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