A Year Abroad

The entire reason I applied for the Uganda/Rwanda program was to study in Rwanda. To me, the Uganda unit was incidental, just a month detour before the real program would begin. While not an expert in post-conflict issues in Rwanda by any means, my knowledge of the situation in Uganda was even more limited.

It’s difficult to quantify what I’ve learned in the last month. I feel like I’ve learned as much about myself as I have about post-conflict transformation, which is nice for me but does absolutely nothing to benefit anyone else. While in Gulu, I saw the devastating effects of 23 years of war up-close on an intimate level and it is impossible not to leave slightly different than when you arrived, even if I have yet to realize exactly I have changed.

During my three weeks in Gulu I saw people still living in the IDP camps, forcefully removed from their homes years ago and placed in cramped and squalid living conditions. During the height of LRA attacks, as much as 85% of the Acholi population was uprooted and displaced from their homes. As many, if not more people died in the camps from disease and malnutrition as from the direct violence of the war. While many people have left the camps since the violence has ended, many are still stuck in the same terrible environment, without the means to leave and start over. Empty packets of alcohol littered the ground of all the IDP camps we visited, leaving me feeling deeply conflicted. On one hand, I was angry that what little money available was going towards alcohol rather than feeding starving people or sending children to school. Yet, at the same time, it is impossible to ignore the fallout of deep psychological trauma as the result of years of violence, trauma that is hardly being addressed or treated. The saying was that during the conflict the men would be drunk by 10 am, the women drunk by 2 pm, and the children drunk by 6 pm. I doubt that the saying was much of an exaggeration.

At the same time as seeing the stagnant despair still permeating the IDP camps, I also I saw people trying to go back to their villages, but facing new problems living on their own after years of dependency on foreign aid. Agoro was just one if many viliages that don’t have the resources to combat years lost to the camps. With the violence over, many NGO’s are pulling out of the area, taking aid with them. After years of surviving on handouts, people now have no idea how to provide for themselves. And as people begin to leave the camps, many violent land disputes are springing up. While we were in Gulu, news reached us of three deaths related to a land issue, when one member of a family locked his grandmother and two young cousins in a hut and burned it to the ground. I’ve met adults who had been abducted as children, met teenage mothers recently returned from the bush, seen massacre sites, and met survivors. I’ve gained an Acholi family and now know the ghosting shadow of what it means to hold that identity.

Even with the LRA gone from Northern Uganda, they are still not gone from East Africa. It is estimated that over 25,00 children were abducted during the war and that many still remain in the bush. Gulu is treated as a ‘post-conflict’ area, which I disagree with, and not just because Kony has yet to sign the final peace agreement. It’s like Gulu exists in it’s own little bubble of deep denial. People want so desperately for the conflict to be over. Even if the LRA never comes back and the violent conflict really has left Gulu, Northern Uganda is still very much in conflict. It is in conflict because it is in transition, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Northern Uganda is in a critical moment, the decisions being made now will determine if this area recovers or if the LRA won the war. The LRA might have physically gone, but they left unimaginable damage in their wake.

During orientation, one of the first things our Rwanda academic director told us was that we aren’t here to fix things. She said we’ll see thing that make us sick and angry, things that we’ll want to change, but that isn’t our job. She said that, for now, our job is to learn. We are here as students so that someday we can come back here or go somewhere else and help in some small way.

It’s hard to to keep that in mind when the community we’re interviewing is dealing with the very real and very immediate problem of hunger. As we listened to them tell us about the contaminated water and malnutrition, little kids with brittle limbs and swollen bellies hung around just outside the circle of adults. We were there for a conflict assessment, but to them, we were there to help.

After listening to them speak of the ever-present hunger for near an hour, we walked through the heat back to the bus for lunch. I couldn’t eat. While the other members of the group munched half-heartedly, the people we’d been talking to waited patiently for us to finish eating so we could have a final meeting. They had no food.

We ended up having a lot left over, since our guilty consciouses prevented us from eating much, if anything. On the way out of the village we gave the extra food to the kids with empty eyes and empty stomachs, young and malnourished children carrying even younger kids on their backs. We didn’t fix anything. For one night a few kids will be a little less hungry, but in the morning when they wake up there still won’t be enough food, there won’t be clean water, and there still won’t be any secondary education available.

To get to Gulu from Kampala we crossed both the equator and the Nile. It is the dry season in Uganda and our van kicked up massive clouds of red dust in our wake. It felt like being on Mars, but with really green grass. In Kampala, the capital city, the air was surprisingly thick and humid, but in Gulu it is just parched and hellishly hot. You dehydrate just by breathing.

