Ways you have and ways you can continue to help us connect our community here in Gulu to your home!


Nathaniel, our program director, talked about how these blogs and this trip as a whole can create bridges for those back home and to make them care about the people and societies that we are living with and in. Especially, given that we live in such a media-saturated world where people constantly hear about “the worst humanitarian crisis” or “the crisis no one knows about”, it is important to have something to connect to and care about because we simply are not capable of knowing and caring about everything.

This thought about the importance of creating bridges from here to home has come up for me many times. I have realized that these bridges have been created in my own life through previous trips that I have been and through this one as I do not think my family would know about (and thus, have the ability to care about) Northern Uganda if I was not here (and probably me neither). My mother sold products from Maya Works, not because she visited the store due to her love for Mayan crafts, but because I met Mayan widows at the Mission I volunteered at in Guatemala who relied on selling these crafts for their livelihood. We are able to give our families and friends the ability to engage with these communities in a new context!

Friends of our group have already responded. A friend from my old high school donated three PDAs for our computer training, Rachel’s family’s friend has provided us with countless computer programs and resources, and Sophie’s friends have donated a laptop! To keep this spirit of connecting communities going as we still have almost a month of work to be done with students on our computer training project, below is a description of our project so please send it to anyone. Afoyo mate:



Brief Description of Our Project:



We are a group of six Northwestern University Undergraduates doing computer trainings with the secondary school (high-school) Alliance in Gulu in Northern Uganda. Many of the students (60-70%) at the school walk to the school from Internally Displaced Persons Camps, which are refugee camps where they are forced to live because of the 22-year old war that has completely changed the way of life for people in Northern Uganda.

We will be helping the one computer teacher at the school train the students in basic computer skills, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access, and the Internet. The school has five computers and only one of them has internet. We are also bringing a laptop and PDAs that were donated so as many kids can be trained and have practice as possible. Any help with computer training programs, donations of computer products, anything would be greatly appreciated and please pass this on to anyone you know. My e-mail is smith.nikolai@gmail.com


Afoyo Mate,

Nikolai Anywar “The Last-Lost Born”