, in volunteerism, in aid (a concept that needs further explanation elsewhere).  Many of my peers who come from similar backgrounds feel the same way.

Wealth is relative.  In America I belong to a privileged group, and I also know there are people much richer than me.  They buy $1000 martinis with real rubies inside and own private islands (we know this! it airs on TV!).  But I don’t normally have access to those people, so I’ve never felt as personally confronted by wealth as I did in Megha’s Kampala home.

Whereas normally I’m the person coming from the sunny side of the street – the one flying to Africa to check things out, to make a hopefully-not-too-misguided attempt at improving something – at Megha’s I felt like I stared myself in the face.  How can I reconcile that?

Last Saturday, my Father here in Gulu took me to see the village (a ten-minute drive from our home) that he was born in, grew up in as a child, and lived in up until 20 years ago when he was forced to leave.  He was Principal at the time of Samuel Baker Secondary School (a couple kilometers up from where we live now) and the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) came to his village to murder him.

He had 5 children then, and two of them, Tony, my 26-year old brother, who was born in the camp and lived there for several years, and Wini, my 20-year old sister, who was born in the camp and moved after several months, told me their thoughts on the village.  Tony said he has no interest going back as he does not remember much about the village and does not feel any ties to it.  Wini likes going back to see the family members there, but she does not like talking about it much.  In contrast to both of them, my father talks about it several times a week and took me to the village “so that I would not get lost when I come back”.  He is going to move back to the village once the war is over and will finally have cattle and goats again as the LRA and government military stole his livestock once he left.

The village was several huts in different spots with a huge patch of mango trees where the kids would climb and throw down the mangoes when they were in season.  My Dad was beaming with pride at the village and showed me how the huts have been moved, where the hut was that the rebels burned down and where his aunt was still living (she was sitting outside her door as she was locked out) and where his brother, the father of my cousin Ochii, still lives.  He is a “drunkard” and my father and Ochii kept their distance from him.

We then went to the family’s graveyard where my Dad showed me where his sister, daughter, mother, and other family members were buried due to different deaths, but the most common of which was AIDS. 

I will talk more about the village later, but a quick update on our project is that we are trying to find an NGO in the area to help continue our computer training at Alliance Secondary School.  We want to institute a peer training program to help the one teacher with his 30-80 students per class, but we simply do not have the time.  Also, we are helping out with a literacy program at an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camp, especially with child mothers there, and the lady we are working with is pushing for a lot there, including a nursery, but we are having problems addressing the issue with her of the importance of people returning to their villages and not providing things to make them not want to leave the Camps and instead provide these services in the villages.

Ok that was a run-on sentence, but I have to run.

Apoyo,

Nikolai Anywar

We are in the fourth week of ENGAGE Namuwongo, the final week of the program. Next week, the kids will practice as we plan for the final tournament, scheduled for August 11^th. My time in Uganda seems to have evaporated before my eyes, and as I look back at the project we’ve done, I have some hindsight bias that would have been useful a few weeks ago.

            The most evident mistake we made, in my opinion, was not putting forth more of an effort to hand the program over to the Ugandan peer educators earlier. We made feeble attempts, but when there were not ample volunteers, or if their ideas seemed as if they wouldn’t work, we took over and ran the show. Part of this can be attributed to how much easier it was to do things in our own, familiar way. Part of it was our protectiveness of our project; we put so much effort and thought into it that it took some time before we were willing to let it move into different hands.

            This mistake has become apparent in the last two weeks, when workshops finally began to be almost totally run and organized by the Ugandan youth. I was dubious at first; I thought the activities were not going to be engaging to the kids, but Moses, the peer educator running the workshop, demanded participation from everyone, and commanded their respect in a way that our American group does not. Furthermore, in an end of the week interview with Edris, a peer educator who had almost no involvement with the workshop Moses ran, Edris was practically bouncing up and down from excitement at his peer’s success.

            So, the moral of the story (as I tend to like to end conclusively): the best way to make change is to empower locals to make the change themselves. This is easier said than done, but the kids in our program respect their elder peer educators in a different way than they respect foreign outsiders. They know the peer educators have experienced something like they have, so they are much more apt to listen to them than they are to care what Americans say.

