A week’s worth of thoughts about life in Gulu and life with our families. Posts to come on our visit to an IDP Camp and the projects we will be doing...


Sorry that this is the longest and most thought-filled and random journal post that I have made. In the next couple days, I will also be posting about the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Camp that we visited on Saturday and a post about the projects that our group of students we will be doing with Chaford (Charity for Rural Development).

I have been wanting to try (it is hard to put it in a text box) to describe my family and Gulu Town (where the students in my group and I live and work) to you since we have been here. We have only been here a week now, but I feel it has been a month like how I felt in Guatemala and other experiences I have had abroad where there is less of an emphasis on time and people aren't constantly checking their watches and pdas and in front of laptops all day. Gulu is similar to towns throughout the world in ways, but it is truly different from anywhere I have ever been. Here are the things that stick out the most for me: My family is absolutely freaking amazing or kope mate (very great) as they say in Luo. There are 12 of us total and a female turkey who sits in a laundry basket on top of 6 recently hatched (three days ago) baby turkeys (does one call them chicks or what?) and other unhatched eggs and then 5 bigger turkeys (including Papa turkey or Gobbles as I call him) in a cage. Two nights ago a couple street cats came under our gate door and were going crazy at the turkeys (and I mean crazy, the loudest hisses and “reowwwwws” I have ever heard). As you can tell, I am quite fond of the turkeys.

I also love my family as Toni, the eldest son at 26, speaks the best English out of the family and calls me Smith as we talk for hours about everything. He works for Invisible Children, an NGO here that works with youth that have been affected by the war. Recently, we talked about how he doesn’t like Shakespeare since he can’t relate to his poems (“the smells of strawberries, the cold of the winter, and all those Thous and Thees) and the different “camps” that have occurred in the past century, such as the camps here in Northern Uganda, the Jewish Concentration Camps, Native American Reservations in the US, and refugee camps throughout Africa and the world. He has many thoughts on NGOs and he is very conscious of the situation that his people are facing in the North.

My father, David (same name as my real dad and brother), is a very, very tall man with a big smile and laughter that travels lightly throughout a room. He is very Catholic (we went to mass this morning) and is the Director of the National Teacher’s College, which is actually located in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Camp that we visited on Saturday (I interrupted his meeting as he ran out to greet me). He moved from Gulu when the war started to Entebbe where he taught at a school by Lake Victoria and then to Kampala where he taught President Museveni’s son who rumors say may run for President in time. My father moved back to Gulu seven years ago where he build a huge compound that houses all his children (9), six cousins, and me and the turkeys. He wants to show me the village where his family’s (our family as he says) land is and where he will plant and have cows once the war is over. He also likes the Beatles and dislikes the President and government of Uganda. All in all, he and the rest of the family are amazing (also, my mom, Santa (I wish it was pronounced the fun way), is a huge smiling women who burps and spits and is amazingly kind).

Hearing about the families that other NU students are staying with is amazing too as Emily’s had her cut a rooster’s head off on Saturday and prepare it, Rachel’s father takes her out for beers with his friends (though he doesn’t drink; I’m invited!!), Jacob’s had a chess tournament in which Jacob’s father beat him in the championship, Allie’s sister took her to church today, and Sophie has a bunch of different people living with her so she can tell you about that sometime ha.

We have discussed the different frustrations living with out host families and a big theme seems to be addressing and responding to things that we see as wrong or want to change and that seem hard for us to do anything about it since they are part of the culture. For instance, many of us have had problems with the gender divide that occurs in our homes where the women serve the men and the men largely sit around and do not do much in the homes. Allie’s blog on the Center for Global Engagement (CGE) website goes into this divide more so check it out at the CGE website. Also, Jacob and I and others in the group have tried to do things on our own rather than be served, but often we are treated as a special guest rather than a member of the family. I also hold back on really telling my father what I think about religion (how I am not fully Catholic, but still questioning if there is a higher power), but I can discuss my qualms with the Church and what I like about it with Toni. So it works out.