Gulu, up until three years ago, was a war zone. For more than 20 years the Lord’s Resistance Army terrorized Gulu with attacks. Joseph Kony used Gulu as a forcible recruiting ground for his army, attacking schools and abducting children into the LRA. Now, with Kony somewhere in the DRC, Gulu is finally at peace.

It almost seems that for every civilian car there is a UN van, for every governmental building, a foreign NGO as well. Everyone is trying to start over, but Gulu’s emerging economy is very dependent on NGOs. There is a lot of poverty and even with the veritable army of NGOs and foreign funding, many needs not being met. However, a lot of progress is being made and so long as Uganda remains stable and foreign aid available , Gulu should be able to recover from the devastating war.

However, Gulu is in the middle of a region in transition and conflict. Sudan, the DRC, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda boarder Uganda. In addition to the conflict in Northern Sudan, Southern Sudan will hold a referendum next January to determine if they will become independent, which has the potential to dissolve into more violence, while Uganda is gearing up for elections of their own. Museveni has been president of Uganda for the last few decades and remains unwilling to give up his position of authority. Technically speaking, the DRC remains a hot mess. East Africa is plagued with problems and I’ve only begun to see them, let alone process them.

So, here is what I’m going to be doing/learning for the next 3 1/2 months:

Post-Conflict Transformation Seminar

Uganda:
The Socio-Political History of Conflicts in Uganda
The Political Dimension of the Conflict in Northern Uganda and the Post-Conflict Politics
Conflict Analysis, Resolution, and Prevention
War, Trauma, and Recovery
The Role of the Military in Conflict and Peace Building in Uganda
Land Related Conflicts, Resettlement and Recovery in Northern Uganda
Government Policy on Decentralization in Uganda
The Economic and Social Impact of the Conflict and Post-Conflict Northern Uganda
International Dimension of the Conflict in Northern Uganda
The Challenges of Nation Building in Uganda
Gender, Conflict, and Peace Building in Uganda
The Role of the Media in Conflict and Peace Building in Northern Uganda
IDPs and Refugees and their Role in Post-Conflict Societies
Constitutionalism and Constitutional Reform in Uganda Since 1962
Forced Migration: It’s Impact on Conflict and Peace in the Region
Post-Conflict Transformation and a Critique of Government Initiatives Towards Peace in Uganda
Challenges to Re-integration after Amnesty

Rwanda:
Political Developments Pre-Genocide
The RPF War and the Arusha Peace Accord
The 1994 Genocide
Post 1994 Politics in Rwanda
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Transitional Justice Mechanisms
The National Unity and Reconciliation Commission
Truth, Justice, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation
Gender, Conflict, and Peace-Building in Rwanda
Development Efforts and the International Community

National and Ethnic Identity Seminar

Uganda:
Acholi Language
The Acholi of Uganda and their Culture
The Peoples and Cultures of Uganda: History and Evolution of National and Ethnic Identity in Uganda
The Transitional Justice in Northern Uganda and the ICC
The Role of Language in Defining Identity in Uganda
Non-Formal Eduction in Peace-Building
National, Regional, and Group Identity as Causes of Conflicts
History and Culture of the Baganda
Stereotypes and Ethnicity in Uganda

Rwanda:
Kinyarwanda Language
Contemporary Rwanda: Economy, Political, and Social Set-up
Rwandan Culture
Pre-Genocide Identity Politics
Post-Genocide Identity: Identity and Citizenship in Contemporary Rwanda
The Politics of Memory

Field Study Seminar
Experiential Learning and Cultural Adjustment
Interview and Observation in a Cultural Context
Rapid Rural Appraisal, Participatory Rural Appraisal, and Focus Group Discussions
Ethics of Research
Qualitative Data Analysis
How to Write a Research Report
Practical Issues in Doing Research

Independent Study Project
A month long research project culminating in a 30-40 page paper and an oral presentation

Assignments:
A comprehensive essay for each country on post-conflict transformation (10 pages)
Journal 3+ times a week
Language tests
Cultural tests
Drop-off presentations for each country
Description-Interpretation-Evaluation paper (10 pages)
ISP proposal (8 pages)
ISP journal
ISP paper
And lots and lots of reading…

So, this is basically a long post explaining why I’m not going to be as diligent in blogging this semester as I wanted. My first homestay starts in a few days and I’m not going to have much access to internet for the next month. Tomorrow I’m going to Gulu, which up until quite recently was not a post-conflict area, but a conflict area. For many years Gulu was plagued by abductions, as children were taken to fight for the Lord’s Resistance Army. The conflict has left Gulu, but it is necessary to be back at our homestays before dark. With classes going until 4 and sundown happening around 6:30, I’m not going to have much time to go an internet cafe and hop online.