--Ann

On Friday morning, in the Kampala taxi park, on the way to Gulu, we waited for about 2.5 hours for our big coach bus to fill before we could take off.  During that time, I alternated reading Herzog and the New Vision newspaper.  The paper had a center spread about the weekend’s Miss Uganda competition (with big photos, undoubtedly a paper-seller), and a fascinating article about a court case brought about by a lesbian couple dealing with right-to-privacy.  Apparently, it’s only the second such case in Africa, after South Africa, where homosexuality is legal.

The coach bus is roughly the size of the American charters (maybe narrower, it seemed to me): five seats wide, divided two-three with an aisle in between.  Additionally, the bus conductor added wooden stools to the aisle, making us a six-across fleet.  I’m 5’3”, and my knees touched the seat in front of me.  My shoulders touched Heidi’s.  The poor man on the wooden stool next to me had nowhere but my armrest to lean as the vehicle rocked across deep potholes.  Eventually, some sort of road authority stopped us and forced the conductor to empty the aisle and refund each passengers’ 20,000 USH.  So… after smashing themselves onto small wooden benches and paying the same fare as everyone else, the aisle passengers were abandoned near some random Ugandan village.  Apparently, they were supposed to catch taxis that passed… magically vacant taxis in rural Uganda.

The bus ride lasted about six hours from Kampala to Gulu.  We stopped – about 7 minutes at a time near the side of the road.  Any urination took place squatting in tall grass with strangers.  There were also “drive-thrus,” ie, groups of people who ran up to the bus’ windows with bottled water, grilled maize, grilled meat on sticks, bananas, nuts, pineapple, and/or cassava whenever we stopped.  They also sold live chickens, which fortunately did not make it onto the laps of any of our travel mates.

Gulu is quieter than Jinja – wider streets, fewer shops.  The GuluTeam describes its small town atmosphere; they often say hello to others on the street.

We visited an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp full of tightly-crowded mud huts.  In addition to the Jinja Team (5 members) and Kampala Team (5 members), one of our program directors, Chris, brought his wife, Jessica, and 2-year-old blonde son, Sam.  On Saturdays, apparently adult camp members travel to their fields to work, so a pack of minimally-supervised young children greeted us.  They swarmed particularly densely around the blonde in the stroller, and stuck close to our whole group.  They fought with each other (pushes to catch up with the visitors, smacks on the head), and grabbed our hands.  Some doubled up on each hand, so occasionally I walked as a molecule of five people.

I don’t know what I thought about the camp.  I’m still thinking about it.

Here are some things that stuck out to me:

*Children fighting.  Did the scuffles occur because their parents were gone (woohoo!, I remember the feeling)?  Is it my imagination, or did they seem particularly aggressive… particularly apt to cry?  Were those two boys really fighting over one straw from someone’s roof?

*Bracelet making.  Inside one hut, camp residents made black bracelets “to sell in America.”  With the resulting funds, residents pay their children’s school fees, among other things.  Our Ugandan camp guide told us that someone informed him that the bracelets were a “mark of honor” in America.  My numbers are fuzzy, but he said they started with about five bracelet makers, but thanks to great demand, now use about 50.  Invisible Children does a similar program.  I don’t know if this was affiliated.

*Brewing alcohol.  As I said, few adults hung around during our visit because they were working in the fields.  Many of those who were present brewed alcohol inside their huts.  I think they can make 30,000 USH from their labors, a l-u-c-r-a-t-i-v-e business… certainly more lucrative than most of the farmers and second-hand clothes vendors I’ve talked to.  What are the numbers?  Who are their customers (neighbors, I assume)?  What does alcoholism look like within the camps?  Child abuse?

-Liz

I took a while reading and rereading this book and meditating and reflecting over a lot of what Freire says and a lot of people in my group wanted to read it (and hopefully will), but I took so long on it so sorry, but I recommend this to everyone.  I was able to reflect a lot on my religious/political/economic/social beliefs and all the cycles of poverty I have seen in Milwaukee with loan and housing discrimination and under-funded schools and in Northern Uganda with a similar discrimination and under-funded education and a war, which has all its own generational cycles.  Ahh, here are quotes from Pedagogy and some questions and thoughts of it that this program keeps bringing up.

