Catching up and ISP!

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog! Hmmm where to begin? Easter weekend was quite an eventful weekend here! On Saturday, our group threw a “stadium bash” for all of Gulu. Yes, like literally. It was CRAZY! Lewie and a couple of other people in our group worked really hard to put it together, and despite a few mishaps, it was a huge success!! We originally wanted to throw a block party for the whole community, but the road we wanted to block off is one of the main streets the buses use, so that plan was nixed. After much brainstorming, we realized that my host dad is the district sports officer and is in charge of the stadium in town. The district speaker in the local government happens to be our homestay coordinator, so he was helping us during our brainstorming session, and he said that we would be the first group to every throw a big free party in the stadium! My dad said he would let us use it for free as long as we cleaned up afterwards, and we were on our way! Lewie arranged for all of the biggest artists/bands in Gulu to perform, got a phone company to sponsor the party (paying for the sound system and stage) and got a beer company to sell beer, soda and water. The party went from 6pm-4am and our teacher estimated that there were 5000-6000 people there! I had randomly brought a pack of glowsticks with me from the US (to give out to the kids in my family) and a couple of us thought it would be so fun to wear them to the party… WRONG!! I have no idea why we thought that would be a good idea, considering we already stand out enough as muzungus and definitely do not need anything else to call attention to ourselves. As soon as we walked into the stadium, we were SURROUNDED by about 50 people, mostly young men. They all started literally grabbing at the glowsticks around our wrists, neck and in our hair, and one guy yelled, “Give me your fire!!” We tried to fend them off, and when we realized that that wasn’t going to work, we started trying to give them to the kids in the circle. The grabbing intensified, and we finally just through them up in the air and bolted out of the circle of people. It was quite an experience. It wasn’t all that funny at the time, but looking back at it now, it must have been quite a hilarious sight. Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be able to look at glowsticks the same way ever again!

The next day was Easter Sunday. I met a couple of the other girls to help clean the stadium and it was a huge mess! (Imagine 5000-6000 people in an enclosed structure in a country where it is the norm to throw trash on the ground…) It didn’t actually didn’t end up taking all that long since there we several of us. I then went to get come pictures printed of my host family and I to put in the album that I was going to give them later that day as a thank you gift, and then went home for our Easter/welcome Freesia/Good-bye Freesia feast. My family was so sweet and had made A TON of food, and some of the neighbors came over to join the party. I learned that in Acholi culture, it is traditional for the guest to eat the gizzard of the chicken because it is a delicacy. After eating SOOO much other food, there was just no way that I was going to be able to down that, so I luckily managed to pawn it off onto my host mom, who enjoyed it much more than I would have. I gave my host family the blanket that my real mom had crocheted for them as a thank you for having me and they really liked it! It was nice to feel like my two families are connected. My host dad had been asking about when he was going to get to talk to my real dad (because he had already spoken to my mom when I had run into him by coincidence while I was walking home talking to her one day), so after the meal I called my parents back home, and my host mom and dad talked to my real mom and dad! These two worlds seem so separate, so it was cool to be able to share a piece of the other part of life with each of them.

Sometime during the last week or so that I was with my family, my host mom told me a little about her experiences during the war as we were in the kitchen chopping vegetables for dinner. She said that for several years, she was constantly running, sleeping in whatever seemed to be the best hiding spot at the time. She had a baby and a three-year-old and she couldn’t carry both of them so she joined up with another group of people who could take care of the three-year-old. This part was a little unclear, I’m not sure if she was actually with those people the whole time or if she gave them her son to take care of for awhile and then got him back when it was safe to settle down again. She explained that it was not safe to live at home because the rebels might attack at any time, so it was better to be constantly moving. They had very little food and were often hiding behind trees, terrified of what would happen if they were discovered. The other people in my group and I had talked about the fact that for whatever reason, the conflict did not feel as real to us as the genocide had in Rwanda. These are clearly two very different situations, but when I was talking to my mom about her experiences, I realized that the conflict did not feel as real because I really hadn’t heard many people talk about their personal experiences of the war. As I was sitting with her, seeing the pain on her face and hearing it in her words as she described how difficult those years had been, the conflict felt much more real and personal.

