Overview of my work

What am I doing here?

It is easy to write about nature; nature has no sensitivity to being caricatured on a public forum. And wondrous nature is indeed one of Uganda’s greatest treasures. Yet from this blog the most important, interesting, and impactful aspects of my experience in Uganda have largely been lacking – first, the people of my personal relationships, and, second, my work. Still wary of attempting accurate public descriptions of my friends and colleagues, I’ll begin with my work:

Every Monday and Tuesday morning, a large crowd of refugees gathers outside the gates of my office building. They represent diverse ages, genders, nationalities, languages, professions, experiences, family responsibilities, psychological trauma and hope, personal safety and security, levels of poverty, strategies for self improvement, and needs. They have come from many of the countries bordering Uganda, as well as several countries bordering those. Uganda provides a haven from the war or victimization of their homeland. It is also a dauntingly challenging new residence.

Uganda is a land-locked country surrounded on many sides by historical centers of conflict but enjoying relative stability for decades. Near and less-than-idyllic neighbors include the Democratic Republic of Congo, (South) Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Uganda’s own history is no fairytale; it’s most infamous scar being Idi Amin’s regime. One of the most common arguments I heard motivating good treatment of refugees was the knowledge that Ugandans may one day themselves be refugees, and the fact that many have experienced forced migration already in their lives. A long war in the north created numerous internally displaced persons, and my company is actively involved in determining how to balance western and traditional justice mechanisms to resolve lingering conflict, rebuild communities, and usher peace and economic development to these regions. Then, too, within Ugandan there are human rights abuses, unemployment, and tribal and ethnic tensions. The refugees and IDPs arrive in this challenging environment with limited knowledge of laws, often limited local language skills, lack of support and broken community structures, experiences of violence, abuse, losing loved ones, and usually rape. They have little bargaining power, few valuables or money, disrupted education and limited opportunity to make a living.

Multiple local and international organizations provide material assistance – food, shelter, clothing, money – though there is always need for more. More rare are the organizations which attempt to change the position of refugees in Uganda by pushing the government and UN for change; it is a politically risky maneuver, but every organization, no matter how idealistic its mandate, must be held accountable by someone.

In Uganda refugees may choose to live in a settlement camp, in which they are allotted sufficient resources to meet their daily needs by national and international aid organizations. Alternatively, they may elect to move to a location such as Kampala – the largest city – and take the gamble to employ their skills to build an independent life and seek greater opportunities than the largely stagnant camp life. If they leave the camp, they are no longer wards of the aid community and must care for themselves. Those gathered outside my company every Monday and Tuesday morning are primarily these urban refugees. Company delegations visit the camps for many weeks each year to provide services, but the work to which I am directly exposed focuses on these urban clients.

The primary mission of my organization is to provide legal aid to refugees, who cannot afford lawyers and are often ignorant of and vulnerable within the foreign legal system. They also provide psychological counseling, free English classes for adults to help them communicate and advocate for themselves, and referrals to organizations that provide material and medical aid. The organization trains police, immigration officers, and other influential stakeholders on refugee policies and rights. They push for existing policies to be respected and sometimes try to change or enact new laws. They research refugee and IDP situations for the purpose of advocating to improve rights, policies and laws for these populations.

What does this mean concretely? A few general examples of services sought by refugees include:

·   Before becoming official refugees, new entrants are called “asylum seekers” and must apply for refugee status from the Ugandan government in order to remain legally in the country and qualify for aid. Asylum seekers may need assistance navigating any delays or rejections, as well as help finding material assistance before (and after) achieving refugee status. As conflicts in the home country evolve, the populations’ status within the national or international policy may change, and they may be ushered home again – more or less legally.

·   While in their host country, refugees may have legal trouble with a landlord or employer, or with government or UN officials. They may be searching for separated family members, or be orphaned minors heading a household. They may face threats of continued conflicts transplanted from their country of origin, such as violence or abduction. They may struggle to access schools for themselves or their children for lack of records from their home country. The list is a long one.

·   Refugees may be victims, in their home or host country, of torture or sexual and gender-based violence (such as rape), and may have been exposed to HIV through these experiences; they may need counseling to move forward in their lives and care for their families, and such experiences put great tension on marriages. Try for a moment to imagine the effect on a marriage and family if a woman is raped and as a result becomes HIV positive and bears a child – What do she and the family feel about the child? What becomes of the marital relationship mentally and physically? How much support does she receive from her family, and they from a traumatized wife and mother? This is only one example.

·   For many, the holy grail of assistance is resettlement to the west, especially to the USA, UK or Canada, but this rare prize is available only to a select few, and most must find means to cope with their new lives in the host country.

If you are interested in more information, ask me for the company’s very informative website.

To return to the initial question – in which several of you have kindly conveyed interest – what am I doing here?