Ah, I could go on about my family forever but I need to go eat dinner with them (we eat late, 9 o clock late, and they try to make us all fat so here comes a big meal) so on to some thoughts on what life in Gulu town is like... NGOs (non-governmental organizations (hey, my mom reads this and not everyone loves acronyms)) are everywhere and I mean EVERYWHERE in Gulu Town. We see vans from the UN, World Vision and the Norwegian Refugee Council. In my morning runs, I go by the giant stone-walled, barbed-wire fences that protect CARE, WarChild Holland and Canada, all just to the North of my house. On my way to work at Chaford from home, I pass by three NGOs in the span of 10 feet: one with funding from Japan, another for youth, and another for women and microfinance, all three tucked away in a small patch of police huts and wooden stands that house soda and barber shops.

I can see the presence of NGOs without moving my head from this screen as my peripheral vision allows me to see that there are four white guys (all doing non-profit work (I asked; they’re filming a movie) in this internet cafe with four Ugandans (given the only whites I see are aid workers and they are all found in Internet cafes) and the files saved on the desktop of this computer have titles like Needs Analysis, Assessment of Gulu Schools, the Self-Help Approach (Gulu’s NGO equivalent of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), and A Report on Gulu Aid. Seriously, ABCD (www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html) is a amazing and two professors at our University started an Institute for it so check out their book as the approach has been used throughout the world on every different community project imaginable (including the Grameen Bank (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank and read about the work of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus).

The U.S. needs more freaking permanent outdoor markets. They are everywhere else in the world and they are amazing. There is a huge one a block away from my house that is outlined with hundreds of small stick made stands that sell everything from radios to sports equipment to school uniforms. When one enters, the sun light disappears and the smells of meat, onions and g-nuts destroy your nose. Ah I could go on forever on these, but please, if you have a store in the US, turn it into an outdoor market stand.

It may be the rainy season, but the clouds here are amazing as in one day you see all 14 different types of clouds (our kindergarten classes cheated us, there are more than three according to the airport magazine I read on the way here, and they can all be seen in Gulu) as they whisk and change and grow angry and beautiful and I see every shape and object in them and if I am ever overwhelmed by the idea that there are millions of people in internally displaced persons camps in villages all around me or overworked by the small change that I can personally make as a student here or stressed out by all the children at my house then all I have to do it step outside and look out (actually, it is hard to get too far in a building here that one cannot just look out and see the sky). Right now I can see a ferocious bear-clown attacking a soft, humungous white (of course) fluffy (yeah I see originality) puppy as a giant tree bark with an old man’s face in it looks on.

Since I’ve looked outside, a man has rode by on a bike while dragging a goat behind him on a leash, a little boy has walked by heading the other way with a goat on a leash, six women have walked by with buckets on their heads, and countless numbers of bicyclists, bikers and people of all different ages (mostly kids in flip-flops) have all gone by and the clouds have changed colors and now a tiger with wings is flying and exploding at the same time.

Ok, that was too much, but I have been busy and electricity goes off here so internet cafes are slow and undependable, but I’ll try to post more often and do so concisely. I need to go play football with my older brothers or basketball at the Gulu Hawks outdoor court where Jacob is the only white guy and the guys there talk American smack to him (“Yo, you got some beef”) in Ugandan accents and where the community team practices and where there is a giant dirt field where people practice driving and where white people play soccer and all laugh at them.

Or I can play 7 stones: a game like dodgeball but better as two people stand about 15 yards away from each other and use a small soft (hopefully) ball to try to hit a person who is in the middle and who can catch it and throw it back or dodge it in order to keep setting up either bricks or stones or some set of four objects. Basically, the middle player needs to stack these objects and knock them down a total of seven times to win but if you are hit (even if it bounces!) you are out and then they yell Enter! and you throw and someone new comes in. We first saw it at the Camp and my siblings love to play it and they say that I am good (for a tall mono!). My siblings now need to teach me other games kids play here like skipping (aka a jumprope game) or rocks (aka hopscotch). In candlelight (as all the power went off here), I taught them tic-tac-toe last night, though we had to play with I’s and O’s as there is no X in Luo! Ah, I could go off on my family forever (this morning we all sat around watching Days of Thunder, eating G-nut butter (small peanuts) and bread, and waiting for the rain to lessen so we could go to school/work). Hope you got some insight into how a Ugandan family lives in Gulu.

Afoyo,

Nikolai “The Lost/Last Son” Anywar (the name they gave me)