“…the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it.  This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled” (21).

Intellects and radicals are at the forefront of these movements in the past, but today have we students lost our “radicalness”?  Has our education turned us into conformists?  Why does a radical have such a negative connotation in our society today?  Are we so satisfied with our current state that for those who want to change it they are viewed as disrupting freedom and order and harming others?

“The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind.  Pedagogy which begins with the egotistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression” (36).

One lesson is to be mindful and differentiate between the types of generosity.  Are we not generous if we gain something from it like more knowledge and a better understanding of the culture and place or can we not help but gain those?  See an earlier discussion on socialedge.org on the goals of international youth volunteerism.  Who starts the pedagogy of humankind, can donors, can outsiders?  These are questions that the book provides guidance to, but it is ultimately one’s own motives and perception and goes beyond “doing good”.

“It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life” (37).

I have wrestled with the debate throughout my life over if those who commit crime are doing it of their own will or is it more a reason of the situation that they have grown up and/or exist in and that they lack other outlets.  Two examples that always come to mind are the thief who stole the bread for his starving family or the terrorist who kills others because he is facing an entire army and is occupied and feels this is the best/only way out/to fight.  They commit crimes and issue terror, but do they initiate it?  Are they helpless and has someone already put them in such a situation that “begets” such a person?  Either way you think, at least look from the other side.

To work with the oppressed, we engage in “not an attempt to learn about the people, but to come to know with them the reality that challenges them” (91).  Freire recommends that we “labor in the fields, meetings of a local association…the role played by women and by young people, leisure hours, games and sports, conservations with people in there homes” (92-3).

Can the work we are doing be more like this, such as with our agriculture project and with all our time here.  We probably need more time to truly gain a broad and comprehensive set of observations.  We have tried working in the field with the agricultural group whose work we are funding, I have attended the local Gulu Chapter’s Rotary meeting, and we live with families, but I do not think we want to do “observation visits” and “register everything” in our notebooks (92).  I think we want to live and work with the people, not challenge their entire society and the state of oppression that they are in.  To be honest, I don’t think I can work with the group in the field or go to much more dorky Rotary-like meetings.  Maybe the people in the Peace Corps and other long-term service trips should take such a comprehensive approach though?

“The most important thing, from the point of view of libertarian education, is for people to come and feel like masters of their thinking by discussing the thinking and views of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of their comrades.  Because this view of education starts with the conviction that it cannot present its own program but must search for this program dialogically with the people, it serves to introduce the pedagogy of the oppressed, in the elaboration of the oppressed must participate” (105).

This summarizes how education should be taught.  It is amazing how in every educational setting that I have been in, I have no say over the content and the way it is taught and it is too much the teacher simply lecturing.  I think that is why I like studying abroad with research components aka the situation I am in now.  My father, the Director of the Teacher's College here, and I discussed this.  How the students here never do any projects?  How the teacher says "knows everything" and there is a lack of discussion and the students don't challenge or ask the teachers critical questions.  He is reading the book now and encouraging teachers to admit when they don't know something and to learn from their students and to search with them for the answers.

“Dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution” (109).

Chaford is supposed to be one of our links to the community as well as our families and those we meet.  Yet, I do not know if what we are doing is the best or what the people most want, yet it is hard for us to push for an “authentic revolution” in two months, but for all my other campaigns in my life, I have to constantly be in dialogue with the people, which is why I like volunteering.  If you care about education, tutor a kid; if you care about possessions, talk to the homeless; if you care about the future, mentor a kid.  Volunteering, hopefully, involves dialogue with someone about their life and about what they think should be done and how you can help.  It is a chance to see their life through their shoes as much as that is possible.

According to the “bishops of the Third World” that Freire cites, “if the workers do not somehow come to be owners of their own labor, all structural reforms will be ineffective…they [must] be owners, not sellers, of their labor…[for] any purchase or sale of labor is a type of slavery” (164).