I’m very excited for what the next 3 months will bring and a little nervous about the ISP and how it will work to write papers with such limited access to the resources I’m used to, but mostly I can’t wait for classes to start. I want to do my ISP about transitional justice in Rwanda, although it will take a little effort to find an angle that hasn’t been over researched.

I arrived yesterday afternoon. I’ll be in Uganda for the next month or so before I leave for Rwanda, where I’ll be until the end of the program. My senses all feel overwhelmed, but in a good way. I’ve only been in Uganda for a little over 24 hours, but there is so much to process. On the way to the internet cafe, I got called muzungu or ‘white person’ several times, so I guess I’m officially in Africa now. I’ll do a longer update once more has happened, but for now I wanted to say that I arrived safe and sound.

One would think, since I’ve been packing and unpacking for the better part of a week, that I wouldn’t be up at the wee hours of the morning, just hours away from my flight, packing one more time. But one would be wrong. In just a few hours I leave for Uganda. It’s hard to imagine warm weather when there is still fresh snow on the ground, that soon I’ll have to worry about sunburns and malaria, when just this morning I was throwing snowballs at my dad. It’ll be a change, but I’m really excited. See you on the other side!

I honesty wasn’t expecting to enjoy my semester in China. That’s about the worst attitude you can have going into a four month stay in another country, but as excited as I was to go, I couldn’t seem to shift my negative expectations. On the first epic plane-ride over, Emily and I quickly established each other as mutual crying buddies, both aware that we were going to be in a completely new place with absolutely no one we knew. As it turns out, the only crying that really happened was four months later, when we had to say goodbye to all of the wonderful people we’d met.

I wasn’t expecting to cry. I’ve been known to cry at the drop of a hat, but I wasn’t feeling particularly weepy when Emily and I planned our dramatic entrance to classroom 6 to say goodbye to our classmates and teacher. The BCA students were all leaving early while all of our friends had to stay another month to finish up the term, so we spent the better part of a week saying goodbye to all the people we’d come to know in our four months in China. Almost giddy, we swung open the door as forcefully as we could, as the Russian students did whenever they would lumber into class 20 minutes late, with Emily clutching her coffee and me with my green tea, our morning rituals for almost four months. And as the door opened and as our classmates saw us, that all changed because they were so happy to see us again. We hadn’t realized that they didn’t think we would come to class that day, even for the last 15 minutes, since we had so much to do to prepare for our journey home. The remainder of class was spent with each student saying, in Chinese, how much they were going to miss us. Then Emily said something long and eloquent in Chinese and by the time it was my turn I was too emotional to speak, but still remarkably dry-eyed. Saying goodbye to the teacher, my favorite of my language teachers and my exchange tutoring partner, was the deal breaker. “我会想你. 我不会忘你.” There was no attempt not to cry, no eyes stinging to warn me that tears were pushing forwards, just the sudden realization that I’d started crying without realizing it and that my cheeks were already completely wet and that not wearing mascara had been a very good idea.

None of us slept the night before we left. I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take to pack up my room. As we all struggled to fit four months into two suitcases, it appeared like I wasn’t the only one who mistakenly thought that four hours would be sufficient to clear out our rooms. We took long breaks, hanging out with our friends and our goodbyes continued throughout the night. I never watched the sun rise from the little mountain by campus. By early morning, everything was packed and we were ready to go but not ready to leave China. Our Japanese friends woke up early to see us off, girls I’d only really met a few weeks prior, but we all held each other and cried some more and thoroughly startled the cabdriver as we sobbed all the way to the airport.

Now, it all feels like a vivid but distant dream. I arrived home on Christmas Eve day after 30 hours of traveling and immediately got swept away in various jet-lagged holiday celebrations. Then it was off to visit family for my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, and then two weeks of never ending vaccinations, plane tickets, and visas as the rush to get ready for next semester pushes my semester in China even further into the back of my mind.

It almost feels like it never happened. Almost. I wish I could say that the life changing experience of being in China for four months is noticeable in profound ways, but it’s really the small things that make it continue to feel real. When Taylor Swift is on the radio I smile instead of shudder because as much as I hate her music, Mollie is obsessed with all things Taylor Swift and I can’t deny that in missing Mollie, Taylor Swift now occupies a slightly thawed out section of my heart. Even as China continues to fade away, Western things still feel off, which reassures me that that last four months really did happen. Knives and forks seemed heavy and unwieldy, Western food to rich and fatty, and the traffic way too orderly. The fact that cars actually stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk still throws me. And I miss speaking Chinese.