I wanted to work several months in Africa. I am interested in medical strategy and technology development in the 3^rd world, and I believed it a critical early step to spend time in the developing world; only in this way could I be exposed to the culture, the true state of affairs, and insights into which development organizations and strategies are actually effective. I decided to volunteer through the American Jewish World Service, which sends grants and professional volunteers to build capacity in small local grassroots NGOs throughout the developing world. I believe it is a fantastic organization and am very happy to provide more information about its activities and philosophies. At the time I applied, AJWS was sending volunteers to Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda, as well as southeast Asia. When I mentioned the African locations to colleagues, Uganda seemed to be known to my parents’ generation as the land of Idi Amin; it hadn’t made major headlines since then. Yet everyone in my generation knew someone who had worked in Kampala and loved the city – the welcoming hospitality toward visitors, the relative safety and stability, the positive attitude toward white westerners. Kenya had a reputation as a more safe and stable country, but Nairobi has a decidedly more sinister side – the need to be home after 8pm, the aggressive interaction with locals, the armed robberies. If you want to know details of Nairobi life I’ll refer you to my co-volunteers’ fantastic blogs. Personally, I was going to Africa to interact with people, and in Kampala I already had a network of contacts – so I chose Kampala.

AJWS didn’t have any companies directly related to my interests, so with limited choices and mounting time pressure, I chose the company with the clearest strategy and organization; I wanted to work for a group who knew what they were trying to accomplish and had a method; I was attracted to the luxury of never doubting that my company was working to have an real impact.

During my 3 months volunteering, I had a variety of projects, and the way I came by those projects will make an interesting intercultural study for another blog entry. For now I will describe the primary work. Initially projectless, I was asked to assist in writing grant proposals. I then reviewed IDP policies with another volunteer to prepare an extensive briefing that my director could use to teach a brief course. I helped staff improve their excel knowledge to create budgets, an unofficial project for which advertisement spread rapidly by word of mouth through the office, prompting a barrage of requests and appointments that inspired one lady to comment that “Shira was going like hotcakes!”

The activity most interesting to me was advising teams on strategic planning. Each team was tasked to draft a 2-year strategic plan, often with limited strategic planning experience and training. For most drafts, the activities were well-planned and the team’s motivation clearly focused, but the objectives outlined in the plans weren’t very concrete or well aligned with activities, and there were limited means to measure impact of the activities or progress toward achieving the objectives. Measuring impact is very challenging in any situation, but especially when providing legal and psychological aid to a population who by definition remain in a challenging, vulnerable situation. And yet the teams were very receptive and enthusiastically attacked the challenge.

My biggest project related to the company’s client management system, in which data about every visit and every client had been stored for over a year but not yet analyzed. I studied the available data and interviewed staff to determine which statistics would be most useful for various purposes, such as designing interventions, advocacy, measuring impact of activities defined in the strategic plans, and grading staff performance. In cases where the existing system allowed extraction of this data, I created visuals of the information and used it to demonstrate to staff the system’s capabilities in order to gain more concrete information on the system’s potential applications. Many of the most useful statistics were not extractable with the existing programming and required a software specialist to adjust the system to allow the information to be searched and quantified. Much of my work was in compiling recommendations for improvements to the system for the future, with concrete examples of how each new tool would be used by staff. In addition, the system currently tracks only company clients, but many refugees visit the company each week and are referred to other organizations whose mandates better match the refugees’ needs. Information about these non-clients and statistics on referral locations are useful to the company but had to be counted manually for lack of a quantitative system. At the director’s suggestion, I taught myself a program to create an easy-to-use form in which information can be entered, which automatically saves the information in excel for easy counting.

I also had the opportunity to attend a 3-day training of immigration officers. I was encouraged to invite myself, and when I pushed for an opportunity to help I was assigned the job of taking notes. Taking notes for 8 hours a day for 3 days, sitting near the lecturer where everyone could watch me, was a big challenge – I have a problem sitting for long hours, and a problem with un-thinking boredom. Yet the information I learned from the training was fascinating and provided a background understanding for the organization’s work. I was also asked to give feedback on any improvements to the training, which was an interesting challenge. Most importantly, though, I interacted with the staff more personally and with the immigration officers.

Each evening, a group of officers left our hotel to have dinner together. They invited me and I was thrilled to accept. Several clearly had respected professional and personal relationships with my organization. They entertained me and the younger officers with endless stories of their experiences, primarily at airport border control. I had not laughed so hard in months, or even years. I made friendships that would last throughout my time in Uganda. My organization’s staff stayed at the hotel or visited their families in the area, so there was no question in my mind that I would join the officers each evening. Yet they were impressed and surprised that a foreign white visitor would split from the group to whom she was assigned and so eagerly join them for fun conversation. Perhaps my luckiest break was that the company car that was supposed to collect the staff broke down on its way to the training; I joined a few officers to drive the 4 hours home and cemented 2 of my closest friendships through the fascinating conversation that filled the kilometers. Throughout the rest of my months in Uganda, they were some of my closest friends. In addition to quality time and conversation, they provided more welcome hospitality than I ever dreamed to encounter, gave me insights into local culture, helped expose me to interesting places and events, found me a place to live, helped me navigate border crossings and documentation, and made me feel great appreciation and interest. Such personal connections are by far the most valuable aspect of my experience in Uganda, yet the most difficult to write about. Pages of blog entries could be devoted to describing my several friends and many acquaintances, to relating fantastically entertaining stories they shared with me, to describing cultural insights and personal experiences. Yet these are not things that belong to the public. This is my first blog and therefore the most public of my writing outside of rather dry scientific papers in specialized journals; I don’t follow blogs (and therefore feel a bit guilty to you who follow mine) – and so I make my own rules. If you are my friend and call to ask about my experience in Uganda, it will be overwhelmingly filled with personal stories of my amazing friends. They are the treasure of my experience.