A lot of projects that we hear about and that we see NGOs doing deal with the issue of empowering people and ensuring that they have ownership over their work.  Freire emphasizes that the most important aspect of labor is not how high of a price people get for what they sell, but that people want to be owners of their work not sellers.  My friend Lauren on a Guatemala trip after visiting Fair Trade coffee farmers talked about our role as buyers in this process and reminding us that we need to be conscious of what we buy and the choices we make.  I feel like I have met too many NGO workers and others, including ourselves, who came in with an idea of what the people wanted instead of asking and working with them.  I think that we have adapted and that having a community-based organization helps in navigating this, but it is still a dialogue that needs to take place for some time with the people having ownership of the ideas and the work because the alternative has a lot of potential for harm and paternalism.  We lacked this dialogue when planning our agricultural trainings (though we are limited by time, language and space to the camp): Did we ask what trainings they wanted?  How was the youth leader chosen?  Is an agriculture project what they wanted?  We put a lot of trust in Chaford’s, our community organization, knowledge of these people, and I do not know if they had the dialogue with them.

“Unity and organization can enable them to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human…it is indispensable for the oppressors to keep the peasants isolated from the urban workers, just as it is indispensable to keep both groups isolated from the students” (126).

            It is interesting to read about the oppressors' need to isolate workers from us, students.  People tell us we “should be studying” and that we are “irresponsible and disorderly”, while peasants and factory workers “should be working” (126).  What role can we as students serve in joining with the workers?  What services can we provide?  Will our higher institutions support us or even let us? 

“The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep the people from thinking.  They have a shrewd intuition of the ability of dialogue to develop a capacity for criticism” (130).

            I have struggled with this point that the elites want the poor to keep quiet so the government under funds schools in poorer areas.  A worse education usually means less free and critical thinking, which means less criticism of the government.  We can see it hear in Northern Uganda (where the main university in Kampala used to be half from the North, and now they are only 1%) and in the US where the schools are funded by taxes, i.e. if you’re in a rich neighborhood, odds are your school is better than one in a poor neighborhood.  I want to study this when I get back at Sullivan High School, which has a huge refugee population and is also severely under funded, and then at secondary schools in Mexico City and Paris, which have high proportions of Guatemalan immigrants and Iraqi refugees, respectively. 

“Young people increasingly view parent and teacher authoritarianism as inimical to their own freedom.  For this very reason, they increasingly oppose forms of action which minimize their expressiveness and hinder their self-affirmation…This rebellion with its special dimension, however, is very recent; society continues to be authoritarian in character” (135-6).

            Is a youth rebellion legitimate?  Will our generation be different and change future ones?  Or is the oppressor legacy too great, and the kids of these oppressors will be too powerful?  Is the educational system with the lack of ownership of students in terms of content and everything too restricting and conformist?

Ok some thoughts to think about with our trip, but for now...

More Funny Stuff From Gulu:

·        Members of our Group went to visit Heifer farmers and in the spirit of Heifer’s giving “passing it on” program, where farmers share the offspring of their livestock with others, one of the farmers gave us a rooster, which Rachael took and hung from the edge of her “boda boda” (motorbike).  So last night we ate “Mr. Millet” and he was delicious as her mother made the best “smashed” potatoes ever.  And Jacob broke a glass, and Rachael’s dad broke a chair, and “our pets’ heads are falling off”!! Heifer needs any animals, but cows are the best.  go to their site at heifer.org and you can see how to buy cows and other animals as gifts for farmers in Uganda!

·        Naked Man and I now share the same name as my Dad had some elders over, including his brother, who is a priest at Pope John Paul II School and who told me that since I am the second and the last born in my “home-home” family that I should have the name Komakec, which Naked Man and the amazing little guy that teaches me volleyball at Alliance (I spike it in kids’ faces now) are both called.

·        The Priest also said I need to get Arsenal and the Chicago Fire to send balls and boots (soccer shoes) to his school so we’ll work on that.

And More from My Family:

·        Lona, my youngest sister at age six, watches Cradle to the Grave with Jet Li an