If I’m honest, my Chinese never got all that good. I could get around and I could understand a fair bit and my Chinese was certainly good enough to keep me from starving, but even after four months in China I got so nervous whenever anyone spoke Chinese to me that, more often than not, I was reduced to a stuttering fool whenever I tried to respond. But I miss it. Occasionally I’ll hear someone speaking Chinese and I’ll unintentionally continue to follow them around for a little bit just so I can listen to them for a little while longer. I find myself still thinking in Chinese words and phrases, but rarely entire thoughts.

Next semester, I think when I get homesick, it’ll just as often be for Dalian as it is for the United States.

I’ll write more when I’m not so completely jet-lagged, but for now, I just wanted to let everyone know that I arrived back home safely.

About a month into my four months in China, Liz asked me if I wanted to blog for Juniata since I was already blogging about my experiences abroad. I thought it would be fun, so I said yes. It was a slow process, which involved getting in touch with the marketing department (or something) but eventually I was sent a user name and password for a blog hosted on the Juniata website. For whatever reason, it didn’t work, and when I didn’t hear back from anyone about why I couldn’t log in, I pretty much forgot about it. At least, I forgot about it until my sister emailed me today and told me that this blog was linked to the PACS site.

I was going to write differently for a Juniata blog, have fewer personal details, mostly because I figured that prospective students don’t really have any interest in hearing about what the Thanksgivings of my childhood were like. And I figured no one besides prospective students would be interested enough to check out a blog written by someone they don’t know at all. I’ve now included a Juniata tag for anyone who just wants to jump right to the Juniata stuff.

And since this is my personal blog and not a Juniata blog, you can see that I genuinely do love Juniata this much and I am in no way being coerced into writing favorably about Juniata. I was worried, when asked to blog for Juniata, that all of my praises would seem fake since Juniata was hosting it, but I can assure you that this really is just me thinking about Juniata and missing Juniata.

And I swear, I’ll do a real update one of these days, but right now I’m working on three papers and trying to figure out how I’m going to be able to pack everything up. I leave China in 5 days and that is SO NOT OK. I have a huge backlog of interesting things to share and eventually I’ll get to writing posts instead of papers.

…You. No, seriously. It does. You guys are awesome. The hardest part about being away is not having you guys here. China is great and I could stay here forever, but if only I could convince you all to join me too. Because without you guys, it just isn’t the same.

There’s that whole ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ saying, but I don’t really think that’s true. I mean, maybe it is, but you guys haven’t felt absent. I’ve gotten to talk to most of you an astonishing amount while I’ve been gone. The only thing really lacking with Skype is the inability to properly give hugs. Cyber-huggy bears just don’t cut it. I think the saying should be amended to ‘awesomeness makes the heart grow fonder’. Because you are awesome. And I’m awfully fond of you.

So, here is a list of all the awesomeness:

Individual Awesomeness:
Marguerita: for sending the first rescue package of junk food
Mom: for sending the most packages (A for effort, B- for the actual junk food. I think the utter fail of the brown rice crispy treats and the total win of the candy corn cancel each other out)
My sister: for sending me a postcard from somewhere in India
My aunt: for freezing an entire cranberry pie from Thanksgiving
Liz: for letting me pester her. All. The. Time.

Joint Awesomeness: Pairs Competition
Anisha: for sending great food and trashy magazines (with an assist from Anisha’s mom: for express delivering the package)
AC and Will: for sending the most psychic junk food rescue package ever (the Reece’s arrived on the same day that I I ran out, and for bonus awesomeness, Nerds! Which I didn’t even realize I wanted)
Dobday and Kat: for always being online (yey for closer timezones!)

Honorable Mention of Awesomeness:
Megan: attempting to bring me real French bread (but not bringing said bread when she realized it’d have to travel in her bag for a week before reaching me)

Not Awesome:
The Chinese postal system. Three weeks? Really? And I have to go downtown to pick it up, why?

Most Awesome: Tie
Barney Stinson
Captain Awesome

But really, you guys are awesome. As much as I love, love, love China, I don’t know how I would’ve made it through the semester without you guys. And not just because you hooked me up with some great junk food, but because you made me feel like I didn’t really go all that far away.

Not on the list of awesome, but want to be? Let me hear from you (send an email or write a comment) and I’ll add you to the updated list of awesomeness (there might be prizes, but probably not). Don’t worry, I won’t think you’re a stalker if you’ve just been silently following me up until now (unless you are a stalker, in which case, not awesome).

Aaaaand I’ll be home in 21 days.