An Assault on Parliament Ave.

Since it's my last week in Kampala my friend/co-intern, Carolyn, and I have decided to go out for lunch everyday. Today while we were walking down Parliament Ave. a pickup truck stopped beside us and some men and a woman jumped out. Suddenly, they surrounded a woman selling mangoes from a bowl on her head on the side of the road. They took the knife she was carrying in the bowl to peel the mangoes and held it against her neck and she started whimpering. They then took the bowl from her head, and grabbed her by her hands and feet and threw her into the back of a pickup truck with a KCCA (Kampala City Council) label on the back. At this point the woman was wailing. There was another woman sitting in the back of the truck who looked equally as terrified.

Initially I thought she was being robbed, then worried that she was going to be raped. It wasn't until someone standing with us pointed out that it was a city council truck that I got a sense that it was a human right violation.

Parliament Ave. is a very busy street lined with government ministries and the front entrance to the Ugandan Parliament. While some people stopped to take notice with us, many others continued to continue with their business, not paying much attention to the violence unfolding in front of them.   

Before we arrived in October, a law had been pass making street vendors illegal. At the time many shops were closed by force but the presence of fruit and airtime vendors has persisted throughout my stay here. It is quite possible that this woman was threatened and assaulted because of her "illegal activity". Yet, the people who accosted her were not wearing uniforms and did not speak to the woman before they attacked her. 

There were also two other mango vendors standing further down the street that these individuals ignored. If nothing else this was a blatant violation of human rights in the interest of city beautification

It's very hard to know what to do in these types of situations. There is no one to report it to and no way to intervene. What's worse is that very few people seemed to notice and even fewer seemed to care.

Field Work

You may be wondering where I disappeared to for the last month. Well two things happened at around the same thing. The first thing that happened was that I discovered that Canadian Cooperative Association would not be sending another Peace and Conflict Officer to replace me when I leave on April 30th which means that a lot of the work I have done will be unsustainable.

Approximately three hours later I went to a party where I made several new friends. Since then my time has been filled with exciting adventures, dinner parties and board games... and trying to make the most of what's left of my internship.

In Mid-February I left Kampala for five weeks of fieldwork in Northern Uganda. During my travels I reached Masindi, Kiraydongo, Lira, Apac, Koboko, Arua and Nebbi. All of these districts have been affected by conflict to varying extent. Lira and Apac we very badly affected by Joseph Kony's Northern War which is still fresh in the memories of our cooperative members. In Masindi and Kiryadongo you can now find a diverse mix of ethnic groups (including Langi and Acholi people who were again affected by the Northern War) since it has become a center for Internally Displaced Persons and refugees which contributes to the use of numerous languages and a variety of needs. Finally in Koboko, Arua and Nebbi, which collectively make up the West Nile Region, you might find traces of long lived political dissent relating to the military Dictatorship of Amin and shared experiences of past frequent displacements.

While I was in the North I was engaged with two separate and equally important endeavors. First, working alongside the Centre for Conflict Resolution I coordinated three conflict-sensitivity and transformation training sessions which were attended by 36 to 44 cooperative members from each of the districts listed above.

Each of the training sessions was different. This is partially because two different facilitators participated from the Centre for Conflict Resolution and also because of the different conflict experiences of the participants and probably also some cultural difference thrown in for fun.The trainings were developed with the goal of encouraging conflict sensitivity within the cooperatives and also with the hope of developing participants' conflict resolution skills.

The first training, held in Kiryadongo, went very well with the exception of some confusion over travel refunds for the participants. It was interesting to watch people who spoke two different languages interact with eachother through group work. It became clear that individuals who spoke English were dominating the discussions so an effort had to be made in order to include everyone. By the end of the training participants were expressing their pleasure at having had the opportunity to interact with different cooperative members throughout the region.

The First SACCO I visited in Masindi as part of my research

The second training was held immediately after in Lira. Participants were somewhat less vocal in this training which made the role of the facilitator a bit difficult. However, the presence of members of Lira's peacebuilding community who had been invited by one of my project's field officers certainly did add a different dynamic. The ability to integrate those participants into the training in different ways was certainly one of the strengths of the training.

One thing that really struck me between the experiences between Kiryadongo and Lira was how much more reluctant women were to participate in Lira. This was an issue of great concern for me and probably speaks to the gender dynamics prevailing in the region. What was simultaneously encouraging and hear breaking in Lira was when a male participant put up his hand and said "The woman sitting next to me asked me to tell you that she learned that women are able to act as administrators after watching you coordinate this training." Of course it was heartbreaking because the woman was unable to get up and say that herself.

Giving the Field Staff in Lira a Thank You Note

Finally the training in Arua was a whole different ball game. That group was the easiest to work with because the fieldstaff had made a point of inviting participants with a good grasp of English. However, it almost never happened because the program administrator for the IFAPI project (which is the project I'm working on and I'm not going to tell you what the abbreviation stands for because you won't remember and I'm trying to keep myself out of trouble) failed to work with our field staff to finalize the budget and said in an email that "If they could not bring the budget down you should just cancel the training" without consulting me first which was very frustrating. Fortunately, after I took a look at the budget I was able to find a number of ways for the field staff to reduce the cost, two days before the training was to take place.

The field trainings were a really good introduction to learn about how the cooperative members perceive conflict, their experiences with armed/violent conflict and their approaches to conflict resolution.

An Elephant on the Border of Murchison Falls National Park on the Way to Arua

In addition to the training, I also conducted research through which I hope to identify conflict indicators for the project. Conflict indicators are used to measure the impact of development projects or emergency relief on conflict dynamics which exist in the communities they work in. Conducting the research was complicated by language barriers and the distance between our field offices and the cooperatives themselves. In Lira this meant having to travel up to 60km in one direction on the back of my colleague's motorbike over bumpy dirt roads to reach the cooperatives. My butt still hasn't recovered.

With Research Participants in Nebbi

I have to say that after collecting information from over 182 cooperative members with assistance from our field staff that I was very ready to come back to Kampala in Mid March. However, I wasn't ready to return to Canada just yet. You might recall that my internship was supposed to be 6 months. After I started collecting the data for this project it became apparent very quickly that the two weeks I had left in Kampala after I returned from the field were not going to be enough to record the data I collected, no less write a report. Since I had faced so many delays in the field CCA was kind enough to extend my internship for another month, although this was not a decision I made lightly.

So you can imagine how unhappy I was when I discovered they were not replacing me, the day I renewed my contract.

Conducting research in Barr. The entire community of Barr was displaced because of Joseph Kony's Northern War but was reestablished in 2005. While a lot of development work does need to be done for the Northern Region to catch up with the development of the South, Northern Uganda is no longer menaced by "bad surroundings"

Since my return to Kampala I have slowly and steadily been working to finish my report, spending time with friends, exploring and salsa dancing.

I'll be back in Canada on April 30th.

In the mean time if you happen to hear of an jobs that might be of interest (human rights, international development, immigrant or refugee settlement, community development or emergency management) don't hesitate to let me know.