The day before we left our families we had a big party with all of our families and some of our lecturers. (That weekend involved a lot of parties I guess!) We ate dinner, people made some speeches, and we did some traditional dancing with a local dance group. We hadn’t all met each other’s families, so it was fun to meet them and be able to place the stories we had told about our experiences in our homestay. The next day we left for Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Kampala is about a five hour drive from Gulu. While in Kampala, we stayed at the same hotel we had stayed at for our first few nights in Africa at the very beginning of this whole experience, and the same hotel that we will be staying at for our last few nights before he say good-bye and fly home. It felt a little weird to be there because in my head I had kind of compartmentalized it as the beginning and the end, so it made me a little disoriented about where we were in the semester (that sounds a little weird, but it somehow made sense in my head…) It was really interesting to compare the way we all thought of the hotel compared to the first time we had stayed in it. We all agreed that we had found it kind of grundgy the first time around, but now we thought it was such a luxury! It’s crazy to see how perspectives change. It had warm water, toilets that flushed pretty consistently, air conditioning, and cereal for breakfast, all of which we were pretty excited about! We had the last of our lectures while there, and spent the rest of the time trying to eat as much American food as possible. I ate two cheeseburgers, two cheeseburgers, and two ice cream cones in three days! It was amazing! On our last day before the independent study period began, we all went to Jinja, a town about two hours away from Kampala. We took a boat on the Nile to this little peninsula. Our guide pointed to a spot in the water and told us that this was the source of the Nile, the exact place where it switches from Lake Victoria to the Nile. Apparently, a ton of different places all claim to have the source of the Nile, so who knows which is right, but it was still cool to see! Later in the day we went to another part of the Nile to look at these waterfall/rapid things. Our academic director told us that in two years, everything we were currently looking at would be underwater, because they are building a dam a little ways down the river in order to generate energy for Southern Sudan. It was so sad to think that such a beautiful place would seen be covered in water.

After our time in Kampala and Jinja, many of us took a bus back to Gulu to begin our Independent Study Projects. As we were driving into Gulu, I was relieved to be back and happy to find that Gulu felt like home! During the ISP, I am living with four of the other girls and I are staying in a hotel that is owned by one of the girls’ host parents. This has proved very eventful, including our attempt to make macaroni and cheese on a charcoal stove… we failed. For my research, I am looking at how leadership development programs for youth in Northern Uganda are trying to empower this generation of youth and end the cycle of poor leadership in Uganda. I spent my first week (last week) at a school called Restore Leadership Academy, which is a Christian secondary school that focuses on leadership and character development. I conducted three focus group interviews with the students, had the kids fill out some questionnaires and interviewed two regular teachers, the deputy head teacher, and the head teacher. It has been a little tricky because all of the schools are getting out for vacation this Friday, so the only two weeks that I am able to spend in the schools is during their exam period. I finished up there today, and I think I was still able to get enough information. The other initiative I am focusing is called KOBS (Knowledge of Behavior and Self) and is a curriculum that has just been introduced into the schools that Invisible Children works with. If it is thought to be successful in two years, then it will likely be implemented into all of the schools in Northern Uganda. The curriculum focuses on topics like self-esteem and friendship building, conflict avoidance and conflict resolution, motivation and goal setting and dealing with worries and stress. Last week I interviewed a teacher who helped create the curriculum and a teacher who is currently teaching the material, and on Thursday I will interview students who have taken the class this term. Though this curriculum is not specifically a “leadership curriculum,” I think it teaches many of the things that are needed in order for the youth of Northern Uganda to move past the difficulties they faced in their childhoods due to the war, and become successful leaders. I still figuring how it is all going to come together, but I’m really excited about this topic and think I might really want to continue focusing on leadership development for youth and adolescents when I get back to the US!

One day last week my friend Anne and I went with two of the Invisible Children engineers and the education officer to five of Invisible Children’s partner schools, including the one that we raised money for in high school! It was really exciting to see the schools and the progress that is being made on them, and to meet some of the teachers and headmasters. It reaffirmed for me how important the work that Schools for Schools is doing is, because these schools are really benefitting from the money that is being raised by the students in the US! Many of the schools were extremely damaged during the war or have always been lacking certain necessities, and by rebuilding the schools, IC is helping to create an environment that is much more conducive to learning. So exciting to see the schools in real life, especially to connect my experiences raising money in the US with the reality here!